Tuesday, March 30, 2010

A-Day-at-the-Beach

Duh… eat real food and don’t drink soda: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain. It’s pretty amazing though, to think that this stuff is in nearly every single thing that you buy. It really takes a conscious effort to avoid, which we all should be doing. / MapQuest Brings Free Voice Navigation to the iPhone / WPilot – A space journey in your browser – Proof of concept game built using HTML5 technologies. / Stay Focused – East coast skateboarding is the best in the world, naturally. Free video download. / Striking anti-war posters / Abstract City, Christoph Niemann art / http://www.jenniferdavisart.com / Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For / Twision, the first ever twitter television show makes a splash in Spain

Friday, March 26, 2010

Brooklyn Bridge1905

“The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure.” Popular shot of Obama’s edits to a health-care reform speech. The contrast to our previous president is staggering, this photo is a nice summary. / News Corp owned, UK news site Times and Sunday Times will begin charging a small subscription fee to access their content. / My argument w/ God – Ricky Gervais / I like the use of the word ‘aboutness’ to describe the importance of semantics on the web. Death to ‘Read More’! / I thoroughly enjoy reading about new elements in HTML 5, if only to provide me with some relevant, semantic class names for use in current work.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Darren Rigo

Find the best pint of Guinness / Run IE7 inside of IE8 via Developer Tools / Interlopers on the Skyline / Search free icons / LastHistory Graphically Visualizes your Last.fm History Through Time / NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by Application / Google Is Working On Letting Users Link Their Gmail And Google Apps Accounts / Recently, I’ve found that using CalDav on your mac and iPhone is the best way to keep your calendars in sync across your devices/apps/web. / NYC Restaurants Required to Post Cleanliness Grades / Hands down, the best way to validate forms with jQuery/Javascript. I’ve been using this for quite some time and fall more in love with each implementation. / Hex is sooo PRE2K, Working With RGBA Colour

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Nate Duval

Font Squirrel appears to be a great font generator that will create the various formats needed for the cross-browser use of @font-face. Some colleagues and I have recently been waxing poetically on the legality of using purchased fonts using this CSS2 based method of font embedding. Especially when deployed for clients, in a commercial environment. While @font-face is a bit overdue to go mainstream (A List Apart was touting it as the next big thing in 2007), now that the browsers are coming of age, the tipping point is near. It will dominate other options that are currently bridging the gap, like http://typekit.com. However, we have come to the conclusion that now is the time to pay more attention to a fonts use policy. Some will explicitly forbid the designer/developer from exposing the font file online. Some will encourage it, and I assume,many more will not mention it. This means web shops should start gathering and using libraries filled with the fonts that encourage the use of @font-face. Here’s where I’m starting. As linked in the previous ALA article: Dieter Steffmann offers up a slew of freely usable fonts and I’m sure several more lists like this, @font-face and 15 Free Fonts You Can Use Today, exist.

Here’s a great explanation of the licensing issue we’re facing with @font-face:

…foundries don’t actually claim copyright in the typefaces themselves. Instead they claim copyright on the .ttf file (or whatever) as a piece of software. Then, when you buy the right to use the software, they make you click “Agree” to an EULA which prohibits you from uploading the file to your website. If you want your users to see your font over the web, then you need to send them that file, and the EULA says you can’t.

Friday, February 19, 2010

The Delicious Tools extension for Google Chrome now has over 10,000 users and has been maintaining a rating of 4 out of 5 stars! Most recently we’ve added a customizable keyboard shortcut, making this a fantastic option for personalized, unobtrusive and simple bookmark saving in Chrome, on both the Windows and Mac platform. Thanks to pix0r for some big time contributions on this fun little open source extension.

View and share Flickr photos in the style of The Big Picture, Boston.com’s excellent photo blog, with the The Big Pictr Flickr mashup. A beautiful way to browse photos, here’s a set from a Susan and I tagged with ‘camping’ on BigPictr.com, a bit buggy but a great idea. If you’re like me, we now expect all photography online to be as big as the Big Picture these days. It’ll be tools like BigPictr.com that will bring that possibility to fruition. Speaking of photography, Divvyshot.com looks like a promising tool to pool your photos together based on a particular event. Round up your family’s digital shots in a single spot.

Randomness: Following up on 2008′s “Growing Up Online” comes Frontline’s “Digital Nation” good stuff / The best looking sites using Typekit / The New York Public Library Jazz Loft Project exhibition opened this week at NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and will run through May 22, 2010 / Great television still exists, you just need to turn off your TV to find it: Party Down, available on Netflix Watch Instantly / ShadyURL.com, a great tool for making your URL’s suspicious and frightening / Take screenshots below the fold with the Webpage Screenshot Chrome extension / Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey / Pretty darn basic, easy to use, handy framework for iPhone web app projects: iWebkit / Constantly forget which veggies and fruit are most important to buy organic? This handy Shopper Guide to Pesticides iPhone app cuts right to the chase and gives me a list, plain and simple.

To express my hate for Facebook I created a couple of poorly designed, badly kerned T-shirts. Because just like Facebook, I too can offer up worthless crap: Facebook: Cultivating Meaningless Relationships and Facebook: The Cure For Culture. If you’re not afraid to express hate on an American Apparel Tee, then here’s your chance.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Conversation, MLK

Time Magazine has some great Martin Luther King photo galleries including Rare Photos at Home and Dr. Martin Luther King, JR. Rare and unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement. I’m sure web surfers around the globe would love to see these twice as large. Which is kind of possible, should you take some time to dig through Google Images with source:life.

Some amazing shots including, The Firing Line (large), Military Escort and, pictured above, Conversation… MLK on explaining to his daughter why she could not go to Funtown, a whites-only amusement park: “One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky.” To keep the Time links going, they do an interesting multimedia piece on the assasination of Martin Luther King as well.

On civil rights fronts, there’s been some great content on the two gay marriage cases that are headed to the Supreme Court. A Risky Proposal: Is It Too Soon to Petition the Supreme Court on Gay Marriage?, and Terry Gross discusses with the author, Margaret Talbot, what the decision of this case will mean for gay rights. Margaret Talbot is also blogging the progress of Perry v. Schwarzenegger for the New Yorker. Go go human rights!

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Parking Garage

In Google labs we have Living Stories “an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment…” Interesting. I recall being excited about Wikipedia’s News coverage, take the entry on Hurricane Katrina for example. The format steps away from the ‘old fashioned’ model of news as a series of historic articles and stepped into the future of news as a single, always evolving, article. Living Stories’ The War in Afghanistan for example. The future is now.

NPR visits a parking garage exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Just a hair more interesting than it sounds. / The Japanese Addressing system, and other opposites / Some sounds from The Jazz Loft Project / New art from vasco mourao / Subscribe to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artwork of the day RSS feed. If only they’d get to the point and offer up large images right off the bat, their subscribers would really really enjoy it. A for effort. / I dig the HTML layout of this Nolan Johnson article from the Skateboard Mag. All print-like on the web. Nice link in the second headline. Print is dead, long live print. / Movie title screens, a set of illustrations on Flickr. / Nerd alert: Optimizing HTML, some fantastic tips to steer you towards “having a solid and robust foundation to build upon”. Well said, well done. Kinda. Things get a bit carried away towards the end and they end up promoting some bad practices. Look for the gems.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

family_photo

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