Rawkes Weekly – 28 September 2008
Stardate September 28th, 2008 – 4 CommentsSo there goes another 2 weeks flying by. I do have to apologise for not posting last week, although I do have a good reason – I was moving into University! Unfortunately because of this I have been slightly out of the loop with regards to the latest happenings on the web, but I’ll try my best to make this week’s post worthwhile.
As for University, It’s been 7 days today since I moved in and I’m absolutely loving every moment of it. The course starts in a week and I think that will be the moment when everything finally sinks in and I realise this is the next 3 years of my life. Bournemouth city is amazing and I’ve already walked down to the beach (500 metres away) a few times – even venturing out in the early morning.
I wouldn’t be a true geek if I didn’t mention some of the awesome technical features of Bournemouth, namely the University’s stupidly quick internet connection – 52 Mbps download and 200 Mbps upload! Let’s just say I’m going to enjoy spending the next 3 years of my life with connections like this.
In slightly more relevant developments, Rawkes was featured on the Web Designer Wall’s post on large background websites – I’ve been a regular on Nick La’s sites for a long time so it’s even more awesome to see my site up there.
Grab yourself a cuppa and let’s get on with what you’ve all been patiently waiting 2 weeks for…
This week’s news
The creator of the internet, Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation: created to study the web, seek out solutions for capability and robustness, and to extend it to everyone on the planet. It’s a slightly bizarre claim which I’m concerned is going to tread on the toes of the W3C. I’m not the only one to feel this way; Read Write Web wrote a post on the announcement and covered the views of some industry leaders, including Eran Hammer-Lahav from Yahoo!, and blogger Moly Holzschlag. With the new foundation already receiving $5 Million from the Knight Foundation (am I the only one to think of Knight Rider?) it looks like we’ll be seeing a fair amount of the W3F over the coming years. Watch this space!
Google Maps mobile was updated last week, bringing with it features such as walking directions and mobile street view. There is a great video that showcases all of the new features, definitely check it out. The only thing that irks me about the new update is that it isn’t for the iPhone, although I’m hoping this will be rectified in future updates.
Firefox 3.1 beta has been delayed by a month. It sucks, but if it’s necessary for Mozilla to make it a better product, then I’m all for it. We can’t have Chrome taking over just yet now can we?
The time sucking web app Twitter has updated the design of their homepage. It’s mainly just cosmetic tweaks and a clean up of the whole design, but nonetheless it’s definitely welcome – at least the website is nicer to use now! I’m hoping that this update is a sign of things to come with Twitter as there are some fairly chunky hints going on like being able to track @replies that have nothing to do with your name, but we’ll see how it pans out.
Links of the week
- Grooveshark – This online music player type thing has been around for a few months, but definitely check it out
- WordPress developer’s toolbox – Smashing Magazine are back again, this time with a tonne of WordPress goodies
- On prioritising feature development – Particletree write an excellent article outlining some methods on choosing features for your project
- Top 7 open-source version control systems – Smashing Mag are on a roll, this time rounding up the big players in version control systems
- Ruby links – I’m not a Ruby man myself, but this big list of Ruby resources will prove useful to the rails programmers I’m sure
- How to solve a problem like the browser – An interesting article from Vitamin talking about what the future holds in store for browsers
- Design Jobs on the Wall – A pretty looking design job board where you can find and post jobs, particularly useful for the freelancers out there
Site of the week
Tomáš Pojeta
Some stunning illustrations on this website with themes right up my alley – space, rockets, and sea!
Grooveshark
Crisp, polished, awesome! The only words I can use to describe this sexish layout. They have obviously spent hundreds of hours tweaking and adding detail to every single page.
Realmac Software
The colours on this website are gorgeous. Coupled with the top notch icon designs and fine details to the layout, this website is another testament to the quality of Mac software developers.
Track of the week
“The Twitter Song” by Ben Walker – Bloody awesome and will be stuck in your head for many days to come!
Tags: weekly
HAHAHAHAAAAA That song was the funniest thing I’ve heard since Cosmo Jarvis’ “If I had Jessica Alba’s number”.