By - Jason Valalik
Being a data junkie I am always trying to manipulate numbers to visually tell a story. Weather its web analytics, usability testing or process improvement it has always been pretty difficult to get Excel to do pretty basic conditional formatting. With the recent release of Office 2007 that has become a lot easier and from what I have experimented with so far seems to be a good step forward. Above is a lo-quality 10 minute video pulled from the Microsoft site which demonstrates the new features around conditional formatting. Video copyright Microsoft 2007

By - Jason Valalik
Ok, so up here in the Pacific Northwest was Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge. Although I didn’t go my guess is that there was plenty of beer consumed and most likely some poor planning resulting in trouble opening bottles of beer/pop. Being a victim of poor planning there have been many a tailgates I have attended which we didn’t have a bottle opener. There were plenty of cars around and if there is a car around there is a bottle opener around. Enjoy

By - Jason Valalik
With the advent of AJAX and real time calls to the server there have been some really slick user interfaces developed that enhance the customer experience. Not all of these are real time calls, but they do support a better user experience giving the user either feedback or system features when they need it. This is a usability principle called progressive disclosure. There is a lot of talk about Web 2.0, but I have seen very few real examples beside drag-and-drop. This should provide readers with some true life Web 2.0 application functionality that demonstrates what pundits are talking about. Videos of these applications after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »