I follow over a hundred different blogs and twitter accounts, most of them tech related so I can keep up-to-date with the latest trends and topics in my industry; however I always take time to relax and read about my other interests.
The following blogs are among my favourites and most often visited; they all have great designs and some amazing content, I hope you enjoy them too.
How can you not love a blog that features ‘Space Suit of the Week’ ? KN has varied content covering fashion, music, culture and art, with frequent free mixcasts, downloadable ‘mixtapes’ based on themes and some fantastic wallpapers by guest artists.
I first came across this photoblog while reseaching for a holiday in Toronto a few years back and have been following it since. I love Sam’s photography and the simple concept of uploading a photo every day, the site reminds me of my time in a fantastic city and the alt text included on every image detailing the equipment used even influenced my last camera purchase.
I’m into food and enjoy cooking; Local Lemons is probably my favourite recipe site. The photography is beautiful, dominating the page and detailing all the ingredients and stages required. Its clear that the author has a real passion for food – check out her ‘Fast Food Slow: Big Mac‘.
Bikes are another passion of mine, I recently added a third to my stable. Boutique Cycles is a simple site for proud owners to show of their custom bikes. There is a subculture of riders that make building up bikes an art form, sourcing just the right parts and dreaming up colour schemes.
This one is actually an independent film magazine; the site features interviews and articles as well written review and encourages community feedback. Every copy of the magazine is viewable online, but I’d really like to own some of the printed versions if only for the amazing artwork.
Something I’ve come to realise as I’ve broadened my view on web application development, is to not rely solely on conventional sources such as books and blogs for learning.
Think about it, were you ever shown how to use a hand dryer? What can their design teach you about UX design? Good design is good design, it doesn’t have to be a web based to inspire you to create a fantastic new webapp.
Great customer service in an Apple store, a nice touch at a restaurant or hotel that made a difference to your visit… what can you take from that? How can you use what pleased you in the real world and apply it to your site or application?
The pride and attention to detail a master knifemaker puts into his work is inspirational, even if your product is virtual and your tools a mouse and keyboard.
Seeking inspiration from unusual sources isn’t new; the development methodology SCRUM is based on the sport rugby. The concepts of Kanban and Just-in-Time, first employed by Japanese factories, have also been applied to software development.
Nature has always been a valuable source of design inspiration, for example the nose cone of the Shinkansen bullet train is modelled on a Kingfisher’s beak and the Fibonacci sequence is also found in the iPod’s design.
Everything in life has a lesson to give, the skill is knowing how to find and use it.
I’ve never been a fan of Flash, either as a developer or as a user, so I’m excited to see the possible beginning of the end for what has become the defacto standard for multimedia on the Web.
Its a common a complaint that the iPhone and upcoming iPad don’t have support for Flash, but why would they? The Flash player is a buggy, resource intensive , security risk that these devices are better off without. There is very little that Flash can do that can’t be done with other technology such as jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3 (see the links below for some examples) all of which will run on modern browsers without the requirement of any plugins.
The two main video streaming sites YouTube and Vimeo are trialing HTML5 versions of their sites, using the h.264 video format in place of Flash. I’m hoping that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices will encourage more content providers (such as Hulu and BBC iPlayer) to turn their backs on Flash and embrace these new technologies.
For the past few weeks I’ve been using ClickToFlash for Safari, which blocks Flash content, giving you the option to run it or not. I have noticed a significant increase in the loading of pages and am not missing the horrible Flash ads that have frequently crashed my browser and brought even powerful dual core computers to their knees. I’m ready for a future without Flash and praise companies like Apple, Google and Vimeo for taking the initiative to push the latest in Web technology to improve their user’s experience.
Apple are apparently going to announce their oft rumoured tablet computer (possibly called the iSlate) in the next few weeks and Microsoft unveiled their underwhelming (stock Windows 7 on a 5″ screen, really?) new ’slate’ PCs at CES earlier this month.
This form factor has been tried before but hasn’t been a widespread success, they are often large and bulky with poor performance; this new generation promise to smaller, lighter and well, we’ll have to see about performance. But still who needs them? A pure touchscreen interface isn’t ideal for work, I can’t imagine coding or writing documents with an onscreen keyboard on a regular basis, more suitable, although still unpleasent to spend much time using, are the cheap netbooks that have become so popular.
So whats left, web browsing and media playback? I already have a great product for that in the iPhone, a fair percentage of my personal web use is already done on my iPhone. Using excellent mobile formatted sites like BBC and Google’s web apps and apps like Facebook and Tweetie; I rarely miss a larger screen. About the only situation I could see the larger screen of a tablet being an advantage is as an ebook reader, however the larger the screen, the less likely I am to carry it, which is the strength of the iPhone I always have it to hand.
But what will the iSlate be? It makes sense that it would run existing iPhone apps, however it’ll be a huge disappointment if it turns out just to be an iPod touch with a big screen, but equally I don’t want Apple to go the Microsoft route of cramming their full OS onto a small device. Having owned a few Windows Mobile devices and a touchscreen PC I know that using unmodified Windows on a touchscreen is awkward and I don’t see OSX being much different. Microsoft’s Courier concept that cropped up a few months ago looks great and I’d love to use something similar, could the iSlate offer this kind of functionality?
Having said all of that, the guys at Apple are smarter than me and its quite likely they’ve thought of something I haven’t and the iSlate will be the most desirable product of 2010. So I’m saving for one, reading all the rumours and patiently waiting on the live blogging of the announcement anyway.
Microformats are additional markup that add semantics to content in web pages; their aim is so to improve the way information can be searched, extracted, indexed, cross-referenced or combined by software by describing content.
A good example of this is hCard, heres some basic contact information in plain HTML :
With the hCard markup this information has become more useful, the content has context making it easier to be automatically processed or extracted for use in applications like Outlook or Address Book (hCard is the web based equivalent of the vCard format). Other Microformats include hReview, hCalendar, hResume and hRecipe, take a look at http://microformats.org/ for more information.
One of the principles of Microformats is that they should ‘be presentable and parsable, visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata’; this definitely seems to be the direction the web is going in as Google recently announced they ignore keywords in meta tags and Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have incorporated support for microformats some of their webapps; as have popular social networking sites such as digg, facebook, last.fm, linkedin, twitter.
Another interesting use of Microformats is the XFN (XHMTL friend network), this was the first microformat and is used to describe the relationship between individual’s and their various online presences. Its really simple and consists of two attributes.
rel=”me” – this is used to show that the link is related to yourself (eg the links from this blog to my twitter profile page)
rel=”friend” – this can be used to describe relationships between people when linking (eg the links from this blog to my friend’s blogs), this tag can also be stuffed with context such as ‘co-worker, met, acquaintance, colleague, child’.
