Link archive: April, 2011

Push Pop Press: Al Gore’s Our Choice

This looks like a beautiful way to present information, although it seems a real shame that the information is locked to just one class of device.

David Emery Online: Response

David rejects a redesign in favour of a bit of responsive tweaking — and very nice it is too.

Modern JavaScript - rmurphey

Rebecca Murphey on the continuing evolution and maturity of the JavaScript world.

Developing the OAuth user experience at Twitter

Ben documents the improvements in Twitter’s OAuth flow. Maybe this will help to stop people blindly giving permission to dodgy third-party sites to update their Twitter stream.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent

A blog devoted to sifting through the gems in the Geocities torrent. This is digital archeology.

Google can’t be trusted with our books | Simon Barron | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians — they can’t be held accountable to the public.

danah boyd | apophenia » Tumblr disappeared me…

Yet another reason to host your own content instead of sharecropping; danah boyd wakes up one morning to find her Tumblr account has been moved to a different URL.

Content Only | tomphippen.com

Tom Phippen points to an excellent real-world example of a print layout that’s superior to the desktop version.

United Pixelworkers — Ethan Marcotte

I am very fond of this T-shirt that Ethan designed.

It’s the Little Things - “Mobile” versus “Small Screen”

1. A “small screen” user is not necessarily a mobile user.
2. A “small screen” device is not necessarily a mobile one.

See also: bandwidth.

the html5 switch | the 200ok weblog

Ben Buchanan has a nice round-up of some of the options available when you’re switching over to HTML5.

In Radiolab We Trust

A great way of supporting the best podcast on the planet: a limited set of prints by five designers, illustrators and artists. Grab yours quick before they’re all gone.

More Responsive Design, Please « Jason Things

A good analysis of many of the factors involved in web design, of which responsiveness is clearly an important part.

Responsive Design Stuff

A handy list of responsive design resources.

Samantha Warren’s Web Design Blog | Design ~ Web Typography ~ Inspiration

An excellent design technique from Samantha that allows you to nail down a visual vocabulary without using something as wishy-washy as a mood board or as rigid as a fully-blown comp. Brilliant!

The style tile is not a literal translation of what the website is going to be, but a starting point for the designer and the client to have a conversation and establish a common visual language.

Cranking | 43 Folders

I got your work/life balance right here. Merlin means it, man.

I love him.

Otomata

A truly beautiful piece of work: generative music based on Conway’s game of life. Go ahead: create something gorgeously unique.

Showoff

This could be a handy little service for sharing locally-hosted sites.

From Me To You

The humble animated .gif is turning into an art form.

The Technium: What Books Will Become

Kevin Kelly asks “What is a book?” and provides some thought-provoking answers. There’s some inspiring crystal-ball gazing in here.

YouTube - Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation

The plan to get Curiosity Rover onto the surface of Mars (ignore the cheesy sound effects in space).

LA Re-Sweet: @adactio -

Aw, this is quite sweet: a tweet of mine, put to music.

The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science | Mother Jones

A look at our inbuilt confirmation biases.

Web-based prototyping software for interaction designers: Handcraft (formerly known as quplo)

A browser-based tool for creating HTML prototypes.

FFFFALLBACK - A simple tool for bulletproof web typography.

A useful bookmarklet that suggests font stacks to match up with the web fonts on whatever page you happen to be viewing.

A List Apart: Articles: Orbital Content

A great piece about the changing nature of content ownership and distribution. And now I share it with you, validating its central premise.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Dean Hachamovitch’s “Native HTML5″ announcement [dive into mark]

Mark Pilgrim translates Dean Hachamovitch’s utterly bizarre and nonsensical announcement of IE10 that kept talking about “native HTML5.”

txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator

I’m rubbish at regular expressions so this little tool might just save my skin someday.

New Titles in Lending Library! « The Open Library Blog

You can now borrow HTML5 For Web Designers through the Open Library. Nice one, George!

