Rawkes Weekly – 31 August 2008
Stardate August 31st, 2008 – 8 CommentsWell, you’ll be glad to hear that I’m feeling a lot better than I was this time last week. No thanks to that damned nemesis of the male race, the man-flu!
The iMac replacement came on Tuesday, much to my excitement. I was briefly the owner of two 24″ iMacs while I waited for the old one to be picked up, but unfortunately that didn’t last too long. I’m happy to announce that the new one doesn’t have any dead pixels! I can finally proceed to melt my eyes trying to take in the giant-ness of this screen. YAY!
I’m going to end the introduction there as we have had a rather large amount of news this week and the post is already turning into an essay. Assume the position everyone as we jump into the events of the past seven days…
This week’s news
FaceBook hit 100 million users this week. That is an astonishing amount of people, considering much of FaceBook’s early days were tied up in the educational area rather than being fully open like MySpace. With the new design and solid plans for the future, I’m really excited about what FaceBook has to offer over the coming years. MySpace just doesn’t excite me in any way what-so-ever, probably because of it’s tarnished reputation with unsavoury characters and the appalling code!
Google Gears Beta has finally been released for the Safari web browser. At last! I’ve been waiting on this for a very long time and it’s been the only thing keeping me from using Gears on a regular basis. It has been strongly advised in the Google Groups post about the beta that it’s in an unstable state and should be used with extreme caution – it could break Safari basically! That being said, it’s a massive step in the right direction. Rock on Google.
Mozilla are on a roll with new releases, this time coming out with Ubiquity: An experiment into connecting the web with language. If you’ve ever used Quicksilver on the Mac (or Launchy on Windows) then you’ll be used to the idea of using words (language) to achieve tasks quickly and from wherever you currently are, be it your desktop, inside your email program, whatever. Ubiquity is looking to use a similar concept, but in the browser and using web services instead. One example given with the prototype is the ability to quickly add a map of a location to an email by selecting some text (eg. Starbucks, Acme Town), invoking the dashboard, and typing the word “map”. Once you do this it enters what they call “interactive mode”, basically where your location is shown on a Google Map and you can zoom in or move the map as you see fit. When you are happy with the map you click a simple link that then embeds an image of your map directly into the email. Simple as that! I think this is an amazing development at Mozilla and I can’t wait to see how they progress with it.
My favourite code editor-slash-do-everything application Coda received a significant update this week. The new version is 1.5 and it brings with it features such as built-in Subversion version control (hooray!) amongst other great additions such as the ability to add custom reference books. Overall this update brings everything I’ve been wanting Coda to do, more than justifying it’s place at the top of my favourite web development apps on OS X.
Is supporting IE 6 sucking up precious time and getting on your nerves? Then you might want to take part in the IE Death March. With the likes of Carsonified supporting the movement amongst other big name studios and designers, it finally looks like the web industry is making a stand on the OAP of the browser world. Good-bye Mr. Internet Explorer 6!
In related news, IE 8 Beta 2’s new features finally bring it up to scratch with the other newer browsers. This is all well and good, but it’s been uncovered that IE 8 has ‘broken it’s promise’ of loading websites in ’standards’ mode by default. I’m not holding much hope for the latest incarnation of the Microsoft browser suite as they always seem to screw it up one way or the other. One step forward, two steps backwards.
Steve Jobs ‘died’ earlier this week! Ok, so he didn’t really die, but Bloomberg certainly put a cat amongst the pigeons by accidently publishing his 17-page obituary this week. Whoops!
Amazon just purchased the online bookshelf web app Shelfari. There isn’t too much to say about this although I’m definitely interested in the direction Amazon are going to take it, and what sort of integration they’ll inevitably come up with.
It might be called Really Simple Syndication, but you’ve always needed a fair amount of computer literacy to use RSS properly. Google has noticed this problem and is implementing some new features in Blogger aimed at making RSS mainstream. By integrating a slimmed down version of Google Reader into the user’s Blogger dashboard and naming the feed links “Follow This Blog”, RSS for the average user will become trivial. It’s such a simple solution, but half the problem is that using the official name for something isn’t always the best option if you want to appeal to the masses, like RSS or RFID (ArrEff-what-now?!).
Last.fm and Flickr sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee! Flickr has released some new functionality that let’s it read the machine tags from last.fm that users have been adding to photos for the past year. What this means is that by using a special tag (eg. lastfm:event=34640) you can link your photos to a music event that is on last.fm. You’ll even get a funky icon underneath your photo with the name of the event and a link to other photos from this event. Cool!
On Friday we saw the new design for the jQuery site, sporting a rather retro rockstar on the banner. The new website looked great, very polished, but the rockstar illustration really didn’t go down well and the community certainly let their feelings be known in the blog comments. By Friday evening the rock star was gone, he didn’t even last 24 hours! I can’t say I was too bothered, but I’m liking the layout in it’s current state – it’s really bringing jQuery up into the serious and grown-up framework territory.
To round the week off, the super-cool open-source eCommerce engine Magento turned 1 on Saturday. I absolutely love what the guys over there are doing with the bland and ageing area of eCommerce software. Magento is a breath of fresh air and the possibilities are endless with it. Keep up the good work!
Links of the week
- Website navigation showcase – Elements of Design is back with a section on navigation
- Required form fields: Where should the asterix go? – Smiley Cat asks an interesting question regarding required form fields
- Efficiant, maintainable, modular CSS – Russ Weakley from maxdesign shares some top notch CSS tips
- GUIMagnets – These are so going on my whiteboard when it’s up
- QuarkBase – Find out pretty much everything about a website
- 10 Weblog engines reviewed – Smashing Magazine give a run-down of the most popular blogging engines
- Wordpress tip: group posts by date in listings – Nice tip to show the date only once for posts on the same day
- CSS Sprites2 - It’s Javascript time – A recent A List Apart article showing you how to make an awesome animated navigation bar in jQuery
Site of the week
TokyoCube
An urban store selling loads of funky products. I really like the way they’ve tied the striking Flash banners into the rest of the site. Overall a detailed and pretty damn awesome layout.
Lesson of the week
Installing PHP extensions on IIS is pretty annoying
Track of the week
“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. This is a killer tune if you need to unwind. Take a deep breath in and slap this on!
Tags: weekly
Comments
8 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 31 August 2008”
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Thanks Eris. Rawkes Weekly certainly takes a lot of time and effort to put together each week, but hearing things like that really makes it feel worthwhile. I’m just happy someone reads it, let alone finds it useful!
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
@Roy: Thanks for taking the time out to come over to my little corner of the internet. I’m really interested in what you guys have in store for the future of Magento and eCommerce in general – keep it up!
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
@Rob: You’re right, I just love the Mac way too much for my own good! Keep coming back, I’m the web design news aggregator! ;)
@Wizely: Thanks for showing up! Don’t worry about not understanding it, now you know how I feel when I try and get my head around writing (or English in general =p). Join the dark side, become a geek – you’ll never turn back!
@Tim: I enjoyed it when it worked, but restarting the server 50 thousand times got tiring pretty quick. Thanks for following the blog, I’ll definitely be doing the same with Insiteability (when we finish it!). And yes, I’ll definitely help write a dConstruct piece – give me a poke about it when you’re around.
Rob,
I just want to say, keep this up! Every time you announce on WDF I try to come and read it. I love Rawkes weekly! I always enjoy reading it, never find it a bore, always manage to read from start to finish and always learn something.
Considering that’s 1,300 words, that’s a pretty impressive achievement. The only other thing on the web that I read that thoroughly is WDF.
Well done!