Good designs always help users solve their problems in a convenient and familiar way. It takes little or no time for users getting used to the product with a good design. In contrast, bad designs frequently introduce confusion and complexity to users. Before we design any product, we should think carefully about every aspect of the product. We share some really bad design here to show how they can affect people's life.1. USB ConnectorHave you ever put one in right on the first try? We frequently put them wrongly the first time.2. The Apple puck mouseNot only was it incredibly uncomfortable and...

Less is more is a very important design principle. It is as important as the 80:20 principle. It means that which is less complicated is often better understood and more appreciated than what is more complicated; simplicity is preferable to complexity; brevity in communication is more effective than verbosity.Next we will use an animated image to describe what is less is more.The popularity of flat design in web application design also proves the importance of less is more. Many famous companies adopt flat design in their products such as Microsoft's Windows Phone and the new Google logo.Note ...

Before you start to do web development, either for a hobby or for your start up project, you should be prepared for learning many different technologies including both front end and back end. You may need to deal with UI design, business logic design, data store and infrastructure setup etc. This seems a very complex. Indeed, if you know where you should go, the  it's actually not so hard.Here are some sites you should go when you face issues while you are doing web development. These sites are not language specific, they will not cover only one specific web programming language, instead ...

Finite state machine is a very useful design model, it can be used to simulate many events in the world.In short, finite state machine has three features:Number of states is finiteAt any moment, one object can only be in one stateIn some condition, it will transfer from one state to another stateIn JavaScript, finite state machine can be applied in many places. For example, one menu element on a webpage. When the mouse hovers on the menu, the menu will show up, while the mouse moves away, the menu will hide. If we use a state machine, there are two states(show and hide), the mouse will trigger...

Have you ever seen the count down component of Apple before its app downloads reached 50 billion times? It's really cool. On a website, we often need to have a count down function, for example, when a e-commerce site initiates some promotions or some organizations want to start an event. In this post, we introduce some cool jQuery countdown scripts and plugins.Circular Countdown jQuery Plugin MORE INFO / DEMOCoconut – Jquery Countdown Plugin - MORE INFO / DEMOIt contains 4 circles with different sizesDynamic Countdown with Counter – MORE INFO /&nb...

In PHP manual, the description for session_destroy() function is :session_destroy() destroys all of the data associated with the current session. It does not unset any of the global variables associated with the session, or unset the session cookie. To use the session variables again, session_start() has to be called.I am confused about this description. If this function destroys all session data, then why the global variables associated with the session are not unset? Why can we use the session variables again?If we read the description carefully, we can find what this function does...

There are many different discussions about PHP sessions. We may often face some weird issues while handling PHP sessions. Sometimes session is expired earlier than expected. Or sometimes the session is not expired. This introduces many confusions.Today we discuss how to set PHP session timeout correctly today. In php.ini, there are three key parameters which will affect the session timeout. session.gc_maxlifetime, session.gc_probability and session.gc_divisor. session.gc_maxlifetime defined the lifetime of a session in seconds which indicates when the session will be garbage collected. Then se...

First, let's check out below codes:<?php$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', "test"); $query = <<prepare($query); $bind_params = array(':username' => "laruence", ':password' => "weibo");foreach( $bind_params as $key => $value ){ $statement->bindParam($key, $value);}$statement->execute();What is the SQL executed finally? Is there any problem with above codes?Many people may think the query executed is :INSERT INTO `user` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ("laruence", "weibo");But the query actually gets executed is :INSERT INTO `user` (`username`, `passwor...