Training site for Bosch training schemes Comments from Bookmark List: WolvertonWork Training site for Bosch training schemes

This is beautiful - if you're a web developer that is - 24 ways: Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs

RT @SFXmagazine: New Ghost Rider Spirit Of Vengeance trailer now online

Are you Naughty or Nice?! Play Naughty or Nice with TMP Worldwide UK via @tmpworldwideuk

RT @MidsummerPlace: CHRISTMAS HAS ARRIVED IN MILTON KEYNES! @CocaCola truck is now in town, outside GAP <= Awww man! ;)

RT @hellogeri: We're listening to a 24 hour loop of ambient noise from the USS Enterprise.

Teach our kids to code - e-petitions

Last weekend's Red Bull Home Run in MK looked awesome! Hopefully they do it again next year!

@afovea Are you going to the top-left or to the top-right?
Anyway - since when did clients think they were designers?!

RT @nationalrailenq: High Winds: This is an example of the challenges facing the railway this afternoon: we'll keep ...

A golden age for design(ers)?

fish and chip salad! (@ Rocket Mayfair) [pic]:

RT @Dropbox: A guide on how to get more free space with Dropbox! Retweet for a chance to get +100GB!

Channel 5's other channels come to Freesat (Not 5HD though) via @pocketlint

RT @stefanrichter: [Paypal have been very bad.] In case you haven't seen it yet:

The startup choice: Get big or get bought - here's another option forgotten these days:

People may love Twitter integrating their pics into - but aren't they just stealing Photobucket et al's advertising?

I hit Aaron from 16.34km in the Great Snowball Fight. Visit to join in! #snowballfight

The Never Forgotten House is a beautifully-written piece with a central premise that is utterly, utterly flawed. Once again the truism that “the internet never forgets” is presented as though it needed no verification.

Someday soon, the internet will fulfill its promise as a time machine. It will provide images for every space and moment so we can fact check our memories. Flickr and Facebook albums will only accumulate.

Citation needed. Badly.

Read the article. Enjoy it. But question its unquestioningness. It made me sad for exactly the opposite reasons that the author intended.

Every essential moment of a child’s life is documented if he was born in the West. With digital album after album for every birthday, every Christmas, he will never struggle to remember what his childhood home looked like.

I wish that were true.

Tagged with
memory
digital
preservation

RT @CliveMKing: 1/2 of the trains leaving Euston are 1st class and 90% empty. Fix the easy stuff 1st before spending billions ...

How SOPA will attack the Internet's infrastructure and security - Boing Boing

A chilling reminder the cost of driving in the UK - Every death on every road in GB 1999-2010

John Williams: “Anything Goes” (from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”) – Andy Ihnatko

@pauldjohnston Highrise is good - and offer a free plan up to 2 users, 250 contacts. Highly recommended.

How to put a dent in the Universe | Boagworld

RT @bostock_pollitt: We want a Little Printer! Who's with us?

Want to understand more about the Carrier IQ controversy? Check out The Verge's beautiful collection page:

@pauldjohnston The is pretty impressive - needs further investigation though.

The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

It's a long time since I've been on an exhibition stand - I forgot how much fun it is! (@ Apps World Europe)

At Apps World enjoying explaining FourSquare! (@ Apps World Europe w/ 18 others)

@maggiebob Time to move to giffgaff?
Or are you already stuck in a contract?

RT @Kat4PR: What would happen if Zuckerberg deleted Facebook - watch this video: << Yeah, right....

More noms (@ Zizzi) [pic]:

@pauldjohnston What about Linode?

RT @intranation: Well this is quite amazing:

Navigating the mobile maze | Boagworld

Really pleased with @clovetechnology transparency on Galaxy Nexus availability and shipping - keep up the good work!

