Today’s Readings

Are you kidding me?  Pac Man is 30 years old????  O… M… G…  At least I can play Pacman for hours and hours and hours at work now, forever!  Thanks, Google!!

Google TV.  The merger between TV and PC has been attempted before, but never successfully.  One issue I still see is “my wife wants to watch Dancing with the Stars and I want to check my email”, so I will still need a separate computer.  But now, I can hunt for the stuff I want to watch on TV via a browser, right on my TV?  Will be interesting to see what comes of this, and whether “the Google” can make this version work any better than those other attempts.

A really interesting video regarding the possible future of mobile devices:

Kudos to this Adaptive Path post for sharing the video.

An encouraging graph from our good friends at Microsoft showing IE9 Platform Preview’s HTML5 capabilities (SPOILER ALERT: It beats all other browsers!  REALITY ALERT: If you only look at the features that it supports better than other browsers…).  And I think it’s cute that the second paragraph begins with “We respect how challenging it is to build one page that works the same in every browser” and that the tabs on the second chart look like this in FF:
IE Test Center tabs

Sort of piggy-backing on jQuery data method, comes the HTML5 Data Attribute.  Pretty powerful, allowing you to move that data you’ve been storing as a class or rel to something more appropriate.  The word of warning near the end of the post is worth repeating here: As data attributes become more widely used, the potential for clashes in naming conventions becomes much greater… I encourage people to choose a standard string (perhaps the site/plugin name) to prefix all their data- attributes — e.g. data-html5doctor-height or data-my-plugin-height.

For you JavaScript-heads out there, you likely already know of James Padosley, he is a really talented JS developer.  While his latest offering, Fairies, looks pretty for a few nanoseconds and then soon looks, well, pointless, becomes much more beautiful when you start reading his dissection of the code that creates the fairies. His code is so elegant and he explains it so easily, it could almost be a great case for those wanting to learn object oriented JS…

Want to interact with your computer like Tom Cruise did in Minority Report?  The day may be closer than you expect…  Check-out John Underkoffler’s TED Talk about g-speak…  It starts getting into pure cuckoo-pants stuff at around 8:45…

I am always on the look-out for ways to optimize anything I work on: faster is simply better.  So when I saw this Ajaxian article about optimizing CSS for the iPad, I had to wonder whether these enhancements would have the same effect on regular browsers… Anyone feel like running some test??

Okay, that ought to be enough for a muggy Saturday night in NYC…

Happy reading,
Atg

John Underkoffler

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