#Reading → New HTML5 gallery options for Photoshop & Lightroom via John Nack on Adobe

#Reading → #GeekConfessions for Geek Pride Day via GeekDad

#Reading → Responsive Typography via Information Architects

#Reading → Improving the Digital Reading Experience via Information Architects

#Reading → Giving Users Offline Access with HTML5 Application Cache via Web development blog, news and tutorials - D...

The responsive images problem

"seriously Dad?" and "Don't put this on the Internet"

The Publication Standards Project

#Reading → Free Adobe CS6 eBooks — Download 1,022 Pages of New Tutorials via ProDesignTools

According to @klout, @_m_space is a Networker. What's your style?

#Reading → It's Content, Not Concept ... Or How We Reinvigorated via ZURB

@mlane: 30 Beautiful iOS App Website Designs for Inspiration http://t.co/qNP6ri7z

RT @FastCompany: Cargo-Bot, An Addictive iPad Game That Teaches Programming Concepts via @FastCoDesign

from xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/

More Than a PV | BLiNK

Sam: Daddy, I made you this gift only because I love mommy more than you

Image compositing in TileMill

5 Reasons to Download Autodesk Inventor Fusion Now

from Wired Design http://www.wired.com/design

"Mistakes are highly underrated," says Bolger-Schuth.

When designer Briana Bolger-Schuth took a break from advertising work, she wanted to make art. She had no art studio, but she did have access to a new Epson inkjet. Working on a project one night, she had a revelation: “I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, I wonder what would happen if I set these up as separations and ran the paper through each time for different colors?’”

The results are pretty wonderful.

She calls the project Let’s Put the Black on Last, and the setup is really simple. After creating a design, she runs her paper through the printer twice. First, she prints all the colors. Then she runs the paper through again, printing in black. (This is how you’d do it if you were screen printing.) Because the printer is never perfect, the black always ends up slightly misaligned.

“The idea of getting something different out of the printer other than just what I expect is so exciting to me,” says Bolger-Schuth, “Where is the fun in knowing exactly what’s going to happen when you press the print button?”

When Walter Benjamin penned The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he bemoaned the loss of authenticity and aura in mass-produced printed works. What he couldn’t foresee was the rise of digital reproduction and how that would give letterpress-printed works an aura of their own.

I became fascinated with the way the printing process gained that aura back in 2010 after watching a video lovingly depicting the process of printing a file that was originally created on a computer. At the time, I wondered at what point the techniques would evolve to the point that PDFs to be printed ‘by hand’ on a color printer would feel more authentic than whatever replaced it?

With Let’s Put the Black on Last, I have my answer.

I don't often eat roast chicken but when I do, it's served by a centaur-unicorn.

The joy of this desktop art technique is that it takes advantage of the imperfections of an inkjet in exactly the same way that a letterpress print takes advantage of its native idiosyncrasies. Because the printer never quite grabs a sheet of paper in the same way twice, there will always be inconsistencies in the registration, which gives you that sui generis look.

The other joy is that the process is dead simple. Bolger-Schuth says that just about any printer would work, though she suggests finding one that lays down a nice thick layer of ink. She does offer a word of caution if you are planning to follow in her footsteps — don’t use the newspaper.

“I almost killed my printer a few weeks ago when I tried to run newspaper through it. I’m still pulling tiny bits of the news out every now and again.”

Bolger-Schuth has begun experimenting further, putting black over all kinds of things.

from Wired Design http://www.wired.com/design

No matter how fast postal delivery gets, nothing beats the immediate gratification of pushing a button on a vending machine and having your purchase tumble down into the delivery box. The Chinese live crab dispenser and Art-O-Mat are old news. Meet the machine of the moment: the DreamVendor, a set of four MakerBot Thing-O-Matics that sit behind glass and 3-D print your tchotchke of choice.

The DreamVendor is the brainchild of Dr. Chris Williams, Director of Virginia Tech’s DREAMS Lab, and student Amy Elliot, who led the design. “We wanted an experience where someone could walk up and use a 3-D printer without having to worry about anything besides loading a file and selecting ‘Print,’” says Williams.

To use it, you insert an SD card containing a physible‘s data file. Then the printer goes to work fabricating your design. It’s not exactly like ordering a Diet Coke — 3-D printers work at a plodding pace — but it’s a lot quicker than sending your file off to a web service and waiting for them to send your object back through the mail.

One of the DreamVendor's MakerBots in action.

DreamVendor brings 3-D printing out of the lab and into the hallway, turning 3-D printing into a spectacle, and introducing students to additive manufacturing processes without having to train them in proper use and maintenance. Passing by the machine, you can’t help but notice the shelves of attractively arranged samples flanking four MakerBots merrily humming along and making stuff. Williams says they’ve had a few stories of students who taught themselves how to design files for the machine “just because of the intrigue.”

