Tagged: ‘technology’

I love the optimism in Janice Fraser’s latest essay for Adaptive Path: It’s a Whole New Internet. Normally, an article similar to this would have just been another link. I guess this one deserved more. Janice captures a lot of the enthusiasm and energy building up around a new connected experience.

I happen to think it’s a little more than just Ajax though. Technologies are ripening everywhere. A culmination of lots of ingenuity at once. One small quote from the essay might be the key:

“Invention inspires invention.”

Embrace what’s happening around you. Contribute something of your own. And heed her words:

“Things are about to change in a very big way.”

# tagged: technology 26

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about XML syndication feeds, publishing redundancy, and how we link to those feeds. Dan Cederholm was wondering last week why we still support multiple feed formats. A few weeks before, Molly Holzschlag surveyed a few sites to determine how they link to respective feeds, and where those links are located on the page. read more

# tagged: site, technology 20

After more than a year of implementing my own measures, I think it’s time to help raise awareness of email security. And in doing so, document the way I use SSH to secure email when I’m on a wireless network. If you’re concerned about strangers having open access to your usernames and passwords, and all the email you send and receive while connected to a public wireless network — whether you use a Mac or not — you’ll want to read this. read more

# tagged: email, technology 74

I’ve given a few public presentations this year, and still have a few more to go. I could have used PowerPoint, or the more logical Mac alternative, Keynote, to assemble the visuals for each presentation. But I’ve never liked that route. Given the material I usually cover, I like to present in the same format I’m talking about. read more

# tagged: events, technology

The very slow lane. I returned from Austin a little over a week ago. Once here, I had to face the reality: I needed to use a dial-up connection to get online from home. Something I haven’t needed to do (at home) for almost five years since DSL was installed. Our office has high-speed wifi, as do the cafes I frequent. Even when traveling, many airports and hotels are now set up with a high-speed wireless network. So I seldom experience dial-up speeds. read more

# tagged: personal, technology

Only a couple days left for the current Blogstakes contests. Win a three-book collection from The Onion or a hard-shell CD case. It couldn’t be easier to get entered if you already have a blog — just add a link to one or both of the contests somewhere on your site where others will find it. Nothing else required is from you. Someone reading your site clicks the link you made, they fill out a simple form on Blogstakes. If they win, you win too. Two girls for every — no, scratch that — I mean: two winners for every prize. read more

# tagged: events, technology

This is interesting. HP and Apple are joining forces to create an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod™. The device will be due out this summer. I had mixed reactions upon first seeing the news. My immediate thoughts went back to the Mac clones of 7 or 8 years ago. But I’m assuming Apple and Jobs know what they’re doing by OEMing the device for another brand powerhouse.

It certainly seems this could continue the increase in exposure of Apple’s hardware and software. According to the release:

As part of the alliance, HP consumer PCs and notebooks will come preinstalled with Apple’s iTunes® jukebox software and an easy-reference desktop icon to point consumers directly to the iTunes Music Store, ensuring a simple, seamless music experience.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment while Apple is enjoying the market leader position in the digital music player space. Will Apple benefit in the long run? Who knows? But it’s a brave step either way.

# tagged: apple, entertainment, technology

After HP’s “you blog” ad attracted enough attention a couple days ago, I thought it appropriate to add a little more context, so no one thinks the campaign is entirely blog-focused. That ad just happened to catch my attention (and interest) because of its subject matter. As others pointed out in the comments for that entry, this could have been part of the ad agency’s intent. But I actually think whoever thought of the blog ad might just be trying to capitalize on a rapidly rising trend before anyone else does. read more

# tagged: technology

Spotted in the Montgomery BART station last week, I finally snapped a photo of this ad on the way into the office today. It’s part of a large HP campaign that has ads plastered all over the walls and floors of the Muni/BART stations, promoting their computing products. This one obviously stood out from the others. Somewhat presumptuous, wouldn’t you say? It shares that same haughty feeling that Wired was known for throughout the mid ’90s. In fact, I think all the other current HP ads are declarative like this one: “You travel light…”, “You do this…”, “You do that…”

Update: I’ve added shots of a few more HP ads in the same BART station, to provide some context for this one.

