Every year, as we arrive in Austin, we usually head immediately to our favorite spot, The Boiling Pot, for some spicy crawfish and Shiner Bock. And every year, our guest list continues to grow. We didn't have any trouble finding Hoosiers in Austin this year as we were pleased to have over 40 of our friends join us to kick off what ended up being a very memorable and engaging week. With everyone's hands and eyes cemented to their iPhones for the remainder of the conference, the menu at The Boiling Pot seemed the appropriate choice to start it off, forcing us to put down our phones for some real socializing and interaction.
Surprise, surprise. IE6 is back in the news. After hackers exploiting a weakness in IE6 launched an attack on Google and at least twenty other companies in China last week, Microsoft has issued a "critical" patch for it's dated web browser. Actually, this isn't so much news or a surprise really. When is Microsoft not fixing vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6? We can probably expect this sort of thing to happen for the next 4 years, until Microsoft stops supporting its abomination in 2014
The reason this specific incident is making headlines this week is because French and German officials are now making recommendations to not use Internet Explorer anymore, regardless of the version. Bravo. Microsoft instead…
Five years ago, if you wanted to rent a movie, you'd get in your car, drive to the nearest Blockbuster and spend 15 minutes browsing the movies on the walls, make your selection, and then proceed through the aisle of candy and popcorn to the next eager & available checkout clerk who would scan your membership card and take your money. Today, if you want to rent a movie, you probably add it to your Netflix queue and wait a day or two for it to arrive in your mailbox, or you visit a big giant vending machine robot called Redbox.
Redbox seems to be all the rage these days (from what I hear on the street). It's so easy. Pick your movie and swipe your card…
I recently stumbled across Screenr, an online screencasting tool that offers "Instant screencasts for Twitter." True to its word, Screenr is a very easy way to capture screencasts and then share them on Twitter OR anywhere you'd prefer on the Internet. The application works in a very similar way to Jing and Screenjelly and desktop applications like Captivate and Camtasia, but Screenr ends up owning the content, posting the screencast to it's own unique URL and to a constantly updating public stream.
However, I'm not exactly sure what, if anything, this screencast recorder has to do with Twitter. From what I can tell, absolutely nothing. But I guess that's one way to draw mass appeal to a new product: say it's for Facebook…
I've been having some trouble lately when it comes to relationships. I recently just broke up with Internet Explorer 6, and now I'm in the process of leaving Facebook.
I quit Facebook a few weeks ago, for a couple different reasons, mostly because I was curious what the effect would be on my social life or personal relationships with friends. Having been a Facebook user since its inception in 2004, I've invested a considerable amount of time uploading libraries of images and building vast lists of contacts and connections. I have sent out hundreds of event invitations and communicated thousands of wall posts and direct messages. So, as silly as this sounds, I didn't take the deactivation…
One of the most common English idioms warns us not to determine the worth of something based upon its appearance: Don’t judge a book by its cover / you can’t tell a book by its cover. This can be good advice when you’re at the library combing through the copious stacks of books, but there’s another medium for which this phrase also rings true. Content-rich web sites and blogs that have very poor or out-dated design sensibility, fall very quickly by the wayside. This is especially true when you work in a design-centric industry and make decisions based on graphical display of information.
Quickly extracting value out of a long article on a blog or news website, without the assistance of an RSS reader, can be a trying task…
Here’s the concept. You are presented with two movies at random, and you are then forced to decide which movie you prefer, no skipping allowed. If you haven’t seen one, or both, of the films, you can skip the film you haven’t seen and update the pairing. Flickchart then updates your list of favorites based upon your choices. Eventually, you’ll begin to build a massive and ranked list of movies you have seen.
If you happen to be presented with a tough matchup, Flickchart provides a forum for discussion on what made you decide between the two movies. Is Back to the Future better than Ghostbusters? Obviously it is, but here…
When moving from the design to the implementation of a website, there are literally countless ways to get started. Among the most important things to be mindful of are keeping the HTML and CSS as clean as possible, limiting the amount of Javascript, and having a clear, organized, and accountable plan for execution. In addition to these three considerations is the decision of how to handle type on your site. Since typography and the display of textual information is such an important element of site design, we all long for a better and more consistent approach to handling fonts than the solutions available to us today. Current methods include the CSS property called @font-face and Javascript solutions like sIFR and Cufón, each with their own drawbacks and limitations. Below…
"Internet Explorer 6, I'm breaking up with you. I feel like it's been over for a long time.
Actually, I've been seeing someone else. Well, a couple other browsers. Firefox, Safari and Chrome, not to mention your younger sisters, IE7 & IE8. They are so much faster than you and prettier than you. Not to mention I feel more secure with them. Don't get me wrong, I want to have those same feelings for you, but I think we've just grown too far apart and I just don't see a future with us. Technology is advancing and you just want to live in the past with your tables and your single-tab browsing.
I created this a while back for our studio tour, part of AIGA Indy's Studio Tour Series. The original animation looped seamlessly, starting and ending on the same screen, which had a pretty hypnotic effect. I could probably watch if for days.
