Rawkes Weekly – 3 August 2008
Stardate August 3rd, 2008 – 3 CommentsIt’s been fairly quiet this week. Not to say that I haven’t been busy, but there haven’t been any surprises emergencies at work to deal with. The same could be said for the world of web design over the last seven days; there really hasn’t been much going on! Maybe everyone is too busy playing with their iPhone’s?
I can safely say that I officially know how to program basic applications in Objective-C now, hooray! It’s a lovely programming language to learn; I’m particularly fond of the rules that it imposes on the code. Before I get pulled up on that, I know C is a lot stricter. Anyway, I’m well on the way to my plan of releasing an iPhone application by Christmas – I just need to learn Cocoa now…
In unrelated and slightly random announcements; I finally reached pro level in Wii Sports tennis and bowling. However, there is a downside to this amazing feat, specifically being that my right arm feels like it’s about to die! Whoever said the Wii wasn’t a workout is lying through their teeth. Make sure to get in touch if you want to hook up on Mario Kart, or just add me as a friend on the Wii – my mii parade is looking more like a lonely stroll at the moment.
Back to the schedule; Here’s my take on this week’s events. Enjoy! (I’m off now to rest my injured arm and read about Cocoa)
This week’s news
Mozilla have released Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1. It brings a few major additions, such as a new interface for tabbing between windows, and updates to CSS3 and HTML5 support. You can find a whole list of changes on the Firefox 3.1 for developers post at Mozilla. I have to admit I haven’t tried out the alpha yet as I’m quite happy with FF3. I’ll be keeping an eye on development and will definitely try it out once they hit beta.
My favourite note-taking/capturing/do-everything service Evernote has been updated this week. Changes include rich text editing on the web based version, plus a few updates to the Windows application. I’m still waiting for them to put hyperlinks and lists in the OS X version, though. Come on Evernote, at least make your features cross-platform!
Delicious finally launched their redesign this week, and boy was it worth it – I’m a sucker for the utilitarian layouts and this one is no exception! I really like that they’ve moved over to the easier to type domain, Delicious.com – Del.icio.us was cool and very web2.0, but it was damn annoying to type in all the time. Along with the Delicious plugin for FireFox 3 and Pukka on the Mac I’m going to get my bum in gear and start bookmarking again.
This one isn’t necessarily new, but I checked out the Opera web standards curriculum for the first time this week and was really impressed. The idea of this place is to teach people proper web design practice, concentrating on the theory as more important than simply learning how to code HTML. I’ll definitely be pointing newbies in that direction instead of W3Schools from now on – I certainly wish this was around when I first started!
Links of the week
- Smashing Magazine fonts of the month – 2 beautifully designed fonts that are absolutely free
- Official Google keywords tool – An official tool from Google to help generate some keywords for your website
- The 10 commandments of web design – I’m going to print this and stick it on every flat surface I can find
- Pattern Tap – Finding inspiring websites is easy, but finding inspiration for specific elements of a website is much harder. This is where Pattern Tap comes in.
Site of the week
Delicious
The new design on Delicious is just that – om nom nom!
Lesson of the week
Being beaten at Wii tennis by your younger sister really does feel as bad as it sounds.
Track of the week
A cover of Coldplay’s “Violet Hill” by Pendulum on the Radio 1 Live Lounge. Absolutely fan-bloody-tastic!
Predictions for next week
I’ll become a hermit for a few days while I play around with my new iMac – which is currently somewhere between me and China right now. I hate being impatient! *twiddles thumbs*
Tags: weekly
Comments
3 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 3 August 2008”
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JaysGirl says: [perma]
wahey! … imac buddies too now! what spec you get in the end?
and wasn’t the pendulum cover bloody awesome! - better than the original!!!
Nice update dude, rounds off a pretty quiet week :) … btw, delicious looks good to!
Oh, Jay has a wii … will hook you up with his lil code doolally and you can duel!
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Oh no, you won’t be using your iPhone then with an injured arm. :)