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
Mike Potter from Adobe demonstrates Apollo at FlashInTO.
Looks like Google has added some new tools for following backlinks on a site.
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.
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. I really hope that this doesn’t start pushing Flash out of the way too much, but I’d be happy just to see a lot less sites that say “Sorry, Microsoft Windows/Internet Explorer Only”.
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.
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.
The New York Times reports Sony blaming profit slides on subsidizing the cost of the Playstation 3 too much. Selling consoles at a loss is nothing new. Sony and Microsoft have both done this knowing that it will establish market-share and that they will easily make up the difference in game sales. There’s more to this than just getting consumers hooked on Playstation. They are using the launch as a way to make Blue Ray the dominant next-generation disk storage. Right now, you would be doing pretty good to find a blue ray or HD-DVD player for $500 to $600. The playstation costs this and is an incredible gaming system and content delivery device as well. One could consider this to easily be a $1000 to $1200 system and it’s getting sold for half of that. Sony has done what they have always done in the last few years, cram as much sony-universe stuff as they can at people when they have the opportunity. The PS3 could have been every bit as revolutionary as a gaming platform without the blue ray drive and actually hit a decent price. I’m actually surprised that on startup you don’t get a commercial and opportunity to purchase and download whatever crap Mariah Carey has puked out lately.
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
So that’s what we’re seeing on the web. How does that match up against the traffic we see at Lincoln Public Schools? Here’s our visitor resolution breakdown (timeframe is 8/1/06 - 1/29/07), provided by Google Analytics:
I’m kind of depressed to see this chart. In my dreams most people are at 1280x1024 but we see it coming in here at 5%. Even if we lump all of the 1280ish and larger resolutions, we come to 20%. So, in general 65% of our traffic is at 1024 x 768 with the remaining 35% being split about 2/3 larger and 1/3 smaller.
A piece of information that I haven’t provided yet is the current size of the site, which is 897 pixels. This means that for the past couple of years, I have already been in excess of what a 800 x 600 screen can display. I am going to work on the assumption that as we improve computers in the district that this number will continue to fall. I think that a site can establish some visual credibility simply by exhibiting traits of sites that have credibility. If many solid sites work at 990 pixels, simply using that width can piggyback on their success subliminally.
So I think that’s where I’m going. I’m going to shoot for 990 pixels. For those that can not display this width, it is only 100 pixels larger than what I was doing before. For others, I think that it will be a forward-looking design that will provide room for a lot of flexibility in content delivery.
An update to my Wii last night gave me the new Wii News Channel. Some thoughts:
The Good
Here’s a demo of the channel from YouTube:
