Useful Stuff

Don’t Make Me Think

"Don’t Make Me Think" is a book about designing websites by Steve Krug.

I only read it very briefly but liked the essence of his book.

Inspired by this book and other sources here are a few ideas for designing sites.

1. First Impressions Count: 

People’s attention span is very short, especially on the internet.
If something is too complicated or not interesting, they can easily click and leave.

2. Make it Obvious 

People don’t surf the net to work things out and calculate, people generally take the path of least resistance.

You may spend hours designing and working on a site, but 80% of your visitors will spend less than 30 seconds.

3. Simplicity

Don’t overcomplicate pages. But, make it very clear what it is about.

4. Send Visitors Where You Want Them To Go

Web visitors do not spend time trying to think where they want to go. They will click on the most obvious links. Therefore, make sure, you point visitors exactly where you want them to go.

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Dterm – a very handy command-line utility…

I was rebuilding my development setup following my recent hard drive crash when i came across this very useful Mac utility: Dterm.

Put simply, it allows you to go to a folder using finder, press a hotkey (apple + shift + return, but that can be configured) and then a window comes up where you can enter a command line:

Perfect if you just want to enter one command, you can also select files and use them as argumants. And if you need to do more than just one line, press shift + return and a Terminal window will open up already arrived at that folder.

( p.s notice the amount of space i have in my new hard drive – every cloud has a silver lining ๐Ÿ™‚ )