The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.

From Cclair.nl, there's a new post sharing some code that's been created in an effort to make a "more modern CAPTCHA".

"ModernCaptcha" is a simple script in order to prevent spam in a very user friendly way. In a few words, your visitors don't have to type some characters as you see on the most websites, the verification is made by choosing the company name belonging to the logo that is show.

It's an interesting approach, but, as one reader pointed out, bots has a one in five chance of guessing correctly. That's way less than with a more standard image manipulation CAPTCHA method. I'm not sure I'd want to use it on my sites, but it might be good for a smaller site.

There's a demo of the end result and a download of the latest version as well as some limited support provided in the comments of the post.

On the Shadow Fox Network today, they've posted parts one and two of their look at building a better blogging system.

In part one, they talk about things where all good projects should start - with the planning and what it will take to get the project done. This includes the structure of the application, the usability, and the extensions you'll want to use.

Part two goes a step further into the planning stage by looking specifically at the design and usability of the application. They start with the base HTML and add some styling and images to make it easier to use.

The guys over at the ThinkPHP blog are already improving their Chorizo security scanner software with refreshed usability for their "My Chorizo" page inside the utility.

In the spirit of Web2.0 applications, we constantly improve Chorizo! and silently update the application with the newest features. In order to scan a host, you have to prove that you are the owner of the host by uploading a unique signature file to your host's document root. Some of our users had trouble uploading it into the docroot, some accidently put it into the wrong directory.

Their enhancement makes it easy to tell which of the products have their signature files in place and while don't at a glance.