But Williams and his team didn’t build the DreamVendor just for its gee-whiz factor. It’s practical, too. “We really needed an interface that would protect the machines and the user,” says Elliot. MakerBots are precision machines that aren’t meant to be roughed up, and, besides, the nozzles can reach 225 degrees Celsius. “That’s not something you want people to be able to get their hands on.”

The system is meant to be as hands off as possible. Assuming you set up your file correctly, the instructions for printing are pretty much “put your SD card in a free slot and make sure the bin is closed.” By allowing people to set up and run prints on their own, it frees up the lab’s people to work on other machines.

DreamVendor’s genius isn’t especially technical. Instead it’s a grand leap forward in user interface.

Projects like RepRap and MakerBot made 3-D printers affordable. DreamVendor is making them automatic.

Dr. Chris Williams and Amy Elliot admire their handywork.

Photographs courtesy of Virginia Tech. Hat tip 3dPrinting.com.

from AddictiveTips http://www.addictivetips.com

Sharing a collection of your photos with your friends or family on the internet is nothing new. It has now become one of the integral parts of various social networks such as Facebook and Google+, and image hosting services e.g. Imgur, Picasa & Flickr. If you’re an avid photographer who wants to share your work on your own website, by creating gorgeous looking photo galleries, then Juicebox is what you need. It’s an Adobe AIR-based application (which means you need to have Adobe AIR installed on your machine to get it working, of course). It creates stylish, HTML-compatible photo galleries with fluid navigation that you can easily embed into your website. You may upload images either directly from your local drive or even from a Flickr profile. Furthermore, the application is based on HTML5 and JavaScript, which means anyone can access your albums using HTML5-enabled web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and more. Apart from being highly customizable, it supports a number of plugins, which allow you to extend the functionality of native features. More after the break.

The desktop client (known as JuiceboxBuilder) is where you actually create your gallaries. The wizard based process consists of a mere four basic steps. If you’re using the builder for the first time, then you need to start by clicking the New Gallery button to proceed to the next step.

If you want to add images from a hard drive, all you need is to drag your photos over the left side of the application window under Add Images section. However, you can also click Flickr to grab the images from there, instead of inputting Flicker User Name or Flickr Tags and clicking Load Images. Under Image Size section to the bottom-left, you may mark Resize Images or Crop To Fit options, and click Change button to select the resized resolution.

Next up, you need to customize your photo gallery. Just type in your Gallery Title, Gallery Width and Gallery Height – select Background color and opacity and enable/disable other Misc. options such as Show Open Button, Show Expand Button and Show Thumbs Button. Finally, click the Publish button at the top to publish your photos.

Your published photos will be saved automatically to your local drive, and the builder app will give you the HTML5 embed Code, so that you can easily embed it into any HTML page.

The following screenshot displays the photo gallery we created during testing.

Juicebox is available as a Free (Lite) as well as two Pro versions costing $49 and 99$ for a single license and multi license, respectively. Free version is limited to 50 images per gallery, while the Pro variant (costs $49) is free from any limitations and contains 70+ customization features, options to add background audio & watermarks, and supports AutoPlay and JavaScript API. The Builder client works on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, provided you have Adobe AIR installed. Both 32-bit and 64-bit OS editions are supported.

Download Juicebox

Related Articles:

Kurst Creates Powerful Flash-Based 3D Photo Galleries For Your Website

PhotoLikr: Create/Manage Picasa, Minus & Other Online Photo Galleries

Embed HTML5 And CSS3 Elements Directly With BlueGriffon WYSIWYG Editor

from DailyJS http://dailyjs.com

I’ve been surveying popular Node modules and the nodejs Google Group to find common portability issues people have found when testing modules in Windows.

For the most part, Node code seems very portable – there are only a few problem areas that seem to crop up frequently. Let’s take a look at these problems and the solutions so we can write code that runs everywhere.

Platform-Specific Code

Despite Node code’s inherent portability, there are times when platform-specific code is required. This is dealt with in Node’s core modules like this:

var isWindows = process.platform === 'win32';

if (isWindows) {
// Windows-specific code
}

This example is based on path.js.

For more detailed information on the operating system, the os module can come in handy.

File System

Windows can actually accept backslashes or forward slashes as a path separator. This means you don’t need to change all of your require calls to use different slashes; most things should just work. There are a few cases where we need to be careful, however, particularly if a path name is absolute or it’s going to be displayed somewhere.

One common issue I’ve found is where the developer has made certain assumptions about the structure of absolute paths. In a commit to Express, Fixed absolute path checking on windows, we can see where the authors have adapted a method called isAbsolute to support Windows:

exports.isAbsolute = function(path){
if ('/' == path[0]) return true;
if (':' == path[1] && '\' == path[2]) return true;
};

Isaac Schlueter recommends using path.resolve to make relative paths absolute in a cross-platform way.

