After reading Jakob Nielsen’s post, “Stop Password Masking”, I really wanted to develop a quick and easy jQuery plugin which provided the ability to toggle a field between a masked and unmasked versions.
Many websites these days are very graphic intensive, have a ton of contrast between content the the background, or are simply overly complicated. One method to reduce this visual noise and provide a more harmonic user experience would be to downplay elements on the screen that the user is likely not paying attention to.
So what’s the point? Why create a plugin for dragging and dropping form elements? I thought I’d try a different take on the typical web-form usability and created what I think is a pretty decent alternative.
Drag and drop elements have been around forever. It’s a pretty good metaphor in terms of describing to the user how certain elements of a user interface are to function. The web is a different matter however. Drag and drop, while isn’t all that new to the web, it hasn’t been as widely adopted with how web sites are designed and are meant to be interacted with.
A major headache that many developers experience when coding their Mach-II views is the fact that they end up writing and re-writing the same (or similar) complex code in order to output simple elements like anchor tags or alternating row colors in a list or table.
Luckily, since version 1.8, Mach-II offers the view tag library to not only help reduce the amount of code required in each view, but make the code easier to read and look cleaner.
In an effort to help me learn how cross domain requests work, and in order to do something a little cool, I’ve developed a very simple search-as-you-type script which leverages Google’s AJAX Search API and outputs the results within the body of the page.