Webdesigninformer.com

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Todays 24ways article is Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes , taken partly from Chapter 6 of the upcoming Icon Handbook , but rewritten to fit to the 24ways format. Instead of using the traditional route of PNG s, web fonts offer a scalable and resolution independent solution. Combined with HTML5 data attributes, you can create one CSS rule to style them all in one go. This article covers both the advantages and disadvantages of the technique. Thanks must go to Drew Wilson who helped me understand how to use data attributes. He created Pictos the excellent icon font used in the article, and his experience in making Pictos was a valuable source of research… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

As the Apple TV doesn’t let you connect a drive directly with your content (it requires a ‘middle man’ of iTunes) getting your content to show up can be a little trying at times. Some of the reasons why it goes wrong are: The Mac serving the content isn’t on The Mac serving the content has dropped off the wifi network (happening a lot in Lion) The Mac serving the content doesn’t have iTunes open The Mac serving the content has iTunes open, but Home Sharing isn’t turned on (or using the same login as the one specified on Apple TV) The drive where all the content is stored has become unmounted, so iTunes can’t access it You’ve remounted the drive, but there’s a bug where if iTunes has tried to play content stored on the network drive, it corrupts the file path data, replacing it with some other obscure file (in my case, it seems to be a photo folder bizarrely) In short, there’s too much to go wrong, and Apple TV is on the naughty step until these steps can be bypassed without hacks. Rant over. Tagged: appletv , mediacentre … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

In episode 2 of Off Book , typeface designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones outline the importance of selecting the right font to convey a particular feeling. Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about building identity in messaging, while Eddie Opara uses texture to create reaction. Infographic designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza map complicated data sets into digestible imagery, mixing color, graphics and type. There is a moment towards the end where Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones have a John and John from They Might Be Giants thing going. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

10K Apart, Responsive Edition : Same as last year’s contest (10k of data total per app submitted), but with an additional rule this year: must be responsive. Site design by the responsive savants at Paravel . … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

As somebody who has publically stated that they “don’t care about user experience” and is fed up of “defining the dammed thing” I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I’d like. Some designers think that user experience is just a made up name and that we’re all user experience designers really. Others think that User Experience is a term used by consultants to trick clients out of money and would prefer it we all just stuck to the title of web designer. Some feel that user experience is simply common sense design while others see it as a land grab to own the fun bit of the design process. This is all complete nonsense of course, which is why I keep getting drawn into an argument I don’t really want to have and one that isn’t especially beneficial to the industry. It’s obviously nonsense to argue that the field of UX design doesn’t exist as there are hundreds of books and conferences devoted to the practice, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people with UX in their job title and an unfathomable number of blog posts about the subject… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Most Common iPhone Passcodes : Hint: 1234. This isn’t actual iPhone passcode data, but instead passcode data from an app called Big Brother Camera Security whose “passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock.” (From what I can tell, Big Brother is an app not unlike Hidden of This Guy Has My MacBook fame, but for iPhone.) There’s some irony here to behold. Users of the Big Brother app track those who use their phone without permission. And how did Daniel Amitay compile the Big Brother passcodes being used? By quietly, albeit anonymously, tracking users of the Big Brother app. Apptly named… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL. This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Hiring: Senior Software Developer at charity: water : Regular readers of this site are familiar with my partiality to charity: water . They’re seeking someone with experience developing with an MVC framework (CakePHP is a plus), database design and implementation (RDBMS or NoSQL) and working in test-driven development. Experience with PHP and Java is necessary, as well as HTML/CSS and JavaScript. It’s a tall order for an organization accustomed to crushing tall orders, i.e. helping nearly a billion people get access to clean drinking water. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

At Clearleft we’re an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPI s increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter. Thankfully we’ve only seen this happen on 4 occasions in our 6 year history. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Andy Budd Go to the source

In 1884 Thomas Marks opened his first market stall in Leeds. Over the next few years he opened 20 other stalls around the UK. In 1894, Thomas Spencer invested in the business and retail chain Marks & Spencer was born. From it’s humble beginnings M&S —as it was colloquially called—became one of the UK’ s biggest success stories and was the first retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over £1 billion. Companies like WH Smith, Woolworth’s and AMSTRAD all started the same way, so it would seem that in order to make it big, you should start small. Can the same thing be said of the Web… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard , which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on. It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards. Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy. Who knows? Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track. That’d be just awful . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Daring Fireball: The Verizon iPhone 4 : The Gruber, comprehensive as always, sharing his take on the new Verizon iPhone. He’s had one for a week already: The numbers don’t lie. AT&T’s data network is faster — when you have a strong connection on both phones. The catch is with that ‘when you have a strong connection’ clause. Verizon’s network has wider, more consistent coverage, and noticeably superior voice quality…. There’s one difference [between the AT&T iPhone and Verizon iPhone], the network, and their network looks better. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Amazon has launched a new API for sending email "in the cloud" called Simple Email Service . Like other Amazon services, one of the biggest draws—besides using the solid infrastructure—is the pricing. You can send up to 2,000 emails a day absolutely free. After that, you’re looking at 10 cents per thousand emails and 15 cents per GB of data transfer. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I spent the weekend at The Guardian offices in London at History Hack Day . It was rather excellent. You’d think I’d get used to the wonderful nature of these kinds of events, but I once again I experienced the same level of amazement that I experienced the first time I went to hack day . The weekend kicked off in the traditional way with some quickfire talks. Some lovely people from The British Museum, The British Library and The National Archives talked about their datasets, evangelists from Yahoo and Google talked about YQL and Fusion Tables , and Max Gadney and Matthew Sheret got us thinking in the right directions. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Eric Meyer Go to the source

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

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Short Review ATV2 may lack support for playing any video codecs other than mp4’s, and any apps/expandability, but it’s bloody good at what it does do. It’s tiny, inexpensive, silent and doesn’t even get warm. It streams far smoother than I expected it to. I absolutely love it, and may have to get another one for another room. Long Review Yeah, I couldn’t resist. I got an Apple TV 2 as well. … Read the rest here