Rawkes Weekly – 14 September 2008
Stardate September 14th, 2008 – 5 CommentsI would like to apologise for the lack of a blog post last week. With dConstruct, a wedding, and my birthday, that weekend turned out to be slightly busier than I expected and I simply ran out of time and energy. I’ve so much to talk about (I’m off to University next Sunday!), but I’m going to keep this short. To make up for last week I’m going to be covering 2 weeks worth of news, so be prepared for an action-packed Rawkes Weekly!
This week’s news
It’s official! Google is making it’s own browser, affectionately named Chrome. They announced it earlier last week with an awesome comic strip and you can download it from the official area for Chrome (You need to be on a Windows machine). Apart from being a revolutionary browser, they are going that extra step and releasing it in an open-source format which is called Chromium – It can be found on the Google Code page for Chromium. There is even a dedicated section for web developers to get a better idea of what’s in Chrome and why they should be excited about it.
In the grand scheme of things I think this is an excellent move by Google, in particular the decision to use WebKit over building their own rendering engine from scratch. The instant browser share of between 1-4% for Chrome will, I hope, give Microsoft a kick up the bum and make the next few years of browser development extremely interesting. I could talk about Google Chrome and the state of the browser market all day, so I’ll stop here and maybe save it for another post.
There was even more to celebrate for the Mountain View giant(?) with Google turning 10 last week. It’s amazing to think that 10 years ago this major part of the internet didn’t even exist, yet you wouldn’t be able to comprehend the web without them now. With innovations in web applications, open-source projects and now browsers, I’m excited as hell to see what the future brings. Happy Birthday Google!
It’s 9am on the 5th of September, and hundreds of geeks are descending on the sunny seaside city of Brighton. Why are so many web developers and designers all in one place? No, it’s not the release of a new Apple product, it’s dConstruct: an amazing yearly conference for the UK web industry! dConstruct is organised by the lovely guys and gals at Clearleft and has been running for 4 years now. I’m lucky enough to have attended it for the past 2 years with my friends from Insiteability and I have to say that the conference last week was absolutely top notch. To be honest the conference couldn’t have failed to impress with high profile speakers such as Digg designer Daniel Burka, Tantek Çelik of IE5 for Mac and Technorati fame, and none other than Jeremy Keith himself. All in all I highly recommend anyone who works or has an interest in the web industry to attend dConstruct, you won’t regret it. For anyone who went, you can find a list of all the URLs mentioned throughout the day on Jim Muttram’s blogger page.
Two of the speakers at dConstruct were Matt and Matt from Dopplr. They did an amazing and funny talk on the possibility of building a successful website that nobody ever has to visit. It was a mighty interesting concept and they covered it well, but I think the most news-worthy part of the talk was the announcement that Dopplr is going to be releasing some new features in the near-future – specifically groups. I personally don’t use Doppr incredibly much, but that doesn’t stop me seeing the importance of such a feature. I can see it being especially useful to companies and groups of people (duh) that need to track their travelling and even their carbon footprint!
Visualising data in new an exciting ways has become incredibly popular over recent years. Vimeo Toys is no exception; with it’s interactive landscape and animated grid system, Vimeo has made a really fun, but inherently pointless method of accessing videos and viewing activity on their website. Overall, it’s fun to use and that’s all that matters – sometimes things can get a little too serious and boring regarding data.
This week Flickr open the doors to a new user homepage (The surprise when it changes is a nice touch). They haven’t made any drastic changes, but they’ve focussed a lot more on statistics and the social aspect of Flickr. You’ll find more information from groups you’re in as well as a small graph of visitor statistics for your own photos. I’ve covered Flickr a few times over the last few weeks and it’s evident that they are really pushing things forward. I know everyone was dubious about how the service was going to be run when Yahoo! took over, but I certainly have high hopes for them after these recent developments.
Stop the press everyone, we officially have a new web app on the scene! Actually I’m quite excited about this one; it’s called Stack Overflow and it’s basically social Q&A for programmers. I’ve had a brief look at it and I really like the concept, although I’m slightly dubious over how they are going to deal with spam and nastiness on the website. If they can tackle that then I can certainly see this becoming a big resource with programmers all over the place.
