Data Visualization for Web Designers
Slides from Tom Carden’s talk from Web 2.0 Expo (via):
Some great pointers and tips in there.
Baking WordPress Blogs
Brent Simmon’s recent plea for baked weblogs caught quite a bit of attention (1, 2, 3), and rightly so: it’s unfortunate if your website goes down exactly at the moment when some high profile site is directing lots of traffic in your direction.
If you’re a WordPress user and worried about your site’s performance under heavy load, you might find this article on pre-baking a weblog with WordPress helpful: Using WordPress to generate flat files. Or if you’d rather keep your WordPress weblog dynamic, Rafe Colburn has some great tips for that.
Disintegrating Computers
Somewhat related to Many Tiny Screens, Combined, Tim Maly writes about Disintegrating Computers:
Where I’d once do that by opening up a new window, I now grab my smartphone and look there. Instead of metaphoric operating system windows, I have a pile of devices acting as a windowing system. I can physically switch between them as needed, lay them out on the surface how I like, and work accordingly.
I increasingly do this myself: open up some manual for reference on the iPad while working on the computer, using the calculator instead of its desktop counterpart on my iPhone, etc.
See also: this lovely example of Screen multiplicity in a Swiss train by Nicolas Nova.
Three simple rules for publishing software on the App Store:
- I will never read the reviews of my apps.
- I will never put a $5 app on sale.
- I will never blindly throw promo codes out via social media services.
Why I Don’t Do Sales On The App Store.
It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when buying a new car. Prospective users would hand-wring for weeks on Twitter and send us closely-worded, punctilious lists of questions before creating an account.
Maciej Ceglowski’s write-up of the mass-exodus of Delicious users to Pinboard late last year is both interesting and entertaining.
The Very Difficult Problem of Notifications:
The notification system must actually alert you to important things (that meeting you are about to be late for) and the system needs to be in your face about it, else you won’t truly be notified of a damned thing. [...] If every icon has a badge that reads 1 in a little red dot, or everything is glowing your favorite shade of color, then nothing is really being conveyed — instead everything is being ignored.
Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP:
The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture.
The Proposition
I’ve been obsessively listening to Flashman’s debut album To The Victor – The Spoils! all week. This video makes the (already excellent) song The Proposition probably a thousand times better:
Flashman — The Proposition from Airside on Vimeo.
Pachube Internet of Things “Bill of Rights”
- People own the data they (or their “things”) create.
- People own the data someone else creates about them.
- People have the right to use and share their data however they want to.
- People have the right to access their data in a standard format.
- People have the right to delete or backup their data.
- People have the right to privacy.
Pachube Internet of Things “Bill of Rights” (via)
Unfortunately we don’t even have these rights on the good old Internet of Bits to begin with.
Augmented Dancing
Realtime projection mapping on a moving body using Kinect (via):
Make the Line Dance from 1024 on Vimeo.
And another one, probably slightly nsfw:
1minute69 Workshop BodyScapes #4 from afterme on Vimeo.
