Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. […] Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.
The campaign itself I’m not too fussed by (although we do send HTML emails at work, but if those emails don’t look nice in Outlook – and they work in Gmail/Hotmail – then that’s Outlook’s problem), but the site itself is pretty nifty with its real-time aggregation of Tweets. It reminds me of what we did on the Albert Hammond Jr. site, although doing via Twitter is pretty cool and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now (probably using Twivatar just to make it easy).
(Via Ben Ward)
We’ve always liked the idea of showing you photos taken in a particular place […] Today we’re bringing that ability to the smartphone mobile site. For those devices that support it (currently Android and the iPhone with the new 3.0 software), the Mobile Nearby page will figure out where you are in the world and show you photos that have been taken in the same area.
I had forgotten that the version of Safari that ships with iPhone OS 3 has location services built in, which is pretty darn awesome. Location services are the next big thing, and this is one of the key enablers.
Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether. Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.
I’ve been waiting for Fever for a while now as I’m very much still in a RSS reader wilderness, and Bloglines is definitely getting worse not better. Sadly though Fever doesn’t quite look like what I’m after, although it does look beautiful – I’m not too interested in the ‘Fever’ Digg-style personal recommendation thing, and the rest of the reading experience looks like it’s not quite what I’m looking for (see the link above for my rather particular feature set I’m after).
However, I’m not 100% sure that it’s not what I’m after but I can’t tell as there’s no live demo, and there’s no way I’m going to put down $30 without having a go first. I have absolutely no problem with adopting a desktop-app style model (pay upfront and install yourself) for web software but a key part of that is being able to try it first. Can anyone who’s bought Fever tell me whether it meets the list of criteria here?
Seriously considering writing my own one at this point, but that’s probably more hassle then it’s worth…
Back in 2007, at the lovely @media conference (which I’ll be attending this year again in a couple of weeks) as part of the High-Noon Shoot-Out session, Drew McLellan argued passionately that ‘There Is No Fold’. He had placards and everything:
Photo by Jason Santa MariaThe ‘fold’, for those of you that don’t know, is a term used in the newspaper industry referring to the fold of a folded newspaper – anything above half-way up the page is ‘above the fold’ and is of more importance as it’ll be seen when the paper is folded on a news stand. This term has successfully made the journey into the web-world (unlike many of the newspapers…), and now refers to the content you can see on a web page without scrolling.
Of course – and what Drew is referring to with the placards – is that on the web, the concept of ‘the fold’ doesn’t really make much sense; there is no ‘one’ window size – everyone uses different size screens, and you might not have your window maximised, so the idea of there being a hard line across your immaculate page design where everything above it is visible on page load and everything below it needs scrolling to get to is rubbish.
Sort of.
The problem with the whole ‘there is no fold’ thing is that, well, there is a fold. Sure, it varies system to system depending on your browser window size but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just makes it a little tricky.
There’s no way using pure CSS that we can figure out where the ‘fold’ is, but with the application of a little Javascript we can dynamically re-size elements on the page to put on the page exactly what we want people to see when they first load the page. It’s exactly what this site does – on load (and on resize) it figures out how big the window is and sets the height of the top bit to the same size, so all you get is the main background image plus the title graphic (which is positioned relative to the bottom of the window as well).
If you want to delve into the JS and see how it works for yourself it might be easier to have a look at the Discovery Site, specifically the scale.js file where all the work is done. This site is actually fold-less (yes, I’m now making up jargon) as it uses the same techniques to make sure that everything is centred on the screen at all times, no matter what size the window is.
With a little bit of progressive enhancement we can use Javascript to make sites that present the information you want people to see when they first get to your site. The fold exists, but it’s pretty easy to tame it and make it do what you want.
At work we’ve just launched the new site for Jack Peñate, which features all kinds of jParallax-based crazy scrolling flowers.
Really happy with the way this one turned out…
Have you read SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions ? Did you know that by signing up, you grant them (and their successors) the right to do almost anything they like with your music? For free? Forever?
The article goes on to say how they’re sure that SoundCloud aren’t going to do anything nasty with their your content, and I agree but that really misses the point; what happens – and this isn’t too far fetched – if SoundCloud gets bought up by someone who has lesser morals? The T&Cs are quite clear – they could do almost anything they like with your content.
This isn’t a problem unique to SoundCloud either – web darlings Vimeo and ustream.tv both have similar conditions in their T&Cs. This is the really boring side of working on the edge of developing technologies, but in the long run do you really want some little web startup owning your content?
That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
This sounds great in theory. They are promising magic however, so I will believe it when I see it. Also, it looks like they might be relying on @font-face which really doesn’t have enough browser support at this time. Hopefully they’ve solved all these problem, though…
“Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes,” the financial publication reports. “In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.”
This is smart. Very smart. The Pre is the first credible contender to the iPhone, but the first thing that went through my head was ‘what about my music?’. Don’t forget that half of the success of the iPod is down to iTunes and the ease of use when it comes to device management it brings with it. I would assume though that if the Pre turns out to be a serious threat – personally I think there’s room for the both of them – Apple will make it start not working.
If I were Steve Jobs, the video to the right would scare me senseless. It shows a Google Android phone running a Spotify app that appears to succeed in porting the full Spotify experience — still not available to most Americans – to a mobile phone.
On the contrary – I think the reason that we’ve seen this running on an Android based phone is that the iPhone app is embargoed until the WWDC keynote in a week and a half’s time, where it’ll get some stage time. Don’t forget that Apple has been featuring the Last.fm app – which has similar streaming music capabilities – on its TV adverts. A Spotify app is a great addition to the app store.
We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic developer to join our in-house web development team, to develop and build upon our suite of online internal business systems and to code and build artists and label web sites. The role will work alongside our web developers specialising in the back-end technical development of wide and interesting range of sites and tools.
Required skills:
• Strong PHP
• Strong MySQL
• Semantic HTML
• Javascript
• CSS
We are hiring again at work, so if you’re a web dev in London and would like to work with bands like Radiohead, Jarvis, Sonic Youth, Bon Iver and many many more get in touch.
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