Gadgetopia

Example Style Guide: The guys over at silverorange have published one of their HTML style guides under a Creative Commons license allowing you to borrow it for your own uses.

Got FoO - Office 2K3 Style: This guy duplicated the upcoming Outlook 2003 layout in HTML for his blog. Nicely done.

Chicago Manual of Style: I will probably pay for this. (Actually, given that my typographical errors on this site are legendary, maybe you all should pitch in and buy a subscription for me?) All joking aside, this is a very cool thing to see. This book is iconic. The Chicago ...

Style Master Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editor: Western Civilisation has released Style Master 3. We've talked about this software before. About a year ago, we said. "...I don't see a need for it, really. It's a GUI for building CSS sheets with controls for just about every possible directive and ...

Current style in web design: Here's a good roundup of the current style of well-designed Web pages, and what makes them that way. For the last few years, I've seen a certain breed of page design that I loved but could never put my finger on why. This style actually ...

Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition: I'm not totally sure, but I think this Web site is a complete reprint of this book. I enjoyed the first edition; haven't read the second.

Grammar Girl s Strunk & Twite: An Unofficial Twitter Style Guide: While I think Twitter is really dumb idea, at least there s a style guide. Don t start posts with I am You re answering the question, What are you doing? It s OK to answer with fragments in a conversation Use proper capitalization. ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...

VisiBone Style Sheet Examples: An interesting little page that uses constantly changing JavaScript styles to show you various style rules will do the styles change constantly as you sit and watch. Nicely done. A free public service by VisiBone. Here are some cascading style sheet examples. See the start ...

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web: While still a work in progress, this site is gearing up to be the most in-depth examination of typography on the Web. It's set up like a book -- some chapter examples: Define the word space to suit the size and ...

indent style: Excellent entry from The Jargon File that describes all the common indent styles in use today. If you program, read this. I use Allman style. You? (What, no VB-style indents? I'm shocked...)

There's an Australian company called Western Civilisation that I've come to know because they have (1) good CSS documentation, and (2) fantastic search engine placement. Whenever I search for something related to CSS on Google, they're one of the first results. They sell courses on HTML, CSS, and Web colors ...

Is it time to put the P tag to rest? It does the exact same thing as a DIV, but it adds spacing below the tag by default. Essentially, you could have a DIV and a style rule of DIV { margin-bottom: 10px; } and it would do the exact ...

PHP Coding Standard: I've been looking for a good PHP coding standards document beyond the PEAR standard which I thought was a little incomplete. This one, by Todd Hoff and Fredrik Kristiansen, is exhaustive and well thought-out. It's based on a common C++ standard from way back.

ONLamp.com: Common Style Mistakes, Part 1: Very solid two-part article (second installment is here) on solid PHP coding style. Well done. I learned a thing or two.

Blind 'see with sound': This may sound far-fetched, but after only one week, the test subject can recognize doors and walls and tell a CD from floppy. The whole set-up is only $2,500. "Developed by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, the system ...

R.I.P. WYSIWYG - Results-Oriented UI Coming: Interesting post on the future of UI. For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most ...

Listamatic: A nice look at using CSS to style lists. "Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list using samples from Eric Meyer, ProjectSeven, SimpleBits and others."

Prince: Overview: There's a big gap in getting Web content into print. I've had to cross the gap a couple times, and I've both generated PDFs server-side and used CSS to style HTML into printable format. Both methods suck. Prince is a system that lets you take XML, style it ...

To make tabs, you ordinarily wind up creating a table, chucking a row in for the tabs, a row in for the tab page, etc. Using tables for layout? The CSS Gods will frown upon you and Jakob Nielsen's ghost will haunt you to your grave (after he passes on, ...

"22nd Century" Tucson Arizona Estate: There's quite an estate on the market in Tucson. My buddy Ryan sent me a link to a listing for it on eBay (yeah, right, it'll sell there...) complete with what looks like a reprint from Unique Homes magazine (though I couldn't find it on ...

Code Style: Sans serif font sampler and comparison: Here's a great article that answers a perennial question: what fonts can I use in my CSS? Font selection for the Web should be based on a generic font family to ensure an appropriate type style is rendered in any circumstances. Specific ...

I found this in the header at computergeeks.com. Major style points for that one.

