Webdesigninformer.com

Andy Budd Go to the source

The rise of smart devices like the iPhone and iPad has led to an application goldrush, with companies racing to stake their claims. In the early days we saw a few lucky pioneers strike gold with novelty apps. There were also a handful of independent developers and well-known brands that invested in user experience and captured the high end of the market. However, as with most goldrushes, the obvious targets were depleted very quickly. Digital prospectors are arriving to find a very different market, one rife with competition and few obvious deposits to mine. Furthermore, our appetite for apps seems to be dwindling as we fall back on a few must-have staples. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I’ve been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I’ve seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector’s equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

How does a photo of a fruit fly breeding chamber lead to the discovery of one’s own lineage back to 14th century France? That’s not a question I’d ever have thought to ask, but this evening I found an answer after following the most fascinating click trail in, well, ever. It started with an idle perusal of recent Flickr photos from my contacts. Jeremy Keith is currently in Chicago for DrupalCon, and after a page of tantalizing food and architectural photos, I found myself back in Brighton looking at his photos from a laboratory-related exhibit at the Lighthouse Gallery. One especially mundane photo in particular caught my eye, his capture of a placard on a fruit fly breeding chamber . … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

There are a handful of people who follow me on Twitter who continually moan about the way I use the service. Some complain when I tweet about what I’ve eaten, who I’ve met or what I’ve done that day. Others complain when I use Gowalla or Foursquare to announce my location or post a stream of consciousness on a topic that is currently bugging me. An obvious reaction is to remind those people that nobody is forcing them to follow me and they can easily unfollow if they don’t like what I’m saying. In fact, I have done just that on several occasions. However Twitter is an unusual hybrid of public discussion and private conversation… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

When I saw Ian Lloyd tweet the words “Cunning. Like a fox. Neat little trick!” I knew I had to check it out, because Ian’s a sharp one. So I popped over to the linked CSS-Tricks article, Show and Edit Style Element , and checked it out. Cunning indeed! And yet, it immediately bothered me. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Let’s get straight to it! I’m busy writing a book called “The Icon Handbook” to be published by Five Simple Steps , hopefully at the latter end of this year. It will be ‘application-agnostic’, looking at the process of creating icons for web as well as software. It will be a manual, reference guide and coffee table book in one. For the last 5 years I’ve been wanting to write this book – I keep looking around for other books of its type on the market, but never find any. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

NYT: No Plans for Smaller iPhone : Miguel Helft and Nick Bilton: [C]ontrary to published reports, Apple is not currently developing a smaller iPhone, according to people briefed on Apple’s plans who requested anonymity because the plans are confidential. Apple’s engineers are currently focused on finishing the next version of the iPhone, which is likely to be similar in size to the current iPhone 4, said one of the people. Among all the press I’ve read the last few days regarding a smaller iPhone, there’s been too little mention of the following, also stated in the article: More important, a phone with a smaller screen would force many developers to rewrite their apps, which Apple wants to avoid, the person said. That seems reason enough to leave the screen alone for now. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

I wrote an article about creating an animated, image-free button with CSS3 and Typekit type and it’s been published today over at the Typekit Blog . Thanks to Mandy Brown for coordinating and editing it. In a way, the article is an extension to a lot of the stuff I talk about in CSS3 For Web Designers : using the experience layer as a place to fully embrace the pieces of CSS3 that have decent support today amongst modern browsers. Buttons are a perfect place to experiment that way—and embedded type makes them all the better, while remaining flexible. … 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

Happy Cog Hosting: White-glove, LAMP-stack Hosting : As of a few weeks ago, Authentic Jobs and portions of this site have been running on Happy Cog Hosting. So far it’s been very reliable, and the customer service has been top-notch. The doors are now open for a limited public beta. But take note, this isn’t a replacement to your $10/month host. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

An MBA? “Don’t Bother.” : Philip Delves Broughton, Harvard MBA, writing for The Economist: The return on investment on an MBA has gone the way of Greek public debt. If you have a decent job in your mid- to late- 20s, unless you have the backing of a corporate sponsor, leaving it to get an MBA is a higher risk than ever. If you are getting good business experience already, the best strategy is to keep on getting it, thereby making yourself ever more useful rather than groping for the evanescent brass rings of business school. That last line cannot be overstated. I know personally a few individuals with MBAs from prestigious schools who are either seeking work or are underemployed. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Earlier today, I updated the CSS Tools: Reset CSS page to list the final version of Reset v2.0, as well as updated the reset.css file in that directory to be v2.0. (I wonder how many hotlinkers that will surprise.) In other words, it’s been shipped. Any subsequent changes will trigger version number changes. There is one small change I made between 2.0b2 and 2.0 final, which is the replacement of the “THIS IS BETA” warning text with an explicit lack of license. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

To follow up on my border-image post from Monday , it turns out that as currently written, border-image literally cannot take an image of a single symbol and repeat it around the border of an element. Instead, you have to create an image with at least eight copies of the symbol in a 3×3 grid pattern. Note that allowing a 3×3 grid pattern for border-image is potentially very useful, as it permits the creation of sophisticated border ‘frames’ with a single image. The objection I have is that it’s required , even in simple cases like the one I described in the previous post. The reason this 3×3 pattern is required is found in the description of border-image-slice , which states: The regions given by the ‘ border-image-slice ‘ values may overlap. However if the sum of the right and left widths is equal to or greater than the width of the image, the images for the top and bottom edge and the middle part are empty, which has the same effect as if a nonempty transparent image had been specified for those parts… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

“… people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing.” … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

“… people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing.” … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

In the reset revision draft I posted Monday , I got tripped up by some last-minute changes and I’m going to think out loud (so to speak, as it were) about possible solutions. The problem is that the presence of a in the first rule means that focus outlines on hyperlinks are removed. Thus in commenting out the :focus rule I restored default focus styles to form elements, but not hyperlinks. This wasn’t a problem up until roughly a day before I published, but last-minute tinkering brought it back. I’d say that’ll teach me not to tinker, but I hate to lie. I’ve come up with the following solutions. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

It was close to four years ago now that I first floated (ha!), publicly refined , and then published at its own home what’s become known as the “Eric Meyer Reset”. At the time, I expected it would be of interest to a small portion of the standards community, provoke some thought among fellow craftspeople, and get used occasionally when it seemed handy. Instead, it’s ended up almost everywhere. (This occasionally backfires on me when people use it in the CSS of e-mail campaigns, it’s exposed by older mail clients, and people then mail me to demand that I unsubscribe them from the mailing list. But that’s not the worst backfire—I’ll get to that in just a minute.) Four years is long enough for a revisit, I’d say… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Impatient Nation: I Can

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Back Online : Mark Wyner

Hicksdesign Go to the source

This is a feature of the iPhone Dropbox app that I use all the time, but keep coming across people who haven’t found it yet, so it’s worth a post! The scenario is: you take a photo and want to get it on your desktop quickly . You don’t want to plug in the iPhone, open iPhoto or Image Capture and download them. In your Dropbox app, click the camera icon bottom centre and choose ‘existing photo or video’ (or ‘New Photo or Video’ if you haven’t taken a photo yet), choose the item, and you’re done. You can bung it in anywhere you like, but as my work folders sit in Dropbox, it means I can drop it in the relevant project folder, or a public album in ‘Photos’. By the time you open Dropbox on your desktop, it’s already there! Tagged: dropbox , iphone , productivity … Read the rest here