January 2009

Beautiful (and scary at the same time) visualization of the growth of Walmart from 1962 through 2007. It’s like a virus that spreads across our country. Compare the Walmart viz with another Nathan just posted for Target today. From Nathan’s post describing the Target work:

You might guess that Target and Walmart expanded similarly (I did, at least), but you’d be wrong. Both started in Central United States, and both were officially founded in 1962 by two men who both owned stores under a different name before the Target and Walmart boom. However, besides more rapid growth, Walmart first expanded outwards from its home state before going country-wide while Target seems to have gone wherever opportunity knocked…

After subscribing to the feed last week on Inauguration Day, I’ve been reading updates on President Obama’s actions on an almost daily basis. I’m not sure if they can keep up the frequency of posts that have filled the blog already. But isn’t it amazing that we’ve never had this level of insight into the President’s activities — and on such a regular basis — before now?

Free service from a datacenter in Germany that allows you to check the rendering of any website in IE 5.5, 6, 7, or 8. It’s fast — it returned each screenshot for me in about 5 seconds. Screenshot size seems to be fixed at 1024×768, so you won’t see anything “below the fold” and there doesn’t seem to be a way to modify that size. But hey, it’s free. They also list and describe other screenshot services. (via Dan Benjamin)

How could I not link to these photos of Obama’s Inauguration posted yesterday on The Big Picture? For some reason, despite numerous other photos that were better composed or more striking in their angle, I was really moved by photo #23, and stared at it for a good 5 minutes, considering everything that was going through Vertie’s mind at the time.

Interesting shift in what Apple allows into the App Store. Previously, some assumed 3rd-party apps that provided duplicate functionality to the core iPhone apps weren’t allowed. Though somewhere, one of the sources I saw about this story noted that each of the approved browsers are based on WebKit. So that premise may exclude Opera or Firefox from ever appearing in the App Store.

An extension for Dreamweaver that validates HTML/CSS, verifies microformats usage, and checks other nuances of standardista fare. It’s actually branded with the name of The King (of WebStandards).

The full text of articles in John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin’s first issue of Scroll Magazine is now online. Includes pieces by Indi Young, Aaron Gustafson, Joe Clark, Ethan Marcotte, Veerle Pieters, and Jeff Veen.

Once again, beautiful work by Jon Hicks on icons for FontExplorer Pro. Plus a look at the sketches and process he went through to arrive at the final results.

John lays down the criticism on they way the W3C is approaching HTML5. He (rightly, IMO) argues that adding new elements is not the way to make HTML5 backwards nor forwards compatible. Toward the end of the article, he suggests that adding new attributes might achieve both goals. Seems logical to me.

Apple introduces revolutionary new laptop with no keyboard. My favorite quotes:

Just press both sides of the wheel concurrently, and center-click, and there, you have an alphabetical listing of every file on your hard drive. Everything is just a few hundred clicks away…

and

I like how the email automatically says ‘Sent from MacBook Wheel.’ That way people know you have one.

No optician required. (via Jason Fried)

Bookmarking this late. But an interesting perspective into Jason Santa Maria’s simple system for creating the dynamic layouts of his recent entries.

Eric goes into detail on why he chose HTML5 for the AEA site, and what some of the differences are compared to what we already know.

Jeffrey Zeldman details the design of the new AEA site.