AdesBlog.com

iPod and Mobile software developer Koloroo has decided to make its products free, or in their own words “careware”. Its products include Color Schemer (for Windows, iPod, and Mobile Phones) and Tip Calculator (for iPod).

What, exactly, is careware?

Careware is free Koloroo software … with one tiny catch — before you download it, you must agree to do something nice for someone. And it doesn’t matter how big or small your act of kindness is. ~ Koloroo

People are already reporting acts of kindness that they have done or plan to do on this page. It’s great that Koloroo came up with this kind of innovative way to give its products for free which promotes social responsibility. (i should have ended the post here)

Constructive Criticism of Koloroo

Koloroo has robust software development and user interface design skills. However, I think they are wasting their skills and efforts on the wrong products that do not make sense (i.e not really useful). For example, their color schemer software for iPod. How you are going to use it? It doesn’t make sense to have a color selection tool on your iPod. It’s not practical at all, and its application in real life would be like zero!

Few weeks ago they have developed a PC version of their color schemer. My question is “Why didn’t they start with the PC version from the beginning?!” Because at least PC version would have been useful to graphic designers.

I am pretty sure that Koloroo’s recent decision to make its products free was because they were not selling well, there was no demand for them. So, probably they thought “why sit on the products that do not make money, let’s give it away for free better!”.

Koloroo’s case is the opposite of FSCapture case. FSCapture started as a freeware in the beginning, but once it became popular the author suddenly wanted to make money on it. But then again that’s life… most of the thing revolves around money in this life.

Lesson: Anything you do (i.e projects) do it with long-term vision in mind. And of course, do your homework (i.e feasibility study) before you launch any product to the market.

It’s a holiday season. So, many websites are offering various promotions on their websites, usually those promotions are placed on the main page (homepage), with the intention that the more people see it, the more clicks will it get. And more people will buy the products.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case with most promotions, (they don’ get clicks, but get ignored instead) especially when those promotions are fancy banners and texts. At least that’s what the usability guru Jakob Nielsen has analyzed.

He made a research on U.S Census Bureau homepage, checking the usability of the population counter (text in red) and how many people actually used that text:

86% of users failed to find the country’s current population when it was presented in large red numbers. The reason? Users ignored a key area because it resembled a promotion..

Beyond banner blindness, the major reason this homepage failed is that it used made-up terms or branded descriptions rather than plain-spoken words. Terms like “Population Clock,” “Population Finder,” and “QuickFacts” are not as descriptive as a simple line of text that says: Population of the United States: 302,740,627 (as of Aug. 31, 2007)

Therefore, this holiday season when you make a promotion or when you want one section of your homepage to stand out from the rest, try not to make them look too fancy. Here is three guidelines that Jakob Nielsen suggests:

• Don’t use clever phrases and marketing lingo (i.e use simple normal words).
• Limit font styles and other text formatting (i.e too large fonts, red color texts etc).
• Don’t make it look like an ad.

As you can see, slight changes in text color and text size can adversely effect the usability of your site. Basically it has the opposite effect of what you want. You would think bigger texts will be seen easily and brighter colors will attract the eyes, but as you can see from the research, it has the opposite effect. People actually ignore such texts.

So use those colors and bigger size texts with caution. I think same size texts that are bolded, or have highlighted background work better. Because they emphasize the important points of your site more naturally.

Learn from the Census Bureau’s mistake: try a softer approach with more straightforward, user-centered information. Let go of the fancy formatting and the fancy words.

You can read the full article here.

LinkWorth has launched a new admin panel. The new design has a nice Web2.0 look, and has a tabbed navigation. The new interface is definitely better than the old one, no doubt about it.

Now it’s a lot easier to submit your site and use the admin interface in general. However you still need to do your homework, that is - take your time to get to know their products first.

If you are new to LinkWorth, it’s a new Publisher Program for bloggers to make money online. I have blogged about it here.

If you are a designer it can get quite boring to read about colors. However Color in Motion makes it fun to learn about colors (see the screenshot). It’s an interactive project done in Flash by Claudia Cortes for her Master Degree in Graphics Design. www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/

I have released a new version of my program AdesClrPicker. AdesClrPicker is a very easy to use, yet powerful color picker application for Web Designers, Web Developers and for Website/Blog Owners. It allows you to capture colors anywhere on the screen with a single click of the mouse and output it in either HTML, RGB, C++, VB or Delphi color codes.

New Features in v2.0:
• Improved Interface
• Hue, Saturation, Brightness sliders (HSB Sliders) for modifying the colors in Color Library
• Now it picks colors in HTML, RGB, Delphi, C++, VB codes
• Support for ACT and ACO formats for exporting colors to Adobe Photoshop
• Automatically add colors from Floating Menu to Color Library.
  See Full Features. Screenshots

www.adesdesign.net/php/products_color_picker.php

Flash Schemer is a flash based color generator tool. You can input RGB or HTML codes and get a variation of that color, as well as other matching colors. defmech.com/color/