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Adactio Go to the source

Whenever I take a trip somewhere—like Copenhagen , for example—it’s a good opportunity to catch up on what I’ve been huffduffing . Trains, planes and buses are the killer apps of personal podcasting. In many ways, Huffduffer becomes more useful the further away you are from a computer and an internet connection. I didn’t get the chance to see Mark speak at this year’s Web Directions @media in London, but now that I’ve listened to his talk on Designing Grid Systems , I’m cursing the two-track format of the conference and the fact that I couldn’t be in two places at once. This talk is superb; one of the best presentations I’ve ever heard… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

An interview with Think Vitamin : While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble . You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer  if you happen to huff the duff stuff. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

There’s been a lot of map-related activity on the BBC recently. The series of documentaries called The Beauty of Maps was all too short. Meanwhile, Radio 4 ran a ten-part series entitled On The Map . They would have disappeared down the Beeb’s memory hole but Brian did a little bit of digital preservation and passed them on to me. I’ve put them on Huffduffer . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

You may have noticed a lot of HTML5 vs. Flash talk lately. Substitute HTML5 for HTML5 video . Frankly, I’m a little baffled by this supposed dichotomy because you don’t have to choose. The way that video works, according to the spec , is for fallback content to be placed between the opening and closing <video> tags. So you can go ahead and use object or embed or whatever you need to put your Flash video in your markup… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Photo: ©Tony Park When I last saw The National play the (now extinct) London Astoria on the Boxer tour in 2007, one person in the crowd asked for “Mr November… AGAIN !”. Such is the energy of this song live, and the presence of Matt Berninger when he belts out that he is Mr November, that you want it again and again. Last week, I saw them again at the Royal Albert Hall, and the photo above by Tony Park is from that evening’s performance of that song. In short, the sound, atmosphere, band and venue all added up to be one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to . I was utterly carried along, particularly during the chorus of new songs like Bloodbuzz Ohio… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I had the pleasure of joining hosts Dan and Jeffrey for the second episode of The Big Web Show . We talked about Pete Townsend and cats that look like Hitler but mostly we talked about HTML5. Specifically, we talked about what’s between the covers of HTML5 For Web Designers . The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure so go ahead and huffduff it if you fancy an hour’s worth of three-way markup action. The Big Web Show 2: HTML5 with Jeremy Keith on Huffduffer Tagged with bigwebshow html5 book audio huffduffer … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I went up to London today to have a chat about HTML5 with some of the developers in the trenches of the BBC World Service . It was only when I was on the train from Brighton that I realised I had left my reading material at home. Never mind , I thought, I’ve got my my Huffduffer feed to listen to. First, I listened to a talk from Robin Dunbar at The RSA entitled How Many Friends Does One Person Need? How Many Friends Does One Person Need… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Thanks to this fine piece of huffduffing I’m reminded that there hasn’t been a Biscuit Friday for over four years. That’s about to be rectified. To the tune of the Hokey Cokey: Facebook Mum YouTube Dad Seabass, manbag Fifty quid to Chad Would the congregation like to rise and sing Hymn number 252 Here come the Barmy Army They’re absolutely crazy Bart, Elvis and the baby Kill kill kill stab murder and dispatch From Petty Sessions on CSI :Ambleside . Read or add comments … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Ever since I launched Huffduffer , one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the sign up form . I have to admit, I didn’t really think it was that revolutionary an idea. All I was trying to do was make the sign-up process a little friendlier and if web standards have taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing inherent in the presentation of any element, much less forms. So I made the form more conversational and less blocky and rigid. Well, it turns out that people love it. I’ve received bucketloads of Twitter messages and emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed the sign-up process. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Tony recently remarked on Twitter : Readwriteweb write the most thoughtful intelligent pieces around, and it’s worryingly indicative of our culture that they aren’t read more I have my own, somewhat selfish, reason to praise this particular tech site. ReadWriteWeb’s lead writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick , is a big fan of Huffduffer . What an astute young man! He even made a screencast for Read Write Web . Huffduffer Screencast Seriously, I’m pleased as punch with this. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I rolled out a new addition to the Huffduffer home page earlier this week. If you aren’t logged in, everything looks the same as before: under the heading Create a podcast of found sounds, there’s a short list giving the low-down on what you can do: Find links to audio files on the Web. Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds. But if you are logged in, then a different list appears, this one showing the activity since you last logged in: How much has been huffduffed. How much huffduffing your collective has done… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Take a look at the line-up and schedule for UX London next May. It’s going to be fan-bloody-tastic. I’m particularly excited about seeing Scott McCloud . When Kai found out that I had never read Understanding Comics , he very kindly sent me a copy. Now I understand what all the fuss is about. It’s a superb book and extremely relevant to interaction design …hence my excitement about Scott McCloud’s appearance at UX London. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

When I added collectives to Huffduffer , I wanted to keep the new feature fairly discrete. I knew I would have to add an add/remove device to profiles but I also wanted that device to be unobtrusive. That’s why I settled on using a small + / - button. The action of adding someone to, or removing someone from a collective was a clear candidate for Hijax . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Huffduffer was launched thirteen months ago. I almost missed the one year anniversary but for an astute huffduffer who pointed it out . It’s been quite a year. Just over 2000 people signed up and huffduffed over five and a half thousand audio files . I’ve been tweaking the site fairly regularly—and blogging about it here —fiddling with forms , machine tags and sparklines . Today I launched the biggest update to the site so far… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A few months ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote about password . Specifically, he wrote about the standard practice of the contents of password fields being masked by default. In his typical black/white, on/off, right/wrong Boolean worldview, Father Jakob called for this practice to be abolished completely. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Apple take a more empathetic approach, acknowledging that there often very good reasons for masking passwords. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer the user the option to disable password masking if they choose … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’ve already described how machine tags on Huffduffer trigger a number of third-party API calls. Tagging something with music:artist=… , book:author=… , film:title=… or any number of similar machine tags will fire off calls to places like Amazon , The New York Times , or Last.fm . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. Thinking about it, getting a correct email address is more important. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. … Read the rest here