Free eBook for web designers
// Smashing Magazine is promoting it’s Smashing Library service and they are offering a free eBook with a collection of some of their best articles. Contents include: - Designing For The Reading Experience - Logical Breakpoints For Your Responsive Design - Sketching A New Mobile Web - Towards A Retina Web - Avoiding The Pitfalls Of [Continue reading]
OMG, it’s full of cubes!
// More three.js awesomeness: here’s how to stretch test your graphics card: a three.js, WebGL demo by Ben Adams featuring up to 600.000 rotating cubes! How many frames per second do you get? (Firefox/Chrome only) See it in full screen
No, this isn’t Flash either
// Scary (in terms of the data) / awesome (in terms of the development part behind it) example of three.js, a javascript library for creating 3D scenes. See it live here
Fillerati: Jules Verne and more instead of lorem ipsum
// If you’re tired of using a lorem ipsum text every time you want to fill up dummy text, here is a simple solution. Fillerati by Michael McMillan offers you: - choice of 6 classic authors like Verne and Wells - choice between plain text, list, title and paragraph html - choice on the amount [Continue reading]
Jazz up your web page with Spritely
// Apparently, programming, like life, is sometimes going in circles. Almost 30 years ago I was doing my first steps in programming, coding sprites on my MSX2 in some lame attempts at game development :) Today, I’m revisiting the technique for a whole different purpose. Below you can see an elegant approach to a hover [Continue reading]
This is not how HTML/CSS should be used! Part II
// Is this getting silly? I’d say probably not, we need to push the boundaries of tech, even if it means we end up in hyperspace :) Following “Tunnel Vision 3D” by Peter Westendorp, here is another example of HTML/CSS mastery by Noah Blon. Enjoy this in full screen! http://cdpn.io/GKflw
“Cute device”
// Legendary science fiction writer Bruce Sterling tried on #googleglass on a Robert Scoble presentation at the NEXT Berlin conference. His response: “Cute device” and “There’s a very 1980′s feeling about it” :) See the video http://bit.ly/186Tqcg at 8:58′, overall an interesting discussion with the audience on the ramifications on every day life, privacy and the ways [Continue reading]
Logstalgia: Visualising Apache logs
// Argh! The moment of anger when you find a cool weekend project but realize you don’t really have a free weekend sometime soon :) Logstalgia is a website traffic visualization that replays or streams web-server access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and an never ending torrent of requests. Requests appear [Continue reading]
Blog Redesign, Part II
// I’ve been refining the redesign of this blog (see previous post about it for a screenshot of how it looked in the past) and here is the summary of recent changes: All pages: Full page width! Home page: - More space between boxes - Very very white background on boxes instead of gray - [Continue reading]
Social media cross-posting with Friends+me
// I’ve recently posted about Fotostat (http://bit.ly/g-fotostat ) , a new service for cross-posting within several social networks, with focus on images. I have been using it with great success for a site I manage. But if your main network is Google+, you are out of luck, because Google has only given write access through the G+ API to selected third-party [Continue reading]
Newton’s playground: Javascript physics engines
The awesome animation below is actually the recorded output of a real-time #Javascript-powered physics engine. There has been quite a lof of progress in this field lately using technologies like #canvas and #WebGL, here are some recent developments: The “dragable/tearable cloth” demo comes from lonely-pixel.com. Play with it live and get the code here http://bit.ly/15wyK0F There are more demos on the developer’s website, [Continue reading]
Look, I have a notification about… something
// The badge icon says I have a notification in the #Google+ app. So I open it, and click app’s notifications counter. And I see this. Some (specified) people did something but it doesn’t tell me what. Some other people whose names are mentioned did something else (or perhaps the same action) in probably another [Continue reading]
Blogger and the Holy Grail of unified comments
// So yesterday Google announced a further integration of Google+ comments and Blogger. If you enable the related setting, if your Blogger post is shared on G+, any comment on the G+ post with your post will also be shown in the page of the Blogger post in the comments section. This is a Holy [Continue reading]
Now this IS parallax!
// I’m not a big fan of parallax scrolling sites. Mainly because it is CPU-intensive which means that you will have people with a bad experience and by definition you are constrained to a small number of "pages" which means that you can only use it for small sites and you can’t upgrade such a [Continue reading]
This is not how HTML and CSS should be used!
// Some fun coding by Peter Westendorp: "Tunnel vision 3D" with CSS. As Peter writes: "This is an experiment to demonstrate the power of CSS and modern browsers. This is not how HTML and CSS should be used." :D See it live here http://bit.ly/10SvqbK
This is the Internet!
