Guide to the App Galaxy : This is a really nice design effort by Google — fun keyboard navigation, embedded fonts, etc. Content-wise, however, I’m a little lost as to the point of the site, and tab after tab of text isn’t helping, either. … Read the rest here
Why Every Child in America Needs an iPad : Mike Elgan: Everybody’s asking: Are iPads healthy for children? I’m here to tell you: That’s the wrong question. The right question is this: Is the iPad a healthy replacement for TV? And I believe the answer is a resounding yes. … 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
Webfont Services Chart : A nice round-up of the current options for webfont hosts. I’d like to see Part 3: Type vendors that don’t host your fonts but sell fonts approved for webfont embedding, e.g. MyFonts . /via swissmiss … Read the rest here
Hiring: Lead Web Designer at Apartment Therapy : I have to admit I’m feeling a little special right about now seeing these guys post a listing on Authentic Jobs. I’ve been quietly following Apartment Therapy for several months, along with its sister site Unpluggd . What’s really exciting for me is that, while the content they post is fantastic, I’ve always felt the formatting and layout could use a little fine-tuning. Looks like that’ll be part of the job: The first job will be to join in our redesign process with our art director, Thomas Porostocky, and work through a complete redesign for launch in September. After that, you will be working on everything: site pages, email templates, cross browser compliance, media kits, and ad driven event campaigns… Read the rest here
Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects : Josh Nimoy: In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble…. In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep… Read the rest here
One of the things I really enjoyed working on (and continue to enjoy working on) is keyboard access in the new Yahoo! Mail. As a fan of using the keyboard, I wanted to make sure that using Mail felt natural and was easy to move around the application. This is much harder than it looks because we have to establish a balance between a web page model and an application model. Todd Kloots, from the accessibility team at Yahoo!, and I had a number of discussions to establish a consistent pattern that could be applied to all widgets within a page and could be applied to all products that we were building. It was important to establish a consistency in design and a consistency in implementation… Read the rest here
The architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously told a customer to move their table when they complained that water was leaking from the ceiling when they ate dinner. This is almost certainly apocryphal but hints at the ego of the experience designer. Well tell our users and customers what experience they are going to have (sometimes based on research) but they have to live with the results. In an agency centric world which I come from, designers are used like Cruise missiles. The target is acquired and we fire and forget. Rarely if ever do we get the opportunity to cycle back to see if the target turned out to be a hospital rather than a barracks. … Read the rest here
Don’t Touch the Screen : Billed as “a podcast for webnerds with kids,” Charlie Park explores a side of web development life that we rarely discuss: what those of us with families do the other 16 hours of the day. I’m fortunate to have been the inaugural guest, and you can listen to audio from the interview here . (Pardon my rambling the first 7 minutes, I won’t be offended if you need to skip ahead.) Charlie is also co-hosting a session at SXSW 2011 with Joshua Porter, “The Life of the Startup Parent,” on Friday, March 11th at 2:00 PM. … 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
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
When I saw Ian Lloyd tweet the words “Cunning. Like a fox. Neat little trick!” I knew I had to check it out, because Ian’s a sharp one. So I popped over to the linked CSS-Tricks article, Show and Edit Style Element , and checked it out. Cunning indeed! And yet, it immediately bothered me. … Read the rest here
I’ve decided to slap a Creative Commons license on the entire darn Chalkwork Family and make them completely free for personal use, starting right now. I’ve been considering doing this for quite a while. These icons represent a lot of hard work for me between 2006 and 2009, so you can imagine I’ve thought through the implications of making them available for free download without a pay barrier: will people use them commercially and not pay? Will they abuse the license terms? … Read the rest here
AisleOne’s Antonio Carusone: A Backup System : I would imagine this is as thorough and redundant as a backup system gets. 6 copies of vital data, 3 copies of unimportant data — spread across Backblaze , Dropbox, iDisk, and a few local drives. There’s a nifty diagram , even. I’m also in the process of assembling a backup system. I went with Crashplan instead of Backblaze because of the option to have a seeded backup drive (scroll down) shipped to your home for the initial backup. Additionally, I purchased a refurbished Airport Extreme to which I’ll attach a Western Elements 2 TB drive . … Read the rest here
As web developers, we want a way to ask “can you do this?” And there are varying degrees to which we can determine this. One of those ways is to use user agent (UA) detection. We ask the browser some information about itself and it tells us. Based on what we know about a browser, we can make certain assumptions. If a browser tells you it is Internet Explorer, chances are you support the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that Internet Explorer supports. This detection could happen on the server-side or client-side… Read the rest here
As I dig into the nooks and crannies of the various CSS3 modules, I’ve come across something that seems like I should be able to do, but I can’t make it work in browsers. Now, I know as well as anyone that if you try to do something and browsers won’t do it, it might well be the fault of the browsers. Particularly if you can get various browsers to fail differently on the same declaration, as I have. But this is, bizarrely, complicated enough that it’s hard to be sure if it’s me or them. So allow me to pose this to you as a challenge. Given the following ideal rendering, how would you arrive at the depicted result using the single 5-pixel-by-5-pixel image shown within the content? … Read the rest here
TUAW: Verizon iPhone News : TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) has some good coverage of today’s Verizon iPhone announcement and related stories — the mobile hotspot feature for up to 5 devices , why it won’t handle data and voice simultaneously , subtle changes to the antenna and button placement , and (linked from the last article) why some existing cases won’t fit the new Verizon iPhone . … Read the rest here
TUAW: Verizon iPhone News : TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) has some good coverage of today’s Verizon iPhone announcement and related stories — the mobile hotspot feature for up to 5 devices , why it won’t handle data and voice simultaneously , subtle changes to the antenna and button placement , and (linked from the last article) why some existing cases won’t fit the new Verizon iPhone . … Read the rest here
A few changes for beta 2 of the updated reset, presented here: /* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ v2.0b2 | 201101 NOTE: THIS IS A BETA VERSION (see previous line) USE WITH CAUTION AND TEST WITH ABANDON */ html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; font-size: 100%; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; } /* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */ article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { display: block; } body { line-height: 1; } ol, ul { list-style: none; } blockquote, q { quotes: none; } blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ”; content: none; } table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } First, the small changes: adding embed , output , and ruby to the first rule. I went back and forth on these quite a bit, which is why they weren’t in the first cut. However, none of them seem to be replaced so they’re in. Others, such as command , are replaced and so stay out for the same reason that form inputs are left out. ( img is a special case.) The HTML5 element I’m still stuck on is datalist , which seems sort of replaced but then again maybe not. I’m really close to including it on the same grounds that I include canvas , but it’s hard to know if that’s a good idea… Read the rest here
