Today’s Readings

The one example in the video is enough to make me think that Weave, from Mozilla Labs, could be a hugely beneficial tool to install!  Who hasn’t been out-and-about and wished they had access to something on their desktop?

A follow-up to Dmitry Baranovskiy’s #jsquizz, comes another JavaScript quiz from Juriy Zaytsev. Even if you’re like me and find these types of quizzes a little mundane (not because I know all the answers, but because I don’t a lot of reasons to know such “out of there” expressions), I think you’ll find much to entertain and educate from Juriy (I have to admit, I was not familiar with delete or the DontDelete attribute…).

And while I was perusing Juriy’s site, I also stumbled across this little snippet.

I had seen the first video some time ago, but not the second. Anyone interested in design, UI, UX, IA, or whatever name you want to give to “make stuff look good and be easy for people to understand”, should know the name Temple Grandin.

What do you know, an article about fonts, that isn’t talking about @font-face!  Didn’t know those were still possible!  :-)  It brings up a good question:  How do you pick your font stacks?  Arial, sans-serif?  Or do you “go deep”, with Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif?  More has to go into font-stack selection than simply “these are all popular” or “these are all sans-serif”.  You should take into consideration the letter-spacing as well as how similar the font-sizes look.  For example, a 14px Times New Roman looks smaller than a 14px Courier New, even though the actual letters are the same height, because Courier New is a mono-space font.  It makes sense to offer your users as many options as possible, to provide as many fall-backs as possible, to maintain a site’s design.   I have been looking for a lists like this for some time, thanks Amrinder!

Last week Google wrote about several new enhancements to Google apps.  From some new search features, to Chrome extensions for Gmail, to adding scripts to Google Apps, and more!  Nothing really ground-breaking, but hopefully something to make your Google life a little better.

And while we’re in Palo Alto, anybody feel like getting a little Buzz?  Google’s intro latest intro to the social web is Google Buzz.  It takes advantage of your existing Google contacts, which is nice, but apparently it’s not-ready-for-prime-time, as their site advises: “We’re still rolling out Buzz to everyone, so if you don’t see it in your Gmail account yet, check back soon.”  :-(

Still (sort of) in Google-mode, Mr. YQL himself, Chris Heilmann, presents a pretty slick way to rotate your online map, the same way you rotate your paper map! And speaking of paper maps, check-out this “zoomable” paper map I found on the Ajaxian post! Awesome!!

A new development on the HTML5/Microformats front from Bruce Lawson, writing at HTML5DoctorThe <time> element, now with Microformats, thusly:
<time datetime="2010-01-20" pubdate>

How much do you hate IE6? (sorry, trick question…)  Check what the Brits are up to!  With any luck, yet another one bites the dust…

And finally, under my radar flew friend Dave Furfero‘s Sexy.js, a winner in the 14 Days of jQuery contest!  Besides a bad-ass looking website, Sexy.js is a tiny (<1kb, compressed) library that allows you to sequentially chain together Ajax functionality (a la jQuery).  I do a crappy job of explaining, check-out Dave’s presentation.  This is really slick, Dave, job well done!

Happy reading,
Atg

<span style="" class="vcard"><a class="fn url" href="http://wait-till-i.com/">Chris Heilmann</a></span>

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