After reading the comments on Jeffrey’s post, I’m surprised and a bit dismayed that people are shocked to hear XHTML2 is dead. It’s been dead for quite some time — just not officially so. As I’ve been saying for the past couple years, HTML5 is the way. XHTML was a nice way to get us all thinking about writing better code, and it helped the Web Standards movement by giving us something to latch onto, but it’s time to let it go, guys. Relax. It’ll be okay.
Details and comments »Simultaneously awesome, hilarious, and well, really, really sad.
Details and comments »This is nice. Mobile Safari now has a very simple and elegant Javascript API to the iPhone’s location functions. This means a web app can request a visitor’s location, and if the user agrees, coordinates are made available (just like with native iPhone apps). Very sweet. Can’t wait for a reason to use this.
Details and comments »Fever is The Wolf’s new feed-reader-with-a-twist. As I have with previous Shaun Inman joints, I’ve been giving Fever a beta trial run for quite some time, and I’ve seen it’s evolution from concept to implementation. It’s a really fascinating product, and one that kind of makes you wonder “why hasn’t anyone else thought of this?” The “twist,” here, is that it smarty analyses your feeds’ content, and lets what’s hot “bubble up,” helping to consume more feeds in less time than ever before. As with all of Shaun’s work, the interface is stunningly beautiful and all of the details work like a charm. It’s really, really well-done. As an aside, Shaun has really perfected the sale of this type of app — his purchase/registration/install/upgrade process is as simple as seamless as it gets for self-hosted software. Love it.
Details and comments »My good friend and colleague Tiffani Jones has moved on from Blue Flavor and is doin’ her own thing! Tiff’s a terrific copywriter. I’d highly recommend her services to nearly anyone with a web presence. Great, simple site design by Matt Brown, too. Tangentially, I really wish more consumers of web design (i.e. “clients”) would be willing to pay for great copywriting. It makes such a huge difference in the overall quality of a site.
Details and comments »Enjoy your retirement, Trent. You were perhaps the classiest, most highly-thought-of Chief of all time, and for those five seasons, you were absolutely terrific on the field. Kansas City will always love you, man.
Details and comments »The Newport Daily News’ innovative new strategy to profit in this digital world? Focus all their efforts on print, of course. They’re not only charging for online content, but they’re charging a lot. Like, more than twice what their print product costs. And the online product offers no additional content, it simply duplicates the same content that has built the print newspaper to a whopping 12,000 circulation. To steal a line from my great friend Nathan Borror, this feels a lot like watching a Christopher Guest movie — only they’re not joking.
Details and comments »Here’s the flip-side of the iPhone 3G[S] pricing debate, for argument’s sake. The guy makes a lot of good points, but he still doesn’t address my concern: Apple and AT&T set and expectation when the 3G came out that existing iPhone owners would be able to upgrade at the two-year contract price. Now, they’ve reneged on the implicit contract created by that expectation. If the expectation had never been set, none of us would be complaining. It’s a good lesson for everyone: be very careful about what expectations you’re inadvertently setting, lest they come back to bite you in the ass.
Details and comments »This is pretty awesome: Pass in a landscape photo you took, and Marmota generates a simulated panorama 360 degree wraparound of what the landscape looks like from height field data. It then matches your photo’s pitch, yaw and roll and lens angle against this virtual panorama to figure out exactly where you were pointing it. Once it’s done that you can overlay OpenStreetMap data (rods, rivers, etc, etc.) right on your photo. Badass.
Details and comments »Basically, if you have an iPhone 3G now, you can’t upgrade to a 3G[S] for the $199 and $299 prices Apple and AT&T are touting. Rather, you have to pay $218 more ($399 or $499, plus an $18 activation fee) — and you’ll have to sign a new contract. This is the way carriers have always operated when it comes to upgrading your device mid-contract, and it’s always been one of the most egregious offenses of customer disrespect we see anywhere. However, when the iPhone 3G came out, AT&T and Apple worked out a deal in which owners of the original iPhone were able to upgrade to the 3G for the same price as new customers, in exchange for signing a new two-year contract. Because they did it last time, most people expected they’d have the same deal this go ‘round. Here’s my take: you can charge me more for a phone if you don’t make me sign a new contract. But asking me to pay $218 extra and sign a new two-year contract is akin to bending me over your kitchen counter and raping me anally.
Details and comments »Pretty nice-looking abstraction API that gives you a single interface to several different mapping service providers.
Details and comments »This is one of the more preposterous and ridiculous articles I’ve ever read. The suggestion is basically that because, for the most part, Twitter staff members don’t tweet all that much and don’t follow all that many people, Twitter will be unable to cater to the needs of its “power-users.” Frankly, I question anyone’s ability to follow 500+ people and get any real value out of the messages. I follow about 300, and am constantly thinking to myself, “I gotta lower this number,” because I find myself missing things and skimming the list, rather than actually reading. But the real thing the writer here fails to recognize is that Twitter is used very differently by different people. And that’s okay. That’s the way it should be. By suggesting that there’s a “right” way to use Twitter (and that the Twitter staff themselves is using their own product wrong), the author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the medium.
Details and comments »Dan Wineman has a great solution for newspaper companies who are struggling to survive.
