Rawkes Weekly – 24 August 2008
Stardate August 24th, 2008 – 9 CommentsI’m ill! Yes you heard right, the boy wonder web design extraordinaire has come down with something positively horrible (headaches and tiredness). It’s probably just a bout of the incredibly life altering man-flu, but I’m sure I’ll be back and bouncing soon!
My new iMac should be here by next Tuesday. I’m a bit worried about turning the new one on for the first time incase it doesn’t work or has even more dead pixels than this one – that would truly suck. The good news is that it’s a bank holiday weekend here in England so I don’t have any work before my new baby arrives. Hooray!
I haven’t mentioned this much previously, but I’ve been applying for University this year. I actually found out many months ago that I was accepted onto the course at Bournemouth Univeristy, but it was only yesterday that my student loan was confirmed and the reality of starting University life set in. This is the beginning of an amazing chapter in my life as I managed to slightly screw up Uni last time by going on a course that didn’t suit me. This time will be better I’m sure as I’ve picked Interactive Media Production; something which is right up my street!
So what does this mean for Rawkes? Well I’ll be covering this more as the time approaches, but the plan is to keep Rawkes running throughout my time at Uni, albeit in a slightly smaller state. The blog won’t be affected in any negative way, in fact I’m sure the things I learn at Uni will show up on here in one way or another! The freelance and work aspect of Rawkes will be cut down slightly, but only in the sense that I won’t be able to take on as many clients at one time. I will be updating the main Rawkes pages nearer to the time as I decide exactly how to approach the matter. All in all nothing negative is going to happen, although you might not see much of me during the first couple of weeks at Uni while I recover!
I’m feeling it’s going to be a rather long post this week, making up for the ’short’ one last week. Let’s assume the regular position, cuppa tea in one hand and mouse in the other as we enter the latest Rawkes Weekly. Enjoy!
This week’s news
On Monday I discovered the new Metropolitan Police mapping service which let’s inhabitants of London and the surrounding area to check crime levels on Google Maps. I’m not too sure on the accuracy of the statistics, but this is a really cool use of the Google Maps API and it’s been implemented really well.
iPhone GTD app Things hit version 1.1 early this week, with the addition of syncing to the desktop version. Things is one of my favourite GTD apps simply because it’s so simple and beautifuly designed – it makes getting things done fun!
On Wednesday Flickr released a new embed-able slideshow for your media.
I like the way that if you take your mouse off the slideshow for a period of time then the controls and Flickr branding disappears. I think this is a nice touch as it’s always an issue for larger companies to use services and tools like Flickr if there is branding and logos plastered everywhere – Vimeo does much the same with their video player.
On Thursday Mozilla announced the winners of the extend Firefox 3 contest. There are some amazing extensions on there, but my favourite out of them all is definitely Pencil: a GUI prototyping tool. The basic premise of Pencil is to let you quickly knock together GUI interfaces and website layouts without worrying too much about the finer details. I’m yet to use this in production, but that doesn’t stop it being an excellent example of what can be achieved with FireFox.
Have you ever wondered what Twitter would look like during The War Of The Worlds? I know I have. Well, you need look no further as some genius put together a fake Twitter feed that occurred during an alien invasion. Awesome!
Towards the end of the week we found out that IE 8 is going to get a privacy mode. Cue thousands of teenagers screaming in joy all around the world! Apart from turning IE into a major pr0n browser, the new privacy mode will prove incredibly useful for public computers and for people who want to surf the web secure in the knowledge that anything they do won’t be found out by a someone using the computer after them. A prime example of this would be someone researching about an illness they might have that they don’t want to announce to their family. It may be a little extreme, but the option of privacy should be in all browsers without a question.
A shock announcement brought this working week to a close with the news that Ma.gnolia is going open-source! The social bookmarking web app has proven popular in recent years with it’s differences to the leader Delicious. The main draws of Magnolia are it’s groups which allow like-minded individuals come together to share bookmarks and discuss a particular topic. Magnolia also boasts a more visual approach on it’s service, rather than the utilitarianised (hooray for new words!) Delicious.
The open-source version is going to be called Magnolia 2, or M2 for short. The project website already has a variety of ways to follow the project and also hosts their project charter which outlines the plans of the project. I can’t wait to download the first public release in September!
Links of the week
- What three web apps excite you most? – User submitted list of favourite web apps
- 7 Priciples of clean and optimized CSS – 7 tips on producing excellent CSS code
- 10 Adobe Air apps for web designers – Some of these are amazingly useful
- How to make the Apple command shape in illustrator – Veerle releases another great tutorial
- Best practice for CSS ID and class names – How to choose names for CSS IDs and classes
- Shadowmaker – An truly useful tool for anyone who makes custom icons for Google Maps
- Coded Preview – Quickly show clients what a layout will look like in their browser
- The anatomy of a stylesheet – More CSS tips and advice, this time regarding the structure of a stylesheet
Site of the week
Wufoo
An oldie, but I absolutely love the playfulness of this layout – it’s such a happy design.
Crowd Science
Simple, but the colours are so bright and refreshing. It has a nice gridded layout as well.
Lesson(s) of the week
Getting ill sucks
Putting off chasing things up only results in bad things
Track of the week
“Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Soulwax Remix)” – by The Chemical Brothers. I love both of these artists, but this remix could be bottled and sold as pure awesome!
Tags: weekly
Comments
9 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 24 August 2008”
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Do you mean the Flickr feed? =p Me thinks Eris is still in shock from the recent Twitter conversations!
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Ben says: [perma]
If your getting headaches and tiredness – I’d suggest a trip to see the opticians and check your room-lights aren’t reflecting off your screen.
That’s what does my eyes in, and leads me to strain my eyes – and have two weeks of on-off headaches.
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ErisDS says: [perma]
Do you mean the Flickr feed? =p Me thinks Eris is still in shock from the recent Twitter conversations!
Nope, I meant the twitter feed about the end of the world… http://kensingtonvictoria.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/alien_invasion_large.jpg
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Wow, I take my eyes off this post for a few days and the comments explode!
Thanks for the kind words everyone, I’m glad you’ve found it useful.
@Eris: I see what you mean now. I totally mis-understood your first comment! Doh…
Loving the twitter feed. It appears manga avatars will still be en vogue when it happens…