Today, the W3C published every one of the HTML5 Working Drafts.
A funeral service for IE6 will be held later tonight. I will be attending.
The future is looking bright.
Sagmeister’s Answers for Design Students. I love these learn from my experience-type features.
How many times should you have to revise a design? As many times as necessary. Sanjay Patel shares color studies from his book Ramayana: Divine Loophole during an interview with Grain Edit.
A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
Necessity is the mother of improvement. Who knows where invention comes from… a cabbage patch?
Two of my favorite designers compete, with commentary by the guy who singlehandedly, repeatedly redeems Adobe’s reputation. Layer Tennis today.
Mobile > Computer
By the end of this year 73% of the earth’s population will have have a mobile phone, so they say. 5 billion people. Just for perspective: when I lived in Nepal, a family I knew lived on just a few dollars a day, yet they owned a mobile phone.
Why does this matter? Mobiles are cheap, durable, portable, network-connected data terminals, and everyone—for all practical definitions of everyone—has one. That’s 5 billion portable printing presses, 5 billion broadcasting stations, 5 billion places to access knowledge.
Unlike OLPC, mobiles have been enthusiastically adopted by rich and poor alike, by way of ordinary market forces. In other words, this is a sustainable for-profit phenomenon, not a resource-limited charity. How’s that for appropriate technology?
One billion of these little data terminals already have access to the most comprehensive network of knowledge ever created: the internet. You thought the Internet was big now? Just wait as the rest of the world—all those who have not had access to computers—joins the fray.
Mobiles, not computers will be the major platform of our lifetime.
Tip of the hat to Gruber for the link.
I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
— Le Corbusier
The BBC shares the process it went through for its website redesign. A perfect example of how designing for the web is about creating flexible systems.
When using Microformats on complex sites, I’ve found it useful to avoid applying CSS styling to them. That way I can add microdata wherever it makes sense—even overlapping vocabularies—without having to worry about messing up my design accidentally.
What’s a good icon for the concept of “clearing”?
Cocoia Blog has a thoughtful analysis of user interface concepts in the iPad OS.
The iPad’s UI is without a doubt the most fascinating thing about this device. The particular way it has been thoughtfully scaled up from the iPhone’s interface is impressive, shrugging off the filesystem and multitasking in favor of obvious modal interactions.
Aerogel is a manufactured material with the lowest bulk density of any known porous solid. It is derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is an extremely low-density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as a thermal insulator and its extremely low density. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, due to its translucent nature.
…! Don’t miss the photo of a 5 lb brick resting on a piece of aerogel weighing only 2 grams. It basically looks like it’s floating.
I’ve been teaching an Intro to Web Apps and Interaction Design at UCD. All of my course materials and syllabus are licensed under Creative Commons, since I strongly believe in Open Education.
Apropos where the heck did my January go?
Zen Coding is an open-source rapid HTML development tool that uses advanced CSS selectors to build HTML. It’s intuitive, looks fast and makes use of knowledge web developers already have. Impressively, plugins are available on Google Code for more than 8 different text editors*.
Unfortunately, my favorite, TextMate, has only partial support so far, but Coda and Espresso both have full support.