When dealing with fragments of paths, using path.join will automatically insert the correct slash based on platform. For example, the Windows version will insert backslashes:

var joined = paths.join('\');

Notice that JavaScript strings require two backslashes because one acts as an escape, so when working with Windows path names don’t be surprised if there are lot of double slashes.

Another big source of Windows issues is fs.watch. This module is routinely used by programs that watch for file system changes. Node’s documentation makes it clear that the API isn’t portable, so the slower but more compatible fs.watchFile can be used instead.

In this patch for the Derby web framework, we can see where the developers opted to branch based on process.platform to use fs.watchFile in Windows, but fs.watch elsewhere.

Text Interfaces

Be aware that not everybody has a super-fancy UTF-8 terminal that supports colours. Certain programs depend on text output, but people may have trouble seeing it correctly if your program relies on symbols their terminal or font doesn’t support.

Mocha is a good example of such a program, and in the issue Ability to configure passed/failed checkmarks for the spec reporter, we can see where someone has struggled to read the output with cmd.exe.

Environment

Assuming certain environmental variables will exist (or mean the same thing) on every platform is a good way to create portability headaches.

James Halliday’s Browserify had its fair share of Windows issues, which was problematic due to several other popular modules depending on it.

This commit to Browserify demonstrates a fix Christopher Bennage submitted that replaces calls to process.env.HOME with the following:

var home = (process.env.HOME || process.env.USERPROFILE);

I tried this in Windows 7 and found process.env.HOME wasn’t set, but process.env.USERPROFILE worked as expected.

Sockets

Node’s TCP sockets are portable, but Unix domain sockets are not. However, Windows has named pipes. The following code is almost exactly the same as the Unix equivalent, it just has a different path to the named pipe:

var net = require('net');

net.createServer(function(socket) {
console.log('Connected');
}).listen('\\.\pipe\named-pipe-test');

Notice the escaped backslashes – forgetting to insert them here will raise a confusing EACCESS error. In node/test/common.js, there’s a branch based on platform to set the name of the pipe so it works in Windows and Unix:

if (process.platform === 'win32') {
exports.PIPE = '\\.\pipe\libuv-test';
} else {
exports.PIPE = exports.tmpDir + '/test.sock';
}

References

Military camera adapters and iOS apps add geotagging and night vision to iPhone or iPad

from Daring Fireball http://daringfireball.net/

Speaking of Paul Kafasis, he decided to try to duplicate Sam Jackson’s “remind me to put the gazpacho on ice in an hour” Siri directive:

If you’ve used Siri yourself, however, you know the disclaimer of “Sequences shortened” is more than an understatement. They’ve edited out the inevitable “No.…NO.…NO!” as well as significant quantities of exasperated sighs. After hearing Jackson say the word “hotspacho” for the umpteenth time, I decided to run a little test.

 ★ 

from Adobe Labs http://blogs.adobe.com/labs

Adobe Configurator 3 preview is now available to download. Configurator 3 introduces several new features and support for Adobe Photoshop CS6 and InDesign CS6. Key features include:

Compatible with Photoshop CS5/5.1 and CS6, and InDesign CS5/CS5.5 and CS6; supports new features and automatic conversion of existing panels.

Distribute and share panels with other Creative Suite 6 users via the Adobe Exchange. Look for more information and a new Exchange panel to be available on Adobe Labs in the coming weeks.

See the complete list of new features in Configurator

Configurator is free for anyone to use. To run the panels it generates you must install Photoshop or InDesign. Creative Suite® 6 (CS6) trials are available on Adobe.com.

Download Configurator 3 preview

Discuss Configurator 3

.@rllewellyn A mental challenge for the long weekend - Compete Against Our Developers!

from Wired Enterprise http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise

Just a little bit of useless garnish was all anyone got out of Oracle v. Google (Image: Kelley Mari/Flickr)

After sitting through the monthlong legal battle between Google and Oracle, one juror said he kept waiting for steak but all he got was parsley.

According to jury foreman Greg Thompson, this unnamed juror was critiquing Oracle’s efforts to show that Google had infringed on both its patents and its copyrights in building the Android mobile operating system. But the quip could just as easily describe the trial as a whole.

Google v. Oracle was billed as a Clash of the Tech Titans. But when the jury returned its final verdict on Wednesday, the battle all but petered out. Yes, Judge William Alsup is still set to rule on whether Oracle’s Java APIs are subject to copyright — the big question the trial was supposed to answer — but after the jury returned a partial verdict on Oracle’s copyright claims, the question is almost moot.

Judge Alsup — who has served on the federal bench for almost 13 years — said the case was the longest civil suit he’d ever presided over. And yet the fireworks never came. The most memorable moment was Alsup telling the court that he’d secretly learned to code in Java, a way of upbraiding David Boies, Oracle’s celebrity lawyer, for trying to claim huge damages on an almost insignificant amount of code. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America,” he said. “How can you make that argument?”