It seems that there's always some consternation in the web design community regarding the styling of form elements. Usability studies and user observation has taught them that they shouldn't be applying styles to form controls; if you change the look of the control, it's less recognizable for novice users who ...

Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers: Web writing is slowly developing its own official style. I know that we ve written differently for the Web for ages now, but Nielsen is throwing facts at the issue, and I wouldn t be surprised if we soon see a Chicago Manual ...

Here's a nice article on writing more efficient CSS using shorthand properties, and reducing the number of duplicated style rules. One of the touted benefits of CSS is that it reduces total page weight, and thus download time, both at first page load, and even more on subsequent loads due ...

I've subscribed to a new RSS feed that's injecting styles into posts each post is surrounded by a FONT tag that makes the text Arial, instead of the default Times New Roman that Outlook (I use NewsGator) would render in if not for the tag. I always felt that ...

Movable Type Style Generator: Semi-WYSIWYG editing of a MT layout. Fiddle with it via th DHTML menus, then download it.

One of the interesting side effects of separating style from content is the fact that it takes very little to redesign the style even if it's not your site. In his programming journal, Mihai Parparita has a neat article about reskinning GMail with his own custom stylesheet. However, there ...

NYPL: Style Guide: Need to come up with HTML and CSS coding standards for your company? You could do a lot worse than this resource a set of well-written, easy-to-understand guides from the New York Public Library.

Build It: Extreme TiVO PC: A good article on how to build your own Tivo. Very cool, but not for the faint of heart. This is the only conceivable application where I'd have to get my wife to approve the PC case style.

Inform: This looks interesting. Inform is a design system for interactive fiction, created in 1993. Found via Waxy's link to this article on how to use the language. This relates to our posts on the fictional Fiction Markup Language and Choose Your Adventure style sites.

One of the great things about properly-done CSS is the ability for your site to degrade gracefully. Here's a link to view the Gadgetopia home page without ANY stylesheet at all. Gadgetopia Sans Style Doesn't look half-bad. It may be even more readable that way.

Giving some thought today to "printer friendly" versions of Web pages. This isn't a tutorial or anything, just a consideration of the options. There are essentially three ways to do them. (1) Using a Separate Page If you're running your site from a database or other central data store, this ...

List-o-matic - generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items : Very cool service. Enter the items in your list, pick a snazzy style, and it will give you all the HTML and CSS necessary to build it. Great for people like me who learn best through reverse engineering gimme ...

WinBeta.Org - TweakUI 2.10 for Windows XP and Server 2003: This little app allows access to every single Windows setting you can think of. Don't like the size of the Alt-Tab box? Don't like the style of the little arrow sub-icon on shortcuts? Want to auto-login your system every time ...

Textism: Dean Allen has released a new version of Textile, his text markup system. "Additions include the ability to quickly create tables like this: |a|table|row| |a|table|row| ...to mix and match list types, to change alignment and indentation of block objects with a single character, and to apply class, id, style ...

Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?: Wired peels back the curtain on Wallop. "In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis ...

Who/Where are the Women?: A good point I'd never considered before. Spawned by recent conversations with friends, I've been thinking about people who are known for designing and working with web standards. Specifically those who have a strong interest in CSS or are already using style sheets to compliment or ...

Welcome to the 'O.C.' video game: This strikes me as the granddaddy of stupid ideas. The style of play is similar to reality-simulation titles like "The Sims," allowing fans of the show to explore the "O.C." universe by dressing to impress, joining the right cliques, dating the right people ...

CSS3 module: Multi-column layout: CSS3 has great column support, it looks like. Consider these rules: column-width column-count columns column-gap column-rule-color column-rule-style' column-rule-width column-rule The coolness of this requires me to end this post only one way: IE sucks. To the IE team -- congratulations on getting to CSS2 compliance with ...

Integrating CSS with Content Management Systems: Here's a great article from the heroin factory that is Digital Web Magazine on building PMS "Presentation Management Systems." Building CSS editing features into our content management systems allows us to make style changes as easily as we make content changes. In the ...

The crew filming the new James Bond flick, Casino Royale, managed to smash to pieces not one, not two, but three $300,000 Aston Martin DBS V12's in a single afternoon. ... in the style of 007 our stunt driver walked away without a scratch. A huge loss, but I guess ...