Really like the new Doco brand - fresh, clean & well applied on their website

My Tech Vice: I Buy Because I Want It, Not Because I Need It - SlashGear

Build Me a Website For £500 - Heart & Sole Web Design Blog

Kevin McCloud's grand design for British housing via @guardian

Google software guru says Android, RIM and iOS anti-virus app makers are “charlatans and scammers”

May I introduce you to the Cheesecake Brownie from @hummingbirdbakery
Awesomeness!

BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?

Nom nom nom! (@ Viet Pho) [pic]:

10 Wise Lessons: What I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger

RT @intranation: BBC to drop the climate change episode of Frozen Planet for overseas sales:

BBC News - Why is Google in love with Bletchley Park?

RT @richardleggett: Delighted to say my app "Are You OK?" has made the final 12 in the Vodafone Smart Access Awards!

Loved How Much Does The Internet Weigh? - YouTube (via Boxee)

RT @AndroidWS: The Android Workshop Tickets are selling well, grab one of the last few! (24th-25th Nov, London)

Introducing 1% of Nothing - Philanthropy for Startups

@mkbizcit Good post - although do link through to the actual article, not the digital edition!
It's here by the way:

Just added Google's two-step verification after some potential dodgy activity on my account. Really secure stuff:

@liamgh I agree - there's a cultural issue here that isn't being resolved.
I'd like to work 4-day working week

@parallelsmac The upcoming Asus Transformer Prime could be the perfect antidote to Apple's iPad:

I’m in Belfast right now for this year’s Build conference, so I am. I spent yesterday leading a workshop on responsive enhancement—the marriage of responsive design with progressive enhancement; a content-first approach to web design.

I spent a chunk of time in the afternoon going over the thorny challenges of responsive images. Jason has been doing a great job of rounding up all the options available to you when it comes to implementing responsive images:

Responsive IMGs, Part 1,
Responsive IMGs, Part 2—an in-depth look at techniques,
Responsive IMGs, Part 3—the future of the img element.

Personally, I have two golden rules in mind when it comes to choosing a responsive image technique for a particular project:

The small image should be default.
Don’t load images twice (in other words, don’t load the small images and the larger images).

That first guideline simply stems from the mobile-first approach: instead of thinking of the desktop experience as the default, I’m assuming that people are using small screen, narrow bandwidth devices until proven otherwise.

Assuming a small-screen device by default, the problem is now how to swap out the small images for larger images on wider viewports …without downloading both images.

I like Mark’s simplified version of Scott’s original responsive image technique and I also like Andy’s contextual responsive images technique. They all share a common starting point: setting a cookie with JavaScript before any images have started loading. Then the cookie can be read on the server side to send the appropriate image (and remember, because the default is to assume a smaller screen, if JavaScript isn’t available the browser is given the safer fallback of small images).

Yoav Weiss has been doing some research into preloaders, cookies and race conditions in browsers and found out that in some situations, it’s possible that images will begin to download before the JavaScript in the head of the document has a chance to set the cookie. This means that in some cases, on first visiting a page, desktop browsers like IE9 might begin get the small images instead of the larger images, thereby violating the second rule (though, again, mobile browsers will always get the smaller images, never the larger images).

Yoav concludes:

Different browsers act differently with regard to which resources they download before/after the head scripts are done loading and running. Furthermore, that behavior is not defined in any spec, and may change with every new release. We cannot and should not count on it.

The solution seems clear: we need to standardise on browser download behaviour …which is exactly what the HTML standard is doing (along with standardising error handling).

That’s why I was surprised by Jason’s conclusion that device detection is the future-friendly img option.

Don’t get me wrong: using a service like Sencha.io SRC (formerly TinySRC)—which relies on user-agent sniffing and a device library lookup—is a perfectly reasonable solution for responsive images …for now. But I wouldn’t call it future friendly; quite the opposite. If anything, it might be the most present-friendly technique.

One issue with relying on user-agent sniffing is the danger of false positives: a tablet may get incorrectly identified as a mobile phone, a mobile browser may get incorrectly identified as a desktop browser and so on. But those are edge cases and they’re actually few and far between …for now.