// Openly accessible data + open source development + open technologies = awesome :)The people at Teehan+Lax have developed a method to create timelapse videos using imagery from Google Street View. They call it Google Street View Hyperlapse and you can see the amazing video that you can produce as well, along with links to [Continue reading]
Full size photo uploads: G+ winning the tech war on Facebook
// In the latest #googleplusupdate, you can now upload the full-sized photos and G+ will serve them accordingly: Initially you get a reduced (but great quality) version but you can zoon and pan to see more detail! How to have this: To enable full-size desktop uploads, just visit your settings at https://www.google.com/settings/plus, and check "Upload [Continue reading]
Social media cross-posting with Fotostat
// I’ve been expanding the number of social networks I use, almost like an addict lately :) So I’ve been looking for a way to administer my addiction in an easier way. I had an automation between G+, Twitter and my WordPress blog (so I was only posting on G+) and additionally was cross-posting to [Continue reading]
Just because you can: GUI icons with pure CSS
// Inspired by an elegant piece of CSS code by +Lea Verou, creating the WiFi code (see it here http://bit.ly/wificss), I searched for other examples of this and found this little gem: A demo of 84 icons created with just CSS by +Nicolas Gallagher. Nicolas calls it’s a "technical exercise" but given that this was [Continue reading]
Charts with Javascript: even more ways to kill Flash
// Javascript-powered chart solutions is a favorite topic of mine, so here are a few more options for you- NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) builds upon the powerful D3 library and currently supports 11 different interactive chart types - Rickshaw (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/) also built on D3, can be used for live-data time graphs with 4 customisable chart types _ [Continue reading]
Draft: cloud text-editing for any anything anywhere
// I’ve written about #Draft already a few days ago http://bit.ly/g-draft when it was “just” a web-based text #editor for #Dropboxand Google Drive with version control and collaboration features.But I need to write again as a #Chrome extension was released that redefined how you can use Draft. I’ll just copy the developer’s (+Nathan Kontny) description: [Continue reading]
Twitter Cards: Engage!
// Just 6 days after my submission for inclusion on the #TwitterCards program, I got in and in the screenshot you can see the result: whenever someone tweets a URL of my blog, an “expanded view” will be available with a title, short description, thumbnail, my name and #Twitter handleIt also works on the mobile (iOS [Continue reading]
Improve links to your site on Twitter with Twitter Cards
// Announced since last July, Twitter Cards is Twitter’s equivalent (or “answer” if you like tech drama) to the Open Graph. By defining a set of #meta #tags in your #HTML code you can provide instructions to #Twitterin order to display an “expanded” preview of your page, when your page’s URL is included in a [Continue reading]
Tracking shares before they happen (or even if they don’t happen)?
// A tricky question poped up in my Quora home page: Is it possible to check, if somebody requested your site’s #meta #tags ?The logic behind this is that you could track social shares even if the user doesn’t complete the process (load’s up the URL on Facebook or a sharing widget) and then quits. [Continue reading]
HTC cloned Jony Ive!
// The “evidence” :) 1) Video of Jony Ive on Apple’s unibody process http://youtu.be/lJx6cF-H__I 2) Video of HTC’s zero-gap process http://youtu.be/pDjfh5mFWUc
Quora, a Google+ blogging alternative?
// I generally detest article headlines that pose questions rather than provide a definite position, but I’m undecided on this one.Recently, #Quora upgraded their Boards feature, renaming the Blogs. The standard features include: - a quora.com subdomain of your choice - set a title, logo/avatar image and #blog description - choice of set of basic [Continue reading]
How to create an infographic from your Google Analytics data
// Well, there’s not much to say here. People love #infographics for visualising information and numbers in an easy to consume manner. People also love #GoogleAnalytics for an endless amount of #statisticsabout their website.Now you can combine both with a few clicks on the free tool by Visual.ly. The process is relatively simple, you connect [Continue reading]
Does your company know what the internet is?
//_UPDATE_: The situation has been sorted out, the project is back online normally http://bit.ly/chartjs // Yesterday I wrote (http://bit.ly/g-chartjs) about Chart.js, a new library for javascript/canvas-based charts. A day later, the site is down with a note shown in the screenshot, basically explaining how the developer’s employer doesn’t like the idea of #OpenSource. Here’s the outcome [Continue reading]
Chart.js: cross-browser, animated, HTML5 charts
//Non-Flash charts is a favourite topic of mine (see more here http://bit.ly/g-chart), basically because charts have been one of the last things Flash could do that HTML couldn’t. This of course has been changing a lot the last few years. Another very recent (released yesterday!) example of is Chart.js. It packs: - 6 animated chart types: [Continue reading]
Text editing on the cloud: Draft
// I’ve been using Dropbox for some time now to access work files from home or when travelling. But when I’ve recently had to work on a closed down Windows PC that I couldn’t install anything, I had to get further "deeper" into the #cloud. :) I’ve been keeping quick notes in text files stored [Continue reading]