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Blogs » Archive for June, 2007
@media London 2007 – day 2 wrapup
Day two started with a fascinating talk by Jon Hicks, called “How to be a creative sponge”. In it Jon outlined his techniques for getting inspiration, how to actually start a design. He explained that there are three steps to becoming a “creative sponge”:
- collect
- catalog
- create
He collects raw material from everywhere: observing life, books, magazines, the Internet, T-shirts, leaflet racks, packaging labels, etc.
To catalog, you can use a variety of different methods, but you do need a system. You can use a sketchbook, binders, box files, etc . On your computer, you can use iPhoto or other photo management software, such as yojimbo. However the real killer app is flickr – tagging, grouping, sharing with other designers.
You can then use your collection as a source of inspiration to actually create stuff: critique your collection, create moodboards (a collage of images from your collections that are associated with your topic – you can even get clients to make them and use them to discuss the project. They’re cool because they’re quick to make), sample colors from the images, spot design patterns, etc..
He finished by saying:”Soak up everything, you never know when you’re going to need it”
Håkon Wium Lie was …
Safari for Windows!
Apple has released a public beta of its Safari 3 browser for Windows. It’s a small download, its rendering of pages is fast, and it comes with all of the features and elegant user interface tweaks (love that text search bubble effect) that make Safari such a popular browser among Mac users.
What stands out for me though is the fact that it doesn’t utilise any of the standard operating system conventions–the browser chrome, scroll bars, buttons, menu fonts and user interface conventions for resizing the window all arrogantly snub the Windows API and provide a very Mac-like interface instead. If it wasn’t for the three buttons in the top right, you could be mistaken for thinking that you were running an OS X application!
In fact, some of the pages I loaded in Safari for Windows looked so much like those rendered in Safari on my Mac that I decided to dig a little further–it seems out that not only is the interface OS X-like, but the fonts used when rendering pages are also independent of the operating system. That’s right — Safari for Windows renders your web pages using whatever fonts come …
@media 2007 London – day 1 wrapup
I’m here at the @media conference in London – I had hoped to blog during the conference but a lack of wi-fi at the venue (my only real complaint about the conference) and shoddy hotel internet connection put paid to that!
There were a couple of presentations on the first day that I found particularly interesting:
Nate Koechley – High performance web sites
Nate spoke about some of the work they’ve been doing at Yahoo! to improve web site performance, culminating with a list of a dozen rules that are simple and easy to do, and if followed, will give you an average speed increase of 20-50%.
- Make fewer HTTP requests – this is the most important rule, use CSS sprites, combine scripts and stylesheets
- Use a CDN (content distribution network, e.g Akamai). Distribute your static content first.
- Add an expires header to all your files, not just for images
- Gzip all components, not just HTML. Really shrinks users download times. 90% of browsers support compression. Gzip compresses more and is better supported than deflate
- Put CSS at the top of the document in the HEAD. Use link, not @import, for faster perceived loading time (not actual loading time)
- Move scripts to the bottom – scripts block …
Win $800 for redesigning the London 2012 Olympic Logo
The London 2012 Olympic Committee logo. Released last week to critical acclaim (lighter on the ‘acclaim’, heavier on the ‘critical’), so far it’s been variously described as ‘a dodgy set of legwarmers’, ‘a pink day-glo pig’s abortion of a logo’ and ‘Lisa Simpson performing an obscene act’. Doesn’t the blogosphere love a good furore?
My personal theory is it will gradually break down and recombine into the Iron Maiden logo. I can’t prove anything yet, but I think we know who’ll be playing that opening ceremony.
So, what do you think? Maybe you’re thinking to yourself ‘It’s rubbish,.. I could do better in 15 minutes!’ .
Well, here is your chance to heap glory upon yourself and make a play for a tasty $800 prize while you’re at it.
Training Camp, a London-based training company is currently holding a SitePoint Contest to find a better Olympic logo design, and they’ve backed it up with an impressive $800 prize.
Impressive ‘money where your mouth is’ work from the Training Camp guys there.
Their only major prerequisite is that ‘it should not look like …
First Look: Google Gears
The following is republished from the Tech Times #166.
As web applications have increasingly become go-anywhere repositories for the minutiae of our day-to-day lives (email, contacts, photos, appointments, to-do lists), there has been a behind-the-scenes race to make them keep working when you unplug your laptop from the Internet. Demos from Scrybe, Dojo, Zimbra, and others have promised great things, but it seems Google has come from behind to win the race with the launch of Google Gears.
As reported last week on the SitePoint Web Technology blog, Google has announced the beta release of Google Gears, a web browser extension that allows web applications to continue to work even when a user is disconnected from the Internet.
