YouTube - The Machine is Us/ing Us Final Version.

“We have to rethink Everything”

Google Releases API for Cool Visualization of Data Mashups from Many Sources.

This is extremely cool and it reminds me of stuff mentioned on Star Trek. The ability to manage datasets that are huge and apply them to easy to read graphs is a huge boon for research and understanding. Enabling researchers access to tools like this make their lives easier because they dont have to have computer science degrees to make use of data from censuses or anything else, they simply plug in the spreadsheet of the relevant data and viola they have usable data.

A Collection of HTML5 Resources and Tutorials : Speckyboy Design Magazine.

This page has great example videos that show the possibilities of HTML5. He also shows how the code looks and explains what functions are used for.

Jaime Davila… – Monday, November 30, 2009

I’d like to talk to discuss the benefits of working with Sitecore when you need to deliver distinct rendered views depending on the device the client is using, in this case mobiles.

The general steps to get your site displayed differently based on the device are the same no matter what kind of site or device you target. Let’s check them out.

I’m going to use some basic code use for a demo we did recently for an important client, The Detroit People Mover. Basically we decided the usual layout use for the site to be displayed in a normal browser would be really awkward for the client visiting the site via mobile.

The important idea behind a site design for mobiles is to keep in mind that the client has a reduced display are and just few possibilities to interact with the site (e.g. the iPhone doesn’t work well with flash animations), so the first thing you need to do is to extract the most important parts of the site to highlight them. This is how we do it.

Now we have the mobile site design we need to get a good front-end developer to create this design in code, specifically in .net code, because the layouts in Sitecore are created as aspx files; the controls/placeholders could be ascx or xsl files.

These are some quick snippets of the main layout and the home and menu placeholders:

After your front-end developer had finished implementing the mobile design, you need to set up Sitecore so it can know what layout to deliver based on the device. To do this you just need to go to this path: /Sitecore/Layouts/Devices

Once there, right click on the Devices icon, and select insert->device, call it iPhone or whatever you want (we decided to serve this render for iPhones, that’s why we choose that name). Here’s the MOST important part – Browser Agent: you can choose to use a query string which contains the browser info sent by the the browser or you can directly type the browser agent. Sitecore supports the most modern devices, so you just need to type iPhone, BlackBerry, WebOS, or just experiment with the model you’re trying to target.

After you finish this step, please go to the page you want to configure with the new layout, right click in the content you want, in the ribbon select “Presentation”->”Details” and then select the mobile device you just created and associate to it the specific layout with its controls.

And that’s it, you just need a mobile device to test your site. Enjoy it!

Read Oshyn’s blog at: http://www.oshyn.com/resources/blog.html

Dress Up Your WordPress Theme In Under 5 Minutes Using jQuery – woorkup.com.

YouTube HTML5 Demo.

http://html5demos.com/

http://9elements.com/io/?p=153

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/spec.html

http://diveintohtml5.org/

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/html-5-supersedes-web-forms-20-004054.php

http://www.slideshare.net/carsonified/the-future-of-html-5-by-bruce-lawson

http://html5gallery.com/2009/11/love-movie/

http://html5doctor.com/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial

Because I will not shut up about CSS3, this time I’ve decided to show you a little bit of the multi-column layout module. This module allows you to layout the content of an element in multiple columns, like flowing text on a newspaper-type layout.

via Web Designer Notebook » Remembering: The CSS3 Multi-Column Layout Module.

Custom CSS, Keep it or Lose it? « SexyBookmarks.

This plugin for WordPress is very cool, it has all the links the major social bookmarking and sites so that a user doesnt have to have a bookmarklet in their menu bar, all kinds of animated goodness.

Adhering to standards and using public tools is incredibly important in that doing so allows for tools and information to evolve beyond its original vision or use. I have previously posted many links from top design sites that espouse the importance of this behavior and also lots of howtos and walkthroughs.

http://lordouroborus.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/34-cheat-sheets-for-web-designers-and-developers-web-and-designers-complete-resource-platform-for-web-designers-and-developers/

http://lordouroborus.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/zen-coding-a-speedy-way-to-write-htmlcss-code-smashing-magazine/

http://lordouroborus.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/poster-what-beautiful-html5-looks-like/

http://lordouroborus.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/great-web-design-resource-site/

http://lordouroborus.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-creating-a-design-and-converting-it-to-html-and-css/

The other great thing about using standards is that you can stand on the shoulders of giants. Not having to reinvent the wheel gives designers and creatives the time to invent new things and ideas. Work smarter, not harder. Dont we have enough to worry about and battle with daily without having to increase our stress and frustration?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_Tutorial

“Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web. Ubiquity commands can do nearly anything. Ubiquity comes with a set of commands that make common Web tasks faster and easier. In this tutorial we’ll teach you how to use some of them. By the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to perform quick Wikipedia, Google, definition, and Yelp searches; add maps to your email; and translate a snippet of a web page, highlight a word, and then email it to a friend.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman

Richard Stallman is a heavyweight in the opensource/privacy movement and he advocates keeping files private and local versus the cloud as he fears that once users are locked into cloud services and storage they will be charged highway robbery prices to use, and even more if they want to extract their data.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-computing.html

This article discusses the different types of cloud computing among the different providers, namely Microsofts “software as a service” model, or Amazons “Utility Computing”, or Google’s “user end applications” model.

http://opencloudmanifesto.org/

This is merely an interest group that is gathering support to keep cloud computing open. Having open formats mean that data can easily be transferred to other services if need be or if a company goes out of business the customers can move their data without having to pay someone to convert the data to a new format.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2008/tc2008082_445669.htm

This article  talks about how some companies that have moved to cloud  services are saving  money and time  by letting services like Amazons S3 handle their data and services. Despite occasional downtimes it has been worthwhile for these companies to remotely manage their data and services and let Amazon or whoever manage the hardware.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm

This article describes Googles Cloud initiative which encourages young engineers to begin thinking about global information crunching and massive scale computing instead of small networks like a college computer network. The University of Washington has a course called Google 101 which teaches students to think in the grand scale to see a bigger picture and to start work on services that utilize the power of distributed processing and information stored on servers all over the globe.

In this post we present a new speedy way of writing HTML code using CSS-like selector syntax — a handy set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. It was developed by our author Sergey Chikuyonok and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.How much time do you spend writing HTML code: all of those tags, attributes, quotes, braces, etc. You have it easier if your editor of choice has code-completion capabilities, but you still do a lot of typing.We had the same problem in JavaScript world when we wanted to access a specific element on a Web page. We had to write a lot of code, which became really hard to support and reuse. And then JavaScript frameworks came along, which introduced CSS selector engines. Now, you can use simple CSS expressions to access DOM elements, which is pretty cool.

via Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code – Smashing Magazine.

Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, weve introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because Im deaf. Today, Im in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.

via Official Google Blog: Automatic captions in YouTube.

Over at the Chromium blog, Google has announced a project theyve been working on called SPeeDY. Its an updated transport protocol for the web which improves upon HTTP, reducing latency through network-fu like multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and header compression.

via Googles SPDY protocol will speed up the web – and Chrome OS, too.