Four months after the curtain went down on dConstruct 2008 , the final episode of the podcast of the conference has just been published. It’s the audio recording of my talk The System Of The World . I’m very happy indeed with how the talk turned out: dense and pretentious …but in a good way, I hope. It’s certainly my favourite from the presentations I have hitherto delivered. … Read the rest here
It’s that time of year when people see the big number roll over and decide to reminisce over good times and bad, and talk of where they plan to go until the big number rolls again. This blog post will be no exception. On the Personal Front It’s interesting to look at last years pontificating . In some ways, things haven’t changed. … Read the rest here
I’ve waffled a lot this year about Evernote, Littlesnapper and their ilk, but I now feel I’ve found the best scrapbooking solution for me. In the comments to my Littlesnapper post , Jo mentioned Leap.app , the file browser alternative to the Finder, as a way improving the approach of using the Finder to browse scrapbook images: Your comment about tagging in Finder reminded me of a program I stumbled across, ages ago, that is a pretty cool alternative/replacement to Finder: Leap. It provides preview thumbnails of just about everything (you can pick the size and zoom in at will), tagging (I believe it covers tag completion, as well; it at least auto-tags based on folders you’ve stored things in); all sorts of neat features, and more ways to search and index your files than you can shake a stick at. If you ever want to ditch Finder for something more interesting that might be more helpful in your collecting endeavors than Finder was, I’d highly suggest taking a peek at Leap. I’d tried Leap a while back when it first came out and didn’t play with it for long, but now having sat down and got used to it’s way of working ( These videos help ), I’m converted! DropBox + Leap.app = Heaven I’ve been a DropBox evangelist since day one, and John and I have pimped it a lot on the podcast. … Read the rest here
About a year after starting college, I was settled on the idea of majoring in music, specifically music composition. It was the perfect blend of two passions of mine. The first was drumming. The second was a long-standing love affair with film scores. James Horner , John Barry , James Newton Howard , Alan Silvestri , and John Williams were just a few of the composers I grew up listening to. To become one of them was the impossible dream. … Read the rest here
I returned from Tokyo on Monday. I gave a talk at the Web Directions East conference. I’ve never had a simultaneous translation of a presentation before. I hope it went OK. … Read the rest here
Victor Lombardi returns to Digital Web this week with a particularly compelling contribution, Concept Design Tools . Fresh off his presentation at Euro Information Architecture Summit , Victor brings practical tools for setting the foundation for forward-thinking concepts and set aside technical or situational constraints. From the Euro IA description of his talk, “Great design concepts have a visceral effect. They force us to think differently. … Read the rest here
Day two kicks off with Aaron giving thanks to sponsors. Aaron then asks the audience about the sessions that occurred yesterday and what they found interesting and if there could be sessions today to expand on that. Audience is talking about things they learned from yesterday. Topics include Dutch libraries, Creative Commons, privacy on the web, EULA s, Denim, financial banking, etc. Rachel comes up to introduce Tamara Adlin. Tamara takes the stage. … Read the rest here
Digital Web Magazine is happy to be a sponsor of InfoCamp 2008 . For those who don’t know what InfoCamp is, here is a little blurb from their website: InfoCamp is an interdisciplinary un-conference for information architecture, user-centered design, librarianship, and information management. It features an egalitarian, community-driven format in which presentations are designed and delivered by attendees. InfoCamp is this Saturday and Sunday in Seattle and Digital Web Magazine will be sponsoring free lunch for everyone! Yes, that’s right, we’re having tacos! If you see me or Tiff Fehr at the event please say hello! I hope to see you there, this year looks like it will be a record turnout! … Read the rest here
Q: I am a course developer for a university. I am interested in attending An Event Apart and need to justify to my supervisor why this conference would be really great for me and the university. I have explained that the learning more about standards-based HTML, CSS and accessibility are a must as an employee of a state university, and that some of the best creative minds in the world will be speaking at the conference. However, my boss would like to know how this conference would benefit me and my department in terms of creating instructional websites. I was hoping you might be able to add deeper insight to my case? … Read the rest here
As soon as dConstruct was over, it was time for the next wonderful gathering of geeks: BarCamp Brighton 3 . I didn’t manage to make it to the event for the kick-off, having spent the previous evening celebrating at the after-party and after-after-party that my talk was really over and done with. That meant that I missed some of the early speaking slots but I still managed to see some great talks (including Nat ’s excellent IE 6 bug-squashing quiz) and spend a pleasant evening playing CSS Specificity Snap and Semantopoly . Despite the fact that the venue boasted eight separate locales for giving talks, speaking slots were at a premium, which is a testament to the enthusiasm of the attendees. I managed to grab a spot towards the end of the day two… Read the rest here
