I have been using Microsoft Expression Web lately and I must say, whilst on the surface it doesn’t seem that special, once you start discovering the features, it has some pretty cool stuff.

Anyway .. onto the post. I decided that I needed to use all this expression goodness to re-build my site, add a bit of Ajax goodness and generally rebuild into an XHTML1.1 table less layout with a low footprint. All was fine until my navigation was not centering on the page, and everything else was. Hmm… a bit of digging suggested that I should use

text-align:center

in the CSS. I made the change and all was good in the world. Then the tester in me stepped in … what about Firefox and Safari? Low and behold, they were not working as expected. After a quick search, it appears that because a DIV is not a block level element, Safari and Firefox are technically correct in not obeying the text-align. So to make this work with an XHTML 1.1 transitional doctype cross all 3 browsers you need:

margin: 0 auto;text-align:left;width: 780px;

If you don’t specify the width, it won’t work and IE will render it on the left of the page.

Well another Microsoft research project has made it to a product. Microsoft Surface is a way of integrating with items using a touch display on a table. Cool.

There is one thing, if you have a look at the Microsoft Surface team, you will notice the absence of any testers. Hmm.

Well Santa did come early. The WPF/E devcenter is now live. You can download the Windows CTP here, and the Mac CTP here.

Well Frank blogged that WPF/E is finally coming. Frank linked to a blog post by David Boschman, a MSDN developer center and a public CTP available for download.

Frank asked the question “Do my eyes decieve me?” Well the blog post has been deleted, the developer center is blank, and the download link returns “The download you requested is unavailable.” message. So it appears the answer, for now is Yes.

Let’s see if Santa comes early.

Coverflow is a really cool application for Mac OS X, that allows you to browse through all your albums stored in iTunes.

Coverflow is a great example of how an application can take advantage of the new features provided by OS X and Vista to provide a great user experience that would have been impossible, or extremely hard to do previously.

And no, there isn’t a single rotating button anywhere to be seen …

I blogged recently about the web design company that my wife started earlier this year. A few weeks ago one of her customers, McGrath Real Estate launched their new website. As part of the design process Sol came up with two interesting innovations for this type of site: lifestyle search, and what I call the suburb selector.

The lifestyle search is the most innovative feature of the new site, and as far as we know is the first of it’s kind for any real estate website. It allows a user to locate a property based on lifestyle choices, such as “Close to a train line” or “Near the beach”. To assist with usability of the search, and provide a visual cue for each of the labels, each one includes rich imagery to show what the choice is referring to.

The second innovation is quite a simple one. Instead of being presented with a group of suburbs with check boxes to select, or a map. The McGrath site presents you with both a map and a list of check boxes (contained in a scrolling listbox), and allows the user to use which ever method they prefer.

These innovations won’t change anyone’s life, but they highlight the difference that good design can make in the overall user experience of a website or application.

So where does imitation come in? We had some friends over for lunch last weekend, who run their own marketing business, one of their clients, a real estate agent, has already asked for a new website that emulates the McGrath site. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but if you limit yourself by only copying what already exists you are always going to be a few steps behind.
Investing some time and energy on simple innovations can go a long way to help differentiate from your competitors, and help escape the trap of chasing taillights.

Frank Arrigo blogged last week about a debate that has broken out within the comment of one of his recent posts.

I didn’t think that it was appropriate to jump in mid sentence in someone else’s “conversation”, however I did want to highlight and discuss one important point that was mentioned by whoever goes by the name of “I’d rather not tell…”

The main oversight on Microsoft’s part in my opinion is that they haven’t released a Mac version of their products.

This is a very important point. Designers use Apple’s products because Apple embraces and represents what designers are passionate about … great design. If Microsoft wants these products to succeed in the design market, they really need to produce Mac OS X native versions. This will not be a simple task however as the Expression suite are all written in managed code, on top of WinFX. As much as I would like it I doubt that Microsoft are about to port the whole of .net Framework 3.0 anytime soon.