# tagged: blog, technology

Remember that confession I wrote a while ago? A sobering story of a designer who grew up on Apples and Macs, but gave into the dark side, jumped ship, and began using Windows. Well, it’s coming up on a year since I wrote that piece. Some of my friends were beginning to wonder if I was serious about shaking the Windows addiction. read more

# tagged: apple, personal, technology

Mozilla Foundation charges out of the gates today with a handful of new product releases. Heavyweight full-featured browser Mozilla 1.5, lightweight standalone browser Firebird 0.7, and email/newsgroup client Thunderbird 0.3. read more

# tagged: browsers, technology, web

News.com staff writer Paul Festa draws more public attention to Internet Explorer’s lack of full CSS support in Developers gripe about IE standards inaction. Paul uses Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Jakob Nielsen as sources for quotes about Adobe’s move to partner with Opera to improve CSS support in GoLive. In doing so, he nails the issues, shedding a brighter light on the lingering problems with Microsoft’s overly-popular browsing application. IE is a decent browser, but its shortcomings make it a dead-weight which is holding back forward-thinking web design and development. read more

# tagged: browsers, css, microsoft, technology

Frank Leahy is a friend and former-colleague from Wired. He was responsible for creating one of the primary Content Management Systems used at Lycos, and made significant contributions to the engineering effort when we redesigned Wired News last year. Frank left Wired a couple months ago, and he and his family of four recently picked up their lives and moved to England, settling temporarily in what looks like an amazing location: Cornwall. Understandably, Frank immediately has more time, and so much to write about that he’s started his own weblog, titled “A Year in Cornwall“. read more

# tagged: locations, people, technology

Yesterday, VeriSign resorted to more anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics. They’ve placed a wildcard in global DNS records for .com and .net top-level domains, essentially hijacking all unregistered domains, and those with invalid DNS entries. In place of the traditional error page most browsers used to display, any user who enters an unregistered domain ending in .com or .net (including misspellings) now gets redirected to VeriSign’s Site Finder service, which displays a page entirely controlled by VeriSign, supposedly providing links to the possible intended destination. read more

# tagged: technology, web

The gap between PDAs and laptop computers continues to diminish. I just noted Sony’s upcoming release of the UX50 CLIÉ handheld. With built-in wireless 802.11b, Bluetooth, a low-end digital camera, MP3 player, video recording, and a larger “keyboard” than the typical thumbpads of today’s PDAs and smart phones, devices like this take a another step closer to their larger notebook cousins. read more

# tagged: technology, web

Congratulations to Dan Cederholm and team on launching a brand new Inc.com. The site sports a clean design, valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup, and a nice dosage of the CSS background-image property to pull in decorative icons and bullets, keeping most of them out of the markup. It also uses Dan’s mini-tab effect for main navigation, which he and I must have independently devised around the same time, since Adaptive Path uses something very similar. read more

# tagged: css, technology, web

There’s a wholelotta recent buzz around using Movable Type for more than just weblogs. In addition to the comments and tips Jay Allen has been providing here on Adaptive Path’s MT use, Matt Haughey gives us some great insight into how he takes advantage of MT’s flexibility in Beyond the Blog. Just before reading Matt’s piece, I followed Jay’s pointer to Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT. Both of these are interesting reads given my recent foray into the use of MT to power portions of this site. read more

# tagged: movabletype, site, technology

As I was starting a follow-up entry on the Adaptive Path redesign, Jay Allen posted a comment under Wednesday’s entry in response to another reader’s question. In an earlier comment, Leonya wrote:

It would also be great to see some technical details about the programming side — MT plugins used, tricks, etc. I’m doing development with MT, so such details can be very helpful.

read more

# tagged: movabletype, technology, web

Note: If you don’t care about the technical details of switching over a site and its structure, you can probably skip this entry — it may confuse you, or simply bore the heck out of you.

For the old (second) version of this site, I used a lot of ASP scripting to generate dynamic content and automatically change navigation states based on directory paths and query strings. This new (third) version uses PHP and shifts around some of the directory structure. While I can change and control internal links pointing to my own content, lots of external links exist on other sites which point to files on stopdesign. I wanted to make sure as many of those links as possible still pointed to appropriate places on this site. read more

# tagged: site, technology