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Posted on April 13th, 2012
Finding icons for your software application can be tough. There are many sources of free icons that you can easily find online with a Google search. If you’re on an incredibly tight budget, but have lots of time, this can make lots of sense. The problems with this, is the amount of time it takes to find the icons you need and often times you end up with an inconsistent look and feel in your application– your icons are often pulled from many different places, and your application looks that way.
I personally prefer to buy big sets of icons. IconShock has been selling icon sets for years, and I can highly recommend their entire icon collection which is only $299 right now– that’s over 600k icons, for only $300. That’s less than $0.0005 per icon… Or roughly 20 icons per penny. Buying icons in a set like this, it’s fairly easy to find just the right icon for every part of your application, and best of all they have the same look and feel(provided you pull from the same or a similar set).
I’ve also started to make my icons larger in my applications. Traditionally, icons are only 16×16 in menus, toolbars, etc… With higher resolutions on screens, I find it’s far best to use 24×24 icons in menus and either 24×24 or 32×3 icons in toolbars. This provides a larger area for the user to see what the icon is(showing off your snazzy new icons!), identify it with the function in your software, and click.
Posted on September 1st, 2011
I am finding more and more sites using Captcha and similar ‘verification’ systems to try to filter out spammers and bots. Unfortunately, the images are getting worse and worse, and hardly legible for legitimate humans, even with 20/20 eyesight to make out! As this article points out, it is simply lazy to use Captcha instead of simple Email verification and spam filtering… Even worse, I often see these captchas on small sites, or on ‘contact us’ pages– so when a potential customer needs to contact you, you must aggravate them by forcing them through this horribly designed ‘security measure’? Talk about great customer service…
Posted on August 2nd, 2011
It really annoys me when websites say ‘username’ when they mean ‘Email’… Just because THEY use my email as their ‘username’, doesn’t mean I know that… When something is labeled ‘username’, I don’t automatically assume I should enter my Email address, which makes it take far longer to access a seldom-used site using an account I created previously…. So please, when creating websites, call it what it is… If some management-type argues it should be ‘username’, at least put small text there that says ‘(Email address)’ or something.
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