I love simple applications. Enter your zipcode and it tells you if you will need your umbrella today or not. That’s it.
On the result screen you can optionally enter your phone number to get an SMS only on days that you will need an umbrella.
Web Form Design, rad new book by Luke W, ordered today. Also see the Flickr photoset with book illustrations.
Lifehack.org announces their 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007. Interesting how much flash is in the list.
Google Spreadsheets just added charting and some other features. That is some serious web appage. How do they do that?
Luke Wroblewski wrote a nice piece last year over at UX Matters on Refining Data Tables. He points out a few helpful techniques of filtering data in a table, including above, where “a user might expand a collapsed group of filters by clicking a link labeled something like Search Options, thereby displaying the filters only when the user needs them to refine the search results.” Thanks for the tip Bri.
Check out picnik. That is one impressive flash app. Great first-time user experience. I love the big, attractive, clearly labeled buttons, the undo, the flickr integration and the simplicity. Not only online apps can learn from this, but some desktops apps can too.
Sweet news: Adobe to take Photoshop online. “Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months.” I hope it’s faster than my Intel Mac version..
There’s a great story over at 37signals about how their webapp, Basecamp, is being used by Lotus Outreach to do some truly wonderful things around the world with a small international volunteer staff. I love seeing the Internet used for such good.