Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Here’s a look at my day yesterday and some thoughts Opening General Session Kevin Lynch demonstrated a lot of fantastic AIR apps. Some of them include a twitter client, an instant messenger, ebay, paypal, salesforce.com and a desktop client for Google analytics (which I don’t think was from Google). Ben Forta demonstrated a technology makeover of the United Way site in which they did some things to improve it with ColdFusion 8.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
There is a lot of debate over whether HTML email should be used at all, but if you are going to do it, here are some templates to get you started.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
People seem to get bored with technology. I know that I often do. It’s why I can’t wait for Apple to release Mac OS 10.5 even though 10.4 works great. It’s why I check macupdate.com throughout the day looking for something that’s new or improved. It’s also why I think that people seem to have forgotten what a great tool Manila is and are so ready to push it out the door.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I just said that I’d stop posting constant lists of links… but these are from somebody else, so it’s okay. Chris Pultz (trainer extraordinaire) sent me some great links through del.icio.us that would be useful to anybody getting started in designing with cascading style sheets Keep It Simple, Stupid showcases 49 site designs that are beautiful for what they did not do to their sites more than what they did do.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I really see my blog as the center of my life on the web. My blog is the first place I search when I want to recall something that I did months or years ago. For this reason, I have often muddied my posts with everything I have been bookmarking and more. Throwing all of this information in one pot can discouraging to those that are looking for some perspective.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The beginning of this summer has been hectic as I have launched a couple of sites already including the new Lincoln Public Schools web site. The new site is a little wider than the old site, now being 990px wide. We had quite a bit of discussion about this before we went live wondering if it was the right decision to do this. Interestingly, since then Apple has launched their new site and CNN has released the beta of their new site.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
I’m not sure how long Contribute 4 has been out, but it has not been a long time. Six months? I was surprised to see, during the Adobe CS3 launch event yesterday, that a new version of Contribute (Contribute CS3) was being bundled with the web studios. I wanted to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were just renaming the product, but after a visit to their web site it is clear that this is considered a full upgrade and an owner of version 4 has to pay the same to upgrade to this new version as an owner of any previous version.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Mike Chambers has a set of training/introduction videos up on Lynda. Apollo Alpha Preview - lynda.com Online Training Library ™
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
I hate taking photos with my camera phone as I know they aren’t going to look as good as a picture taken with a normal camera, but sometimes you need a shot and it’s all you got. Here’s some tips to make the best of your situation. Digital Photography Weblog: 13 best tips for Improving CameraPhone Pictures
Saturday, March 10, 2007
In a story detailing how some Pokémon game will be the first to tie the Nintendo Wii and DS together, an upcoming schedule sets June 4th as the release date for the Nintendo DS web browser. I’m pretty excited to see how well this Opera browser runs on a DS compared to other available portable browsers.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Chris Pultz hit me with this incredible list of 53 CSS techniques. A couple of the methods listed here are duds, but most of them are fantastic. If you don’t do CSS yet, you should look through these to see what you’re missing. If you are on CSS, then get to using them! powered by performancing firefox
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Mike Potter from Adobe demonstrates Apollo at FlashInTO.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Looks like Google has added some new tools for following backlinks on a site.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Read/Write Web has an article today on a web site genre I hadn’t considered before - event invitations. After taking a look, some of these sites could be a real help to anybody planning any kind of activity.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Macintosh users can now download the “WPF/E” beta from microsoft. This allows Macintosh users to play files created by Microsoft’s new “Flash Killer” application Sparkle. Once you have installed it, the plugin works with both Safari and Firefox. You can see examples of it’s use here (note the first video in the second example where they talk about the number of Macs that have been appearing in Redmond). This is exciting only because it offers hope that whatever development platform content developers use in the future, the mac should be able to display them all.
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Google Operating System blog has found clues that Google may be working on a presentation application to go with it’s word processor and spreadsheet application. While Powerpoint is fine and Keynote is fantastic, I think that I would be very willing to give up the beautiful looking slides and transitions for something that was built into Google. Even if you didn’t use it to create and present your slideshows, one could always use it (I’m assuming) to upload your Powerpoint presentation for online storage and retrieval.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Zoho has released their new notebook application as a part of the zoho suite and it looks uh… sweet (I had to do that). Anyway, it’s just another example of the best applications moving to the web.
Monday, January 29, 2007
I’m working today on designs for the next www.lps.org and this morning trying to establish a target width. To get started, I’m examining some of the best sites on the web to see what width they are using. Here’s what I’m finding. * ESPN, MLB, NFL: 990px * New York Times: 973px * ABC News: 770px * ABC: 803px * Cnet (including drop-shadow): 990px * Washington Times: 980px * Apple: 781px * UNL (including drop-shadow): 1000px * NBC: 971px * CBS: 977px
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Here’s an article at read/write web with good information about some current web 2.0 e-learning products.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Chris Pederick has updated the invaluable web developer toolbar for Firefox and Flock to version 1.1.
Monday, November 27, 2006
I have really liked using textile for my post formatting as it provides easy to read and write code while also publishing very clean HTML. I have had problems with it when I mix HTML and Textile code as I do often on my web log. Textile's main alternative is similar language called Markdown. I have started working with it this morning and so far so good. First, I downloaded the markdown plugin for wordpress.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
One of the greatest things about CSS is the ability to create styles for non-screen delivery. Digital-Web features has a new article called “CSS Styling for Print and Other Media”.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
I started visiting Brightcove a couple of years ago when Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion) mentioned it at the 2004 Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. It took a long time before it became publicly available, and even then it seemed to be geared towards professional media producers and not something available to the masses. I'm not sure when things changed, but recent visits have excited me as it became clear that Brightcove would make it very possible for non-professional media producers to get their content online in a way that was easy and looked great.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
If you tried visiting my blog yesterday, you may have seen a short-lived experiment as I considered moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogger. My only real reason for trying Blogger is that I've really become pretty fond of Google's other tools and figured that I might as well do everything that I can in one place. I discovered quickly that Blogger is no Wordpress. Today, Ted Patrick of Adobe found his blog's feeds broken as in Google's upgrades of Blogger, they disabled all RSS and RDF feed publishing and moved everybody completely to Atom.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Adobe put out the first non-beta release of the Flash 9 player with full-screen video this week. Brightcove is already utilizing it. Try it out here… technorati tags:flash, brightcove, adobe
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Ryan Stewart uses Google Trends to compare Rich Internet Application technologies and shows that Adobe Flex is ranking best compared to other environments like OpenLaszlo. I ran his query then added AJAX and they were blown out of the water - basically flatlined at the bottom of the graph. technorati tags:flex, apollo, ajax, openlaszlo
Thursday, November 2, 2006
While Flock is still my favorite browser, I’ve been working a lot with Firefox to see what I think of it. I like it. As is typical, I think that the appearance of the windoze version seems a little more polished than the mac one (which is funny since they used different themes for them this time). I think the greatest thing that was added in this version is a built-in spell checker that checks anything you type into any web form.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Mozilla has made release candidate 3 of the upcoming Firefox 2 browser available. technorati tags:firefox, mozilla