Daily Links
PROJECT 2501
If you ever watched the “Ghost In The Shell” anime when it first came out, you were probably blown away by its animation and design. Project 2501 is a live-action tribute to that film, reconstructing classic shots from the original opening sequence.Daily Links
TELUS invests in Manitoba
TELUS will invest $130 million in new infrastructure and wireless technology across Manitoba through 2016 This year, TELUS’ infrastructure investment will advance services for the benefit of Manitobans by: Extending the reach of the world’s fastest wireless technology, called 4G LTE, to even more Manitoba communities. TELUS will rapidly deploy the 700 MHz spectrum purchased in the recent auction to enhance speeds and coverage even further across the province; Installing dozens of new wireless sites to enhance coverage and data capacity in rural and urban areas, enhancing the safety of travel across the province; Expanding the reach of TELUS’ healthcare solutions, which currently provide electronic medical records to more than 12,500 Canadian physicians across the country and support more than 45 million patient interactions each year.Apple to Acquire Beats Music And Beats Electronics
Apple is acquiring the two companies for a total of $3 billion, consisting of a purchase price of approximately $2.6 billion and approximately $400 million that will vest over time.Daily Links
Kids React To Old Computers
Pfft. Kids these days, with their flat screen TVs and their on switches in logical places :)Font Awesome Icons to PNGs
Need a single Font Awesome icon fast? Pick an icon, size and colour and this site will give you a PNG.
Google Releases VirusTotal Uploader Utility for Mac OS X
VirusTotal is a free service that analyzes suspicious files and URLs and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware.Abolish the week: The case against dividing time into seven-day periods.
We stick to the regular work week because most of our clients do as well. But in terms of productivity and creativity, 9-5 almost never lines up.
Daily Links
As Publishers Fight Amazon, Books Vanish
Super. Here I thought Amazon was one of the decent tech giants over the past couple of years. Scummy to say the least.Covering Roads With Solar Panels
"In theory, the idea could work: replace all the nation’s asphalt with solar panels, and we’d generate more than three times the electricity the US uses."Use of electronic devices to be allowed during all phases of flight in Canada.
The Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Transport, today announced an important change that will benefit travellers flying with Canadian air operators, as well as the aviation industry. Passengers will soon be able to use portable electronic devices such as cameras, electronic games, tablets and computers during all phases of flight. This includes while an aircraft takes off, climbs, descends and lands, provided the device is in non-transmitting, or flight mode, and that their airline has met certain safety conditions outlined by Transport Canada. http://aircanada.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=770Daily Links
My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment
Pretty interesting stuff. Should be a fun experiment to run if I want some extra personal space at the office!What is costs to book your favourite band.
It seems like I gave up my budding career as a DJ a bit early. I would have tried harder if i knew I could make up to $400k / show spinning records for tripped out dancers!
Daily Links
Batman: Arkham Knight
A new trailer, "Evening The Odds", released by Warner Bros.
Doors Open Winnipeg
Heritage Winnipeg presents the 11th annual Doors Open Winnipeg event May 31 through June 1.Intelligent Details Ad for Bentley
This ad is shot entirely on iPhone 5s and assembled on an iPad Air, in a Bentley. Stick around until the end and watch the behind the scenes footage.Daily Links
uncss
Give a URL to this NodeJS utility and it will return a stylesheet with only the CSS marked thats actually used, dropping any excess code accumulated through maintenance and feature changes.Font Awesome Icons
All the icons from Font Awesome. Um… awesome!Surface Pro 3
Today, Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 3, a tablet that directly competes with both the iPad and Macbook Air.
Happy Meal Ambassador
McDonalds new happy meal mascot must be the CREEPIEST thing I have seen in a long time O_ODaily Links
FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
Mark my words, Canada will follow on the heels of this as soon as it passes in the US.Mac keyboard shortcuts
Matt Gemmell has a run down for you of all the MAC shortcuts you thought you knew already.The Economics of a Kickstarter Project
Cameron Moll's "Brooklyn Bridge" Kickstarter project raised over six times the money he was asking for. This is a followup article on where the money goes after this sort of campaign, and the lessons he learned along the way.
Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
Yesterday, large number of Creative Cloud users could not access their tools or files due to a fault with Adobe's login system. This includes install apps and elements, such as desktop fonts from Typekit.
