Brad Neuberg, from Google's Open Web Advocacy group, has made a video introduction to HTML 5. In just 40 minutes shows us vector graphics with the Canvas tag and Scalable Vector Graphics, the Geolocation API, the Video tag, Client-side database and 'application cache', and 'Web workers.'
The people behind Typekit, the upcoming licensed font subscription service for use on websites, outlines the measures they take to protect the fonts on their service. Basically they're not trying to be too smart, they realize that people, with enough talent and time, will find a way to break any security. Instead they put up some hurdles, that will discourage casual misuse, and make it clear that stealing fonts is an explicit and intentional act.
Keir Whitaker, from Carsonified, gives us a brief overview of the upcoming Typekit service. Typekit will be a subscription service, that provides licensed fonts for @font-face enabled browsers.
For some Mac OS X applications, it is nice to hide the dock icon. Most apps, where it would make sense to do so, it is possible via a setting in the apps preferences. But some apps, like the Drobo Dashboard, or the HardwareGrowler, no such setting is to be found. For these apps, it is possible to hide the icon, by hacking their 'plists'. Mac OS X Hints shows us how.
One of my biggest issues with OS X, is the way Copy & Paste, for some applications, will copy everyting, including the text formatting. Thankfully there is an easy solution to the problem, it involves a custom keyboard shortcut, that will overwrite Paste, thus normalizing the paste-behavior for all applications.
The personal blog of the internationally acclaimed photojournalist Joe McNally. His posts combines beautiful photographs with technical info on how he got the results. This, and his sense of humor, makes the blog a very good read for the want-to-be photographer.
Matt Gallagher, from Cocoa with Love, defends the naming conventions for method names in Objective-C. He does so by comparing them to naming conventions used by other C based languages.
If you too suffered from the demise of the social bookmarking service 'Magnolia', back in January 2009, you know the importance of a local backup of your online bookmarks. Lifehacker wrote an article back in January, that describes how to backup your data from the social bookmark service 'Delicious' on a Unix terminal, by using either Wget or Curl.
Peter-Paul Koch, of quirksmode.org fame, did a presentation on JavaScript Events at Yahoo! in California. First part of the talk is about desktop computers, and how the browsers handle mouse and keyboard events. The second part is about mobile devices, and how they handle mouse events, when no conventional mouse is present.
The UX Zeitgeist track the trends in the field of user experience design. It generate a list of the books written on the subject, sorted by the books sales rank at Amazon, blog mentions (plus other data from external sites), and nominations given by the UX Zeitgeist participators. This list provides an excellent overview of the 'need to have' books, according to the UX community.
ID Software, no introduction needed, has made a port of the classic 'Wolfenstein 3D' available for the iPhone/iPod Touch (30 danish kroner in the app store). I find it a little hard to master the controls, but it is well worth the small amount of money—and if you're adventurous, ID Software has made the source code to the iPhone application freely available, right from the page.
Alex Faaborg, the principal designer of the Firefox web browser, on disruptive dialogs, and the thin line between a cognitive connection between a user and an interface. On a related personal note; One of my biggest Mac gripes is the lack of a system wide third party application update system. What I miss is a system like apt-get, known from many Linux distributions, I could run manually on my own time—the last thing I want from the tool I've just reached, is the question "would you want me to update myself the newest (and properly exciting) version?"
Rob Foster, from the web design powerhouse 'Northtemple', reminds us all that accessibility is more than an item on the checklist; it's about people, the ones that will be using the end product: Accessibility is a personal issue—a good read for everyone who produce something that will be used by others.
Twittertinget, a Twitter mashup heavily inspired by the swedish counterpart 'Twixdagen', collects and displays the tweets from the members of the danish parliament. As I write this, only 7 out of the parliaments 179 members is using Twitter.
In this clip from 'Make: television', Cris Benton shows us how he creates interesting aerial photographs, by using a kite and a remotely controlled Canon DSLR.
Scott Chacon created a site dedicated to screencasts on the topic of Git. The screencasts range from minute to hour long in length, covers the basic to advanced, and the few I've seen has been of a very good quality.
The talented animator, Jonathan Jarvis, has made an animation that describes the causes of the economic crises. It is 11 minutes long, and it is well worthwhile to go for the high definition version.
Thomas Gideon wrote these scripts that turn the Git source revision system into a seamless source control system, aimed at non-technical users. The commit message is filled with external factors, like the 3 latest listens on the music player, so it records the authors state of mind when the commit was made.
Poenn, over at 'Mac OS X Hints', point out that the old firmware updates, for both iPod and iPhones, are stored in the iTunes folder in the user library. His hint describe how to get rid of these old, used updates, freeing hard disk space.
John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, gave a talk at the TED-like ‘Pulse’-section of Macworld Expo 2009. In this 17 minute talk he explain, by using auteur theory, that the quality of any collaborative creative endeavor, is only as good as the taste of the person with the final cut.
Matt Biddulph, from dopplr.com, explains how dopplr makes sense of user input, and translate it into computer readable data. Dopplr is powered by some interesting and clever logic.
Randy Pausch’s giving his last lecture on ‘how to achieve your childhood dreams’; the video is 1:44, but watch it anyway … it is truly a great, and thought provoking talk, given by a truly extraordinary man. - R.I.P.
Andy Clarke on why HTML should be the first thing that you show to a client, instead of a static photoshop design. This is argued as being a great way to manage expectations, towards progressive enhancement, instead of cross-browser “pixel-per-pixel-perfect” designs.
Written and produced by Martin Gausby, powered by Movable Type and licensed under a Creative Commons License