Check out how Pandora integrated advertising on their web site.

awesome goofy hack for bikes

The future of web standards. The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days...

Understanding CSS Colour modes. A good article that walks you through all the different options available to define our colours.

Thanks for all the fantastic comments on my previous post about Opera’s complaint to the European Commission. Sorry it’s taken a while to post a follow-up, but I moved house over the holidays and BT haven’t sorted out my Internet connection yet. Anyway, I’ll try to address some of the issues that were raised in the comments, but apologies if I miss anything out.

I personally believe that Microsoft have been doing a great job over the last couple of years brining their browser up to scratch. IE7 still has a few issues, but then again, what browser doesn’t? So I honestly think IE is pretty comparable with its competition in regards to current standards support. Future standards support is another issue, but I’ll cover that in a future post.

As a quick aside, the concept of “fully standards complaint” is a tricky one and the reason why CSS2.1 is taking so long to finish. The CSS2 specification was very loose and didn’t cover error handling or fall-back cases. As such, each browser took it’s own stance and you ended up with them technically following the spec while at the same time behaving differently. CSS2.1 attempts to address this problem by defining these niche issues, but as you can imagine it’s taking a long time.

I agree that IE7 is a much more capable browser these days, so many of the concerns developers have about Microsoft’s market dominance have vanished. This is one reason why I think Opera should remove the issue of standards support from their complaint. This leaves the complaint purely about monopolistic business practices which, from the content of your comments on my previous post, people seem less concerned about. This makes perfect sense as we’re mostly concerned with making our lives and the lives of our users easier, rather than worrying about the ethics of global business.

However on the ethics side, I think it’s important to make the distinction between people not being able to pre-install a different browser on their machines and simply not wanting to. I agree that most hardware manufacturers would probably stick with IE as, like a few people mentioned, that’s what most home users expect. However surely manufacturers should have the right to install whatever browser they want on their hardware? I could definitely see a case where manufacturers would try to distinguish themselves through the software they bundle with their machines. And I could foresee large companies such as IBM buying computers pre-installed with Firefox rather than IE.

The issue isn’t about supplying a PC to end users that doesn’t come with a browser pre-installed. That would obviously be stupid. The issue is about allowing computer manufacturers, and by extension their end users, to choose what browser or browsers come pre-installed. Whether people choose to exercise that right is another matter.

Just the other side of Christmas we took that early flight out of Belfast City to Stansted with Ryan Air - the company that put the "shit" into "budshit airlines": shit systems, shit service, surly staff (clearly pissed off by the shit systems they have to use so probably struggle to deliver anything more than that shit service).

Without the focus we had the previous year, this year's trip proved more random so, whether you like it or not, here are the disconnected hightlights:

Reading The Times on the train into town I thought this low energy lightbulb from Hulger looked cool and further investigations revealed their Plumen Project.

Breakfast (again) at Smiths. We love it there.

Fortified, we took a hike over to the Kemistry Gallery to see Eatock's stuff

Now I (at least) really enjoyed this tiny exhibition. I guess there's not much point me pontificating, cleverer people than me have probably said what needs to be said but stand-out pieces included his hand drawn graph paper and those stones that David mentioned.

Then there's that Olympics symbol and his packing tape sculpture. The Converse trainers, slung over a telephone wire made me laugh because I see a pair of trainers slung up every day on my way into work. Daniel's, if you haven't seen them, are hilariously fitted with laces so long they still (almost) reach the ground.

It's Eatock's love of the mundane that I enjoy most, reminds me of Shrigley. Couldn't help wonder if this Post-it note was just a note or actually an exhibit.

On the way back, we passed this brilliant bit of graffiti.

And I really liked these signs.

Then we went shopping and fiddled about in the Apple store, bookmarking Ace Jet on as many iPhones as I could get my hands on.

Finally, this is the fabulous Barbara Hepworth's Winged Figure fixed to the side of John Lewis, which kind of links vaguely with my next post.

One of the best ways to promote yourself and your work is through forums. Besides of that, you have an excellent opportunity to talk to other designers and learn a lot from them, sharing ideas and discussing nice topics.

Your Design Forums is without any doubt a great design forum.

Advertisement:

read more

Happy New Year!

At the beginning of 2007 I listed some resolutions:

• to get back to some “real” work,
• to keep travelling and speaking (I do love it so!),
• to not write a book,
• to play more bouzouki.

Three out of four ain’t bad. While I didn’t play nearly enough bouzouki, I enjoyed rolling up my sleeves and diving back into HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I really enjoyed not writing a book and yes, I certainly did plenty of public speaking:

• Web Directions North in February
• BarCamp London 2 in February
• South by Southwest in March
• The Highland Fling in April
• Web 2.0 Expo in April
• XTech in May
• @media America in May
• Reboot 9.0 in May
• @media Europe in June
• Hackday in June
• An Event Apart in August
• dConstruct in September
• BarCamp Brighton in September
• Fundamentos Web in October
• Voices That Matter in October
• Web 2.0 Expo Berlin in November
• @media Ajax in November
• BarCamp London 3 in November

As a result, I did plenty of travelling. I paid inaugural visits to some wonderful destinations:

• Whistler
• San Francisco
• New York
• Chicago
• Asturias

I’ve already got some more travelling lined up for 2008. I’ll be making at least one return trip to San Francisco and needless to say, I’ll be in Austin again for South by Southwest. But not all of my sojourns will be web-related—Jessica and I will be making a trip to Thailand in February that I’m very excited about.

I’m going to start cranking up this year’s odometer in a few hours when I make my return trip across the Atlantic from Arizona back to Brighton. I think one of my new year’s resolutions should be to plant a forest in an attempt to assuage the guilt I’m feeling about my carbon footprint.

For my future self throughout this coming year, here are those resolutions you were looking for:

• Reduce and/or offset your non-renewable energy output.
• Give blood.
• Lose some weight, you fat bastard.
• Play more bouzouki.

---

Tagged with travel 2007 2008

Back from the New Year’s eve, I bit of hangover, I’d like to wish you all an excellent 2008. And celebrating the new year I created this new image that I will write a tutorial showing how to create clouds in Photoshop.

They are not simply clouds, they are more a cartoon clouds, very colorful and stylish.

Advertisement:

read more