Links from 2009

Those individuals carry at least one non-traditional title. To the advertising creative partnership that traditionally has teamed a copywriter and an art director, a third member must be added: the creative technologist.

Good analysis of the recent WebAIM screen reader survey. Use <Hn> tags, think hard about accesskeys, use skip links, know your audience.

"The real question is not "What is the industry standard?" but rather "What response time will the users of my Web site or application find acceptable?"

For the past few months I've been touting a presentation around the BBC entitled 'How we make websites'. It's a compendium of everything our team has learned from long years developing /programmes, the recent work on /music and the currently in development /events.

Quality music at a low price, and fair pay for artists - Ten Tracks

Love this idea. Deserves support, I think. “Ten Tracks is an innovative new music download portal. Get curated bundles of ten brilliant tracks, for £1, knowing we give fair pay to artists.”

Handy. "To show or hide the design grid (or other graphic), just import the following javascript file, and then use the keys Control and ; to show or hide the grid."

One key real-world benefit of this separation is that come redesign time, one only needs to change or replace the CSS stylesheet, and needn’t lay so much as a finger upon the hallowed grounds we call markup. I’m here to say that this mantra isn’t much more than a fairy tale.

FTP Replacement, Large File Transfer, Custom Extranets

<blockquote>Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies"</blockquote>

Includes estimates by age group.

"The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat." Blimey.

Enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms

A software pattern considered a derivative of the Model-view-controller

"Enter a UK town or postcode to find out when nearby shops are open". Brilliant.

Excellent presentation on current state of web fonts/methods and typography. Grab the version with the notes.

It is difficult to overstate how impressive, and important, tools like Google Earth and PhotoSynth are visualizing geographies and in pushing the boundaries of what is possible both technically and conceptually. But both do so at the expense of what Scott McCloud calls “the magic in the gutter“.

Interesting rant about microformats.

The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior. They’re also easily skinnable with a few lines of CSS

FireScope is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS.

Old, but I keep misplacing this link. "We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously."

One price, one ticket, unlimited train journeys ... when the snow clears, the rail rover could be one of Britain's best-kept travel secrets.

Unlike previous campaigns, which required those carousing to have Bluetooth devices enabled and receptive, the Liverpool campaign used adverts projected onto walls and buildings around the city centre to encourage drinkers to turn on their Bluetooth connectivity

RA: Inside the dark art of mastering – Feature / Interview

“What a mastering engineer does – and why they’re vitally important to every note of music you hear.”

Interesting way of using twitter to conduct polls, plus a debate that goes on and on (2p: main title, not logo! Otherwise you have the same h1 across all pages on a site).

A possible sIFR alternative. "Fast text replacement with canvas and VML - no Flash or images required."

geekpop.co.uk

“Geek Pop is the world’s only sci-pop festival – a free online music event featuring songs about science. In 2009, Geek Pop will take place between 6-15th March.”

A robust but compact Twitter application built on the Adobe AIR platform. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives.

Flow makes working remotely every bit as intuitive and natural as working locally with the Finder [...] can connect to FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and MobileMe iDisk servers.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

A robust and unintrusive backup system for Mac OS X Leopard, which can be used either as a System Preferences pane or directly as a command line tool.

In December 2008 through January 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. We received 1121 valid responses to the screen reader survey, which was conducted Dec. 2008 - Jan. 2009. The response was amazing.

A project of WideTag, Inc., a technology infrastructure company providing innovative solutions for an Open Internet of Things.

"NFO files usually contain release information about a software program. They are commonly associated with warez groups who include them to declare credit of and "bragging rights" over said release. Similarly they are often found in demoscene productions, where the respective groups include them for credits, contact details, and the software requirements."

BLEEP – Special 5th Birthday feature

To celebrate Bleep’s 5th birthday, we asked a select cast of people working in music to pick their 5 favourite releases or tracks from the entire Bleep catalogue.

To celebrate Bleep’s 5th birthday, we asked a select cast of people working in music to pick their 5 favourite releases or tracks from the entire Bleep catalogue.

I hate myself for marking this. "ASP.NET AJAX is built-into ASP.NET 3.5. It is also available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0."

Clever clever. Nice detail.

interesting variation of CSS Sprites has been getting a lot of play on large web sites that serve millions of users.