The bigger issue with relying on user-agent sniffing is that you are then entering into an arms race. You can’t just plug in a device library and forget about it. The library must be constantly maintained and kept up to date. Given the almost-exponential expansion of the device and browser landscape, that’s going to get harder and harder.

Disruption will only accelerate. The quantity and diversity of connected devices—many of which we haven’t imagined yet—will explode, as will the quantity and diversity of the people around the world who use them. Our existing standards, workflows, and infrastructure won’t hold up. Today’s onslaught of devices is already pushing them to the breaking point. They can’t withstand what’s ahead.

So while I consider user-agent sniffing to be an acceptable short-term solution, I don’t think it can scale to the future onslaught—not to mention the tricky issue of the licensing landscape around device libraries.

There’s another reason why I tend to steer clear of device libraries like WURFL and Device Atlas. When you consider the way that I’m approaching responsive images, those libraries are over-engineered. They contain a massive list of mobile user-agent strings that I’ll never need. Remember, I’m taking a mobile-first approach and assuming a mobile browser by default. So if I’m going to overturn that assumption, all I need is a list of desktop user-agent strings. That’s a much less ambitious undertaking. Such a library wouldn’t need to kept updated quite as often as a mobile device listing.

Anybody fancy putting it together?

Tagged with
responsive
design
mobile
images
futurefriendly
ffly

RT @SamJaneMorris: RT @SangeetaHaindl: Six-year project to tweet the Second World War - Telegraph #secondworldwar. ...

Am trying to convince @awakey to do the wedding speeches in the form Ignite talks - Seriously! :o)

For a bit of culture on your commute, may I recommend John Lithgow's The Poet's Corner from @audibleuk - awesome!

What do young workers want: social media, device freedom (via @gigaom)

RT @SimianE: Government's been lying to us all about the NHS... But that's just fine (and not at all predictable), isn't it. ...

Really looking forward to getting my winter tyres on my Yeti - surprised so few people in the UK have them. Read this -

RT @EuCyclistsFed: Boston clears 71 parking spots to make way for bicycle lanes: “The city has decided ... the car ...

Continuing the nation's obsession with weather is BBC's Will It Snow:
No mention of winter tyres to help driving though

The Way Companies Are Getting Financed Is Completely Changing via @businessinsider

Really enjoyed listening to The Undercover Economist (Unabridged) from @audibleuk

Here’s The First GTA:V Trailer And It’s Spectacular | TechCrunch

First day at work back in the big smoke! (@ TMP Worldwide London Head Office w/ 2 others)

 



 





User experience design isn’t just about building wireframes and Photoshop mock-ups. It extends to areas that you wouldn’t necessarily think are part of the discipline.

For example, your customer service department can have a huge impact on your website’s overall user experience. Similarly, the design of your user experience could have an awfully big effect on your customer service department. Of course, not all of your users will interact with the customer service department, but for those who do, their experience can improve or destroy the customer relationship.

Improving Customer Behavior
Consider the difference in customer perception between Zappos and Comcast. Customers routinely rave about one, while the other was attacked with a hammer. Clearly, there’s a difference in the way they deal with their users.

An excellent customer experience is a core value for Zappos

One of the biggest differences between the two is that Zappos appears to go out of its way to deliver great customer service long before a user ever has to deal with a representative. The differences aren’t just in the way they treat unhappy customers. Zappos makes a concerted effort to prevent customers from ever being unhappy in the first place. And that’s a good policy, because unhappy customers are expensive.

I spend a lot of time talking to customers, customer support reps and community managers. I’ve learned that there are three types of users who take up an inordinate amount of time and energy for customer service departments and cost far more money than they should. The great thing is that the behavior of many of these users can be improved or corrected with the right set of features and a proactive interaction design.

Let’s look at some of the folks who are costing you money and time. I’ll call them idiots, drama queens and scammers.

The Idiots
Customer service representatives spend a lot of time explaining obvious things to users.

