Conceptual sight into our future with amazing gadgets, social technology and augmented reality. This graduation project is cool short movie illustrating how our future might be and unfortunately most likely will be as technology continues to invade our lives.
Remember Quake - a highly dynamic first person shooter for PC? Warsow is a similar type of game with great fast-paced and balanced gameplay. The game is completely free and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Its like a really-nice version of Hotmail with Skype video calling built in, all in a clean Metro style interface. Seriously, it looks sharp! You can register now for an @outlook.com email address, if so inclined.
If, like us, you have recently updated to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, you may have noticed that your Coda application is no longer updating or accessing your SVN repositories. It seems Mountain Lion does not come with SVN, regardless if you've done a clean install or upgraded from a previous version of OS X.
You can test this by opening a new Terminal window and typing...
svn --version
...in the command line. If you get a "command not found" response, then this is your problem. :/
Another horrible font choice out of the gate from Apple. Granted we have to remember who they are targeting and designers are no longer their market, but jeez, how about a little legibility? What a mess of a font.
Holy cow. When you run your own company, you can always do more, but a life work balance is essential. Curt Schilling's story here is pretty tragic for all the wrong reasons.
"Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates's successor, as the man who led them astray."
"Yes,' said Frodo. 'I shall keep the Ring from the foolish parasities who wish to destroy it. For shockingly, many wish to destroy the Ring! They wish to keep the Ring from the rightful ownership of the rugged individualist who made it as his own.'"
If you haven't heard, OS X Mountain Lion is out. I'm currently emailing in this link to the blog from the new Mail.app. Go over to Ars and read up on John Siracusa's amazingly detailed review of the new OS X.
Speaking of iOS, Michael Critz has updated his list of fonts to include those added in iOS 6. A handy resource for all us mobile app developers out there.
The WHATWG would now focus on an evolving, "living standard," while the W3C would stick to producing static "snapshots" using its traditional numbered versioning system. While some are worried that this is going to lead to HTML forking, Ian Hickson says the fears are largely unfounded.
Posting fourth-quarter earnings after market close Thursday, Microsoft reported a loss of 6 cents a share on revenue of $18.06 billion. This is the first ever quarterly loss for the company.
A six-year-old girl picks up her mother's books and describes the contents by what she sees on the cover. I really want to read the novels she's describing, most of them sound great :)
Reminder, starting Sunday, July 29, 2012 you'll have to dial 204 before calling a local Winnipeg number. This is to accommodate the new 431 area code coming in November.
Agreed with him on every point. US gun control laws are pretty much non-existant. Their laws threaten our safety as legally store bough guns are being brought into Canada and sold illegally to people who plan to use them, for not so legal purposes. Not to mention how the US can stomach senseless tragedy after tragedy and not get angry enough to want these laws abolished.
2 degrees Celsius. 565 Gigatons. 2,795 Gigatons. Read it and weep. Literally. For the world stands on in-action and soon it will burn and there will be nothing we can do to stop it. What happens then? My daughters are 8 and 6 and this will all take place within their lifetimes. While my generation is not without guilt, our parents generation sold us all out years ago. So we need to fix it. Turn off your AC when you don't need it. Install anything that helps you save. Petition, write, lobby government to make laws that force businesses to change. We lack time. We need to think differently about changing climate change ... and soon.
If some of your fancy transformations stopped working after updating to Firefox 14 do not panic, this is not a bug. Firefox 14 drops support for CSS3 transform skew() property in favor of skewX() and skewY(). MDN is stating that skew() is non-standard and you won't find it on W3C either. Unfortunately this also breaks the shorthand properties like -moz-transform: skew(10deg) rotate(6deg); including rotate().
This is the price we pay for using latest and non-finalized features, but this is the only way to test and bring those features to the masses. So go ahead and update your styles! You can also follow discussion on Reddit.
Vyclone is a new, cool and free way to shoot video of events on iPhone with your friends. The app uploads all the videos, automatically syncs them together and even makes the "magic" cuts for you. But you have all the control of the RAW file and can make your own edits. Then share final product with others.
Video editing always scared me, but it looks that this new service will cure my fears!