Nearer the end of the week Dropbox launched out of beta. Dropbox is a web service that allows you to share and sync files across as many computers as you want – you can even access them through a web interface. The beauty of Dropbox comes when you share only a particular folder with a client or a friend, making sending and sharing files with that person a breeze. I’ve been using this service for months now and I have to admit I can’t think of anything that comes close to it’s shear usefulness and ease of use. Definitely give it a shot!
We had a controversial end to the week with Facebook announcing that the new design is staying, like it or not!. Personally, I absolutely love the new design, I don’t have a problem with it whatsoever. For some people there is a different story. Around 1 million people signed up a petition on Facebook against the new design, but I’m glad Facebook stood up to their decisions as I believe it’s better for the long run. I feel that some people, especially when they don’t understand the thinking behind website design can sometimes be afraid of change – “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” sort of thing. The problem with Facebook was that they recently hit 100 million users and any change they did was going to cause a problem with someone. Give it a few months and this will blow over and we’ll move onto the next big thing like MySpace closing down… I wish!
Links of the week
- Big asteroid hitting the earth – Stunning CGI animation of an cataclysmic asteroid hit on Earth, the music works so well
- Breaking bad habits in Photoshop – Lots of tips on how to do things properly in Photoshop
- CSS organisation methods and writing style – More ways of organising your CSS code
- JavaScript in modern web design – Massive list of modern JavaScript techniques and tutorials
- FancyZoom meet Prototype + jQuery – Create Apple-esque image zoom effects using Prototype or jQuery
- Finding harmony between categories and tags – Some advice on how to use tags and categories together
- Ubiquity commands – Loads of commands for Mozilla’s Firefox extension Ubiquity
- Accessible forms with WCAG 2.0 – How to create an accessible form
- 20 Inspiring pixel artists and tutorials – Stunning examples of pixel art. I’m a sucker for this stuff
- TypeChart – A really interesting idea for viewing typography and downloading the CSS to achieve it
- A web developers personal projects – Some excellent reasons why you should work on personal projects
- Cooking with stock – When and how to use stock photos in your projects
- Landing a job in PHP – Some tips on what to do and learn to grab a job in PHP
- To refresh, or not to refresh – When is it ok to use AJAX and prevent a page refresh?
- Domize – Quick and easy domain name search
- The design session – iPhone developer tap tap tap share how they collaborate and work together as a team
- 75 Really useful JavaScript techniques – Smashing Magazine strike again with a plethora of JavaScript techniques
Site of the week
Acko
Some amazing use of angles and perspective have been brought together to achieve this layout.
SMS Parking
A simple layout, but one that I feel really works to achieve the desired outcome – making a technical service look as easy as possible to use.
Lesson(s) of the week
Don’t skip a week of Rawkes Weekly, it means the next one takes absolutely ages to do!
Track of the week
“An Ode To The Spaceman” by The Mandrake Project. This is a very relaxed and ethereal track. It’s quite long as well, so definitely one for when you’ve got 10 minutes spare and want to kick back and zone-out.
Tags: weekly
Comments
5 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 14 September 2008”
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Thanks Ben. Jonathan’s article is a common sense one, but definitely a goodun. Hopefully it’ll spark a flurry of web apps from ourselves – PHP for me, Ruby for you!
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Excellent news about the blog Ruth, I really miss your old one. I’m really glad you liked the live broadcast I did, it was really fun! The next one will probably not be until after I’m settled in at Uni, but I’ll make sure to let you know when it’s on – if you’re around!
The big move down to Uni is tomorrow afternoon, it’s all a little bit hectic as I try and pack everything. I’m leaving the iMac until last so I have some light relief from all the stress. You better come down and visit me!
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awesome mate as usual.
Loved jonthan snooks article, I need to add “build lots of practical web apps that are lightweight and cool” to my growing list of things todo.