26,000-Hit Wonder Keeps It Hopping: That's what you get when you have a jukebox full of MP3s. "Mr. Stuto's basic idea was to digitize his music collection and make it available in a jukebox that held far more than the standard 100 albums. EL DJ, or Extra Large Digital Jukebox, ...

Gloves come off as Wal-Mart, critics slam each other on Web: A Web war is on between Wal-Mart and their critics, with new Web sites popping up all over the place. The brawl between Wal-Mart and its union critics is escalating as groups on both sides, fighting over whether the ...

I've waxed poetic about the joys of OpenOffice here before, but here's a really neat trick. Create a "Word" document in OpenOffice Writer, then save it. Now, using an archive tool like WinZip, open it -- unzip it just like it was a zip archive. You should find the following ...

We've written about CSS Zen Garden before, but development of style sheets for that site has really taken off. There are some truly breathtaking designs on display over there. Try these links any one of them will blow your mind. Zunflower fleur de l’avante-garde Backyard White Lily Creepy Crawly ...

Architecting CSS: This is a pretty shallow, but solid, article on how to organize CSS. It covers how to organizes the three big components of CSS. Stylesheets (the CSS files and STYLE blocks) Rules and Selectors (within stylesheets) Attributes (within selectors) There's some good advice there, but I'm really looking ...

Asus Lamborghini VX1 Review: Your pathetic little Ferrari laptop makes me laugh. PC fans commonly liken the speed of their computers to that of high-performance cars. It's therefore somewhat surprising to note that relatively few hardware manufacturers have released car-inspired PCs. Acer pioneered this phenomenon with its Ferrari laptop range, ...

Identity2.0: This is video of a presentation at OSCON from Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, on the future of digital identity. What's interesting is the style of presentation. He talks for about 20 minutes, and goes through about 600 slides (do the math). On top of making a good ...

CMS Deployment Patterns: Great, great discussion of the different content delivery methods in a CMS. Last year sometime, I wrote a very similar article where I presented three models: Template Pull, Data Push, and Full Stack. This article covers it in more detail, with different subclasses of the major categories. ...

Helping your client maintain markup quality: Interesting concept of a way to help your clients keep their markup clean: style it ugly when it s wrong. [ ] one idea is to make any errors or suspicious markup obvious to the person working on the document. One way of doing that is ...

Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service: The social networking space is getting awfully crowded, capped now by Google's entry. The launch of Orkut comes after Friendster's rejection late last year of Google's offer to buy the site that has become known as an online venue for hooking up friends ...

Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot: Here s a five-minute video of a full auto shoot somewhere in Oklahoma where folks take their machine guns and just go nuts. Included is the heart-warming footage capped above, where a girl no more than six-years-old spits hot death downrange with her daddy s machine gun. You ll ...

Keep CSS Simple: Are CSS hacks getting out of hand? I don't really use any, that I know of. I don't have any CSS on this site that panders to one browser over another. "The complexity monster has reappeared, right in the center of modern Web development. Nowadays it doesn’t ...

Photo Gallery (Pensonal Computer): Snopes reports on something almost impossibly cool. It's a computer broken apart into pieces, each the size of a pen. The screen and keyboard are projected onto surfaces. P-ISM is a gadget package including five functions: a pen-style cellular phone with a handwriting data input function, ...

Google Page Creator: Joseph Scott pointed me over here this morning. Google Pages is a Web page editor built in Google style. I don't know what the point is, but you can create "pages" with a pretty compentent editor. Here's my first Google Page. It was simple to create, and ...

Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators": You know time management is in short supply when O'Reilly is writing books about it. Thomas A. Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I've seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications ...

CSS Colors: Take Control Using PHP: Good article on how to use PHP (or any scripting language, really) to generate your CSS. While many web sites use powerful programming environments to create HTML, these same tools are usually ignored when it comes to creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article ...

How to Obscure Any URL: Great, great page on how spammers and scammers obscure URLs so most people don't know where they're going. These tricks are known to the spammers and scammers, and they're used freely in unsolicited mails. You'll also see them in ad-related URLs and occasionally on web ...

Dabble DB: 7 Minute Video: Holy cats, this app looks good. Think Access on the Web. I shut off the video halfway through, because it was just too much to handle. My head is spinning. Good Lord, man -- someone get me some water. This comes via has_many :though, which ...