There have been a couple of great presentations either side of lunch here at dConstruct. Joshua Porter — social web expert and occasional Digital Web contributor — revealed the hidden mental tics (or “cognitive biases”) that designers should be aware of when thinking about how best to attract engage with their users; and Daniel Burka (Pownce, Digg) shared his recommendations on how to approach the key pain points when designing for social interaction. Keep an eye out for the dConstruct podcasts of these talks; in the meantime, Daniel’s slides are on SlideShare — when I find Josh’s I’ll post the link here too. … Read the rest here
The second day of An Event Apart San Francisco is drawing to a close. The day opened with my talk, Patterns in the Process . You can download the slides if you like—Creative Commons licensed, as usual—but just looking at the slides is like trying to listen to a presentation by putting a glass against the wall of the building next door. When I was giving my talk, I thought it was kind of rambling and incoherent. But it went down well and lots of people told me they liked it afterwards so I’ll put my self-criticism away… Read the rest here
An idea had struck me this afternoon that there might be some technology deep in the depths of Internet Explorer that might unlock the secret to easy rounded corners. Unfortunately, my initial idea fell flat and I was left in the same place I was before. However, bouncing from idea to idea, I thought to try VML. VML is an XML-based approach that Microsoft came up with and proposed it to the W3C . Alas, the proposal never went anywhere but that’s neither here nor there… Read the rest here
The first day of An Event Apart is wrapping up in San Francisco. The quality of talks has been outstanding. Now I’m really bricking it about my talk tomorrow morning. The bar has been set ridiculously high. I’ve done my best to liveblog throughout the day. Inevitably there will be mistakes and omissions in these second-hand reports but here they are: Understanding Web Design by Jeffrey Zeldman The Lessons of CSS Frameworks by Eric Meyer Storytelling by Design by Jason Santa Maria Web Application Hierarchy by Luke W. … Read the rest here
Dan Cederholm is in the house at An Event Apart San Francisco. He’s all about the bulletproofing. Simplebits describe what they do as hand crafted pixels and text . This idea of craft, building something with your hands, is what Dan wants to concentrate on. It isn’t always obvious in web design how well-crafted a web site is. Dan will run through a case study that focus on three aspects of web design: being bulletproof, being adaptable and focusing on the details. … Read the rest here
I love ampersands. And interest in this quirky character seems to be on the rise as of late. Case in point: Just last week, I purchased not one, but two t-shirts adorned with nothing more than an ampersand. That’s telling, no? For much of last year, I had a little portion of a presentation dedicated to using CSS to serve up alternate, compelling ampersands. It’s also something I’ve done here on SimpleBits for quite awhile in our tagline. … Read the rest here
An Event Apart Chicago is just a few months away, and I’ll have the privilege of speaking on a brand new topic, “The In-House Designer”: The fundamental principles of design remain constant irrespective of organization size, technical discipline, and the like. Yet within larger organizations, the dynamics of applying these principles, the ability to produce quality output, and overall job satisfaction are a challenge at times. Learn how to hone your technical skills, and, more importantly, your soft skills, to effectively grapple with the politics and red tape that are common to larger organizations—or, for that matter, to client services work. In my mind, this is a subject that’s long overdue for being addressed in conferences, and I’m excited to take a shot at addressing it. But I’d like your help. What are the issues common to “larger organizations”… Read the rest here
In support of the still-to-be-finished proposal for allowing most HTML 5 elements to become hyperlinks, I’ve written a quick proof-of-concept demo for your perusal. Basically, it’s a page with some JavaScript that captures the whole document tree, looks for any elements with an href attribute, and then sprinkles some events on those elements in order to make them act like hyperlinks. There’s also some CSS that applies old-school link presentation to said elements (blue and underlined, baby!). I’m using href because it was the easiest thing to do. I’m sure I could have written a more elegant script (and yes , I know , your favorite JS framework would done it in half the lines and seventeen times the page weight) and I suspect there are some things I’m missing… Read the rest here
The “ href everywhere” document (which is officially titled “HTML5: More Flexibile Linking”) has been updated, so kindly give it another look and challenge my assertions, use cases (or lack thereof), and any weak points. Unless you consider the whole idea of extending linkability to be a weak point, in which case, never mind. You may or may not be right, but attacking the whole premise isn’t going to get much traction. I’m convinced the general idea is a good one. Now it’s up to me to make the best case for it and convince implementors that I’m right. Thanks to comments on the previous post in the series , a few elements were added to the list of those which have plausible use cases, and I added some documentation of the elements that either aren’t on the list or don’t need to be on it at the end… Read the rest here
Just when you thought the whole embedded-video thing couldn’t get any worse, here I come with videos featuring, well, me. The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot , where I comment at my usual pace on the suppression of quotation marks in my reset styles and why I think relying on browser-generated quotation marks is a bad idea. You also get to see my hair before it got to be the length it is now, which is even longer. There’s a complete transcription on that page, by the way, courtesy Mr. Z . Then there’s the vaguely silly one , in which I attempt to debug my clothing while sitting in my living room. … Read the rest here