“Existing subscribers feel so insulted by having to pay twice that their negative ratings dominate the App Store feedback. Thus, many potential new subscribers will see the 2-star rating and immediately abandon the application download. With 500,000 alternatives, people don’t have time for junk apps.”

And here is the most important part:

One Bad Screen = Millions Lost

“Although overall user experience is paramount, as this example shows, you must also pay attention to the details. A single bad screen can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and brand value.

As the saying goes, you get only one chance to make a first impression. That’s why startup screens are crucial. This is particularly true for mobile users, who often have fairly low motivation to mess with apps they’ve downloaded for free. But even in “regular” software, the installation, setup, and initial screens can make or break an application.”

http://uxmovement.com/forms/innovative-techniques-to-simplify-sign-ups-and-logins

Along with some best practices there are a few interesting ideas:

Allow Users to Type Their Pass­word Only Once

Com­bat Spam by Hid­ing a Javascript Textfield, Instead of Using CAPTCHA

A modal win­dow also keeps users on the cur­rent page, but it opens up at the cen­ter of the page, putting the focus entirely on the login form. This option gives you room to add sup­ple­men­tal infor­ma­tion on your login form.

• How to Imple­ment a jQuery AJAX Login Form into a Modal Box
• Sim­ple jQuery Modal Win­dow Tutorial

Use a Ques­tion Mark Icon for the Pass­word Recov­ery Link

Users should have no trou­ble find­ing the pass­word recov­ery link on your form. Instead of using a “for­got your pass­word” link, con­sider using a sim­ple ques­tion mark but­ton that won’t take up a lot of room and get lost among other links. Because the ques­tion mark is the uni­ver­sal sym­bol for help, users won’t won­der where to go when they’re hav­ing pass­word trouble.

Make the Login But­ton as Wide as the Textfield

The login but­ton isn’t just for tak­ing action. It also lets users know what action they’re about to take. A small login but­ton has as a weak affor­dance and can make users feel uncer­tain about log­ging in.

A wide login but­ton gives users more con­fi­dence in log­ging in and is hard to miss. The button’s label also becomes more vis­i­ble so that users are clearer about the action they’re taking.

Natural Language Processing with Python helps you get started.

You can also use this tutorial and try this demo.

jqPlot is built on top of jQuery, the javascript framework everyone seems to be using now-a-days. jqPlot has plenty of examples and documentation for getting started. If you want to draw linegraphs you’ll have everything out of the box. But bargraphs don’t have the much needed tooltip. So you’ll have to add custom tooltip for your bargraphs, which requires you to handle ‘jqplotMouseMove’ event listener hook. It wasn’t very obvious how to do it from the documentation, but thanks to their google group discussions, I was able to get some basic tooltip for bargraph as well. Should you need help with the same, here are useful links:

Highlighter 2 example

But it was not clear to me what value was coming in to the event handler. And what was it that I need to display as tooltip. Here is what helped me figure it out:

“With Firebug you can see that the “neighbor” object is the one that
indicates which bar has been moused over and then you can do, for
example,
var myText = neighbor.data[1];
to populate what is displayed on mouseover.”

So if you are considering to plot a simple graph, jqPlot is of great help. Specifying the type of axes, clickable legend labels to hide some data, locating the legend are all straight-forward. Also irrespective of the order of your data in the javascript array, the date axis sorts the data by date automatically.

If you are looking to become a data scientist, these posts may be of interest to you:
http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-become-a-data-scientist
http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-come-up-to-speed-on-MapReduce-Hadoop-and-Hive

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/dotnetquestions/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1108

Great visualizations

Digg Swarm

1. Path to Flash Player installation. It is quite not enough to have the flash player and debugger installed. Debugging didn’t work for me until I added the files flashplayer_10_ax_debug.exe and flashplayer_10_plugin_debug.exe to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\Player\10\win.

2. If you get the error “Parameter blendmode must be non-null”, set the blendmode of the component that gives the error to BlendMode.NORMAL.

3. If you want to change your  browser settings for debugging, go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Web Browser and change the settings in Flex Builder 3.

• OpenNLP
• MinorThird
• UIMA
• NTLK (A useful link on some features)