Rawkes Weekly – 27 July 2008
Stardate July 28th, 2008 – 4 CommentsIt looks like last week’s predictions were proven right with the “mini heat-wave” currently hitting the UK. Temperatures hit a rather toasty 30 degrees today, and with more planned for next week I can safely say that summer has finally arrived. No doubt it’ll only last a couple of weeks, but grab a nice cold one and let’s enjoy it while it lasts!
In other events this week; I’ve become an official developer for the iPhone. I was pleasantly surprised with the entire process taking less than 48 hours – although I’m not sure where all these reports of “huge queues” are coming from, but I certainly never had any major issues! In fact, a 2 minute call to Apple (including waiting) sorted out my only problem. Kudos to you Apple for proving you care about your customers.
Related to my decision of developing for the iPhone and OS X is the need to expand my programming skills into Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve always wanted to do this, but only this week have I really put these plans into action and grabbing a few books on the subject. I haven’t had much time to read them yet, but hopefully I’ll have an application in the wild by Christmas. Watch this space!
One of the coolest things things I saw recently was while I was at Fabric in London. I’d heard about their “sonic dance-floor” from friends in the past and I must say I was rather excited about checking it out for myself. The whole concept is that they’ve built-in some fairly serious sub-woofers under the floor which give you a “kinetic dance experience”. To cut a long story short, it was absolutely amazing. You really know you’re a geek when the technology under the floor excites you.
So let’s wrap up the week with the latest happenings on the interweb. Enjoy!
This week’s news
We started the week with the outage of Amazon’s S3 distributed file system, crippling a whole variety of web services that have come to rely on it. The outage completely disabled two web services that I’ve come to use often: SpanningSync for synchronising Goolgle Calendars with iCal, and the Twinkle localised twitter application. I remember this occurred earlier this year and I think it shows that you should never let your business rely 100% on another company’s service; you never know when it could go down!
Everyone’s favourite social network Facebook released their long awaited redesign to mixed opinion. The design has gone down fairly quietly, which is definitely better than an uproar. However, I feel that the more hardcore users (the addicts) of Facebook are a little frustrated over the redesign because so much has changed. Personally I think it’s a great design and Facebook are really heading in good directions with the clean, utilitarian look. I’ve spotted the odd table element being used for layout, but at least they aren’t basing their entire system on tables like some of the other networks… *cough* … MySpace! … *cough* … Excuse me, I seem to have caught a cold!
MySpace isn’t all bad, though. They announced that they’re going to be supporting OpenID, which is a great move on their part. Let’s just hope they can pull it off.
Clearleft’s user testing application Silverback was released on Thursday. I have to admit I haven’t had time to try it out yet, but I’m really impressed with the development and the video walkthroughs that are doing the rounds on Vimeo. With guys like Clearleft behind the wheel you can be fairly sure this app is going to be polished and really useful for web designers, I’m looking forward to being able to use it in my projects.
Google has announced that it’s now indexing around 1 trillion pages. These are some totally mind-blowing statistics, though. It makes Rawkes a massive 0.0000000017% of Google’s index!
Links of the week
- Onehub – A promising looking project management and resource sharing web app
- iPhone samples – A selection of code samples to create web applications for the iPhone
- jQuery colour picker – Useful plugin for adding colour picking functionality to a web app
- WordPress template tags reference – A well formatted list of the template tags for WordPress, much more user friendly than the Codex
- The Process – How would a major coporation handle the creation of a project like a simple “STOP” sign? This rings true on so many levels!
- Hi-res Adobe icons – Adam Betts has updated his range of icons for Adobe products
- A small design study of big blogs – Forget the slightly odd title, this article does well in going over the design choices on major blogs
- The Font Conference – CollegeHumor strike again with this hilarious skit on fonts
- Automatic URL shortening with TextExpander – Applescript to let TextExpander automatically create bit.ly URLs from a url in the clipboard
Site of the week
Silverback
An awesome guerrilla holding a clipboard. What more do you want?
Onehub
Such a clean layout, with excellent attention to detail.
Design Disease
The illustrations and texture on this design really make it stand out for me.
Lesson of the week
Not everything can be thought through logically.
Track of the week
“Gobbledigook” by Sigur Ros. The new album by Sigur Ros is an absolute spanker, but I really like this one in particular, it’s surreal when you listen with headphones on!
Predictions for next week
I’m going to melt in the heat and start praying for the colder weather to come back!
Tags: weekly
Comments
4 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 27 July 2008”
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Sounds like an awesome idea! I’m trying to make one that downloads my brain, but I can’t get the cable to fit! :(
I got a few ideas, though. We’ll see how it goes. I gotta learn Cocoa first! I’ll poke you later Roo as I bought an iMac and want advice!
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Guy Davies says: [perma]
When are you planing to launch your series on “Setting up OS X for Web Development”? I have been eagerly awaiting this for ages :)
iPhone development? - oh awesome. Make me an app which allows me to pay for anything by swiping my phone across a scanner :)
I will give you 25% of the profit :)
Any serious ideas for apps tho?