-
“The song giveaway is clearly to bring attention to the partnership, even though all of its coffee houses in the US will be giving away the songs, while only a very select few will have Wi-Fi Music Store capabilities.”
-
“Last week a number of computers were stolen from our office in Vancouver, BC. One of those computers was a shared iMac with Flickrbooth, an app that automatically uploads photo booth shots to our flickr account, installed on it.”
-
Bypass the Web-based WordPress writing tool for a desktop software application. Very non-Web 2.0.
-
“OpenID is terrific in theory, it’s real-world usage still has a way to go.”
-
“ ‘It’s shocking. Things like that just don’t happen out here. I just can’t believe it happened,’ Lekki said.”
-
“I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.”
-
“Amazon.com offers music on CDs or as instant MP3 downloads.” Meh.
Month: September 2007
links for 2007-09-24
-
“Snipes are just the latest effort by network executives to cram promotions onto television screens in the age of channel surfing, ad skipping and screen-based multitasking.”
-
A gallery of interesting looking business cards. Well, I know they are more interesting than mine at any rate.
-
“or the IE7 re-calculated offset with hover on or off bug”
-
“I sincerely believe that a blog engine is one of the rare pieces which employs all the basics of Web programming but can be simple enough to understand.”
-
“For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home.” I’d rather get an iPhone, but more power to you.
-
“When it doesn’t float to the left or right.”
links for 2007-09-20
-
“A new service lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world.”
-
“The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practical technology. This article explores why; and what w
-
“Telephony geek Brian Aker controls his entire home phone system using the free, open source Asterisk software which does some crazy stuff.” Funny presentations.
-
“The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, not to get money from customers. It’s a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.”
-
“The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date.”
-
Includes Apple in the data.
-
“Spock! It’s solid beef, baby.”
links for 2007-09-19
-
A Star Wars game for the Wii coming next year. Think Wii remotes as lightsabers. Know awesome.
-
“It’s the first time the company has officially said it would fight attempts to use the popular device on unauthorized networks.”
-
Google launches Gadget Ads. “Think of gadget ads as mini versions of your website in any AdSense ad size.”
-
“Finally a lightweight accordion that is built with scriptaculous and works properly in every browser.”
-
This is the second video clip I couldn’t stomach long enough to finish. (The first being the “leave Britney alone” video.)
-
“Easily transform your microformatted content to nice, clean, easily digestible, XML, JSON or JSON‑P. You can also easily set filters to only receive particular formats.”
-
“Take notes anywhere using Twitter.”
links for 2007-09-18
-
Nothing really new. More of a run down of Web design history and some of the designers and companies involved.
-
“If you’ve interviewed for programmer jobs a few times you will probably recognize some of these patterns. If you are just beginning your career as a programmer learn these patterns to prepare yourself.”
-
The PNG 8‑bit file format can handle more than one-color transparency. If you have the right software.
-
Google Documents now handles presentations. Upload PowerPoint presentations to share and collaborate with others like you would a Word or spreadsheet document.
-
File under Y, for “Yet Another Social Network”.
links for 2007-09-17
-
“A European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, illegally abused its market power to crush competitors.”
-
Also a good basic introduction to how WordPress works.
-
“Know if your carrier adheres to this rule. it could be your saving grace.” I’m practicing saying, “240 me!”
-
“Only iPhones activated through AT&T are eligible to receive a credit.” Spending $100 for people to buy more Apple stuff is great marketing.
-
“If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup.”
links for 2007-09-13
-
“If you’re like most professionals, you’ve got a stack of business books sitting somewhere near your desk — many of the so-called classics that every smart manager supposedly needs to read.”
-
Swap out Adobe’s periodic table of element-influenced icons for something snazzier.
-
“Seems as though many casual programmers produce Facebook apps that they never seriously intend to scale successfully.”
-
“Much is written about engineering landing pages for PPC campaigns, but all too often little thought goes into creating the right landing pages for SEO.”
-
“The X PRIZE Foundation and Google today announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million prize purse.”
links for 2007-09-12
-
The visual voicemail doesn’t work, but I think that’s a small price to pay to avoid a two year contract with AT&T. Also, the hack will probably break when any major software updates comes from Apple. Otherwise, you’re good to go.
-
“Do you have a great idea or an existing application that uses services from AWS? Enter the AWS Start-Up Challenge to win $100,000 in cash and AWS credits, and receive an investment offer from Amazon.”
-
“In this article, we’ll study the JPEG baseline compression algorithm.” Not for the faint of heart.
-
“Free and low-cost enterprise wiki tools and open-source content management systems are plentiful. Here’s a quick guide to the available options.”
-
“Competition on the web is fierce and getting more ruthless by the day.”
links for 2007-09-11
-
“In an overlooked announcement, Jobs said that early adopters of the Apple Lisa would be receiving a $7000 in-store credit.”
-
“In a bid to help searchers focus their efforts, Google released up-to-date images of Nevada for the search giant’s Google Earth software. After the release of the images, Amazon created a collaborative search scheme run via its Mechanical Turk system.”
-
This is what happens you buy a movie studio filled with awesome nerds.
-
“It is not surprising most website developers and proprietors believe that very few, if any, people with disabilities use the Web.”
-
“Don’t look now, but the role of the industry’s biggest bully is increasingly played by Apple, not Microsoft.”
iPhone-specific Web Development Misguided
Today, I noticed that A List Apart ran another article on how to get Web sites up to speed on the Apple’s iPhone.
First, a few points. As a Web developer, I’ve relied and will continue to rely on the strength of ALA’s articles time and time again. Also, I’ve written for ALA twice before and, as always, would love to write from them again. And I’m a fan of Apple products as much as the next Web designer out there, but the exposure of the iPhone is a little too much.
Yes, surfing on an iPhone is a rewarding surfing experience than say, I don’t know, every other cell phone on the planet. I’ve even mentioned before that iPhone’s browsing capabilities will completely eliminate the need to provide a separate “mobile” Web site.
Rather than promoting the new hotness, though, we need to have more information about creating rich, yet salient surfing experiences for other devices besides the iPhone.
One of the main arguments I picked up from Joe Clark’s book, Building Accessible Websites, for the development of accessible Web sites is the desire to grab the largest audience possible.
Apple recently sold its first million iPhones. Yet, there are an estimated 37 million Americans with sensory and physical disability between the ages of 16 to 64.
If only ten percent of these 37 million people with disabilities surf the Web on an assistive technology, their numbers are 300% greater than every iPhone sold.
Looking at those numbers, focusing on iPhone Web site optimization seems like an imbalance in priorities. This is perceived overkill especially when you know the dirty little secret about optimizing a Web site for an iPhone: If a Web site is built on Web standards like XHTML+CSS, your Web site will be viewed on the iPhone without too much worry.
The point is that I believe that there are more important issues at hand for making sure our Web sites can be seen by an Internet-enabled device other than a Web browser rather than forcing every other electronic doodad to have a Web browser on it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think you can over-sell the importance of Web standards, but reselling them is another thing altogether. If your Web site is geared to run on assistive technologies like screen readers, hand wands, eye tracking, voice recognition, or braille displays, the odds are that you’ve opened your site up to more of an audience than the iPhone crowd.
There’s no reason we can’t have both a great surfing experience on an iPhone as well as one on assistive technologies. I’m just asking for more balance.