Recently, I spoke with a community manager for a web-based marketplace where users can sell things to other users. The community manager was annoyed because he routinely had to explain to the sellers, “If you ship something to an overseas army base, it will take longer than it does to ship within the country.” He couldn’t believe that people didn’t know this. He thought they were idiots.

(Image: JD Hancock)

But are these sellers really idiots? Of course not! They might be geniuses who just don’t ship things on a regular basis, so they don’t know that an APO address indicates an army base that might be overseas. As far as the seller is concerned, they’re shipping to a regular domestic address and now have to wait almost a month to get paid.

In fact, a huge proportion of the time, the “stupid questions” that customer service representatives get over and over aren’t stupid at all. They’re opportunities to improve the user experience design.

If you’re getting the same question, it probably means you’ve made an incorrect assumption about information that a typical user is likely to have. In our example, the company was mistakenly assuming that everyone knows what an APO address is and that delivering a product to one could take up to a month.

How to Turn Idiots Into Geniuses
Spend some time with your customer service people, and find out what questions are being asked repeatedly. Figure out a way to answer those questions within the interface so that someone doesn’t get to the point of having to contact support.

In our example, the company could add a small note to all APO addresses, pointing out to sellers before they ship that the address is for an army base and warning that delivery could be significantly delayed. It probably won’t stop every inquiry they get about this problem, but it should help just by letting people know what to expect.

The Drama Queens
Too often, interactions with certain customers blow up far more quickly than service reps expect. As soon as their special requests are denied, some users will rant and rave and threaten legal action, while others calmly accept the fact that rules apply to everyone equally.

(Image: F. C. Photography)

If you talk to customer service reps or community managers, they could probably name a dozen drama queens off the top of their heads. And they won’t look happy doing it either. You’ll see eye rolling and head shaking.

One client complained that every time they released a new feature or a significant change, their power users would blow up and start screaming and yelling about how the company was trying to ruin their lives. It got to the point that the product manager was terrified of releasing anything new for fear of angering customers.

The saddest part of all of this is that the people who cared the most about the product were the ones who were complaining the loudest when things didn’t go their way.

How to Turn Drama Queens Into Advocates
You might think that you couldn’t do much as a user experience designer to calm drama queens, but you’d be wrong.

One of the main reasons why people escalate to that point is that they feel they’re being ignored. In fact, one of the most common reasons that customers leave is that they believe the company doesn’t care about them. Your job is to make them feel that their opinions are important and that they’re being heard.

One way to do this is to provide a good venue for them to express their opinions. Unmoderated or lightly moderated forums where they will talk to other people who are also unhappy are not good venues. One-on-one conversations with staff are the best, but talking to every unhappy customer is obviously not always possible.

A client of mine had a great way to deal with this problem. The company needed to recruit people for user research. Meanwhile, a number of people were writing in with complaints. So, the company frequently asked those people to participate in user research sessions. Two birds!

You’d think that the users’ responses would be skewed because they were already unhappy, but this could be easily controlled in the sessions. The complainers were much easier to book as research participants because they had initiated the contact, and they always ended the sessions much happier for having been asked their opinions.

Another important way to minimize drama is to involve important customers early on in design changes. Sure, power users often push back when you make a major design change, but that push is significantly softer when the change is an obvious improvement and people know what to expect and feel that their opinions have been taken into account.

You can keep the community on your side by getting their feedback during the design process and keeping them in the loop on the progress of changes. Allowing them to opt into changes and to give early feedback can really improve your relationship.

Even more importantly, involving your most important users early on will significantly improve the design of the feature, since you’ll be able to anticipate any complaints and edge cases.

The Scammers
Scammers are both the hardest and the easiest group for customer service reps to deal with.

They’re tough, because determining whether someone is a scammer or just an idiot or drama queen is not always easy. They’re easy, because once you know for sure that someone is a scammer, the correct thing to do is ban them immediately and never let them come back.

