PhotoSwipe, an Image Gallery for Mobiles Devices : HTML/CSS/JS-based image gallery specifically targeting mobile phones and tablets. I’ve just tested this on iPad 1, iPhone 4, BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and HTC Aria. It works fine on all of them except the Aria (slow loading for some reason). … Read the rest here
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte : I have an advance copy in hand, and I can’t wait for this to be released to the general public on June 7. Ten bucks says it outsells the first A Book Apart title, HTML5 for Web Designers , which I’m fairly certain did extremely well. … Read the rest here
Back in November 2010, David Cameron announced plans to turn the Olympic Village in East London into a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley. These type of Grand Plans are great at generating headlines and creating a legacy for all those involved, but how likely are they to succeed? Are we going to inherit a shiny new creative centre in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympics, or will it become just another mediocre science park like the ones clinging to the sides of the M4? It would seem that successive governments have tried to align themselves with the dream of Silicon Valley, with little success. Back in the late 70s and early 80s I grew up in a town called Bracknell which was supposed to be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley… Read the rest here
Bento Book : Core77: The Bento Book is a system of devices that work together… kind of like Voltron. The phone, tablet, hard drive, and battery dock into the base of the laptop to essentially form half of it. The phone becomes the track pad, the tablet becomes a touch screen keyboard/input area, somewhat like a Nintendo DS. Content can be surfed on the tablet, and then say you want to modify that content, or interact with it more deeply, you dock the tablet into the screen to continue working with it in a more focussed way. Then you can pop the phone out to take it all on the road… Read the rest here
Yesterday, Brandy Fortune asked me on Twitter if there are “ any major sites written in HTML 5 now “. I decided to throw the question to my Twitter gang , and was of course immediately deluged in answers. Also a small helping of standards politics, which wasn’t really what I was after but probably should have known was inevitable. Le sigh. Anyway, here’s a sampling of the sites most frequently mentioned and how they’re using HTML5, listed in no particular order… Read the rest here
The Hobbit: Filming at 48 fps : I tweeted about this earlier, but it’s worth repeating here so I can excerpt a few highlights. On Facebook, director Peter Jackson describes why 24 fps (frames per second) — the standard frame rate used in nearly every major motion picture — is an antiquated practice: Originally, 24 fps was chosen based on the technical requirements of the early sound era. I suspect it was the minimum speed required to get some audio fidelity out of the first optical sound tracks. They would have settled on the minimum speed because of the cost of the film stock. 35mm film is expensive, and the cost per foot (to buy the negative stock, develop it and print it), has been a fairly significant part of any film budget. … Read the rest here
Brilliant solution to listening to your iTunes library remotely. I already have a Mac set up at home with Home Sharing on, to serve the Apple TV and my iPhone in it’s speaker dock. Now I can use it to play it anywhere there is internets! Comment on this … Read the rest here
The Monster at the End of This iPad : An interactive version of my all-time favorite children’s book. Totally worth $4. /via @ zelph … Read the rest here
Is a Macbook Air up to the job of being a primary working machine? It has for me… Since 1995, I’ve always used a Mac laptop as my primary (and only) work machine. When at the office, I plug it into a large screen with keyboard and mouse, and then at home or travelling I’ve got absolutely everything I need with me. Having seen the new generation Macbook Air in the flesh/aluminium, and how small and light it is compared to my unibody MacBook Pro, I wondered if it could be the way forward. The fact that I now cycle to work gave me more impetus to get something that wouldn’t be so heavy on my back. … Read the rest here
A superb student project, creating a series of possible posters for The Smithsonian Museum. The copy-writing is spot on with these! Comment on this … Read the rest here
Those nice chaps over at Iconfinder.com recently interviewed me about how I started, Icon Design, the upcoming Icon Handbook. Pop along and have a read if you’re so inclined! Comment on this … Read the rest here
I’ve been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I’ve seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector’s equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. … Read the rest here
Apple’s Role in the Earthquake : An email from an Apple Japan employee and friend of Kevin Rose: 7 hours and 118 aftershocks later, the store was still open. Why? Because with the phone and train lines down, taxis stopped, and millions of people stuck in the Tokyo shopping district scared, with no access to television, hundreds of people were swarming into Apple stores to watch the news on USTREAM and contact their families via Twitter, Facebook, and email…. You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that’s what the Tokyo Apple stores became. … Read the rest here
Yesterday, Web Standards Sherpa launched. A WaSP outreach project initiated by Aaron Gustafson and Easy! Designs and sponsored by Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, W3C and several other companies. I had the pleasure of handling the initial design and art direction for the site and working with the fantastic team that put this project together. It’s exciting to see it alive and kicking. Web Standards Sherpa will… “…provide web professionals the opportunity to receive feedback, glean advice and learn best practices from experts in the field to help them improve the quality of their own work.” Check out the first pool of articles from sherpas Jared Spool, Aaron Gustafson and Erin Kissane or read more from the Web Standards Project… Read the rest here
There’s something not generally mentioned by those advocating a four-day workweek: tuning out the rest of the world on day five. Lots of us webbies have either promoted the idea of a four-day workweek, or have sought after it, or both. Not a 4/10 workweek , but four days of normal working time and three days of non-working time. Carsonified was one of the first to promote the idea, and recently Ryan Carson wrote once again on the topic. 37signals joined in a little later… Read the rest here
How does a photo of a fruit fly breeding chamber lead to the discovery of one’s own lineage back to 14th century France? That’s not a question I’d ever have thought to ask, but this evening I found an answer after following the most fascinating click trail in, well, ever. It started with an idle perusal of recent Flickr photos from my contacts. Jeremy Keith is currently in Chicago for DrupalCon, and after a page of tantalizing food and architectural photos, I found myself back in Brighton looking at his photos from a laboratory-related exhibit at the Lighthouse Gallery. One especially mundane photo in particular caught my eye, his capture of a placard on a fruit fly breeding chamber . … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
If you think your site’s content doesn’t matter, then you are sorely mistaken. Granted, the argument for content strategy has always mystified me. Not because I think we can do without content strategy, we can’t, but I’m amazed that we still have to make the argument. Folks care very much about appearances; what their websites look like means the world to them. But why don’t they care just as much about what their sites are saying? … Read the rest here
Matchboox : Books that come packaged inside a matchbox. /via @ insideoutmag … Read the rest here
The third book from A Book Apart, The Elements of Content Strategy , is a “brief guide [that] explores content strategy’s roots, and quickly and expertly demonstrates not only how it’s done, but how you can do it well.” That’s an accurate description, although this book, unlike the previous two, does not feel brief. This book focuses on content and is all content. There are few diagrams and no code samples filling up the pages; this books feels lengthier than it is, and I mean that in a good way. The writing within this book is also eloquent and well-written, as I suppose might be expected for a book on content strategy. While much of the content seemed targetted at larger organizations that could afford the cost of a dedicated content strategist, I felt the material would be good to know for freelancers and agencies, alike. When I worked in an agency, I worked with project managers who had many of the skills described within… Read the rest here
There are a handful of people who follow me on Twitter who continually moan about the way I use the service. Some complain when I tweet about what I’ve eaten, who I’ve met or what I’ve done that day. Others complain when I use Gowalla or Foursquare to announce my location or post a stream of consciousness on a topic that is currently bugging me. An obvious reaction is to remind those people that nobody is forcing them to follow me and they can easily unfollow if they don’t like what I’m saying. In fact, I have done just that on several occasions. However Twitter is an unusual hybrid of public discussion and private conversation… Read the rest here
