Daily Links
RWD Hits YWG
Local Winnipeg web developer Cole Peters recommends New Media Manitoba's free event on responsive web design May 22nd. Visual Lizard ♥'s Responsive Web Design too!jQuery Knobs
Pretty interesting demo by Anthony Terrien. Need to figure out a practical use for it, but looks pretty awesome.Skrivr is a Blog Engine Built on Dropbox
Neato. We happento be working on something very similar. I love it when stuff like this happens. Check out their site thought, pretty awesome idea!Daily Links
Wolfenstein 3D 20th Anniversary
Bethesda is celebrating Wolf3D birthday by launching the seminal first-person shooter as a free browser game. Achtung!Daily Links
Attackers Target Unpatched PHP Bug
Exploits remotely take control of underlying servers on PHP websites running in CGI mode. Make sure you're all running a firewall and patch your machines.Diablo III: Wrath
Metalocalypse and Aeon Flux makers team-up on this official Diablo III animated short.Economic Development Winnipeg gets a new coat of paint
Economic Development Winnipeg has just relaunched their site with a minor redesign and a major change to how they present the plethora of documents they provide. The changes to the design were both aesthetic and presentational.
Aesthetically speaking there was some honing to the colour palette and a sharpening to the fonts by our friends over at Doowah Design. The largest of the display change appeared on the home page of the site where there was a change to how the promotional elements were displayed. These are now smaller banners which can be swapped out and run over set periods of time. The former version of this promotion functionality was more prominent in the display, taking up the majority of the home page. The new design has changed the focus from those large promotions to the core behind EDW. EDW provides statistics and information about business in Winnipeg, the home page now provides more immediate access to the latest business and economic development news. It also presents instant access to the latest EDW publications for the visitor who is interested in the economic outlook of this city.
One of the features from the old version which has now been expanded is the feature drop menus. A visually appealing piece of functionality which the visitor can use to find the information they want within the site. Short concise titles of internal pages allow the visitor quick access to the information in which they are most interested.
The presentation of information has changed slightly as well. Each page of the site will now display documents associated to the topic of that page. Also, the addition of a right side column to the presentation of the internal pages provides corresponding contact information for the people at EDW most appropriate to discuss the information presented on the page that the visitor is viewing. Instead of having to go to a long list of people and description of their job titles in order to find the individual that a visitor would want to contact, the new presentation makes that information available right there.
From a functionality standpoint, there have been a couple of big changes. Firstly, in discussions with EDW, it was decided that administratively it was in the best interest of the site's development to include a central place for the management of all of the documents that are presented on the site. There is now a central place to do this, and once a document is uploaded, it is assigned to any and all categories to which it may belong, and then the administrators can assign the document to any page or as many pages in the site they wish. There is no longer a need to upload a document many times in order for it to appear in many places.
Secondly, we were asked to create an Associated Contacts piece of functionality. As described above, this piece allows the administrators to assign contacts to pages throughout the site based on the individual's expertise.
All of the development work done for the latest design and functionality was built on the Catalyst administration CMS while the site was still live and was able to draw on current data so there was no reason to worry about keeping data synchronized. This specific situation allowed for a seamless transfer from old to new. This isn't always the case, but it's nice when it happens this way.
Daily Links
Jay Z Opens with No Sleep Til Brooklyn
Pretty amazing tribute to the Beasties by Jay Z.Cold Play Does Fight For Your Right
Coldplay pays tribute to a song that the Beasties themselves wrote tongue in cheek towards white kid angst, it just happened to vault them into the stratosphere and sold millions of copies of Licensed to Ill.Adobe Unveils Creative Suite 6
There you go, a new version of all Adobe software. The Adobe Cloud (I'm getting pretty tired of the cloud moniker) will be available shortly which will let you subscribe to all their software for a low monthly fee of around $50. Not sure it is worth it for us, since our copies of CS4 are still chugging along and we do most of our work in source code. Interesting nonetheless.Daily Links
42 Years Ago Today
The Kent State massacre served as a pretty big wake up call for that generation. Neil Young wrote Ohio as more of a reminder than a protest song, but it captures the anger in the misplaced trust that occurred on that day.Adam Yauch, One Third of the Beastie Boys, Dead at Age 47
The amount of time me and couple of buddies from high school spent listening to the Beastie Boys was insane. Adam has been battling cancer since 2008, but this still makes me sad. Rolling Stone with more detail.Better Virtual Keyboarding on the iPad?
This looks like a clever, logical solution to a problem I've encountered myself.Facebook Timeline of People Hating Facebook Timeline (And Other Design Tweaks)
Every time Facebook has updated their design and functionality, out of the woodwork comes a percentage of people that cry out in hatred. Buzzfeed's FWD has put together a Facebook Timeline of some of these changes and some of the (very) vocal folk that hate them.Daily Links
Simplest SMTP server ever?
Looks pretty awesome. Book marked to dig in further when I have some time.42Floors
Nice site. It features really cool office space and things you can buy to make your office space into one too! I could spend much money. Linked for possible future use.Canadian Mint's last penny produced tomorrow
Legislation to phase out the penny was announced earlier this year. Canada will be a country without new pennies starting tomorrow.Daily Links
Logo Lounge has Posted Their Trends Report for 2012
Love the write up. Design friends, this one is for you. Go and bask in logo goodness.ImageOptim
ImageOptim optimizes images by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. Always a handy goal in web development.What Clients Don't Know (And Why Its Your Fault)
A video of a Mike Monteiro (author of A Books Apart's recent "Design Is A Job") talking at TYPO San Francisco 2012 Connect. Must Watch.Daily Links
Real Life Robinson Crusoe
8000 and 40 years later, Brendon Grimshaw has his own secluded island paradise.