Beyond the mobile web by yiibu

Aaaaaand once again, the Riegers show us the way. This time it’s Stephanie’s presentation at Breaking Development in Dallas. Bloody brilliant.

1001 Beers App

This is my bucket list. 1001 beers to drink before you die.

Job at Bandcamp | Bandcamp

I like this way of whittling down potential candidates for the job: “To apply, check the HTTP headers.”

Typography Deconstructed | A comprehensive guide to the anatomy of type.

A beautiful glossary of typographic terms.

Tom Armitage on Vimeo

Tom talks about “Things Rules Do.”

Red Plaques

Even more historic significance than blue plaques.

Cute Roulette: Cutest videos on the web

Kittens, puppies, and other baby animals on continuous rotation.

kim jong-il looking at things

There appears to be an endless supply of subject matter for this.

Client-side routing, the teenage years // James Aylett’s diary

James follows up on his previous excellent post on hashbangs by diving into the situations where client-side routing is desirable. Watch this space for a follow-up post on performance.

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. on Vimeo

A great presentation on contracts and payment by Mike Monteiro …and his lawyer.

Qwery - The Tiny Selector Engine

A handy little JavaScript selector—IDs, classes and attribute selectors are supported—for those situations when all of jQuery or Sizzle would be overkill.

WhatFont Bookmarklet « Chengyin Liu

A handy bookmarklet that allows you to examine any piece of text on a website to determine what font it is set in.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE on Vimeo

Just imagine the world we would be living in if it weren’t for the warnings given to us by these film-makers.

The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers » HTML & CSS, Layout » Design Festival

A lovely bit of experimentation with prime numbers and multiple background images.

How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon

Present day Austin Kleon gives ten pieces of advices to past Austin Kleon.

BLDGBLOG: Islands at the Speed of Light

Freaky stuff. If you’ve seen Kevin Slavin or James Bridle talking about the increase in property prices on Wall Street as the buildings get closer to the network hub …that’s nothing—these are the new centres of world power; places where the speed of light interferes least with the speed of transactions.

Experimental Firefox and Chrome extensions to copy and paste contacts — Glenn Jones

More brilliant and useful code from Glenn: copy and paste contact details from one URL into a form on another URL.

Jeremy Keith Interview: Web Standards and Design Principles at An Event Apart

A quick chat with me in the hallway after my talk in Seattle.

Page Speed Online

A supremely useful tool from Google for measuring performance.

Ten Sexy Ladies

I think that I too will begin rating all my experiences on a scale from one to ten sexy ladies.

This is genuinely hilarious stuff from the genius behind Fireland.

Experience Is What We Make It | UX Magazine

The Riegers are like emissaries from Planet Smart and we mere mortals are fortunate that they take the time to give us great articles like this.

Access Main Computer File

Well, there goes my afternoon: here’s an endless supply of computer interfaces from films.

Virgin’s Evil Microcopy | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

It’s like, how much darker could the pattern be? None. None more dark.

Dead drops in Brighton (beat: James Burt’s weblog)

Looks like those dead drops that Jessica, Brian and I created haven’t survived the inclement weather.

The fall and rise of user experience : Cennydd Bowles on user experience

Cennydd’s closing remarks from this year’s IA Summit. Huzzah!

Media Query Test

Testing ways of only displaying background images on large screens whilst ensuring that they aren’t downloaded for smaller screens.

Do Lectures - Ideas that inspire action

The redesign of the Do Lectures site is gorgeous (and responsive).

BBC News - Are you experienced? Business and the web user experience

A nice overview of the increasing importance of UX on the web, written by Bobbie with soundbites from Andy.

LukeW | An Event Apart: Design Principles

Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart Seattle do a good job of capturing the gist of what I was saying.

YouTube - Being a Google Autocompleter

Yeah, it’s an April Fool’s video (lamest day on the internet) but this is amusing.