The biggest problem is that misidentifying legitimate users as scammers can have an incredibly negative impact on your business. No one likes being accused of something they didn’t do.

Also, in a social environment, the behavior of scammers can have a negative effect on other users. Think of fraudulent buyers and sellers on eBay or the highly publicized assaults by people who advertise on Craigslist.

How to Turn Scammers Into Good Citizens
Sorry, you can’t! What you can do is quickly identify the bad actors and get them off your website as quickly as possible before they negatively affect your good customers.

Enlisting the help of the community in policing can make this process much faster and more effective. Give users tools, such as flagging and comments, to report and protect themselves from scammers. Enlist community moderators to interact regularly with other members and alert you early on when someone seems to be doing something sketchy.

Also, give customer service reps tools to track the behavior of individual users so that they can resolve disputes quickly and appropriately, without a lot of “He said/She said.”

Other Problem Customers
Obviously, these three aren’t the only types of users that your customer service people will deal with. There will be the normal folks who have a genuine problem with your service or who find bugs. There will be people who want to cancel a subscription or ask a question about a policy.

But idiots, drama queens and scammers are the ones who will take up a disproportionate amount of your time and energy. They are the ones who can sap the spirit from your customer service reps and make them less able to deal with other problems.

Luckily, they also have the kinds of problems that you can address in your user interface. By providing the right information at the right time and enabling customers to report bad behavior, you can dramatically lower the amount of time you spend dealing with problem users.

And that means you’ll have a lot more time to deliver fabulous service to your best customers!

(al)(fi)

© Laura Klein for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

American Express is rolling out a new travel service for its business customers. As is customary for today’s web services, there’s are terms and conditions that the new user needs to agree to when they sign up.

Now, these are often implemented with a checkbox that says something like “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions.” Most of us know that hardly anybody reads and everybody just checks off the box. (Once, I watched my dad, a lawyer, check the box without reading. “It’s probably unenforceable,” he told me.)

But on this new Amex site, there’s a different implementation of this control. Sure, there’s a checkbox, but it’s grayed out. The only way to enable it for checking is to scroll to the bottom of the agreement.

The Amex Biz Travel site greys out the checkbox until the user scrolls to the bottom.

Now, as is also standard, the agreement is presented in a tiny little scrolling text box that shows about 200 words at a time. And, as is also standard, the agreement is a whopping 7,243 words (13 pages in a standard document) long.

Therefore, scrolling through this box takes a fair amount of effort. It’s unlikely that scrolling will encourage anyone to read the document. It’s just an extra hoop to jump through to continue the farce of pretending that the user has “read” whatever it is their agreeing to.

Apparently, the lawyers at Amex think that by having me scroll to the bottom, they can claim that I had every opportunity to read and agree to the terms. Therefore, if there’s something down the road I want to sue them about, I gave up that right with my scrolling action. (It’s unlikely any sensible judge will buy this argument, but it’s just as unlikely that any suit against them will get in front of a judge.)

Of course, the best way to do this would be to be honest with your users and treat them with respect. Amex could write the terms in simple language and give users a chance to really understand what they are agreeing to.

The problem with a design solution like the “scroll to agree” implementation is that it won’t be good enough. What happens when some other lawyer at Amex (or whereever) discovers that users don’t read it when they scroll to the bottom and therefore don’t understand what they are agreeing to? They’ll put in some other ridiculous control, where you’ll have to enter a secret code or recite poetry or something.

At some point, we, as designers, have to stand up and say, “This isn’t really doing what you think it’s doing. It’s just making our relationship with our users worse.” When do we do that?

I’d like to start now.

Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs:

@ledbyyou Because my Applications menu is now shorter and looks like this on the dock: Perfect! :o)

RT @tojulius: RT @brainpicker: Ah, yes. The strikingly accurate anatomy of an agency

 



 





Everyone who is a regular Smashing Magazine reader will know that we have a traditional habit of regularly researching the latest resources, tools and services out there on the Web, as productivity is a crucial asset of professional Web designers and developers. We could, and should, all integrate workflow optimization into our working practices.

