Jun 29, 2007
Everyone has it. A far to busy desktop. In real life but also on your computer. Tons of icons filling the screen, leaving just a bit space to see the image of your loved ones on the background. The people at Bumptop approached the computers desktop like in real life. Big piles of paper in the corner of your desk. When you need more space, you just shove some paper aside. This is now possible on your computer.
Select an icon, drag it around. When hitting other icons, they will react. You can make a pile of icons of one type, sort them like a deck of cards. It all sounds beautiful, but we have to wait. It is still in development. But you can subscribe to Bumptop’s newsletter to be informed when it is finally released.
Watch a movie of Bumptop in action, or read “Keepin’ It Real: Pushing the Desktop Metaphor with Physics, Piles and the Pen (PDF)” to read about what Bumptop is going to be.
Jun 29, 2007
How do you attract more people to a zoo? What if normal advertising in newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. hasn’t had the right effect. Advertising Agency Scholz & Friends from Berlin, Germany had a brilliant idea. What if we take a dog and dress it up like a crocodile?
I really like the concept they came up with and it worked. The zoo had 15% more attendees per month.
Jun 28, 2007
Just ran a quick test and www.lutsr.nl is blocked in China! Why? What did I do wrong? I order Chinese food almost twice a month!
China is blocking a lot of website because they see them as a tread for their country. Even the big guys (Yahoo! and Google) have to face the new super power. To become big in China they have to play by the rules of the communist country. This is a bad development… as www.greatfirewallofchina.org want to point out.
Jun 28, 2007
An application like so many others out there. Trying to become the new Web 2.0 hit. Normally I would not directly write a blog post about such an application. But this could be different… The founder of is also one of the founders behind Digg. There are positive stories out there on the Internet and it looks good. I’m still waiting for an invite, but I installed the desktop application based on Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR a.k.a. Apollo).
What am I waiting for? Twitter on steroids!
“Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.“
Jun 27, 2007
Everyone knows them. The game shows on television with too slick hosts and babes as slaves to present the prices or turn the letters around. Game shows like “countdown”, “the price is right” , “wheel of fortune”, etcetera. We all hated the shows but watched them secretly and tried to answer quicker than the dumb people attending these shows.
wedigtv has now transformed these shows to Internet games. They even found the annoying hosts, the “pretty” babes and it even has commercial breaks. I think it is quite addictive.
Jun 22, 2007
On content heavy website it can help to group content in one or more content panes. To navigate through these content panes you can use Yahoo tabs. It enables navigating to another pane without a page refresh. This tutorial will cover how to set up basic tabs with the Yahoo User Interface Library.
HTML / CSS level: Medium
Javascript level: Low
Continue reading
Jun 20, 2007
At softwaredeveloper.com there is an article about how to, and about how *not* to develop an AJAX application which is search engine friendly.
Some do’s:
- Design your site with degradable AJAX, that way users with JavaScript disabled can view a working version of your website along with JavaScript enabled visitors.
- After you’ve established a non-AJAX working version of your website, go back and include an alternative AJAX enhancements where you desire.
- When designing, make sure to check your website with JavaScript disabled as well as through the eyes of a text only browser such as Lynx or SEO-Browser.
- Perform a browser check to make sure the user has JavaScript enabled, that way you’re only serving AJAX pages to users that can view them.
Some don’t s:
- Making it too simple. Designing sites where AJAX controls everything and serves content on a single page can be a search engine ranking disaster, as your website will have only one URL for everything. Instead, be sure to offer unique sub-links and URLs for popular site features.
- Disabling browser controls. Since AJAX does not communicate with your browser’s history, simple actions like hitting your browsers back and forward buttons are rendered useless. Although you may not traverse your website via browser buttons, many users do. Make sure you’re not overdoing AJAX so much that users get lost in your website.
- Not using Google’s Webmaster Tools. These tools are a simply and reliable way to keep track of the pages of your website Google is indexing.
Read the complete article “How to: get Google and AJAX to play nice.” atsoftwaredeveloper.com.
Jun 20, 2007
North + East uses a bright color scheme and the headlines are easy scanable.
Jun 20, 2007
Firebug is the invention of this century when it comes to Javascript debugging. It lets you trace objects, alerts, monitor performance, etcetera.
You can trace and object for instance by adding the code:
console.debug(objectName);
While testing in different browsers this will generate an error, because Firebug is Firefox only. To overcome this problem just add this code to you Javascript file (this will fire a normal alert function):
if (!window.console) {
window.console = {
debug: function( o ) {
alert( o );
}
}
}
Jun 18, 2007
Gran Paradiso is an early developer release of the next major release version of Firefox (3). This version is for testing purpose only!
Some changes / new features:
- new crash report system
- javascript based password manager
- getElementsByClassName() is supported
- animated PNG support
- and a lot more: for developers and Gecko 1.9 changes