When it sued Google in the fall of 2010, Oracle sought as much as $7 billion as it asserted various copyrights and patents it acquired with its purchase of Java-maker Sun Microsystems. But after the copyright phase of the trial ended with a partial verdict and the jury rejected all of Oracle’s patent claims, the trial had merely shown that out of 15 million lines of Android code, Google had infringed with about eight decompiled files and nine lines of copied code.

For Google, the jury’s denial of Oracle’s patent claims showed just how flawed the system is. “This illustrates the costs when the patent system doesn’t work well,” Google general counsel Kent Walker told us after the patent verdict came down. Oracle did not respond to request for comment.

But the copyright phase of the trial was by far the messier of the two. Part of Oracle’s argument was that Google had infringed Oracle’s copyrights in cloning 37 Java APIs, or application programming interfaces. Ultimately, the jury decided that Google had infringed in mimicking the APIs, but it couldn’t decide whether this should be considered “fair use” under the law.

According to jury foreman Greg Thompson, 52, a retirement plan specialist from Fremont, California, the argument in the jury room came to down to whether Google’s use of the APIs was “transformative” — i.e., whether had changed the nature of the work enough to qualify for fair use. But the jury also tussled over whether the amount of copied material was insignificant and whether the copied material was used for material gain. Google argued that since Android open source and free to download, it isn’t a commercial product.

(Image: Afsart/Flickr)

In the end, Thompson said, the final vote was 9-3 in favor of fair use, with Thompson and two others in the minority. He had argued that even though Android was free and open source, companies like Google intend to make money from most strategic moves they make. Indeed, Android will generate huge amounts of ad revenue for Google.

After the partial verdict was read, Google moved for a mistrial, arguing that the court couldn’t assess damages without settling the “fair use” question. But Judge Alsup has yet to rule on that matter too.

As Thompson spoke with the press, Oracle counsel Mike Jacobs and most of the company’s other lawyers stood nearby and listened. Presumably, they’re preparing for an appeal. Thompson said that in the end, the jury did not feel that Oracle’s arguments were convincing. That’s when he quoted another juror as saying he was “waiting for the steak and only got the parsley.” He also said that the lawyers often spoke too quickly, making it difficult to grasp where were already complex topics.

“In hindsight maybe we should have had the testimony read back to us but we were all looking through our notes saying, ‘We know it came up, but…’” he said, trailing off. “We just couldn’t put enough information together to reach what we saw as a level of preponderance of evidence that infringement had occurred.”

Thompson also acknowledged that sorting through the expert testimony was “problematic.” Both sides paid expert witnesses to testify on their behalf. Stanford computer science professor John Mitchell and Duke computer science professor Owen Astrachan, hired by Oracle and Google respectively, gave lengthy and detailed testimony on the nature of Java code, the process of compilation, reverse engineering, and the inner workings of virtual machines. But when questioned by the other side’s lawyers, they generally gave short, dismissive answers.

“We had a lot of difficulty with that,” Thompson said. According to their answers during jury selection, only two members of the jury had rudimentary experience in computer science.

Oracle will only seek extensive damages if Judge Alsup rules that the Java APIs are subject to copyright, and his decision is expected to come sometime next week. But don’t expect steak. Only parsley.

from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com

Whether you have an iPad or an Android tablet, you've probably been tempted to doodle a bit on it, or open up an app to make sketches or take down a few freehand notes with your finger or a stylus. Maybe you just love to draw, and you found the perfect drawing app to express your creativity. This week we want to know which app you turn to when you want to do a little drawing on your tablet screen. More »

from ZURB http://www.zurb.com/blog/posts

This week, we relaunched our ZURBexpo.com that pushed the newest content front and center. In December, we threw up a rather ho-hum, static page because we needed to get something up temporarily when we incorporated all of our publishing efforts under one umbrella. Check out the old page:

OK, we admit it, we punted on that one. But the page wasn't a priority for us at the time. Nevertheless, the page we put up was static. Newly published material wasn't being changed out as often as it was being published. For instance, there was nothing on the page to show when a new blog post went up. All in all, it wasn’t a hub where people could go again and again to see what’s new with those properties. It also didn’t feel as if it belonged visually with the other properties that make up ZURBexpo.com:

ZURBlog — where we share product design tips, tricks, lessons learned and ideas.

ZURBplayground — where we share our experiments such as JQuery plugins, CSS3 buttons, stencils and apps to make it easier to design great products.

ZURBword — where we share quick design concepts and our design methods

ZURBnews — where we keep in touch with our family of thousands of passionate hackers out there in the world

When I came aboard in February, it was decided to make an updated ZURBexpo.com a priority and pushed forward with a complete redesign. And I was put to work to come up with the new look.

The Concept Isn’t More Valuable Than The Content

One of the earliest ideas that I came up with was to capitalize on the concept of an expo, literally. Sketches were done inspired by old World’s Fair pictures and other similar exhibitions. An expo meant fun and exploration, and we thought we could carry that through to the Expo page.

