- Maqetta — open source (modified BSD) WYSIWYG HTML5 user interface editor from the Dojo project. (via Hacker News)
- Hacker News Analysis — interesting to see relationship between number of posts, median score, and quality over time. Most interesting, though, was the relative popularity of different companies. (via Hacker News)
- Real Time All The Time (Emily Bell) — Every news room will have to remake itself around the principle of being reactive in real time. Every page or story that every news organisation distributes will eventually show some way of flagging if the page is active or archived, if the conversation is alive and well or over and done with. Every reporter and editor will develop a real time presence in some form, which makes them available to the social web. When I say “will” I of course don’t mean that literally . I think many of them won’t, but eventually they will be replaced by ones who do. (via Chris Saad)
- Changes in Home Broadband (Pew Internet) — Jeff Atwood linked to this, simply saying “Why Web 1.0 didn’t work and Web 2.0 does, in a single graph.” Ajax and web services and the growing value of data were all important, but nothing’s made the web so awesome as all the people who can now access it. (via Jeff Atwood)
"HTML5" entries
Four short links: 4 May 2011
WYSIWYG HTML5 UIs, Hacker News, Real Time, and Web 2.0
Four short links: 14 April 2011
HTML5 Demos, Resilience Engineering, Kinect SDK, and London Nerd Daytrips
- Chrome Experiment: ArcadeFire — choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering in HTML5. I have to say that “Built for Google Chrome” at the bottom does turn my stomach, a “this page looks best in Microsoft Internet Explorer” for the 2010s.
- Resilience Engineering, Part 1 (John Allspaw) — listing human error as a root cause isn’t where you should end, it’s where you should start your investigation […] The idea that failures in complex systems can literally have a singular ‘root’ cause, as if failures are the result of linear steps in time, is just incorrect. Not only is it almost always incorrect, but in practice that perspective can be harmful to an organization because it allows management and others to feel better about improving safety, when they’re not, because the solution(s) can be viewed as simple and singular fixes (in reality, they’re not). It’s all must-read stuff. (via Mike Loukides)
- What’s in Microsoft’s Kineck SDK — it does seem to include the new super body tracking software able to track up to two users at the same time and it also promises a new feature – the ability to listen. It has four microphones and there’s promise that, with the position information, it’ll be able to isolate your voice from background noise. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Nerdy London Day Trips (Ben Goldacre) — hundreds more reasons to visit London (and then leave it). Includes abandoned nuclear bunkers, an “eccentric” Victorian philanthropist’s labyrinth of tunnels, and the first house in the world to be powered by hydro-electricity. (via Kari Stewart)
Four short links: 6 April 2011
Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking
- Timeline Setter — ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma)
- Return to Shenzhen Part 1 — Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk cell phones. That’s right, you could buy a pile of cell phones. […] This market was truly amazing. It was one of most dense I’ve been to, shoulder to shoulder with very little standing room. Every device imaginable was available (checkout the pile of iPads) and people were literally negotiating a spot price minute by minute. The raw phones were sold for cash and then taken to other parts of the market for parts, resale, or recycling.
- Suwappu Toys in Media (BERG London) — a concept video for a toy project. This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds.
- Predator Eye-Tracking Video (YouTube) — neat technology. The source was released, retracted, reposted to GitHub by a third party, then retracted but rumours are it will be properly released soon.
Four short links: 5 April 2011
Big Maps, ssh VPN, Line Maps, and HTML5 Multiplayer Pacman
- The Big Map Blog — awesome old maps, for the afficionado. (via Sacha Judd)
- sshuttle — poor man’s VPN built over ssh. (via Hacker News)
- Remembering LineDrive — I, too, am bummed that LineDrive never became standard. And Maneesh, one of its cocreators. Check out his publications list!
- Websockets Pacman — multiplayer Pacman, where players take the role of ghosts. All implemented with WebSockets in HTML5. (via Pete Warden)
Four short links: 1 April 2011
Murky Future for Transparency, Browser Awesome, Future Realized, and Data Bias
- Transparency Sites to Close — the US government’s open data efforts will close in a few months as a result of the cuts in funding.
- Browser Wars, Plural (Alex Russell) — nice rundown of demos of what modern browsers are capable of.
- Brief Descriptions of Potential Home Information Services (image) — lovely 1971 piece of futurology, which you can read going “Google News, Amazon, Google Calendar, PayPal, ….” The ancients vastly over-estimated our appetite for educational material, though. There’s no education site on the scale of a Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. (via BoingBoing)
- Google’s Recipes for Recipes — I’m as astonished as anyone to find myself agreeing with Nick Carr. The whinge is basically that by promoting recipes marked up in a particular format, Google have created an environment that favours corporate recipes over small less-technical people who can post plain text recipes but wouldn’t know microformats from microfilm. The really interesting part is how the choice of drill-down categories can backfire: Take, for instance, a recent search for “cassoulet.” The top search result is a recipe from Epicurious, one of the larger and better sites. But if you refine by time, your choices are “less than 15 min,” “less than 30 min,” or “less than 60 min.” There is no option for more than 60 minutes. In truth, a classic cassoulet takes at least 4 hours to make, if not several days (the Epicurious recipe takes 4 hours and 30 minutes; yet there in the results are recipes under each of these three time classes. One from Tablespoon goes so far as to claim to take just 1 minute. (It’s made with kidney beans, canned mushrooms, and beef, so it’s not long on authenticity.) … Refining recipe search by time doesn’t result in better recipes rising to the top; rather, the new winners are recipes packaged for the American eating and cooking disorder. (via Daniel Spector)
Ubiquity and revenue streams: How HTML5 can help publishers
Google's Marcin Wichary brings HTML5 into perspective for publishers.
Should publishers jump on the HTML5 bandwagon? Marcin Wichary, senior user experience designer at Google, discusses the benefits and opportunities.
Accessibility and HTML5 highlight TOC day 1
Workshops on publishing standards and HTML5 caught the attention of TOC attendees.
TOC recap: Publishers were very interested in the HTML5 workshop, and the publishing standards took a broad stroke look at the changing scene, including accessibility issues.
Can Flash and HTML5 get along?
Adobe's Duane Nickull on serving developers -- HTML5 and Flash alike -- through choice.
As HTML5 matures, the overlap between the new standard and Flash becomes a point of examination (or contention, depending on your perspective). In this interview, Adobe technical evangelist and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Duane Nickull says the real issue isn't which option is better, but rather how developers are best served.
Four short links: 12 January 2011
Zork Pen, Clever Web Design, iPhone Library, and Text Layout
- Zork and Tic-Tac-Toe on a LiveScribe Pen (YouTube) — this guy totally ported the Z-Machine so he can play Zork on his pen. My favourite bit is the comment from Infocom founder Scott Cutler: As the implementer who wrote the first Z-machine for the TRS-80 some 30 years ago and one of the founders of Infocom, I was thrilled and impressed to see what you did. I can guarantee you that we never imagined it would be played with a pen! (via Joe Johnston and Jason Scott)
- Ben the Bodyguard — brilliant web site design. (via Aza Raskin)
- three20 — open source iPhone library based on the Facebook app, providing things like photo viewer, message composer, etc. (via The Mission Lab)
- Scale and Rhythm — beautiful web site that lets you experiment with the variables in text layout.
New directions in web architecture. Again.
A focus on data is finishing the revolution that started with Ajax.
Modern applications require data. That means developers must see themselves as data providers, and they must create stable public APIs for accessing that data.