Perhaps we should warn you upfront for the long compilation, but what can we say — there are so many excellent tools out there which deserve attention of the community, yet unfortunately remain obscure way too often. We love all the designers and developers out there for releasing and producing useful, valuable resources for all of us to use! We, for one, surely sincerely appreciate it in the name of the Web design community. Whether you like it or not, here are some of the most useful coding and workflow tools released recently.

Feel free to comment to this post and let us know how exactly you use these tools in your workflow and also share other tools you’ve found with others who may also find them useful and still haven’t run across them. Please do avoid link dropping and share your insights and your experience instead.

Useful Coding and Workflow Tools
Stripe: Easy Credit-Card Processing For Online StoresA website owner has many options for accepting credit card payments. Most of those options have a verification process that is quite slow; some have APIs and interfaces that are more or less robust than others; and some solutions are much easier to use than others. With Stripe, you can forget the tedious experience of the PayPal API and other mysterious programming environments. Unfortunately, Stripe is currently available only in the US.

The Web Developer’s WonderlandWeb development comes with truly enjoyable, creative tasks and some mundane, boring ones. Probably the most frustrating task is having to reload the browser page during development or debugging every time you make a change to the page. Livereload is a desktop app that monitors changes in your file system. As soon as you save a file, the file is preprocessed as needed, and the browser is refreshed. Also, every time you change a CSS file or image, the browser is updated instantly without you having to reload the page. The tool supports CoffeeScript, SASS/SCSS, LESS, Stylus, HAML and Jade, and it ships with all of them included. Currently available only for Mac.

Ender: The End Of Monolithic JavaScript LibrariesEnder allows you to search, install, manage and compile front-end JavaScript packages and their dependencies. Essentially, it’s a command-line tool that allows you to combine and mix all of the popular and small JavaScript libraries out there to create your own personal development library. If one library you use goes bad or is abandoned, Ender will help you quickly replace it with another. And if you need a particular version of a package, the tool can help you out as well. The release page contains detailed documentation, a user guide and some video tutorials. No more wasted bandwidth!

Open-Source Exchange Rates and Currency ConversionSo, you’d like your customers to be able to purchase your products in various currencies, but how exactly do you build this functionality into your product? Finding a free and reliable API for developers to access the rates data is darn hard. Joss Crowcroft has created an Open Source Exchange Rates API, which provides up-to-date, flexible and portable currency-conversion data that can be used in any application, framework or language (not just JavaScript). It has no access fees, no rate limits, no nasty XML: just free, hourly updated exchange rates in JSON. Even better: Joss has also built money.js, a JavaScript currency conversion library that can be easily integrated in any website. A demo playground and detailed documentation are provided on the website, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Easier Number and Currency FormattingThis simple, tiny JavaScript library will solve your currency and numbers-related formatting hassles, and it even includes optional Excel-style column rendering to line up symbols and decimals. It will make all of your numbers and currencies look much more uniform and professional than they would if left to many content creators.

Tilt Firefox Extension: DOM Inspection In 3-DHow much time do you spend traversing the DOM in Firebug, exploring the relationships between nodes, analyzing the structure of code and trying to manipulate it with nasty (or not so nasty) JavaScript? Well, perhaps you’d like to try a different approach to DOM inspection for a change. Mozilla’s new tool, Tilt Firefox Extension lets you visualize the DOM tree of any Web page in 3-D. Because the DOM is essentially a tree-like representation of a document, the developers of the tool have decided to layer nodes based on the nesting in a tree, creating stacks of elements, each with a corresponding depth, and textured according to the Web page being rendered.

Mou – Markdown editor for web developers, on Mac OS XWhen current available Markdown editors are almost all for general writers, Mou is different: It’s for web developers. Syntax highlighting, live preview, fullscreen mode, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, incremental search, custom themes, HTML export, enhanced CJK characters support. It’s exactly the app you want.

