I suck at search, YOU suck at search, everyone sucks at search. Accept it. (unless your the Google bot indexing this page)YOUR sucky search skills are killing usability on the web! But it’s ok, there are people who don’t suck, and they’ll let you drink the kool-aid for free.
I recently updated this site to use Google Custom Search. It took me 5 minutes to setup, andnow anyone can search for all the everthing that rocks on this site. I was so impressed I recommended it for a client project, now their search doesn’t suck either.
It actually gives you quite a bit of style control. You’ve got full CSS control over the search box (minus a little bit of Google branding), plus color/font choices on the results page, which you can display in site. Sure the Google results page isn’t the prettiest thing you’ve seen, but it’s usable, fast, and familiar to your audience (no matter who they are.)
If you need more control, you can upgrade to their very reasonable paid service. It’ll take years for the cost of the basic plan to reach what it’ll cost you to pay a developer to build you a bad search system. And by that time you’ll probably be 2 site revisions down the road and still have crappy search. So go for it, admit that you suck, and give your users something they can actually use. I’ll be doing it whenever I can.
This weekend I decided to take an in depth look at the options we have for formating text in AS3. Those three options being standard HTML, CSS, and TextFormat objects. In the past I have worked with all three types with disappointment. The text format options are the best on a whole, allowing for the most control and flexability, but difficult to control if your working with dynamic text. CSS is great for accomplishing styling determined externally and dynamic content, despite the fact of its limited implementation.
I came up with one intriguing idea that I felt was worth sharing, that being using regular expressions to parse text data and format HTML tags (or rather any tag) with text format objects. There are some benefits to this, mainly being the ability to offer a wider range of custom support. I’ve only done some basic proof of concept tests, (see below), but the possibilities are intriguing. One immediate concept that comes to mind is proper image tag support.
In a robust system tags could offer all kinds of support, for example button definitions, or ordered/unordered lists, nested lists, and custom bullet styling, and support for a wide range of html tags, such as H1, H2, ect.
Heres an example of it in use. Even though tags are applied to the fields, they don’t get stripped out since the text was applied using the standard .text rather than .htmlText.
One of the commonly agreed issues with Flash based sites is the inability to use the back and forward buttons on your web browser, page refreshing, or link to a specific page within a Flash site. Maria Lubenova and Rostislav Hristov of the small studio Asual DZZD have developed a great, and incredibly easy solution to these issues.
SWFaddress is a powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. The library has full support for both AS2(eww) and AS3. They make it so easy that there really is no more excuses for not including this support in our Flash applications. I will be supporting this in my work whenever I can.
