Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness.

Bookmachine takes your Pinboard links and makes paperback books of them: one 6"x9" book a year.

I wrote a piece of software to ingest an XML file of all my Pinboard links (easily available from the Pinboard API by anyone – you just need to know your username and password). That software then generates a web page for each book, which is passed into the incredible PrinceXML to create a book. Prince handles all the indexing, page numbering, contents-creation, and header-creation.

A folding grid for responsive design.

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores.

Make subtitles, translations, and captions for almost any video. Easily caption and translate your videos, with help from your viewers.

RESTduino is a simple sketch that lets you talk to the Arduino using easy REST-like HTTP requests.

Netflix may be known for offering some of our favorite TV and movie streams, but the company is about to step up its game and begin offering original content. Netflix has allegedly outbid a number of major cable networks for a new drama series produced by and starring Kevin Spacey called House of Cards, and may be about to close a deal at more than $100 million, according to a report on Deadline.com.

The deal has yet to be finalized, but Deadline's unnamed source claims that Netflix has made a commitment to two seasons of House of Cards, which the media site described as "staggering" and "pretty unheard of these days." A source for the New York Times later confirmed that Netflix was indeed involved in the bidding, but said there was "considerable uncertainty" about the terms of the deal. Yet another source for the Wall Street Journal said that Netflix was likely to pay much less than Deadline's speculated $100 million.






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As expected, Amazon has announced its new and improved Amazon Prime service that now offers more than 5,000 streaming TV shows and movies to customers. Those who already pay the $79 per year for Prime won't have to pay any extra to get access to the streams. Video will be available on Macs and PCs in the US, as well as a number of set-top boxes.

Amazon has been rumored to be working on such a service for some time now, but the stakes were raised earlier this month when Amazon accidentally let a few movie pages show up on Prime subscribers' Amazon accounts. That was a hint that the service was on the verge of launch, and we speculated that Amazon was looking to leverage its massive built-in audience to try to take on movie streaming giant Netflix.






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A new reset template for HTML5.

Free online tools for building, sharing, and playing your own browser-based games.

Netflix continues to inch its way up the movie distribution hierarchy and will soon be able to stream some new releases during the so-called "pay TV window." The company struck a deal with Relativity Media, a distribution house responsible for some major Hollywood films, that will give Netflix users access to streamed movies years faster in some cases.

As many Netflix users are painfully aware, the Watch Instantly pool is typically made up of a random selection of old 'n' busted films (and usually not even the good ones), with the occasional surprise movie that was released sometime after the year 2000. The reason for this is because most distribution houses give priority to their DVD release window, at which time, no one can play the movie until the studios feel they have milked every last drop of DVD revenue.





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Schooloscope is a new project from BERG, and I want to show it to you.

What if a school could speak to you, and tell you how it’s doing? “I have happy kids,” it might say. “Their exams results are great.”

Schools in England are inspected by a body called Ofsted. Their reports are detailed and fair — Ofsted is not run by the government of the day, but directly by Parliament. And kids in schools are tracked by the government department DCSF. They publish everything from exam results to statistical measurements of improvement over the school careers of the pupils.

Cooooomplicated.

What Schooloscope does is tell you how your school’s doing at a glance.

There are pictures of smiling schools. Or unhappy ones, if the kids there aren’t happy.

Each school summarises the statistics in straightforward, natural English. There are well over 20,000 state schools in England that we do this for. We got a computer to do the work. A journalism robot.

You can click through and read the actual stats afterwards, if you want.

Why?

A little of my personal politics. Education is important. And every school is a community of teachers, kids, parents, governors and government. The most important thing in a community is to take part on an equal footing and with positive feeling. Parents have to feel engaged with the education of their children.

As great as the government data is, it can be arcane. It looks like homework. It’s full of jargon… and worse, words that look like English but that are also jargon.

Schooloscope attempts to bring simplicity, familiarity, and meaning to government education data, for every parent in England.

A tall order!

This is a work in progress. There are lots of obvious missing features. Like: finding schools should be easier! There are bugs. There’s a whole bunch we want to do with the site, some serious and some silly. And full disclosure here: over the next 6 months we’re working on developing and commercialising this. Schooloscope is a BERG project funded by 4iP, the Channel 4 innovation fund. Is it possible to make money by being happily hopeful about very serious things and visualising information with smiling faces? I reckon so.

Anyway. The way we learn more is by taking Schooloscope public, seeing what happens, and making stuff.

The team! Tom Armitage and Matt Brown have worked super hard and made a beautiful thing which is only at the start of its journey. They, Matt Jones and Kari Stewart are taking it into the future. Also Giles Turnbull, Georgina Voss, and Ben Griffiths have their fingerprints all over this. Tom Loosemore and Dan Heaf at 4iP, thanks! And everyone else who has given feedback along the way.

Right, that’s launch out of the way! Let’s get on with the job of making better schools and a better Schooloscope.

Say hello to Schooloscope now.

Everywhere you look (even here at Ars), there are articles about people making poor decisions about what kinds of info and how much to share on sites like Facebook. The Internet is no longer a place where you can hide out easily—friends, family, and employers are all lurking, reading your embarrassing status updates and checking up on those drunken pictures from last week. And that's just the beginning—the world of social networking is a feeding ground for identity thieves and stalkers, too.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Many users are aware that Facebook has numerous privacy controls, for example, but even the most experienced Facebook users often don't know just how much they can control who sees what. For instance, did you know that you can specify exactly who can see your status updates, down to different groups of friends (not just "friends" versus "everyone")? What about controlling which groups of people can even find you in a Facebook search to begin with?

If you don't want to be socially available at all, then the solution is right in front of you and you can stop reading! However, if you have been wondering how you can be socially available on Facebook while still keeping your privacy under control, this guide is for you.

Beautiful stuff

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital assets.

From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful.

See how different resolutions and displays view your site.

online color resources

A more readable web is a better designed web.

A practical guide to web typography

Massive collection of links and resources for standards-based web design

Web-Harvest is Open Source Web Data Extraction tool written in Java.

There are a lot of CMS choices -- Drupal, Mambo, Bricolage, WordPress, and Plone are some of the most recognizable names. While they all perform the same basic functions, you have to pick only one. How do you do it?

Subtraction's Grid Imposition Method for designing websites

analysis and visualizations of search engines

[JavaScript & DHTML Tutorials]

This article shows you how to embed a customized Google Map into your website or blog.

So you want to make a mashup but aren't entirely sure where to begin? This page can help you get there.

Create RSS feeds for any site.

Open source software for IM programs

CSS, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc.

news & discussion about designing for mobile devices

Create a CSS Blogger Template from scratch