Creating Buzz With Launch EffectThe one-page theme lets visitors sign up using their email. Upon signing up, the page generates a special URL for them to share with their friends, so that you can track your most active promoters and reward them for spreading the word. What more do you need from a pre-launch page? This is a good tool to bookmark for your next creative breakthrough or start-up idea.

A Better Responsive GridThe Golden Grid System uses the concept of “folding” grid columns into one another, based on the browser’s size. So, a 16-column grid that works great in desktop browsers would fold down to an 8-column grid for tablets, and a 4-column grid for mobile devices. It can handle screen sizes ranging anywhere from 240 pixels wide all the way up to 2560 pixels. The columns themselves are not the only things that are elastic either; while the column’s widths are based on screen size, the gutter widths adjust based on the page’s font size (specified in ems). The Golden Grid System comes with other features that make it perfectly suited to modern responsive Web design.

The Semantic Grid SystemCSS grid frameworks can make your life easier, but they’re not without their faults. Fortunately for us, modern techniques offer a new approach to constructing page layouts. But before getting to the solution, we must first understand the three seemingly insurmountable flaws currently affecting CSS grids.

Bootstrap Kick-Start Development ToolkitBootstrap is a toolkit that includes the base CSS and HTML for typography, tables, grids, navigation, error messages, modal boxes, buttons and forms. It’s built with the LESS framework. It comes with a standard 940-pixel grid (i.e. 960.gs without the side margins), or you can create your own. Bootstrap allows you to create fixed or fluid layouts, and it comes with many elements that can be used as is or restyled to fit your website. Of course, the toolkit is free to use.

Colour BookmarkDrag the Colour Bookmark link to your toolbar to find out the colour palette of the website you’re currently on. Then simply: copy, paste and use the colours you choose.

Leaflet: Open-Source Interactive Maps with JavaScriptThe library offers a variety of map layers, including tiles, markers, pop-ups, image overlays and GeoJSON. It supports panning on both mobile and desktop browsers, double-tap zoom on mobile browsers (plus multi-touch zoom on iOS) and more. On iOS, hardware acceleration is enabled, and Leaflet has a modular structure that lets you reduce the size of the library to make it even faster. The project is open source and available for further development and forking on GitHub.

Weinreweinre is a Web Inspector Remote that is essentially a debugger for web pages, like FireBug (for FireFox) and Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it’s designed to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone.

Aardwolf: Remote JavaScript DebuggerMobile browsers are becoming more powerful day-by-day and you can do almost everything you do on your desktop browser. One of the major concerns for the developers is the lack of developer tools. The reasons are quite obvious — real estate needed to show the debugger, non-developer friendly environment. The solution to this problem is remote debugging. You can use JSConsole for this purpose but when it comes to JavaScript debugging, Aardwolf is a better choice. Aardwolf is a JavaScript debugger for iPhone / Android / WindowsPhone 7 / BlackBerry OS 6+. (via Varun Kumar)

IE VmsMicrosoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. But setting these virtual machines up without Microsoft’s VirtualPC can be extremely difficult. The ievms scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. With a single command, you can have IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines.

WhatFontThe tool allows you to easily get CSS typography details about the text you are hovering on.

WordPress TextMate BundleThe WordPress TextMate Bundle is a TextMate bundle built with the sole purpose of reducing the amount of time spent digging around the WordPress core to look up the little things that we work with every day. The plugin features auto-completion of WordPress functions, snippets for common sections of code, and templates for WordPress components. We even[…]

When a designer goes about creating a logo, the first thought that should always come up is the hope to create a logo at a high enough level that it could still be used decades from its creation. Despite that being the common hope, there are two different ways in which how a logo can transcend time and use. These two types being known as timeless and classic. Now logo designs that are fortunate enough to be qualified for either of these categories have many similarities, so much so that it is easy to confuse the two. Before going into the two highest level of acclaim a logo design can get, we first need to do a quick run through on the basics.

