David Emery OnlineGod Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔OnLive Makes PC Upgrades Extinct
You may never buy a new video card ever again. Actually, the only PC gaming hardware you might ever need will cost you less than a Wii, should OnLive’s potential live up to its promise.
[…]
The concept is simple. Your controller input isn’t going from your hand to the controller to the machine in front of you, it’s going from your hand to the controller through the internet to OnLive’s machines then back again as streamed video. Whether you’re using a USB gamepad, Bluetooth wireless controller, or tried and true keyboard and mouse, the processing and output happens on OnLive’s side, then is fed back to your terminal, with the game “perceptually” played locally.
Very interesting, especially considering the rise in netbooks and other low performance, connected platforms (cough iPhone cough).
Visit ➔Textpattern Admin Themes
dds_admin_style is a Textpattern plugin that enables two features for the Textpattern Admin:
1. Select a style saved within Textpattern as the admin CSS.
2. Set a unique favicon for the admin.
A nice set of themes for the admin section of Textpattern – one of my current bugbears with Textpattern is how old-school the admin interface is (along with the lack of rich text controls) and this solves that problem nicely.
Also, check out David DeSandro’s site – who made the plugin – as well; it’s very nice.
Visit ➔Pitchfork Redesigns
Obviously nicer then their previous old-school design, but it’s all a little generic, isn’t it? Take away the logo and you’d have no clue that it’s Pitchfork – it looks like a slightly inferior Drowned In Sound.
Also, they’ve taken the nicely designed pitchfork.tv and genericised that too, taking their embeded video player – which was my favourite embeded video player, due to its simplicity (yes, I have favourite embeded video players…) – and ruining it in the process (it even autoplays if you embed it!). Oh well…
Visit ➔Fun with Augmented Reality
Love this Mini augmented reality ad:
Feels like there’s some really cool things you could do with this technology, now that it’s hitting the mainstream.
Visit ➔Kindle on iPhone
• No Kindle required
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync
It’s clear the Amazon means business with their online book store – they know that they’re not really cut out to be hardware manufacturer (although it’s obviously a nice side line). Their key strength is as an online retailer of content, and they obviously want to become the dominant force in this area (much like Apple with the iTunes Store). It wouldn’t surprise me if further down the road we see some kind of more formal Apple – Amazon hook up on this front (with books in the iTunes Store).
A real shame it’s not available outside the US though; I assume that – much like with the music industry – all the deals to provide content need to be done on a region-by-region basis.
Visit ➔Skittles.com
Obviously a massive reference to Modernista but I quite like simplicity of this – it’s not as though anyone is really that interested in a Skittles website, quite frankly, but they need to have one and this is a good compromise. Borne of similar thinking to the XL Recordings site, I imagine (which I should probably add some form of Twitter conversation tracking to…).
Visit ➔Cappuccino is not designed for building web sites
Them: With Cappuccino, you don’t need to know HTML. You’ll never write a line of CSS. You don’t ever have interact with DOM.
Ben: Everything that’s wrong about Cappuccino, quoted from their own about page. I actually get angry about this.
Ben has hit the nail on the head here. Cappuccino and the new Atlas IDE are both very impressive feats of coding, but are based on completely faulty thinking. I haven’t used a ‘web app’ that behaves like a desktop app that I like – look at Gmail, Flickr, Facebook et al – and I’m not sure why anybody (other then desktop application developers) would think it’s a good idea.
Spotify is a good example – there are quite a few competitors with similar offerings – iMeem, We7 etc – but because they’re a desktop app the user experience is so much better. Some things should be in the browser, some things shouldn’t.
And don’t get me started on the whole “you don’t need to know html/css/js” malarky – it’s akin to calling yourself a graphic designer and using PowerPoint and clipart.
Visit ➔OmniWeb and three other Omni apps set free
The Omni Group, those loveable guys behind OmniWeb, has announced that it’s setting free four of its previously for-pay Mac applications. As of today, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, OmniObjectMeter, and, of course, the Mac web browser with a cult-like following, OmniWeb, are now free to the public, fully-functioning and sans license. […] “By making these applications—which are not currently under active development—available as free downloads, we hope that more people are able to enjoy using them without the barrier of cost.”
The timing of this is rather interesting – I switched from OmniWeb to the new Safari 4 beta (which is very good so far) today. I’m a big OmniWeb fan – it offers so many compelling features – but it’s in serious need of some work done to it as it’s falling behind Safari, Firefox and (soon on the Mac) Google Chrome. Safari 4 runs rings around it in terms of speed and UI, but it still lacks some of the OmniWeb power features like visual tabs (although you can get a slightly worse implementation in SafariStand), Workspaces and Zoomable text areas.
Visit ➔