There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you: Choosy Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference. My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. … Read the rest here

There’s a great article by Wilto in the latest edition of A List Apart . It’s called Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need . What all I really like about the article is that it details the the thought process that went into trying working out responsive images for the Boston Globe. Don’t get me wrong: I like it when articles provide code, but I really like it when they provide an insight into how the code was created. The Filament Group team working on the Boston Globe site were attempting to abide by the two rules of responsive images that I’ve outlined before : The small image should be default. Don’t load images twice (in other words, don’t load the small images and the larger images)… Read the rest here

Earlier this week I recorded an interview with Chris Bowler for his Creatiplicity podcast . Chris has a very genial style and the whole affair felt very relaxed and enjoyable! Its not just about The Icon Handbook either, we discussed everything from parenting to cheese. Pop along for a listen! Comment on this … Read the rest here

I’ve published the transcript of a talk I gave at An Event Apart in 2010 . It’s mostly about interaction design, with a couple of diversions into progressive enhancement and personality in products. It’s called Paranormal Interactivity . I had a lot of fun with this talk. It’s interspersed with videos from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy , Alan Partridge , and Super Mario , with special guest appearances from the existentialist chalkboard and Poshy’s upper back torso . If you don’t feel like reading it , you can always watch the video or listen to the audio . … Read the rest here

Clearleft has been running dConstruct since 2005. You can still visit the site for each year: 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Right from the first event, we recorded and released a podcast of the talks—thanks to Drew ’s l33t audio skillz—and all of those audio files are still online. That’s quite a collection of aural goodies. So we decided to put them all together in one place. I give you… The dConstruct Audio Archive . … Read the rest here

YAY !!! What a way to celebrate 10 years of Hicksdesign (to the very day) – my advance copy of The Icon Handbook arrives! I’m actually holding it in my hands! It has pages that turn with words (what I wrote) and pictures on them! It looks and smells flipping’ gorgeous! Excuse me, I think I need a sit down… If you’ve been waiting for the print version to be available before purchasing, now is your time to pick up a copy ! Tagged: hicksdesign , iconhandbook , icons … Read the rest here

We’ve had a new intern at Clearleft for the past few weeks: Alex Jones . He likes a good coffee and as it’s his first time in Brighton, I promised I’d tell him where he could find the best flat whites. So I made a map tale of Brighton Coffee . Tagged with maptale brighton coffee … Read the rest here

There’s definitely something stirring in the geek zeitgeist: something three-dimensional. Tim Maly just published an article in Technology Review called Why 3-D Printing Isn’t Like Virtual Reality : Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working. Meanwhile The Atlantic interviewed Brendan for an article called Why Apple Should Start Making a 3D Printer Right Now : 3D Printing is unlikely to prove as satisfying to manual labor evangelists as an afternoon spent with a monkey wrench. But by bringing more and more people into the innovation process, 3D printers could usher in a new generation of builders and designers and tinkerers, just as Legos and erector sets turned previous generations into amateur engineers and architects. Last month Anil Dash published his wishlist for the direction this technology could take: 3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes : Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. … Read the rest here

On Twitter the other day, Justin Hall wrote : hah! 18 years ago today, I posted my home page on the public web; here’s a 27 January 1994 version bit.ly/AraMW0 Eighteen years! That’s quite something. For reference, Justin’s site links.net is generally acknowledged to be the web’s first blog, before John Barger coined the term “weblog” (or Peter coined the more common contraction). If you go right back to the start of links.net, Justin explains that he was inspired to start publishing online by a 1993 article in the New York Times —he has kept a copy on his site . What’s fascinating about the article is that, although it’s talking about the growth of the World Wide Web, it focuses on the rising popularity of Mosaic: A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate. From a journalistic point of view, this makes a lot of sense: focusing on the interface to the web, rather than trying to explain the more abstract nature of the web itself is a good human-centric approach. When the author does get around to writing about the web, there’s a lot that must be explained for the audience of the time: With hypertext, highlighted key words and images are employed to point a user to related sources of information. … Read the rest here

Since publishing a section from The Icon Handbook as part of 24 Ways last December ( Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes ) I’ve been involved in a few discussions regarding its cons, some of which have since gained workarounds, and it felt a good time to do a follow up post. First of all, its worth mentioning the context of the article – it’s from Chapter 6, where all the various possible methods for deploying icons on the web are laid out. This includes creating icons with CSS , which isn’t something I’d recommend, but just may be a solution for someone out there and work well in a particular context. In the same vein, using fonts to display icons is just one of the options. Lets go over the 2 cons that keep coming up: Unicode Mapping Jon Tan states (rightly) that where matching unicode characters exist , the key should be mapped to that (such as the heart symbol for Favourites) and others that don’t to Private Use Areas where they have no associated meaning or content. This isn’t a problem with the technique as much as the current implementation of the fonts… Read the rest here