Gears works in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with a view to eventually supporting Safari as well.
Far from the plug-and-go solution that you might expect, Gears is actually just a layer of relatively low-level features that make offline web apps possible. A lot of the hard work is still up to you.
Gears gives you three features, which you access …
News Wire: Ruby on Everything
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JavaScript 1.8 Progress
jQuery’s John Resig summarizes enhancements to JavaScript that are now available in the nightly test builds of Firefox 3. Warning: this ain’t your father’s JavaScript!
(tags: javascript firefox) -
Google Gears ORM
In what was an inevitable development, the first (simple) object-relational mapping library has been built on top of Google Gears, the client-side database framework launched last week by Google.
(tags: javascript google software) -
Toggler
From Art & Science of CSS author Jonathan Snook, a nice, little script that enables users to select a range of checkboxes just by clicking and dragging the mouse over them.
(tags: javascript software) -
HTML Entity Character Lookup
Even more useful than it looks at first glance, this page lets you look up HTML character entity codes by typing in text that’s “similar” to what you want (e.g. type “tm” to get the trademark symbol). Mac OS X Dashboard widget also available. (thanks lox)
(tags: html software) -
Give your web app international appeal
A slick solution to translating your PHP-powered web site into multiple languages using the gettext functions, which are available in most PHP installations. (thanks paul.annesley)
(tags: php …
FirefoxPortable – Your Mobile Office Without a Laptop
SitePoint plays host to a growing number of people who operate small internet-based businesses, often single-person operations. Sole-proprietors have always found it tricky to find time for vacations given the constant demands of business.
The always-on nature of internet business only exacerbates this – your users operate on numerous different timezones, and customer support expectations are high when competition is fierce.
Luckily, the flip-side is that your internet business can, by and large, be operated from anywhere. This gives you freedom to travel when and where you please – so long as you can take care of day-to-day operational issues in a timely fashion.
At first thought, this would imply taking the laptop with you. I gave this careful consideration prior to making the trip to Thailand, from where I’m writing this post. But the idea of lugging a laptop + accessories to a hot, humid location where it’s liable to get damaged / sandy / lost really didn’t appeal.
As this is a short trip, I examined what the necessities were in terms of things I might need to do while away. I certainly planned not to undertake any development work, instead taking care of customer …
Simple Date and Time Localization With JavaScript
One of the many challenges we’ve encountered during our work on SitePoint Contests and Marketplace is deciding the best way to present dates and times to our users.
This sounds simple, but there’s quite a few considerations that we need to keep in mind.
Easily Readable by Humans
“Started 2 hours ago” and “Ends in 2 days” are much easier to understand than “Started Mon, 4 June 2007, 10:04am +1000″ and “Ends Wed, 6 June 2007, 9:28am +1000″.
Cachable by Search Engines
“Started 2 hours ago” or “Ends in 2 days” are meaningless when looking at a snippet or full copy of a page cached by a search engine 2 days ago. Likewise, “Started Mon, 4 June 2007, 10:04am +1000″ is difficult to understand for a person in a completely different time zone.
Cachable for Performance
We like to be able to allocate cache lifetimes to as many parts of our pages as possible. The text “Started Mon, 4 June 2007, 10:04am +1000″ needs no cache expiry, while “Started less than a minute ago” could only be reliably cached for 1 second.
Local Time
While most people can figure out what “Started Mon, 4 June 2007, 10:04am GMT” means in their local time zone, it would …
News Wire: Zend Framework is here
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Zend Framework 1.0.0 RC1 released
The “official” PHP web development framework nears its first release.
(tags: php software opensource) -
What the heck is “VBx”?
The codename for Visual Basic 10, that’s what! Microsoft is still working to finalize the upcoming VB 9 release, but it has developed a wishlist for VB 10, which will return to the language’s dynamic roots by bringing it to the Dynamic Language Runtime.
(tags: .net microsoft) -
Google Web Toolkit 1.4 Release Candidate
The next major release of GWT is almost ready for release. It features smaller script sizes, quicker startup times, a handful of powerful, new widgets, and the ImageBundle, which combines multiple images into a single file to boost performance.
(tags: google opensource gwt java) -
Audible Ajax Episode 21: Dojo Offline on Google Gears
In an exclusive podcast interview, Dojo announces that its Dojo Offline library for supporting offline storage in browser-based web applications has already been updated to use the just-announced Google Gears offline storage engine by default.
(tags: google javascript opensource) -
Last.fm Acquired By CBS
In a deal worth US$280m, US media giant CBS has …
