"affordances" entries

Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, I’ve heard a few people asking “is that it?” I remember how awesome it felt to have Firefox 1.0’s popup blocking working for me—it felt like the browser was on my side. Now it’s time to look ahead and see what else can help us take back the web. One of the really big…

Yahoo! Local Blog: "Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews." Ultimately, standards for open data interchange (including but not limited to microformats) will turn out to be more important for the web than open APIs or even open source software……

I never thought I'd ever see a Javascript-based film editor but it's here. EyeSpot is the latest from mp3.com's Michael Roberts' Ajax binge. We weren't impressed with the first two Ajax apps (Word and Paint in Ajax) but this is something different and something cool. I foresee a rocky road for EyeSpot, despite the technology being cool. As techcrunch pointed…

Marc Hedlund noted in email: "It's interesting how closely the Mix06 web site hews to these observations on current web style: It was *not* like that when it launched." Microsoft has always been a great learning organization when challenged, and the quick evolution of the site about their conference on their "Web 2.0" catchup strategy may be another good sign…

U.S. News & World Report groks Life Hacking, featuring some suggestions by our friend Danny O’Brien. While I don’t necessarily agree with the analog tilt of the piece–the focus being too much on pulling the electronic plug and eliminating tech as distraction rather than attenuation of information in whatever form it takes in your life–it’s obviously great to see attention…

I want software and a book that'll help me get my 4-6 year old kids into programming. Gerv wants something similar but for twelve year olds. In my best of all possible worlds, there'd be an O'Reilly Radar reader out there with kids who wants to teach them how to program. That person would then document what works in book…

Plowing through proposals for and discussions around ETech 2006, and with our focus in this upcoming edition on affordances and attenuation, I've been thinking a great deal about email of late. To that end, I've kept meaning to point to Merlin Mann's excellent contribution to the usabilty of email, "Writing sensible email messages". His missive was brought to mind this…

IT Conversations has put up Kim Polese's keynote on collaborative testing. I know what I'm listening to on the flight to Portland tomorrow!…

OSCON keynoter David Heinemeier Hansson just launched The New Rails Movie. It's a walk-through of building a blog engine with Rails. Whether or not you think Rails is the bee's knees and the wasp's nipples, you have to admit that the 37 Signals crew are master marketers. In many ways, more amazing than the technology of Rails is the way…

Via the blog of my ever-interesting friend Mr Coates, comes the slides for Matt Biddulph's XTech 2005 presentation The Application of Weblike Design to Data, which references Web 2.0 for Designers, an article in Digital Web magazine by Richard McManus and Joshua Porter. Both talk about the implications of RSS, Ajax, and web services on the design of web sites….