Mike Davidson: A House by the Park : The venerable Mike Davidson is blogging about his homebuilding experience, complete with photos, product links, and total accumulated cost with each post. (Clicking the link in the sidebar to reveal pricing details will cookie your visit with pricing info.) … Read the rest here
5 Years ago somebody wrote something stupid on the Internet that annoyed a bunch of bloggers enough to write about it, including myself. Yesterday I received a contrite email from this person saying that the incident had ruined their life and asking if I’d remove the post. It turns out that my blog post ranked in the top 20 results for this guys name and he was wondering if I’d remove the article. I considered it, as to be honest I’d completely forgotten about the event (as had most people 2 weeks after it happen) and I didn’t really care that much anyway. However it got me thinking about two different things. On the one hand, the Internet can freeze youthful folly and a small transgressions can stick with you for life. … Read the rest here
One of the things you discover as a speaker and, especially, a conference organizer is this: Keynote generates really frickin’ enormous PDFs. Seriously. Much like Miles O’Keefe, they’re huge . We had one speaker last year whose lovingly crafted and beautifully designed 151-slide deck resulted in a 175MB PDF. Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe. Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt… Read the rest here
Incase testing-friendly packaging : Incase: Our research showed that consumers were opening packages and test-fitting products before making purchases. In most cases, the packages were not correctly returned to the shelves or were somewhat damaged and unsightly, making it difficult to sell these products. The design solution was to create an outer wrap that was easy to slide on and off, offering full access to the product without damaging the package. The sliding action of the wrap was simple and intuitive and did not involve additional flaps or mechanisms that the previous packaging employed. This is brilliant and overdue thinking. … Read the rest here
Gizmodo: Detailed review of Windows Phone 7 : Microsoft has literally nothing to lose by completely overhauling Windows Mobile OS—its global market share is paltry, and the UI is nearly unusable for anyone other than the die-hard Windows user. Hence, the unveiling of Windows Phone 7 is impressive news, regardless of whether or not it gains significant market share. It’s proof that Microsoft realizes it’s lagging far behind in OS innovation and is taking dramatic measures to correct its course. … Read the rest here
Monospace text sizing is, from time to time, completely unintuitive and can be quite maddening if you don’t look at it in exactly the right way. Fortunately, there is a pretty simple workaround, and it’s one you might want to consider using even if you weren’t aware that a problem existed. But first, allow me to lay some foundations. Assuming no other author styles beyond the ones shown, consider the following: span {font-family: monospace;} <p>This is a ‘p’ with a <span>’span’</span> inside.</p> All right, what should be the computed font-size of the span element? Remember, there are no other author styles being applied. … Read the rest here
In the course of digging into the guts of a much more complicated problem, I stumbled into an interesting philosophical question posed by web inspection tools. Consider the following CSS and HTML: p {font-size: 10px;} b {font-size: 1.04em;} <p>This is text <b>with some boldfacing</b>.</p> Simple enough. Now, what is the computed font-size for the b element? There are two valid answers. Most likely one of them is intuitively obvious to you, but take a moment to contemplate the rationale for the answer you didn’t pick. Now, consider the ramifications of both choices on a situation where there are b elements nested ten layers deep. … Read the rest here
In the course of digging into the guts of a much more complicated problem, I stumbled into an interesting philosophical question posed by web inspection tools. Consider the following CSS and HTML: p {font-size: 10px;} b {font-size: 1.04em;} <p>This is text <b>with some boldfacing</b>.</p> Simple enough. Now, what is the computed font-size for the b element? There are two valid answers. … Read the rest here
Watch the full resolution video on Vimeo . This project began 12 months ago when Suzanne and I purchased tickets to Rome. It’s consumed a good portion of my working life since then. This is a sneak preview. Sign up to be notified by email when it’s available: … Read the rest here
I had noticed this little bug on my own site. In the footer, there’s a 5px border with the colour set using rgba. In Safari, it’s as if the semi-transparent borders overlap each other in the corners and the values are compounded. This creates little squares in the corner of my squares. Not quite what you’d expect. … Read the rest here
I had noticed this little bug on my own site. In the footer, there’s a 5px border with the colour set using rgba. In Safari, it’s as if the semi-transparent borders overlap each other in the corners and the values are compounded. This creates little squares in the corner of my squares. Not quite what you’d expect. … Read the rest here
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
Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. … Read the rest here
Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. Cheese Diaries ) – where I take snaps of cheese labels to remember what I ate… Read the rest here
I’ve spent a bit of time playing around with HTML5’s canvas element lately. It’s a fun new toy and has a lot of potential to be useful. But the biggest headache I’m finding so far is the lack of authoring tools. SVG has been around for ages, whereas Canvas is still relatively new. … Read the rest here
I’ve spent a bit of time playing around with HTML5’s canvas element lately. It’s a fun new toy and has a lot of potential to be useful. But the biggest headache I’m finding so far is the lack of authoring tools. SVG has been around for ages, whereas Canvas is still relatively new. (Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević has a good overview presentation of the differences between the two, and when and where to use each.) SVG support is built into plenty of graphic editing tools; Canvas support is so far sadly lacking, although Matt May pointed me to this YouTube video that shows off the upcoming Canvas support Adobe’s CS5 suite will have, whenever it becomes available… Read the rest here
It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. … Read the rest here
While travelling this Christmas, I came upon some copywriting in a loo that I took umbridge with: 10-15 seconds and 80% less energy? Rather than 2 seconds and 0% energy? It’s really that last sarcastic last line that got to me though. It’s like the signs you get in hotels, claiming that they don’t want to wash your towels every day because they’re very concerned about the ‘environment’. ‘Well now’, I DID use my jeans, so that taught them! Fools! Since when did we become Americans and start calling the toilet a ‘bathroom’? And surely ‘as nature intended’ would be actually be a large bush… Read the rest here
While travelling this Christmas, I came upon some copywriting in a loo that I took umbridge with: 10-15 seconds and 80% less energy? Rather than 2 seconds and 0% energy? It’s really that last sarcastic last line that got to me though. It’s like the signs you get in hotels, claiming that they don’t want to wash your towels every day because they’re very concerned about the ‘environment’. ‘Well now’, I DID use my jeans, so that taught them! Fools! Since when did we become Americans and start calling the toilet a ‘bathroom’… Read the rest here
I’m more than just a few days late with this one, but I couldn’t let this pass without a mention! On Monday, Boxee unveiled their Boxee Box , a collaboration with D-Link to provide their own hardware solution. My initial reaction was that it looked like an award, and something that wouldn’t fit snugly into existing setups: However, once I saw just how small it is… …I changed my mind somewhat. In fact, the shape has very quickly grown on me, and in short, I really want one , despite already running Boxee via an Apple TV. (the restrictive supported formats, and size of, the PS3 are starting to get to me). It’ll be interesting to see if it get’s a UK release and what the cost will be. I seem to recall the US price being $200, which should translate into roughly £120… Read the rest here
