HTML5 Live with John Allsopp : Just purchased my subscription. Though I’m familiar with a lot of this, I still have plenty to learn. I suspect it’ll be a good interactive complement to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers . … Read the rest here
A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. … Read the rest here
Phaeton Typeface by Kevin Cornell and Randy Jones : The always-entertaining Kevin Cornell: If you’ve ever made a font, you know how much work it is. Fortunately, I don’t. Because I was lucky enough to have teamed up with Mr. Randy Jones in the creation of Phaeton, which made it significantly more fun and less stressful. It was a good match-up, because brains are like chewing gum. I shall explain. … Read the rest here
Just before noon (Eastern U.S. time) today, An Event Apart Minneapolis sold its last available seat. That’s three events so far in 2010 and three sell-outs. If you were hoping to join us in Minneapolis but hadn’t registered yet, we’re sorry we won’t see you there! You can contact our Event Manager to get put on the waiting list, or you can join us for one of the remaining two shows of the year: Washington DC and San Diego . There are strong reasons to prefer either one. In Washington DC , we’ll have our second-ever A Day Apart , a full day of in-depth learning with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte taking on the topics of HTML5 and CSS3, respectively… Read the rest here
A hard copy of Jeremy Keith ’s HTML5 For Web Designers arrived in the mail today. It’s wonderful to finally see how well-designed it is as a physical object. Most importantly, it’s the clear explanation of a confusing subject that’s made this little book a must-read. … Read the rest here
Is CSS the New Photoshop? : John Nack, Photoshop’s principal product manager: As people can do more and more in code, it makes sense to ask whether even to use Photoshop in designing Web content. I think Adobe should be freaking out a bit, but in a constructive way…. As for Photoshop, we could either teach the app to speak HTML natively (via live HTML layers ), or we could translate Photoshop-native artwork into HTML (e.g. ‘copy this button/text as HTML/CSS’). It’s not yet clear to me, however, how such code would smoothly integrate into one’s projects… Read the rest here
Inc. Magazine: How to Design and Build a Mobile Website : In which myself and several others offer advice to those diving into mobile. … Read the rest here
“Google is Bringing Android Software Development to the Masses.” : It’s called Google App Inventor for Android , and how’s this for user testing: User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. The chances of anything extraordinary coming of this? About the same as me writing a course for nursing students. Or about the same as useful, elegant websites created by FrontPage . … Read the rest here
Hard Candy Case for iPhone 4 : It’s thin, comes in a few colors, and — most importantly — it’s not rubber. This may be the perfect fix for my Bumper woes . Update: Phil Coffman found another case , less expensive and perhaps even thinner. /via @carlpeterson … Read the rest here
If you upgraded Thunderbird and discovered that the fonts used to display messages suddenly changed, and worse still, you were unable to get all messages to obey your font display settings, then this post is most likely for you. Here’s what happened to me: I upgraded to Thunderbird 3.1, and suddenly all my messages were in a font I didn’t recognize or appreciate. I insist on seeing only the plain text version (technically, the text/plain part) of all my e-mail; and what’s more, that it be displayed in a monospace font. Courier 13, in my case. So I made sure “View > Message Body As” was still set to “Plain Text”, which it was… Read the rest here
SlideShowPro Adds HTML5 : SlideShowPro, which is as prolific as Jeffrey Zeldman describes, is fully Flash-based. Zeldman recaps Todd Dominey’s resolution for accommodating Flash-unfriendly iOS devices. For publishers who use SlideShowPro, it’s as easy as updating the Flash Player embed code in your HTML documents. … Read the rest here
Tweet Sleuthing : So, the article I’ve linked to here is actually about a possible acquisition bid for Thing Labs , the makers of Brizzly , by Foursquare . That is of very little interest to me. The real story here, in my opinion, is how Louis Gray pieced together a series of tweets from a VC and two founders to create a convincing speculation of the potential bid. That is of great interest to me. Nice work, Louis. … Read the rest here
Springfield Punx have been doing a series of Simpsons-ised characters from Season 5! I’ve also got a soft spot for his Steve Zissou … Comment on this … Read the rest here
Two sizes of dive slates, as displayed in my shower. I’ve written before about showering as an ideal model for creative pause —minimal distraction, mental freedom, and a change of scenery. What I haven’t written about is how to capture what comes of the pause. Inspiration is elusive and fleeting, and if it isn’t captured when it comes, it’s often gone for good. … Read the rest here
You may call it Ambient, Drone, Minimalism or Modern Classical, but I always think of this sort of music as being like bat detectors. In the same way that they change the frequency of the bat sounds so that we can hear them, it’s as if this is what nature sounds like once converted for our ears. Whatever the pigeonhole, it’s a form of music I adore and Kyle Bobby Dunn’s A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn is in it. It’s a 2 disc collection of beautiful, atmospheric music. His site even has one of those mediaplayer widget thingies, so pop along and have a listen! Start with my favourite ‘Empty Gazing’ and go from there! Tagged: ambient , music … Read the rest here
Apple: 3 Million iPads in 80 Days : There’s not a whole lot of new stuff they can say following the 2 million milestone just a few weeks ago. Hence, “magical” appears three times in this brief press release. … Read the rest here
Apple: 3 Million iPads in 80 Days : There’s not a whole lot of new stuff they can say following the 2 million milestone just a few weeks ago. Hence, “magical” appears three times in this brief press release. … Read the rest here
“Swype” Input for Touchscreen Mobile Phones : The New York Times reports on a technology in development by the same inventor of T9, a predictive text input technology used by most “candy bar” phones with numeric keypads. Watch the Swype demos on YouTube . Try it out on your iPhone or similar touchscreen device. You won’t be able to type anything, but it seems to me there’s a noticeable speed improvement over thumbing. This tells me the technology has potential… Read the rest here
Type Hinting : Peter Biľak: I have been designing type since the early 1990s, and for as long as I can remember, type designers have been saying that hinting would soon be made obsolete by new advances in hardware and software. Now, almost 20 years later, hinting seems to be more relevant than ever. According to Peter, hinting—the process of mapping a font’s mathematical outlines onto a monitor’s pixels—remains relevant even with @font-face in play, which explains why it’s likely we’ll see font foundries republish their libraries as “web safe” (e.g. FontFonts Web Fonts ): Last year there was considerable hype about the @font-face declaration, a function that makes it possible for a webpage to display any font, freeing designers from dependence on the ‘web-safe’ fonts and opening new design possibilities (not the least of which is the creation of visual identities which are consistent across both print and web media). On the other hand, this also raises new issues, including poor onscreen display of non-hinted fonts. … Read the rest here
Replaying a 1982 Football Match in an Urban Environment : A meticulous remake of the last 15 minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Germany. Camera angles, player movements, and even audience participation were all carefully recreated in various urban environments. Filed under “Way Too Much Time on Your Hands.” /via Coudal … Read the rest here