- Bomb in the Garden (Matthew Butterick) — design excellence is inhibited by two structural flaws in the web. First flaw: the web is good at making information free, but terrible at making it expensive. So the web has had to rely largely on an advertising economy, which is weakening under the strain. Second flaw: the process of adopting and enforcing web standards, as led by the W3C, is hopelessly broken. (via Alex Dong)
- Google’s New Play Store Policies on Ads (The Next Web) — the walls of civilisation holding back the hordes of assclowns. Imagine the behaviour responsible for each of these restrictions.
- Inside Password Cracking (Wired) — how pros go about cracking your password once they have the encrypted hash. (And gosh, how those “but I used numbers and symbols!” passwords fall)
- Brackets (Github) — open source web code editor by Adobe.
"Adobe" entries
Four short links: 27 August 2013
Web Broken, Android Ads, Password Cracking, and Adobe Brackets
Four short links: 21 November 2012
Commandline Gists, Pixel Tools, Indie Business Case Study, and Adobe Tablet Tool
- gboom — commandline tool for making gists.
- Pixel Based Websites — great collection of Javascript tools for working with sprites and backgrounds.
- Indie Game The Movie: Case Study — lessons learned, lots of detail, about the self-publishing crowdfunding success story of this documentary. Last piece in the series busts the myth that only big name people can make it work. (via Andy Baio)
- Adobe Proto — tablet app for making prototypes and wireframes. (via Josh Clark)
Four short links: 5 September 2012
DIY Spectrometry, Mind-Controlled Drones, Javascript Games, and Open Source Font
- DIY Spectrometry Kit — This open hardware kit costs only $35, but has a range of more than 400-900 nanometers, and a resolution of as high as 3 nm. A spectrometer is essentially a tool to measure the colors absorbed by a material. You can construct this one yourself from a piece of a DVD-R, black paper, a VHS box, and an HD USB webcam.
- Mind-Controlled Drones — Chinese demo of EEG to Bluetooth to laptop to wifi to UAV.
- Pac-Man in Javascript — in-browser loving recreation of a bunch of original Pac-Man games, with source on github. Cf this article on building Atari Arcade in CreateJS. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Source Sans — Adobe’s first open source typeface.
Apple vs. Adobe vs. Content Creators
Lack of Flash support on the iPad could undermine publisher's tablet ideas
Publishers may have gotten ahead of themselves when they rolled out pre-iPad tablet demos. At least one relied on Adobe Air, which the iPad won't support. And the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe could soon influence publishers' decision making.
Four short links: 30 Mar 2009
A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free:
- Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator — CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I’m loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson’s delicious stream)
- How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger — tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point’s not to fix anything. It’s to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a “death spiral” and Clay Shirky predicts “a bloodbath,” the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it’s a conflagration or an inferno. It’s like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski’s delicious stream)
- BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist — take a picture of a DVD’s barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of “DVDs” in stores that you could browse and snap to “buy” (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.
- Survey of Free Business Models Online — an interesting breakdown of ways to make money from “free” on the web. (via glynn moody)
Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB and Digital Editions
The new firmware for the Sony Reader (model PRS-505) supports EPUB and Adobe Digital Editions. From MobileRead: I can now confirm that this particular speculation seems to have proved out: the new firmware (available sometime today, July 24th) will include support for both epub and Adobe's Digital Editions. It will also include support for PDF reflow, which is something we've…
Adobe Eyes Interactivity in Ebooks
Adobe just launched the Open Screen Project, an initiative designed to easily move content and applications across devices: This initiative provides one more motivation for adopting Flash for rich media and interactivity to take eBooks beyond static paper-like experiences and make digital content more compelling to consumers … More and more, digital publications — whether downloaded or consumed online…