Details and comments »Simple and clean little PHP-based CMS from Drew and Rachel edgeofmyseat.com. Looks really nice for those simple projects that don’t need something heavier.
Details and comments »I just read Tara’s new book, The Whuffie Factor, and found it to be really brilliant advice for any business, or even individual, looking to raise their profile on social networks and IRL in this “Web 2.0 world.” In this little interview, Tara outlines hey five keys factors to “raising whuffie,” and gives a really nice overview of what the book is all about. Tara is everything social media gurus should be, but usually aren’t. After the book talk, she discusses what she believes is “the greatest idea she’s ever had in her life” (and I cant argue with her): a karaoke tour across America, which she calls Whuffaoke. I’m going to try to meet up with Tara and the gang for at least one of the stops — and you should, too.
Details and comments »Jeff Veen, who I have mad, mad respect and admiration for, announces his company’s new project: TypeKit. It’s basically a hosted solution for web fonts, wherein Jeff and team negotiate a license with font foundries, and then you (the average web developer) pay Jeff and team a fee in order to use the fonts. It will use standards CSS @font-face embedding, and automatically switch out Opentype for EOT based on a user’s browser. This all sounds great, but the post is a bit short on details, and I definitely have questions: will it scale? How much will it cost? What will the license look like? All concerns people have over a subscription-based music service versus the iTunes model apply, here. What happens when you unsubscribe? Are the plans per-site or per-designer? And so forth. So, bottom line: sounds like there’s a lot of potential, here, but I’ll save my fanboyish excitement for when I have more information.
Details and comments »A thoughtful analysis. The conclusion? Well, it’s two-fold: First, It depends on the tweet. Second, almost no tweet would ever be protectable. A protectable tweet exists in theory, but actually finding one is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, pretty much, your tweet is not copyrightable. In other words, get over yourself.
Details and comments »It’s hard to imagine anything nerdier than tweeting from the command line. But then, you’re already on Twitter, and at the command line. So face it: you’re a fucking nerd. Get the gem.
Details and comments »Sounds like a great gig for the right candidate!
Details and comments »Tara Hunt compares love to an addiction and talks about what needs to be done to get over someone who has dumped you. Having recently been in a situation where someone I was really, really into didn’t ultimately want me, I can say with a great deal of certainty that all six of Tara’s tips are effective. Apparently a lot of this comes from a Helen Fishers book called “Why We Love.” Totally wanna check it out, now.
Details and comments »Word.
Details and comments »Here’s one for my hometown peeps: Garmin, the industry-leading GPS producer, is looking for a Web Interface/Designer, based at their headquarters in Olathe, KS, the Kansas City suburb where I grew up. I’ve got a couple good friends that work at Garmin and love it there. Definitely one worth considering if you’re a web designer in the KC area.
Details and comments »This is pretty awesome. It’s a plain-English explanation of what rules should have to apply to any literary use of time travel, given what we know about space-time. “Time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed.” I was, of course, reading these rules and thinking of LOST, which, by my count, seems to play by all the rules expect maybe number three (but, in their defense, if you don’t have some visual cue to the audience that time travel just happened, how would they ever know? I understand that it would happen in the real world, but you kind of need the flashing light as a storytelling device). Great read.
Details and comments »Seattle wildlife agents have suspended ths search for the black bear cub that’s been evading them in Seattle for the past 48 hours. That’s amusing and cute and entertaining, but what’s more amusing is a couple things about this Seattle Time article. First, they’re calling him “Urban Phantom,” which has to be the worst bear name of all time. Second, they use ALL CAPS at the end of piece to stress the importance of not looking to bear directly in the eye. ALL CAPS. Really? In a newspaper? Wow. Finally, the suggest that if you see the bear, you tell it, “Everything is fine, take it easy.” I love the mainstream media.
Details and comments »My good buddy Tara Brown and her hubby Sean Bonner are the proprietors of a great new series of workout videos wherein you use your cat for resistance. Yes, your cat. Don’t have a cat? Don’t worry, there are other cat-like instruments that can be used in lieu of a domestic feline.
Details and comments »A nice overview of the Twitter @replies kerfluffle that went down this week, if you weren’t part of it. I guess maybe because I’ve built my share of web apps, it was completely obvious to me from the moment they announced the option was going away that it was for reasons of scaling an optimization. But Biz messed up by not just saying that. I love, love, love Twitter, but I do have a beef with the fact that they keep doing this. Every time they have a scaling issue (which is, let’s be honest, often), they solve it by removing features. I still want track back, but it was taken away in the name of performance. So was IM integration. I appreciate that Twitter is facing scaling needs the likes of which have probably never been seen by any other website. It’s a tricky problem, no doubt, and I certainly don’t have any answers for them. But, removing features to lighten the database load every time things get a little slow just seems like a back-asswards approach to optimization.
Details and comments »Blue Flavor’s Keith Robinson has a lengthy and thought-provoking piece on creativity in our profession, questioning established patterns, and the drive to keep innovating and not get comfortable with the status quo. Good stuff.
Details and comments »Over at the Blue Flavor blog, Tiff talks about the importance of understanding your competitive difference, and talks specifically about what makes Blue Flavor different from a lot of other agencies.
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