A few of us, including myself, were quite fond of the fun, interactive aspect that the concept could bring to the page. One concept had a wheel that visitors would be able to manipulate to go from ZURBlog to ZURBplayground to ZURBnews to ZURBword. While another had a series of circus-like posters that would rotate out of the latest from each of the properties.

But Bryan made a good point about the concept — it was less important than the content. The content should be front and center. In other words, the concept didn’t have tremendous value, but the content did. So the content should really be the “hero” of the ZURBexpo story. With that, the World’s Fair exposition was abandoned and we concentrated on something that was more visually aligned with the rest of the properties.

For A Few Iterations More

For our first take, we still tried to include a World Fair theme. But the content (“the good stuff”) was confined and and didn’t have the spotlight it deserved. Check it out below (click for a larger image):

Our next round of iterations explored a pin board-style page, where items would look as if they’d been “pinned” to the page. The feeling we were going for was “Look at all this goodness!” but it was more of “Oh my, what should I be looking at?” They had to hunt for the latest blog post. In other words, the content was lost in the shuffle. Click the image below for a larger image:

Another idea was to go back to the idea of fun and do something that was visually similar to ZURBword’s main page with blocks of content that would constantly shift. Click the image below for a larger image:

The problem with that idea was that it didn’t allow visitors to easily select the property they want to go to directly. But when it comes to updates, not all the pages are equal. ZURBlog gets updated daily. ZURBplayground is our most popular, but it isn’t updated as frequently. ZURBnews gets updated monthly. ZURBword gets updated periodically, but not as much as the blog. It can be a challenge to balance all those properties. So we eventually moved away from the idea.

However, the blocks of content stayed through are next iterations before we came to the almost-final design. Click the image below for a larger image:

We also varied the sizes of the boxes and the amount of boxes so they were associated with a particular property. For example, ZURBlog has two long rectangular boxes while ZURBword has one rectangular boxes followed by two smaller boxes. Another way we differentiated between the properties was by using the colors associated with each particular one, such as orange for ZURBlog and blue for ZURBplayground.

The last iteration came to aligning ZURBexpo with the overall ZURB brand, which meant cleaner, streamlined graphics and simple overlays. That’s where we landed. And here is the final design (click for the larger image):

Built with Foundation

Since ZURBexpo.com was built with Foundation, that meant the design would look good on smaller devices, such as a smartphone. With Foundation's fluid grid, the content easily stacks down and allows you to scroll to each of the four properties.

With this final design, we had something that had the content front and center where it wasn't buried behind a concept. Not only that but it better matched with the other properties in terms of visual language. More importantly, this page better accomplished being a hub to all our ZURBexpo properties than its predecessor.

Check out ZURBexpo.com »

from Queness http://www.queness.com You can create wireframes in many ways and by using many tools, depending on how much money you are willing to spend on it and what you want out of it. We have a list of 10 Best Wireframe Tools For Web Designers.

@brainpicker: The secret to creativity? Curiosity + rigor, says Andrew Zuckerman, one of my favorite photographers http://t.co/Usjp2IOK

RT @HarvardBiz: Following lean principles allows product teams to solve problems iteratively — and successfully.

RT @ForbesTech: Google: Up to 500,000 Computers Face Disconnection From The Internet

RT @zackmoros: NYTimes: Mayonnaise: Oil, Egg and a Drop of Magic

I've seen it in action. Tru dat. RT @davidgrandy: Innovation isn't just random discovery; it can be designed

#Reading → Comics and UX, Part 2: Flow and Content via The UX Booth

RT @dougwignall: The importance of social media on the workplace.

House Industries - Objects - Printed Stuff Add this to the wishlist for design geek dads

from Weblog Tools Collection http://weblogtoolscollection.com

The official WordPress.org Plugin Directory has received a rather significant redesign. With over 19,000 plugins listed, the team took some time to revisit this highly popular destination for the millions of folks using WordPress.

Right off the bat, you should notice a new ability to to mark your preferred plugins as Favorites. Each plugin page now has a new Support tab populated with the plugins’s support thread, and a super-handy chart showing you the resolved vs. open thread count so you can see at a glance how well supported a plugin is. Finally, there is much more focus on the authors this time around and some improved styling over all.

What do you think of the newly redesigned plugin directory?

#Reading → Resource-Oriented Computing with NetKernel via O'Reilly Media, Inc. New Titles

#Reading → Comics and UX, Part 1: Cross-disciplinary Techniques via The UX Booth

Jury clears Google of infringing on Oracle patents | ZDNet

Flame on! A beginner's guide to Ember.js | Adobe Developer Connection

JavaScript design patterns – Part 2: Adapter, decorator, and factory | Adobe Developer Connection

JavaScript design patterns – Part 1: Singleton, composite, and façade | Adobe Developer Connection

Printed Reality | BLiNK

RT @khoi: This is great. RT @Slate: Nine-year-old's lunch blog shames school into making changes:

#Reading → Quiz: Manly Brand Mascots via @Issue Journal of Business & Design

from kottke.org http://kottke.org/

In this interview with The Daily Beast, Ridley Scott reveals that he's currently working on a sequel to Blade Runner.

