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Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The latest issue of A List Apart is one of my favorites in recent memory, and has three articles you can’t miss. In “ An Important Time for Design ”, Cameron Koczon challenges designers to be all that they can be: The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A month ago I made one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. I bought a kick scooter . Not one of those aluminum things with rollerblade wheels where the handle is so short you have to hunch over—but a scooter built for adults. Check out this video that shows how the KickPed operates—particularly how it folds up. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

by Jeremy Keith I grew up in Ireland, the home of Halloween. I know that it seems like a quintessentially American holiday, but Halloween has its roots in the Celtic feast of Samhain. The Americans embraced and extended Halloween, adding the tradition of trick-or-treating, which in turn made its way back to Ireland. I spent many of my childhood Halloweens trick-or-treating in the town of Tralee in County Kerry with my cousins. It’s funny, but when I think back to those times, I can’t think of any specific sweets (or “candy”, as the Americans would say)… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Recently I pulled this form letter out of storage. It’s one of my favorite mementos of Grandpa Moll. An independent contractor later in life, he probably sent this to companies in the surrounding area, most likely larger cities such as Reno, Nevada, as his quaint home town of Markleeville, California had only about 150 residents at the time. Back when I did client work as a freelancer, I would often describe myself as a pinch-hitter . In baseball, a pinch-hitter substitutes for another player when the coach feels the substitute player may perform a specific duty, such as bunting or base running, better than the player he replaces. Not that the pinch-hitter is better overall than the other player, just that he might have a better shot at succeeding in a specific scenario or critical play in a close game… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

My Neighbor, Steve Jobs : Lisen Stromberg: While Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and CNET continue to drone on about the impact of the Steve Jobs era, I won’t be pondering the MacBook Air I write on or the iPhone I talk on. I will think of the day I saw him at his son’s high school graduation. There Steve stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, his smile wide and proud, as his son received his diploma and walked on into his own bright future leaving behind a good man and a good father who can be sure of the rightness of this, perhaps his most important legacy of all. /via Hacker News … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Window to the World (CIID/Toyota) from CIID on Vimeo . A nice visualisation of a near future car journey from Toyota. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Window to the World (CIID/Toyota) from CIID on Vimeo . A nice visualisation of a near future car journey from Toyota. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

In my previous post I stated that while I didn’t think responsive design was the right approach for every mobile experience, it was appropriate for 90% of cases and should become the natural default option. Sadly the current default for most organisations is to build a suite of device specific mobile apps. While giving designers control over layout and companies the ability to make a bit of extra money through app store sales, this seems like an expensive, labour insensitive and somewhat wasteful approach. Especially when you consider the relatively small number of app consumers, compared to the number of people who access the web through mobile devices. For most online companies a mobile optimised website is going to be the smartest option in terms of reach and ROI. I think one of the big problems with responsive design is that it’s a relatively new and unproven concept. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

So I’ve been learning the banjo. At the beginning of 2011, I set out to learn something new—something that had nothing to do with pixels, browser bugs, typing, or angle brackets. I’m not calling it a resolution, as I can’t think of another resolution I’ve ever followed through on completely. But I’ve fallen through on the banjo. Specifically, clawhammer banjo, which is an old time style of playing without finger picks… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I just shipped off the last of my drafts for CSS Pocket Reference, 4th Edition to my editor. In the process of writing the entries, I set up an ad-hoc test suite and made determinations about what to document and what to cut. That’s what you do with a book, particularly a book that’s meant to fit into a pocket. My general guide was to cut anything that isn’t supported in any rendering engine, though in a few cases I decided to cut properties that were supported by a lone browser but had no apparent prospects of being supported by anyone else, ever. For fun, and also to give fans of this or that property a chance to petition for re-inclusion, here are the properties and modules I cut… 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

Adactio Go to the source

I don’t get up to London that often. Much as I like the place, the travel to and fro from Brighton can be exhausting, given the woeful state of the rail services on that line—just ask anybody who does the daily commute. On Monday, I had an appointment in London. Rather than take the usual train to Victoria, it made more sense to take the London Bridge route. It must have been quite a while since I was last on that train because, as it pulled into London Bridge station, I was confronted with the impressive sight of a science fictional structure rising out of the city: the Shard . From my subjective perspective, it came out of nowhere. … 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

Snook Go to the source

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

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Hey, any interest in spending a few days in a luxury lodge in the Great Smoky Mountains this coming spring with me and Aaron Gustafson, learning about and working with HTML5 and CSS3? Then you might want to sign up for Retreats 4 Geeks: HTML5 & CSS3 in the very near future, because it was announced late yesterday and as of now there are only six spots still available. It’ll be a very focused two days of training and a day of hands-on project work with a very small group of people, and it’ll be a ton of fun! Personally I’m looking forward to this for many reasons, but two stand out: this sort of very-small-group training and team project work setup is a new thing for me, and it’s the sort of thing I’ve thought about doing on and off for more than a decade but never quite found the time to do. Aaron, thankfully, did find the time and I’m honored that he asked me to take part. I hope I’ll see some of you this April in Tennessee! … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

It’s well past time for me to spend a few minutes reflecting on An Event Apart in 2010. In two words: absocrazifreakiperfluously staggerblasticating . [I totally stole those .

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Gowalla 3.0 Adds Foursquare, Facebook Places Integration : Founder Josh Williams: Gowalla is now the easiest and best way to keep up with your friends across services with a combined activity tab that merges the whereabouts of your Gowalla, Facebook and Foursquare friends. Additionally, Gowalla now supports checking in on both Facebook Places and Foursquare in addition to sharing with both Twitter and Tumblr. I

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Things have been, and will continue to be, quiet around here this week and part of next. I

Cameron Moll Go to the source

MSN Spaces Closing, Becomes WordPress.com : Matt Mullenweg: As just announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt , Windows Live (formerly MSN) Spaces is shutting down and migrating their 30m+ users to WordPress.com. Four years ago I was fairly worried as every internet giant (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google) had a hosted blogging service. Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly in our sights. Blogger, no doubt, has the lion

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Today marks the beta launch of Internet Explorer 9. To celebrate the release, Nishant Kothary from the MIX Online team at Microsoft reached out to me to help showcase its support of WOFF . I knew immediately this was a great opportunity to collaborate with people I admire, so I dropped a line to Frank Chimero and Naz Hamid to lend their design talents, and Trent Walton (who also brought in the skilled Dave Rupert ) to help pitch in on coding duties. As things progressed, Trent and Dave really came in swinging and the group ended up collaborating and nurturing ideas together. … Read the rest here