Engadget's 20-year BBS Flashback post is chock-full of utter nerd deliciousness. All done-up BBS style, with relevant stories from August 22nd, 1985. They're probably best known for their tires, but lately Finnish industrial conglomerate Nokia's been making a big push into the wireless biz with its Mobira subsidiary (best of ...

All-Girl Gaming Team Takes Aim at Boys: No, the title of this post isn't the same as the last spam you got. They apparently play a wicked game of CounterStrike. At first glance, Les Seules might look like an all-girl rock band mdash; complete with sassy attitudes and fawning male ...

Some folks will tell you that, compared to the great capitals of Europe, American culture is crude and basic, lacking any true style. I have two words for those folks: Crazy Frog. The Crazy Frog started out as a dude imitating a two-stroke engine. It hit the net, and then ...

Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML): I posted the other day about how I wished there was a Fiction Markup Language for annotating fiction. Well, it turns out there's an Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML) and engine for creating text adventure games or "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style Web games. The IFML ...

Robots.txt, The Big Crawl: These guys grabbed 75,000 robots.txt files, and found a few problems: [...] we found a wide array of problems with peoples robots.txt files. We found more than 5% of the robots.txt used bad style and up to 2% were so badly formed that they would not ...

Fuji recently unveiled a prototype of a digital camera with Wi-Fi capability built in. The interesting part of this story is that the camera they displayed is the exact style of the one I own. It features a compact flash and a smart media slot. If Wi-Fi is not actuaully ...

A (CSS) Horse of a Different Color: The W3C is busy working on the CSS3 specification. This article has information on an interesting twist to colors: specifying them in HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) instead of the traditional RGB (Red, Green, Blue). I tooled around the What's New page at the ...

Wow is right. WowRobot's KHR-1 Robot is amazing! (The link will take you to the Web site and download the 10MB WMV.) The site is in Korean so I know nothing other than what the video shows (let me know if you can find an English translation), but it looks ...

Is your 2.5 pound Ultralight laptop really dragging you down when you tote it through the airport? Sony has you covered: The X505 is Sony's smallest notebook, weighing less than two pounds and under an inch thin. While small in size, the X505 delivers big performance through the power of ...

If you haven't upgraded to Firefox 1.5, then you may still be dealing with those horrible dialog boxes when there's an HTTP or DNS error. The new version has nicely formatted standard pages, like the sample above. I always hated those dialogs, because when a domain wasn't found or something, ...

How do you or your company release code you re compelled to release under the GPL? One of the core tenets of open source is that you release your changes to the community. Everyone pays lip service to this idea, but how do people and companies actually do it? Does your ...

Computers hang up SBA loans: The Small Business Administration "upgraded" their computer system last December. Because of the new computer system, paperwork that once took 30 minutes now takes hours, workers for the SBA say. The network that connects inspectors with their offices is frequently down. And workers in the ...

WYMeditor - standards-compliant XHTML editor: This is very interesting. It allows intra-text structure -- very XML-ish. Check the demo. WYMeditor's main concept is to leave details of the document's visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible ...

When Word-to-XML Conversion Get Nasty: A good, solid look at Word conversions which drives home an important point: a conversion is as good as the construction of the underlying Word document. If the author used styles well, then it's not so bad. But if the author ran rampant with the ...

Adding style to substance: A good article on the resurgence of innovative design in product development. "'When everything else is commoditized, design is the one area where you can add value,'' says Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, the Palo Alto industrial design studio which has crafted everything from the Palm ...

The Stone SouperComputer: Who says your cluster has to be expensive? When it was running, this cluster at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory had 133 nodes in it, most 486s with 32MB RAM and 10 MB/s Ethernet cards. While our first Beowulf-style parallel computer isn't built out of the most ...

Slashdot is Going out of Style in 2006: Of course, it will take a while, but Zawodny predicts that sites with more community will take over. Haven't we figured out that the crowd is generally smarter than any one individual in the crowd? Sites like Digg and Reddit understand that. ...

Death in Sakkara: The BBC has released the first installment of a Flash adventure game. I don't do a lot of gaming, but this is so well done. Egypt, 1929. Journalist Charles Fox plunges into a darkly sinister world of intrigue, murder and mysticism in the hunt for a missing ...

