Over the course of the last couple weeks, I’ve gotten some emails from friends and colleagues saying “Hey Will, did you know your blog is getting a malware warning on Safari on Mac?”

Alarmed, I clicked on the Google diagnostics link, and saw

Google provides these kinds of services through a variety of different affiliated and semi-affiliated organizations.

Notice the issue here? “This site is note currently listed as suspicious” “0 items of malware.” So why exactly is there this warning?  And why does it *only* show up in Safari? And why does the warning only happen on Mac?  And why does it only happen on the home page?  Lots of questions.

Ok, questions aside, next, I took a spin over to my ISP to see if anyone had hacked the site, uploaded anything nasty, cast a spell on the site.  After spending far more time than I wanted to reading through FTP logs, etc (why is it so hard to provide a graph of access over time?), digging through the file system, and just beating my head against the wall.  What had triggered the warning?

Still not knowing, I at least decided that I was convinced I was clean.  Time to head over to Google Web Master tools.  There, I selected my site, and asked for “reconsideration.”

Time passes.  This afternoon, I got an email from another friend warning me that Safari on a Mac was flagging me for malware.  Wondering, I logged back into Google’s tools only to find that I had a new message waiting for me.  Woo hoo, maybe there’s resolution, or at least guidance on how to correct the issue.

We’ve processed your reconsideration request for http://ux-strategy.com/ August 17, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://ux-strategy.com/.

We’ve now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don’t find any problems, we’ll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn’t appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

Huh?  What the hell does that mean?  Well, I’m so glad you took the time to send this extremely informative response.

So now I’m caught in limbo: the one avenue of appeal the site tells me pursue, provides a useless non-answer, and yet I’m still tagged in Safari on the Mac. Kafka, I hear you laughing.

Update: Also known as #fail. Now it it fails only if you’re running Leopard on a Mac – works fine in Show Leopard.  Fun.  Thanks Apple & Google.

The Phizzpop Design Challenge will be held at Zune LA this year.  Register to attend the party at www.phizzpop.com.

You’ll see Archetype, Manifest Games and PUNY compete for a chance to compete in the Phizzpop Design Challenge Nationals at SxSW.

What could be better?  Open bar, food and great design.  See you Friday!

Get the plug-in here.

Once installed, you’ll see this:

Great stuff!

In 1998, I began using HTML prototyping as a way to capture the interaction design for the projects I was leading (while I may have described them as a ‘web app’ at the time, I certainly wouldn’t now…).   Now mind you, CSS1 was barely out the door at that point, and it was all table all the time.  Despite that, I had some great creative developers working with me, and we were able to iterate very quickly.  This experience was transformational for me – it’s one thing to develop a concept map as a way to structure your thinking, it’s another thing to develop an HTML prototype to show the interactions your proposing.

Fast forward 5 years, I’d gotten really good at making Dreamweaver behave the way I wanted it to in a prototyping environment.  I’d also gotten really good at getting teams on board, and getting clients to focus on the interaction, not the fact that they’re looking at a bunch of gray boxes.

Once  I decided I wanted to move back to CA, and managed to convince my wife of that as well, I started looking at the typical players here.  I settled at a large eCommerce retailer here, and started my work.  What amazed me was even though I was responsible for the most ‘application-like’ portion of the organization (I was responsible for digital photos, (digital) music, books, and (digital) Videos), the organization used Visio as a way to represent the layout of the page.  This created problems:

1. In order to accurately represent the states, transitions, etc, it meant that *massive* documents were required 
2. rent a car bulgariaCapturing animations was extremely difficult and describing behavior is ambiguous
3. Review of the document is very difficult, long process.  Additionally, the review is prone to error, misunderstanding and requires the participants to imagine how the final experience will ‘feel’

All this is compounded by the process that many firms use down the line from the wireframe:

‘On paper’ this looks like it makes sense in the same way that waterfall methodology makes sense on paper.  The fundamental problem with it is that 

Silverlight

· To learn more about Silverlight visit the Silverlight Community site. This site includes tons of tutorials, videos, getting started information, samples and a showcase where you can see the latest sites created with Silverlight

· One of the best online resources is the library of videos from the latest MIX event in Las Vegas. These are many dozens of hours of videos that talk about Silverlight and User Experience – http://sessions.visitmix.com/

· The Silverlight Reference includes the nitty gritty of Silverlight. Covering both versions of Silverlight you will find detailed information on all functions, events, properties and objects as well as useful examples – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404708.aspx

· Microsoft Learning has also created some fun Silverlight Snacks that provide you with high level information on Silverlight

· Mike and Mike’s Silverlight Webcast series is great (mainly aimed at developers but also useful for you as a designer) – http://www.miketaulty.com/SLVideos.html

· Tim Sneath is one of the most popular bloggers in Microsoft. He is a developer but his posts will be very useful for you too: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/

· Lynda.com has produced a free Silverlight series. Please note this is Silverlight 1 but might still be useful for you in order to understand some basic concepts of Silverlight – http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=473

· Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 Feature Matrix. Learn more about the differences between Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 – http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/overview.aspx

Expression

· Visit the Microsoft Expression site for more information about the Expression tools, video tours, feature lists, trials, preview versions and to purchase the products.

· Visit the Expression Community site for more learning and technical resources for designers. Visit the forums, download the samples and check out the blogs from some Expression product team members.

· The XAML-Ready agency session at MIX will help you speed up in understanding Silverlight and Expression concepts from a Flash designer point of view – http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=C01

· To learn more about DeepZoom check out this post which talks about the latest version of DeepZoom Composer.

Microsoft UX and Design    

· Microsoft Design site. Learn more about different designers who work for Microsoft in different areas.

Community

· Kirupa is a Program Manager in the Blend team. You will enjoy his blog and will found lots of great tricks in there: http://blog.kirupa.com/?cat=13

· Arturo is a Product Manager for Expression. You can also get news and announcements in his blog: http://ux.artu.tv

· All the Expression product teams also own and post news and tips & tricks in their blogs:

o Expression Blend and Expression Design

o Expression Web

o Expression Encoder

o Expression Media

New Resources

This online resource list for Designers will continue to be updated and expanded. You can visit http://ux.artu.tv/?page_id=70 to get the latest version.

Sorry for the delay in posting, I promise I’ll be back soon.  As you can see, I’ve got my hands a little full at the moment

In the mean time, check out this interview I did with Tony Sokolowski, Design Director at Vertigo.

Check out the rest of the Expression Newsletter here.

Check out it out here.

UPDATE:

Check out the Microsoft Press Pass on Cynergy’s win!

Deep Zoom used to be called “Seadragon”  – gotta love code-names.  If you running IE, you can check out an earlier implementation of the technology in a project called Photosynth.  Incidentally, this was was also featured at TED07.

Our launch example is a great project we did for Hard Rock.  As some of you may know, Hard Rock owns a massive amount of music related memorabilia.  Working with one of our partners, Vertigo , we created Hard Rock Memorabilia.

Now, you too can create your own with this handy new tool: The Deep Zoom Composer

I’ll post my own Deep Zoom Gallery once I’m back from Redmond tomorrow.  Enjoy!