Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 103
April 26, 2010
More Mod on the Digital Book
A Reading Heatmap: Key passages illuminated by layering all readers' highlights for the same text.
LAST MONTH, he wowed us with Books in the Age of the iPad, a call to make digital books as beautiful as printed ones. This month, Craig Mod is back with Embracing the Digital Book, an article (or blog post if you must) that begins as a critique of iBooks and Kindle and moves on to discuss the e-reader of our dreams, complete with reasoned social features:
I'm excited about digital...
Roll your own iBooks with ePub
In A novel concept: Roll your own iBooks with ePub, Macworld's Dan Moren tells how to create your own e-books as easily as you export a PDF or GIF from an authoring program like Office or Photoshop:
Earlier this week, Storyist Software released an update to its eponymous writing software that supports export directly to the ePub format, including the ability to add cover art, tweak formatting, and more. Likewise, the forthcoming 2.0 version of popular writing tool Scrivener is...
Like Buttons Falling From the Sky
CNN announces what you should know about Facebook's changes:
Buttons with the word "like" and a thumbs-up icon on them are going to start popping up all over the Internet [web:]. By clicking one, you indicate that you find the content interesting, relevant or helpful. Basically, you would recommend it to a friend.
Before Wednesday, "like" buttons only were on Facebook. Now, they'll be all over the place… When you click one, you post the item — whether it's a blog post, photo or...
April 24, 2010
Even Money
When a designer has no client, (s)he can sometimes do the best work. MONOmoda reviews a US money redesign by Michael Tyznik. The use of the Amendments to the Constitution is quite striking and smart. Compare and contrast. Hat tip: Mau.
A List Apart No. 304
Issue 304 of A List Apart for people who make websites squeezes JavaScript and delves into faceted navigation:
Better JavaScript Minificationby NICHOLAS C. ZAKAS
Like CSS, JavaScript works best when stored in an external file that can be downloaded and cached separately from our site's individual HTML pages. To increase performance, we limit the number of external requests and make our JavaScript as small as possible. The inventor of Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI...
April 23, 2010
April 22, 2010
Go fly a kite
Oops! I forgot to write a blog post about the new $100 bill when I tweeted about it last night.
It's ugly as hell.
April 21, 2010
Stop chasing followers
The internet is not a numbers game. It's about dialog, persuasion, and influence.
You don't want a million people reading your HTML5 blog. You want members of the HTML5 working groups and key influencers from Google, Apple, and Microsoft reading your HTML5 blog. Likewise, it's better to have twenty meaningful comments than a thousand +1s.
Ditto with Twitter follower counts. What it would gain you to acquire all the followers in the world? Bragging rights? Mysterious leverage...
April 20, 2010
Touch Gesture Reference Guide
The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces including iPhone, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Android, and more.
The guide contains an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands. It tells how to use these gestures to support major user actions; provides visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables; and additionally provides an...
April 19, 2010
My glamorous life
My small old shi'zu watches intently as I embed the five pills that keep him alive in little balls of hypoallergenic canned food—a process that takes five minutes and must be repeated three times a day. As I work, I smile down at him and sing, "Daddy's makin' meatballs."