Funny enough, I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week. We have a very good take on it. And we'll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.

Tags: Blade Runner   movies   Ridley Scott

#Reading → Sappi Standard 5 Begs to Be Touched via @Issue Journal of Business & Design

#Reading → “This redesign is deliberately over the top.” via Cameron Moll / Designer, Speaker, Author

#Reading → Meet the Man Who Invented the Instructions for the Internet via Wired Enterprise

@ADC_Adobe: Adobe Developer Connection | Video encoding/transcoding guidelines for Apple iOS with Adobe AIR; http://t.co/kgpKP8ij.

#Reading → Google’s Knowledge Graph: Yeah, that’s the Semantic Web (sort of) via Gartner Blog Network

Top Ten Trials of Traveling | BLiNK

from The UX Bookmark http://www.theuxbookmark.com

William Playfair — a businessman, engineer and economics writer from Scotland — created the first known pie chart in 1801. Playfair’s graphic innovations went beyond the pie chart: he also invented the bar graph. Academics conduct studies about which Playfair invention performs better. Excel and PowerPoint may abound with pie charts, but not everyone is a fan.

The data-visualization pioneer Edward Tufte wrote that “pie charts should never be used.” Dan Boyarski, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, encourages his students to expand their horizons. He also concedes, however, that in some cases, like illustrating a budget, the pie chart is fine. “We know what it stands for, so we immediately relate to it,” Boyarski said. “That’s the advantage of the tried and true.”

Abhay’s note: The article is short and interesting. While it tells you about the origins of the pie chart, its the comments that offer better reasons on why or why not and when to use a pie chart.

Who Made That Pie Chart

from Wired Enterprise http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise

The rumor was that Google banned the use of Windows. But CIO Ben Fried says otherwise. Photo: Google

In the wake of the late-2009 attack on Google’s internal systems that saw Chinese hackers pilfer proprietary software code, the rumor was that the search giant was dumping Microsoft Windows.

A report from the New York Times indicated that Chinese hackers had infiltrated Google’s infrastructure via an employee machine running Microsoft’s instant messenger client, and in a later story, citing several unnamed Google employees, The Financial Times reported that Google was “phasing out” the use of Microsoft’s Windows operating system in an effort to improve security, and that this would “effectively end” use of the OS inside the company.

According to one unnamed Google employee, the FT said, getting a new Windows machine required “CIO approval.”

But two years on, Google CIO Ben Fried tells Wired that Google never banned the use of Windows and that the company continues to offer the Microsoft OSes on employee machines. Employees, he says, can choose from among a Mac, a Windows PC, a Google Chromebook, and a machine running Goobuntu, the company’s modified version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

At Google, employees can chose from four different operating systems: Mac OS, Chrome OS, Goobuntu, and, yes, Windows.

Fried does indicate that the China hack had some effect on the way its employees choose their machines. “We wanted people to think more about why they were choosing a particular operating system,” he explains. But he says that tales of a Windows ban were well wide of the mark.

With its Google Apps suite of online business applications and its Chrome OS browser-based operating system, Google is pushing the world towards a new breed of online software that discards the old Windows model, and in many ways, it’s succeeding. Google Apps is now used by over 5 million businesses. But the company’s internal operation underlines the fact that the transition to a world of web-based software takes some time.

Although Google employees generally use Google Apps, Fried says that some employees still require the Microsoft Office suite, and he indicates that some people are just more comfortable with Windows. According to a Google spokesman, most of Google’s Windows machines run Windows 7, the newest version of Microsoft’s OS. “The vast, vast majority of our Windows machines are running Windows 7,” he says. “But there are a very tiny handful (really, a negligible amount) of machines running older versions.”

Presumably, these older versions of Windows are used to test various applications and web services.

Fried was unable to say what percentage of Google employees use what OS. But he did indicate that Goobuntu is widely used across the company, saying it’s the OS of choice not for many Google engineers, but by various other employees, including some company lawyers. The company has said that even a small problem with an upgrade to a new version of the OS can cost the company upwards of $1 million, indicating that it’s used by a large portion of its more than 24,000 employees.

Earlier this month, at a conference dedicated to Ubuntu, Google developer Thomas Bushnell — who works under CIO Ben Fried — detailed the company’s use of Goobuntu, which has long been an open secret but was rarely discussed in public. According to Bushnell, Goobuntu is based on the LTS (long-term support) releases of Ubuntu, with modifications made to improve security and stability. Fried confirms that Google is currently using the “Lucid Lynx” version of Ubuntu (10.04), but that the company is moving to the “Precise Penguin” release (12.04).

According to Bushnell, even the cook at his office building uses Goobuntu, and he indicates that “tens of thousands” of Google workstations run the OS.

