I installed wordpress 2 a few weeks ago, which doesn’t mean much in terms of reading this blog, but much in terms of administering it due to the majorly reworked back end. Anyways, to make a long story short, the admin site has this really great implementation of the “flash” (that is a highlighted element on a web-app page telling you something important/permanent has been executed, as in “your mail has been sent” or “changes saved”).
As flash messages must be, they are a bright, attention-getting color at first, but the innovation in wordpress is that they slowly fade to a color that doesn’t demand attention at all, leaving the user to work with the page without the distraction of a message that was only important for the first few seconds. The effect is so subtle that it took me a little while to notice it, but now that I do, I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing this.
I made a video so you can check it out: wordpress-full.mov
And from the archives, for fun, I mocked up what this must have looked like before DHTML: wordpress-oldtimey.mov