Static Site Generators
The definitive listing of Static Site GeneratorsCan Email Be Responsive?
Some very helpful tips on making emails responsive.Supermassive Black Hole At The Centre Of The Galaxy May Be A Wormhole In Disguise, Say Astronomers
I want to live for a 1000 years just to see how wrong our current understanding of everything is. That and to travel in space from dimension to dimension via wormholes!Daily Links
Maze Tree
Nice d3 rendering and animation of a spanning tree maze generated with Wilson's algorithm.
Firefox adopts closed-source DRM
Cory Doctorow does a nice job summing up what the move by Mozilla (Firefox) means for the browser and open-source.Jest - Painless JavaScript Unit Testing
Nice little tool for JS unit testing, from Facebook.Daily Links
Git for Beginners
We are getting more active in Git. For those that have never used it, Sitepoint has a quick little run through you might find handy.iOS Human Interface Guidelines
Apple just released their design bible onto the iBooks store for free. Download and enjoy.The Illusion of Life
A terrific animation based on the 12 priciples of animation set forth by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson at Disney, in the 1930s.
Discover Typography
For the typography fans, by H&Co.
The Origin Chip And The End Of The Internet As We Know It
Last week, internet enthusiasts all jumped onto their blogs to write about Chrome Canary. It seems that version 36 started burying the long-form URL, and showing only a webpage’s domain name in a new “origin chip”.
If you want to give it a look-see yourself, download Chrome Canary and enable the origin chip by copy-pasting the following line into the address bar:
chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox
Chrome Canary is the experimental version of Google’s browser that lets developers and early adopters try out proposed features. There’s never any guarantee that anything found in it will ever make it to the main channels, never mind being adopted into rival browsers.
Some guessed the change was to emphasize internet searches over internet addresses. Others assumed it was to make it harder to trick the average user with phishing sites. Either way, you’ll be hard pressed to find an article that sees this possible change as a ‘good thing’.
I’m uncertain where much of the apocalyptic conjectures are coming from. A similar thing is already happening in iOS’s default web browser, and has been there for a while now. Last I checked, the mobile web hasn’t yet melted down into an unuseable chaos of phishing trap sites.
Here’s that same blog page rendered in Mobile Safari:
We’ve been on a trend of reducing the URLs for years. Once upon a time, we needed to type in both “http://” and “www.” if we wanted to reach a valid webpage. I think we all got sick of radio advertisers saying “double you double you double you” every morning on the ride in from work.
Modern URLs are more influenced by search engine algorithm changes than by any affirmative attempts to human readability. This has lead to URLs getting stuffed with various pieces of content like page titles, published dates, author names, etc. It may help page rankings, but this information unnecessarily formatted into URLs is just duplicating the ‘real’ content on the associated page. I predict that Google will eventually drop ‘readable URLs’ as part of its rankings for the same reasons it did for keyword metatags.
Developers have to help the machine interpret these long strings into the ID values and file names its expecting. And as web users, we have to do the same thing, trying to translate a coded address into the context we’re interested in. After all, when we send a friend a link, we don’t actually want to share the URL with them, but the content at that URL. This is why Twitter and Facebook use open graph data to provide a preview with status posts:
This isn’t to say URLs are disappearing completely. Over the past four years, the URL has become more prominent in Google own search results. In 2010, the URL appears at the bottom of a listing, and it didn’t even earn itself the link underline:
Today, the URL appears at the top, second only to the content title itself. Even the green font color has been tweaked to let it stand out more:
But realistically, URLs have always been just a means to an end. Every web browser worth its salt can save and sort bookmarks, a feature whose purpose is hide a URL behind a memorable label. As web developers, our job is to tuck the nitty-gritty workings of a webpage underneath slick user interfaces and carefully chosen font families.
The tech savvy among us will laugh at the idea of our grandmothers going to the Google homepage that she’s bookmarked, typing “facebook.com” into the search field, and click the “I’m feeling lucky” button every single time… but it's a stereotype that demostrates how many people see URLs. Domain names are seen more as brand names than machine addresses these days. This is going to blur even more as top-level domains like “.tv” and “.bike” become more prevalent.
The long-form URL will exist behind the curtain for a very long time, but its importance up front and on stage is certain to diminish. It's the scaffolding of the internet, not the star.