A year ago, at Google’s annual developer conference, co-founder Sergey Brin said that about 20 percent of Google employees were still on Windows, but he stressed that he did not know the exact percentage. Brin also said that Google hoped to move most of its employees to Chrome OS, which not only moves all applications to the browser but seeks to improve on the security of a desktop operating system.

Though Fried declined to comment on how prevalent any OS was within the company, a blanket move to Chrome OS is presumably years away at best. At least publicly, the OS is only available on notebooks, though Google has long said it’s working on desktop Chrome OS machines as well.

@MattWilcox: BTW: if you need to search your twitter timeline, http://t.co/Wy3Ho0mh is awesome.

@davidgrandy RT: @nerdgraph: Diagrams Rule: A Funny Look at Infographics {Infographic}

RT @smashingmag: Looks interesting: WYSIHTML5 - A better approach to rich text editing -

from Daring Fireball http://daringfireball.net/

Nicely done package from Google explaining and illustrating their environmental strategies. Impressive and never-before-seen look inside some of their data centers. And their “Story of Send” is Google at its whimsical best.

 ★ 

from Daring Fireball http://daringfireball.net/

Lengthy, detailed treatise by Mat Honan for Gizmodo:

There’s a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr’s social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what’s that, you don’t have one? Exactly.

Flickr could have — should have — been to mobile photography what Instagram has become.

 ★ 

from ZURB http://www.zurb.com/blog/posts

We looked at the current state of responsive tables, and we weren't happy. Today we've released a new playground piece, with a new, awesome take on responsive tables.

If you've ever tried to make large data tables work in a responsive design, you know what a pain they can be. Tables have a magical property that says they can never be so small that parts of a word have to be cut off — they can't overflow. That means that, when your design shrinks down for the width of, say a smartphone, large data tables will ensure your design doesn't actually shrink all the way down. It sucks.

We wanted to try and do better, so we got to work on a responsive table implementation that would meet three criteria:

Doesn't break responsive layouts

Doesn't unnecessarily hide table data

Still allows you to compare rows with a key column

A bit of a tall order but with some crafty CSS/JS, we cooked up something we think is pretty nifty. You can go ahead and check out our new responsive tables, or stick around to hear more about how it works.

How it Works

As we looked at tables we realized that, most of the time, the first column is the unique key for a table. That provides the reference for the other columns, while the column headers provide the legend for what everything means. With that in mind, we wanted our responsive tables to have that first column available at all times.

This is a schematic of how the table changes from a larger screen to a small one. Basically, we take the first column and pull it out of the table element, positioning it over the table in its own element. Then we allow the table itself, minus that first column, to scroll under it horizontally.

What this allows is for the user to see the entire table (albeit not all at once, they have to scroll) while still seeing that first 'key' column. We don't have to flip the table axes, or hide data, or break the layout, we just rely on the user's ability to swipe across to see all the data and compare the rows and columns.

There are a couple caveats here. First, for the small device format we have to restrict cells to a single line (for a consistent height). The separate left-hand column and other column elements don't impact each other, so they can't correctly dictate an arbitrary height. Second, this doesn't work in Android 2.3 and below as it doesn't support scrollable DIVs. Android 3+ should be good to go.

Built for Foundation

We developed these to drop right into Foundation, our responsive, open source front-end framework. They're great if you're working on a responsive prototype, or responsive production code, and need a way to manage large sets of tabular data. While they're built for Foundation, they should work in any responsive front-end.

Try it out, give us feedback

You can check out our responsive tables or you can go right to the code on Github.

If you're interested in other approaches, Chris Coyier did a great round-up a while back on responsive data tables — there are some fascinating approaches in there, but none which met our criteria.

If you have some other ideas to either improve on this approach, or something else we should check out, sound off in the comments. Have fun with this new code, it was fun to work on and hopefully fun for you to use!

from Varsity Bookmarking http://pieratt.tumblr.com/ “The extension of our nervous system as a total environment of information is an extension of the evolutionary process.”
- Twitter / @mcluhanspeaks: The extension of our nervo …

from ZURB http://www.zurb.com/blog/posts
Last week, we were excited here at ZURB to distribute new iPads to every member of the ZURB team: design, operations, marketing and engineering — even our interns. There's plenty of companies in Silicon Valley that kit their employees out with nice gear, but this wasn't just about everyone having shiny toys (though it doesn't hurt).

Multi-Device is the Future

You've probably noticed that it's not just laptops and desktops people are using these days. Other classes of device, like smartphones or tablets or eReaders (etc, etc) are beginning to dominate how people access the Web, or talk to each other, or capture and share things in their life.

We believe that, given this inevitable shift toward more disparate devices, it's important to put more of our eggs in that basket. That's why we developed Foundation, our responsive framework for developing sites and apps for any device. That's why when we relaunched ZURB.com we did so in a way that worked across devices, and it's why we develop sites and apps for our clients responsively.

