Virtual Hosting just released their list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs. Lots of old favorites here and some new ones. I wish there was enough time in the day to read them all!

Some of the ones I’ve been following for several years now are:
Signal vs. Noise
456 Berea Street
Adaptive Path
A List Apart (also an excellent resource for CSS tips and tricks)
Zeldman
Meyer Web
Andy Budd
Duoh (also an excellent resource for Photoshop and Illustrator techniques)
Mike Industries
Good Experience (I’m dying to go to a GEL conference)
GUUUI
D. Keith Robinson
Design By Fire
Louis Rosenfeld
Alertbox
Laws of Simplicity

They left out one of my favorites, maybe because he’s more design focused, but it’s definitely worth mentioning Jason Santa Maria. He’s very talented and just a nice guy who will answer email questions about his camera from yours truly.

A great find in the list is Software As She’s Developed, an Ajax and Usability blog by Michael Mahemoff, author of Ajax Design Patterns (our bible for Ajax projects).

At Alabama Code Camp we talked about a few great resources for design and development of Ajax apps. Here they are:

Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff:
Buy it
Check out the patterns online
Read his blog

Ajax in Action by Dave Crane and Eric Pascarello:
Buy it

I just got back from the AL Code Camp where Keith, Lee and I spoke about our experiences creating Capmed’s Online Personal Healthcare Record application, which is a part of the new Microsoft Health Platform. The audience had some great questions for us, and our hope is that we saved them both aggrivation and debugging time on their future Ajax apps.

In our presentation, we mentioned several tools we use to monitor memory leaks, logging javascript applications, and client-side xsl transformations. Our notes (along with urls to download the tools) can be found here. I mentioned our strategy to solve the “IE freeze bug” previously on this blog, and our presentation slides and video can be found here.

Thanks again to Jeremy Chance and Todd Miranda for putting on such a great Code Camp! We had a great time and look forward to future events.

Prototype is one of those foundational frameworks that anyone writing an Ajax application is interested in. While part of the fun (depending on your perspective) of writing cutting-edge Web 2.0 applications is that one must become and expert at Googling to figure out how to do things, it is clearly desirable to have a nice set of documentation on the tools and frameworks one is using. Well, Sergio Pereira has done an outstanding job of doing just that for Prototype. Here are the resources:

Developer Notes on Prototype
Prototype Quick Reference PDF

Source: Ajaxian

We have been blessed to work with a client that is open-minded regarding technology, and has signed-up with us to develop a brand new web application that entirely embraces Usability and Ajax. They already have a desktop thick-client (which we have helped them build), and they wish to replicate much of the rich User Experience found on the desktop in the new Online version. However, as we have gotten further into the process of design and construction, the client has gotten a little jittery now that it has become clear that we are actually talking about an entirely new paradigm for web applications. Below, is our ‘apologetic’ addressing their primary concerns. Hopefully, you may find some of the points useful as well, whether you agree or disagree…

An apologetic for writing an Online Web Application using Ajax to maximize the User Experience

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