The 4 Basic Logo Types
No matter how you design your logo, with whatever inspiration you can think of, it is going to be classified as one of these logo types. Having the knowledge of these different types improves the quality of your design by providing more direction into what your best route is for your logo when considering the company or group it represents.

Emblem Type
An emblem type logo is one that incorporates the companies name within the design.

Examples:

UPS

Harley Davidson

Letterform
In this type, the logo is created by using letterform design(a letter’s shape) to create a symbol.

Examples:

Roger Federer

Associated Press

Text Type
A text type logo only utilizes letters and in some instances typographic design is incorporated.

Examples:

FedEx

Visa

Representation Type
In this type an image is used as a pictorial representation of the company. It can also be representing its reputation, perception, or attitude.

Examples:

Shell

Apple

Important Things To Keep In Mind

Always convey your message first.
A proper color scheme can make or break a logo.
Make sure that it is easy to understand.
Your logo should be adaptable, needing no changes for any environment.
Don’t let the creative in you try to make the design overly complicated.

Okay now that we have covered the basic logo design types and went over some of the important things to consider when designing a logo, we are now ready to take a look at what timeless and classic logo designs are and how you can achieve this acclaimed status.

What Is A Timeless Logo
A logo that has reached the status of being timeless means that it is able to maintain the same high level of acclaim long after its creation. However, logos in this category also need minor alterations occasionally to remain relevant as the years go by. These alterations could be anything as long as it makes a change, but the base structure is never altered in any way. For example, lets take a look at the logo of MTV.

Original MTV Logo

As you see above, this is a very well designed text type logo. It utilizes a great color scheme for the loud, brash, unruly, and whatever other youthful rebellious urge all teens and young adults have.

Current MTV Logo

Now take a look at the original logo of MTV, and then take a gander at the current one. The current one has a heavier font weight for the letters involved, the t and v are less playful, but the most noticeable and important change is the removing of the music television from the logo. As mentioned earlier, the most important thing a logo is responsible for is properly conveying the identity it represents. The music television tagline that was once at the bottom of the logo had to be removed, because MTV has become known more so for reality TV than actually playing music. That was the only mishap played by the original logo, assuming a company called Music Television would continue to have a network comprising of mostly music related content.

What Is A Classic Logo
There isn’t that much difference between a classic logo and a timeless logo. The only differentiating factor here is that a classic logo will never come across the need for a change because it complies to one of the top important things to be considered when designing a logo. This being adaptability. The logos that are able to be apart of the classic group have designs that can adapt to any type of environment you can think of, and it still will be able to do well. Let’s take a look at the ABC logo, probably the most iconic classic logo.

ABC Logo

Everything that can be said about this logo, has already been covered for awhile now. This logo is simplicity at its best, and won’t be seeing any changes coming its way.

How To Create A Timeless or Classic Logo
By now your probably wondering what is the best method to go about for achieving a logo design that can be categorized into one of these two categories.  Well its a lot easier than it seems, and here are some tips to help you with that.

Always have the represented organization’s desirably perceived attitude, or message, showcased
Never overlook adaptability. Your logo should look just as good in your original color scheme as it does when stripped down to black and white.
Focus less on the type of industry the logo is being designed for. If your focus your design for a particular industry, and try to approach it with incorporating that vibe into your design, than it won’t be able to go beyond that industry.
Don’t be afraid of trends. In essence, a trend is simply an original style or technique that just became popular. You’re a creative, put your own spin on it.
Embrace your own design style. How do you expect to get the best results when your competing with your natural inner creative?

Conclusion
The difference between a timeless logo and a classic logo is all in the details, the little things if you will. A timeless logo design is one that is great in concept, but may need an alteration done to remain relevant. A classic logo design is fine the way it is, and probably will never see the drawing board again. Logo design is a very complex creative job that requires much to consider throughout the entire process. To achieve either one of these classifications is very possible, all it takes is to focus on the little things.