Links from 2009

"How about you make something that would take away that hassle, but still let us send postcards to the people we love - printed objects that would arrive through the letterbox and make those people smile? Hmm?" Please do this, Royal Mail. Or someone else?

Each unit of UK electricity is currently causing this much CO2...

A full-featured content management and website development system, with Django templates and a custom data model integrated with GIT.

Kaltura allows publishers of all sizes to easily, quickly, and cost effectively enhance their web site with video and interactive rich-media functionalities, including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising.

"This is a collection of e-mails I have sent to people who post classified ads. My goal is to mess with them, confuse them, and/or piss them off." Very childish, sometimes amusing.

In addition to launching a specific application when you connect a camera, you can also have your images download automatically. Never again spend time launching the right app or quitting apps that you didn't want to launch.

Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase.

To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year. You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game.

Banks and card providers haven't really done enough to educate customers about the system, or to make the forms more usable, but retailers can at least minimise some of the damage to conversion rates by doing as much as they can to advise customers about what to expect during the checkout process.

We're a 20% company. For one day of our working weeks (sometimes more) we work on projects which have mostly non-commercial aims, like digital work for charities, or things which are just good fun.

Share your Spotify playlists with the world and discover new music

"Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself." Want.

This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.

Twitter is becoming an ever present backchannel at conferences and events. However sometimes it needs curating and moderating, especially if it's to be displayed large as a part of the event. Here we talk about an app built in a few hours and open sourced today which we used for this purpose for The Guardian's Activate Summit.

A Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

An open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.

Beautiful. Need an iPhone version.

The Typography Manual has several useful features and resources for designers, including a visual type anatomy glossary, a font size ruler, an em calculator, and enough content to fill a 60 page book. It has all the essentials of a desk reference in a regularly updated pocket resource.

The way we do this is by having a 1-hour meeting every Tuesday morning where my manager presents a PDF report that outlines these figures and colours the report either Red (we're in trouble and we better do something about it), Yellow (We're in danger, but it's fixable) or Green (we're on track to achieve our goals).

Looks cool. Wish I could be bothered to install the Webkit nightly so I could see it in context.

At no. 1, "Max Tundra’s Limited Edition Kosher Chicken Soup". Ah, Ben.

Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations. In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't.

Statistics from Amazon, Google, Jupiter Research and others show that a faster web site increases traffic, repeat visits, clicks, and conversions. There are two other motivations, in addition to these user metrics, that I give for always working to improve the speed of your web site. First, even if your site is fast enough for some users, there are always other users with slower connections. Mediocre performance in the U.S. means an unbearable experience in other parts of the world. If you hope to attract and retain a global audience, your site has to be blazingly fast under normal conditions so that under degraded conditions it’s still usable.

We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the 'users' themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences? What, ultimately, is the role of the designer in sorting through these desires to determine which should drive our design decisions? And what frameworks, other than intuition, should we use to make these judgments?

Finally had a chance to read this. Very good; an Instapaper classic.

Allows you to always see the file's history and save file versions and get file versions without switching from the main Photoshop window.

A music content resolver service - run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and more.

Hosted, accessible CMS solution from Nomensa.

"Hopefully one day Twitter will stop growing stupidly fast and their engineers can spend some time, you know, adding features like exposing favourites (which might even help eliminate the scourges of “retweeting” and trending topics.) I’m not holding my breath, though." Hear him, hear him.

Scene7 competitor

A set of standardised icons for popular social networking services and tools.

Maybe you want to use AJAX to load a script that requires the use of document.write. But after teh page has loaded document.write tends to destroy the universe without even asking first! Solution: Replace document.write!

Missing. The. Point.

"With this tool, you are able to import both realtime and historic Pachube data (i.e. sensor and environment data) into popular 3D CAD package Google SketchUp. The incoming data can be used to generate or modulate a 3D model of a building or environment, and enables sophisticated design-decisions that are based on actual (and not simulated) sensor and environment data. Possible uses include designing interactive façades, undertaking post-occupancy evaluation (which is where you evaluate how well the design performs) and sensor-based form generation." In love.

A jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

Wish more people did stuff like this.

The Quick Look plugin that handles source code in Leopard is, well, boring. We developers expect syntax highlighting these days! Thanks to WebKit, Highlight, and the foresight of the Quick Look API designers, however, this is easy to achieve. Just drop this plugin into /Library/QuickLook or ~/Library/QuickLook and bask in the glow of the beautiful syntax highlighting!

Working in all major browsers, including Google Chrome!. It works with floated 2-column layouts and we don't get overlap in resized browser windows unlike older solutions you find when you Google sticky footer. And you don't need an empty push div.

A URL shortening app for Django.

"We’ve combined some fun things, a treasure hunt / i-spy game which you play using your mobile, which generates a list of everything you’ve seen at an event (in an end of school holiday essay style), with geotagging and analytics. Your mobile number is the tracking cookie. We call the game And I Saw...”

Excellent overview of agile (small-a) process from Malarkey