The new feature, rolling out to merchants who have claimed venues on the social service, allows them to post text messages, special promotions, and photos to the Foursquare activity feeds of loyal patrons who are in the vicinity.
"Grum's takedown resulted from the efforts of many individuals," wrote Atif Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye. "This collaboration is sending a strong message to all the spammers: 'Stop sending us spam. We don't need your cheap Viagra or fake Rolex. Do something else, work in a Subway or McDonalds, or sell hotdogs, but don't send us spam.'"
If you are a web developer, programmer, love the internet the way it is, hate big monopolies telling you what you can and can't do, then join the Fight!
The thought on rising sea levels is that melting glaciers are adding water to the oceans, but that is only part of the story. This explanation is simple enough for even young children to understand... let's hope those folks who are in charge of policy can learn from some elementary school science.
Want to see something that will make you feel tiny? How about a web page that gives you the size of our planetary system to scale? Just think, that is one star with 8 planets among a single galaxy with approximately 400 billion stars in a sea of billions of galaxies... and you're a part of that.
The Smaller The Web Form, The More Likely It Will Be Used
As heavy internet users ourselves, we encounter forms all over the place. Registration forms, contact forms, payment forms, etc. Usually, getting to the form is a quick trip, a short easy-to-find link that appeals to our impulses. But as most web traffic analysis will show, only a fraction of the people who visit a form actually fill it out. What's happening?
Recently, Luke Wroblewski did a presentation at An Event Apart Austin. Though it focused on the growth of mobile applications, he covered a lot of good points on web forms and usability. His thoughts on the current troubles and recommended practices mirror the advice we regularly give to our clients...
The key is to reduce effort.
Studies have shown that smaller, simpler forms have resulted in an increase in submissions by site visitors. The shorter the form, the easier a form is to fill out, the more likely a visitor is to submit it. The more people fill out and submit forms, the better your form is at doing its job.
When constructing forms, we try to reduce them to their bare essentials. We take a look at the form and take out anything that doesn't have to be there.
One good indicator is multiple fields marked as "optional". What these labels are saying is that this form is asking for more information than is actually required for submission. So if those fields do not need to be filled in what are they doing there?
Also, some information collected is broken up into multiple fields, such as names (commonly separated into first and last) and phone numbers (separated into area code, extension, etc). This is less convenient for a visitor, so why are they set up that way?
Sometimes it is done for validation in order to ensure good data is being collected. Sometimes it is done so the collected data can be easily filtered and sorted and listed in different ways. Sometimes it is to support some other system or process, either computerized or otherwise, that wants the collected data in a specific way. Sometimes it is to collect as much data as they can up front, because there is little guarantee it will be collected later on down the line. And sometimes, it is just to make the form look "right" or "standardized".
The trouble with all the above reasons is that they prioritize the needs of the owners and operators of the site over any benefits to the visitors actually filling in the form. We want to reverse this thinking. Prioritize for the visitors.
A person browsing to your site and filling out your contact form will not be interested if whether or not you can export all the form submissions as an excel file and sort them by last name alphabetically. Their priorities are not your priorities. They care that the contact form is asking for their first, middle, and last names as three separate fields, and that the contact form complains if any of those three fields are left blank. Do not make this an issue that prevents someone from contacting you. Prioritize for the visitors.
An eye-tracking study on four familiar, existing registration forms found that most visitors were "blind" to almost all "required" or "optional" indicators. People went into a form expecting to fill in everything. Oddly enough, some developers try to alleviate this issue by adding more text and more instructions and more design. They end up solving the wrong problem.
An example of this came to light in 2010, on one of Expedia's "buy now" forms. It seemed the optional "company" field was not only unnecessary, but was actually confusing their customers. The solution wasn't to make its purpose more obvious, but to recognize that it could be removed entirely. This minor change lead to more successful form submissions and a $12 million increase in annual profit.
When building web forms, we need to strike a balance between client requirements and general usability. We try to skew it towards the visitors needs since they are the target audience. The easier it is for them to fill out forms, the more likely they will fill out forms. Remeber this and your site will generate more submissions.
The United States Geological Survey has nearly completed its project to digitize over 200,000 topographical maps and create a free, searchable online archive.