At some point, I think every web jockey has scoped out the CSS Zen Garden for a little inspiration (I dig this one). It's a great example of the power that comes from the separation of style from content, and the proper use of semantic markup. Judging by this link ...

Monolithic Dome Institute: A year ago, we discussed a special type of dome home that survived Hurricane Ivan quite handily. A commentor to that post points us to this site, which is the manufacturer of that home. The site is filled with content about the "monolithic" style of dome -- ...

London Congestion Charge : This is an interesting Wikipedia article about the "congestion charge" levied on vehicles entering the busiest zone in Central London. Apparently traffic was so bad here, that they charge people $9 US for a day pass to drive in it. Those sneaky Brits are too smart ...

Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne made its first X-Prize attempt this morning. Early measurements indicate that the craft made it to space, but it did so rifled-bullet style, rolling rapidly. The engines were shut down 11 seconds early as a result. A sudden roll due to a stuck actuator had also caused ...

I just unsubscribed from the Freakonomics blog feed, and that bums me out. I loved the book, but the simple fact is that the feed sucked. Two problems: Bad: They only put abbreviated parts of the feed in each post. So you couldn t read the whole thing in your feedreader, ...

Authenticity of new Bush military papers questioned: The question of whether the damaging military records on President Bush are accurate or not is coming down to a Word formatting question. Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft ...

I'm writing this from the second floor of the Apple store on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. We spent the day with the guys from 37 Signals at The Building of Basecamp Workshop. I'm on a little iMac, and I have to admit it's impressive...the store, I mean. Everything is ...

Mavromatic had a post this week with a link to some nice photos about the Volga V12, a hand-built one-off with the heart and underpinnings of a BMW 850CSi and a body modeled after a Soviet-built commodity sedan. The original Volga isn't much to look at (and was ...

Here's another argument for CSS-based, table-less design that I haven't heard before: by not using tables for layout, then you know that a table is, in fact, a table intended for the display of tabular data. Yesterday, a client of mine wanted to insert a table into the description of ...

Wired 11.07: Slammed!: Here's the story that Wired took some heat about. The first page is a harrowing look at the spead of the SQL Slammer virus written in a style that would make Michael Crichton proud. The second page tells you how it works. "By 12:45 am, huge sections ...

Experts: New submarine can tap fiber-optic cables: This is fascinating a billion-dollar packet sniffer. The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities, intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through ...

Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation: I've been playing around with some of the plugins in the MT3 Plugin Pack. Markdown is a plaintext to HTML convertor, much like Textile. However, there's a philosphy behind it: Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as ...

Let me ask you for your opinion here: do you think that the computer book sections at your local book store are shrinking? Five years ago, the local Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls had a majestic computer book section. I don t know the official names for these things, but ...

Tired of talking on that tiny cellphone handset that makes your ear sweat and only comes to the back of your jawbone when you hold it to your ear? Nick Poole's Pokia is a crazy bit of retro chic that turns old 70's-style phone handsets into cellphone accessories. His latest ...

Applications have patterns -- ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. These aren't object modeling patterns, about which books and books have been written, these are...best practices for how to solve a particular type of functional problem. Around my city, you see a certain style of ...

Web Developer Extension: I don't remember where I heard about this one, but it's a peach of an extension. We've talked about the Web Developer extension for Mozilla and FireFox before, but the latest version comes with the sweetest sidebar you could ever imagine... You can open the stylesheet for ...

Slashdot has posted an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In the usual SlashDot style, the ten highest-rated questions from the community were the ones they asked. Good stuff. It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. ...

Here's something that's slowly making its way through the W3C working groups. CC/PP is a method by which a device browser, PDA, SmartPhone, whatever can describe itself and its user's preferences to a server in the HTTP request. Think of it as a User-Agent string on steroids. The device ...

I m pretty saddened to say that I just didn t get this book. I ve known about it for a couple years, and finally read during downtime in Chicago, but I just didn t get it. Peter Morville, of course, wrote the Polar Bear Book (I ve read all three editions) and is a ...

Canonical Intranet Homepage: Great article about how intranet homepages are becoming so similar. [...intranet] homepage layouts are becoming more and more similar over time. We've now reached the point where one specific intranet homepage layout is so common that it makes sense to anoint it as the canonical design. He ...

Australia's Internet Industry Association is launching a new campaign to educate consumers on the best way to eliminate spam: "Don't try - Don't buy - Don't reply". "'Spam is the unwelcome by-product of a largely free and open email system', says IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos. 'Spammers are freeriding on ...

