We recently came across an issue when creating a site with SSL plugged in that in Internet Explorer we were getting the good ol' "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items." popup. It took us a good long while before we finally realised what it was... Fancybox!
Google Labs has a visualization of the different browser sizes used by people accessing google.com. It can be overlaid over any site to see what percentage of people have to scroll to see elements, the drop off after 1024x768 is quite remarkable. How much of this is negated by people having a smaller browser window to search or netbooks even?
Using and managing embedded fonts in Flash is a lot easier than it was a few years ago, but I still find myself repeating tedious steps of set-up each time I need to create a new font-asset swf.
So, I created an Air application to do it for me 
Skip to the end to download the app and source, or read on for all the juicy details...
Flash uses an XML file to define all the possible character ranges for embedded fonts and uses them to create the "Character Embedding..." list for dynamic TextFields in the IDE.
If you have ever tried to use a non-breaking space in a Flash textfield, you will of come across a pesky little issue - the non-breaking space character is not included in any of the unicode ranges used by Flash for character embedding.
Ever been vexed when Flash seems to think you're using a US keyboard layout, only when it's embedded in a page?
We came across the issue while building sites that require users to input an email address; when using Firefox, the @ character arrived in Flash as a " quote mark. After a little more testing it turned out, regardless of your setup, a transparent Flash movie in Firefox will always receive keyboard input as if from a US keyboard.
So (here in the UK) our @ and " characters get swapped around. Indeed, it seems that Flash embedded on a page with the wmode parameter set to transparent has been giving Flash developers headaches with text input for many a moon.
It's not just the Firefox @ mix-up either, but rather than me reiterating the specific issues, why not read about them and get a handy ActionScript 2 / JavaScript workaround here.
Well, I recently needed an AS3 solution to the problem, and converted astgtciv's AS2 version to meet my needs.
So here it is, released under a Creative Commons licence (as was the original)
It seems that Adobe are aware of the issue, but as yet there's no official solution.
This has apparently been fixed in Flash Player 10.1 - out now.
Interesting concept for usability testing from Australia. So much of design is about first impressions and that seems to be the idea here...
An interesting case study outlining the importance of usability testing. The company highlighted was able to increase customer purchasing by 45%, resulting in an annual $300 million revenue increase, by simply changing a button.