We Need Multi-Device Design Literacy

There's plenty of reasons to have iPads in an office. We use them for QA, we can use them to present work to clients (or each other) ... but the biggest reason we kitted out each and every ZURBian with an iPad was to foster an environment of multi-device design literacy.

It's not just our designers who need to understand how Design works in a multi-device world. Our marketing team needs to be immersed in these devices so they can talk about it. Our engineering team needs to know about them so they can build new apps and services to cater to it. Our operations team needs to understand the multi-device world so they can plan for it, and work with it, and find new talent to drive it. We all have iPads because each and every member of our team needs to intuitively understand the multi-device world (we all have smartphones, too) and understand what it means for our business and our industry.

The Practical Effect

Here's an example of how this is already helping our team. The new iPads, with their retina displays, make for a great reading and browsing experience. We also recently relaunched ZURB.com with a visually rich design. However: we did almost nothing to cater to retina displays (it didn't even exist when we started the redesign). No high-resolution imagery, no consideration for the improved readability when it came to font sizes and the like.

We could simply serve up giant images and scale them down for everyone else, but something else the iPad teaches you is that while the resolution might be enormous, often the bandwidth is not. Even on 4G LTE Retina-sized background images are a seriously large file load. We're still working on this problem, but without team-wide exposure to this we might not have even bothered and we have to bother. These devices aren't going away, and they're not going to get less capable.

That's a technical example, but the effect is spreading already. When we evaluate new services to drive operations, we consider whether they work on different devices. We're already planning for TVs with connected AppleTVs in our breakout rooms, because our iPads can present directly on them without messing with cables. And so on.

Consider how immersed you are in a multi-device world. Smartphones, tablets, notebooks, eReaders, glasses (hehe), TVs, cars ... to work on what we all work on we need to understand these things.

The CS6 Desktop Brand System | Adobe Brand Experience #adobe #cs6

from Wired Enterprise http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise

GitHub's mascot: the Octocat. Image: GitHub

The cool and popular GitHub source-code sharing site just got a little easier to use.

On Monday, GitHub released its first client for Windows, giving users an easier way to set up a Git source-code repository on their PC that can then be shared with the GitHub website.

GitHub is changing the way that hackers share and develop software. It’s built on top of the command-line-driven Git software, created by Linus Torvalds. A good part of its success is due to the fact that GitHub simplifies many of the things that are tricky in Git, making it easier for developers to hand over source-code improvements to their favorite projects.

There’s already a GitHub client for the Mac, but until today, users who wanted to host their own projects or set up their own versions of existing projects on Windows PCs would have to install Git locally, set up encryption keys, and muck about with obscure commands such as git push -u origin master.

GitHub for Windows lets you do this kind of stuff with a nice clean graphical user interface. “GitHub for Windows is a 100% native application that will run on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8,” GitHub said Monday in a blog post. They call it “the single best way to start using Git on Windows.”

More than 1.3 million people use Git already. With a free, easy-to-use Windows client out now, that number is sure to get a bump.

from I love typography, the typography and fonts blog http://ilovetypography.com

Craig Mod

A wonderfully eloquent and thought-provoking talk by writer-designer-publisher, Craig Mod. After outlining the differences (physical and emotional) between the book as artifact and as digital, he addresses how we might reduce the experiential gap. Well worth 40 minutes of your day.

Sponsored by H&FJ.Designing for the Future Book

from John Nack on Adobe http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack

The next show will be hosted on May 4-8 in Los Angeles, writes CTO Kevin Lynch. According to Kevin, it’ll focus on

Design and creativity

Web sites, including the latest on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS

Digital publishing, video, and gaming, including the latest on Flash

Applications, particularly for mobile platforms

More details will come out in the months ahead.

from John Nack on Adobe http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack

Charming: Adam Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos for 5 seconds apiece, then asked her to draw what she remembered:

[Via Carolina de Bartolo]

from Adobe Labs http://blogs.adobe.com/labs

The Enterprise IT Tools for Creative Suite are designed to facilitate and simplify deployment and update management in enterprise settings.  The following list comprises all of the resources that are currently available to download.

Exceptions Deployer Application

Remote Update Manager

More tools/utilities may be added in the future.

Learn More About Enterprise IT Tools for Creative Suite

Download the Enterprise IT Tools for Creative Suite

Discuss Enterprise IT Tools for Creative Suite

 

RT @SomeChum: Open Source Urbanism: #cities

RT @lukew: Chromes overtakes Explorer

Lambs Ear #macro #olloclip

Pollen, the nectar of life #olloclip #macro

The Magical Short–Form Creative Brief

RT @phase2tech: Laura Schoppa shares here designer point of view, Drupal vs. Wordpress #Drupal

Ecce puella

Ecce Puer @ St. Cecilia Middle School

RT @zeldman: "John Conner sent me from the future to prevent you from authoring this RFP."