This is an extraordinarily broad overview of technical writing. So broad that the author delves into subjects like how to write your resume, how to take criticism, and even how to avoid on-the-job injuries like repetitive stress injuries and eye-strain. And, oh yes, somewhere in there is some information on ...

Cross-Site Request Forgeries: An interesting article about a vulnerability that's probably present in a lot of apps. [...] cross-site request forgeries, a style of attack that lets an attacker send arbitrary HTTP requests from a victim user. That's worth reading a couple of times, and it will likely not be ...

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

Uh oh I may have started a new addiction... I'm a subscriber to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf service, which I've discussed before. Tonight, I was doing some heavy reading into Microsoft Sharepoint, and I was getting annoyed at the interface. Reading books online is never fun, but I usually just ...

Eric Meyer, in addition to working the turntables and personally speeding up the entire Internet (at least if you get your news from Apple), has come up with a really slick set of CSS rules and Javascript that can take a garden-variety web page and turn it into a dead ...

HTML provides formatting tags for headings, so why don't we use them? H1, H2, H3...you wouldn't believe how often designers re-invent the wheel by enclosing headings in DIV tags with stylesheets classes attached. I used to do it, then I learned a few things: Search engines will weight terms in ...

Anybody who has hung around Gadgetopia long enough has heard about the T-Rex, the North American built, motorcycle-based trike/sports car. The T-Rex will out corner and out accellerate most any exotic car built today, and riding on three wheels made it pretty unique. But now two other manufacturers ...

The OQO (pronounced oh-queue-oh) is such a spiffy little unit, I'm surprised that Apple didn't build something like it first! In handtop mode, the screen slides up to reveal a QWERTY-style thumbpad, mouse buttons and a TrackStik. The 800 x 480 W-VGA 5" transflective display is readable indoors and out, ...

According to a BBC.co.uk article, scientists are working on ways to make teleconferencing more real by using animated robotic avatars of the speakers that mimic the movements of the person at the other end of the line. They use claymation as an example of how it might work, and hope ...

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

Firefox add-on lets surfers tweak sites, but is it safe?: This Greasemonkey extension is getting a lot of coverage these days. Essentially, it lets you write JavaScript that's applied to individual pages automatically. So if there's this one page that shows too many ads, you can write some JavaScript to ...

MBoffin.com did something really cool while redesigning his blog. They made a 'design timeline' while working on his latest site design. Every time the designer saved the site, he took a screencap, and turned it into an animated GIF. He's imbibed the 'presentation separate from content' Kool-aid, so you can ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

I watched "The Incredibles" with the kids this weekend. Amazing film. Not only is it entertaining as all get out, but the CGI is jaw-dropping. Absolutely stunning stuff. I was perusing the trivia section of the IMDB record, and I found this: The unusual architecture in the film was based ...

Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link: http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm Looks like a "CMS preview" link accidently made it's way into production. I ...

The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide: This is a short but interesting piece on the "damage" that PowerPoint has done to discourse and presentation skills in the last ten years. "Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, 'Let me show you ...

I'm working on an app right now with a multi-step form process, and a brilliant designer put step indicators in the design so you'd know what step you are on. So the unstyled HTML looks like this:

  1  2  3

Now, before I knew I could use multiple classes on a ...

Some good news -- it looks like Amtrak isn't going to die anymore, given that Congress just gave them $626 million. But are we just shoring up an industry that, sadly, hasn't been self-sufficient in this country in maybe 20 years (total speculation there)? I love trains, and I wish ...

Here's something I believe to be true: intranet adoption is more a function of personal and corporate psychology than of technology. Put another way, the greatest technology in the world won't help if your employees aren't interested in using your intranet for whatever reason. I'm involved, to some extent, in ...

Is it true that if you shoot a bullet through the skin of an airliner in flight, everyone would get sucked out the little hole? If not, Hollywood has a lot of explaining to do. Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel set out the other night to ...

The Woolamaloo Gazette: This guy got fired for his personal blog. He worked at a bookstore in the U.K. and, as he puts it: Anyone who has been a regular reader of the Gazette will know that I do occasionally mention my work life, although it accounts for a fraction ...

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can't say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of ...

At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these ...

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...