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Breaking Development Orlando 2013: Pitfalls & Triumphs of the Cross-Screen Experience by Cameron Moll. Via HTML5Weekly, which describes it thus:
A video presentation from Breaking Development Orlando 2013 where Cameron Moll walks through what’s required to present a consistent Web experience to users regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends.
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Emergent Futures Tumblelog: The Community, Tumblr and Yahoo - Do we Protest?
There are a couple of services that are really important to my life and my business. One of them is Tumblr and the other is Evernote. In promoting Evernote for example I often tell people that if Microsoft buys it I will retire. That is because it has become so important to my work flow and because of my view that large corporations hardly ever get these sort of services right.
Tumblr is equally important to me in a different way and I am part of the community and honoured to be one of the Tech editors, and have almost 200,000 followers.
There are rumours going around that Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Tumblr which worries me a hell of a lot. Let me be clear that I have no problems with the founders and investors making money off the contributions of the community but I worry what would happen to Tumblr in the hands of a large entity.
In a world where business models like these require both the founders and investors to contribute and create but the community to contribute and create as well, valuations and business strategies have a different flavour. No community and there is no business valuation.
If you have similar concerns then please reblog or like this post. I intend such support to be a signal to both Tumblr and Yahoo (if the rumours are true) that the community is concerned and should be involved in the decision making process. Maybe that is thinking with delusions of grandeur or maybe it isn’t - over to you the community to decide
Paul Higgins
- The loss of tropical rain forests is likely to reduce the energy output of hydroelectric projects in countries like Brazil that are investing billions of dollars to create power to support economic growth.
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Avoiding Unnecessary Paints - HTML5 Rocks
Rendering performance is critical to users enjoying your application, and you should always aim to keep your paint workload under 16ms. To help you do that, you should integrate using DevTools throughout your development process to identify and fix bottlenecks as they arise.
Inadvertent interactions, particularly on paint-heavy elements, can be very costly and will kill rendering performance.
Via HTML5Weekly.
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5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery
Best of the set:
.grep()or.map()instead of defaulting to.each()with conditional logic inside. I’m sure there’s a blog post out there about the speed of jQuery vs. Underscore’s implementations….Follow-up: JSWeekly #130 points to a comparison of Underscore’s
.map()and .reduce(), their performance and ECMAScript5’s inclusion of them as[].map()and[].reduce().Also, the non-jQuery tip for >IE8-browsers for
document.querySelector('#list')anddocument.querySelectorAll('#list li')is helpful food-for-thought, too.Via JSWeekly #129.
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A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On cellular encryption
Cellular eavesdropping seems a lot more tractable [than land-line eavesdropping], if only because mobile calls are conducted on a broadcast channel. That means you can wiretap with almost no carrier involvement. In fact there’s circumstancial[sic] evidence that this already happening — just by different parties than you’d think. According to a new book by reporters Marc Ambinder and Dave Brown:The FBI has quietly removed from several Washington, D.C.–area cell phone towers, transmitters that fed all data to wire rooms at foreign embassies.This raises a few questions: once you’ve tapped someone’s cellular signals, what do you do with the data? Isn’t it all encrypted? And how easy would it be for the US or some foreign government to lay their hands on the plaintext?All of this which serves as a wonderful excuse to noodle about the state of modern cellular encryption. Be warned that this is not going to be a short post! For those who don’t like long articles, here’s the TL;DR: cellular encryption is a whole lot worse than you think.Love this blog. Emphasis mine though it was already italicized.
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Scoops and Software: How The New York Times Tells Stories With Data | Fast Company Labs
Embedded in the heart of the New York Times, Aron Pilhofer runs an experimental news team made up of veteran journalists and top-notch computer scientists. Their job is to tell stories using software, data, and old-fashioned journalistic skills. Here’s how they do it.
In case you’re curious about my team and colleagues. (I’m currently not paying attention to our team’s informal show ‘n tell about new infrastructure tricks.)
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Why the New Google Maps is the Most Honest Form of Cartography
Is the hot dog vendor who stands on a street corner as worthy of inclusion as the bank on the same corner? That decision still lay with mapmakers—in this case a giant internet company. Google’s solution to the problem was to remove itself from the equation. Its map maker tool, much lauded for its use in creating usable maps of North Korea and now slowly being rolled out in other countries, allows users to mark locations in a Wikipedia-like fashion.
The new product goes further. It says on the tin that this is map is made for you: “a billion maps, one for each user,” as Google’s lead map designer, Jonah Jones, told TechCruch. What about advertising? Of course Google will use your information to serve you ads. That is what it does. And as on other Google products, ads will be clearly marked.
The idea of “mental maps”, or how individuals see the world, is an old one, used by artists and ethnographers and New Yorker cover designers. What Google has done is to bring the mental map to a service used by several million people. With one for every user, maps can never again lay claim to—or even give the illusion of—neutrality. Despite its restrictive nature, such a map frees us to see the world anew.
Read more at Quartz
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chartsnthings: Sketches from Money on the Bench
On Monday we published something a little different than most of the graphics we make – a running, updating tracker of how much money major league teams are paying to players on the disabled list.
I love sports, but I’m not a huge baseball fan and I’m neutral on the Yankees scale – I don’t…
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Gamasutra - Why Candy Box became more social than ‘social games’
The game…is so minimalistic that it recalls a beloved earlier age of games, when all of them were opaque and mysterious, and the only real way to progress was to share playground lore.
In the early stages of Candy Box, it seems impossible that there should be a dragon somewhere in the game, but while you’re still counting candies and fighting tree trunks for practice, seeing on Twitter that people are planting trees and using acid rain spells against a castle beast sounds like a myth you’re determined to see for yourself.
As childhood gamers, everyone always had that friend with the false boast about what happens later in a game you yourself can’t conquer. Or you learned about secrets and easter eggs through rumor and conversation, things you never thought to try for yourself.
Via colleague Erik Hinton on a work distribution list.
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“It comes down to this: what’s the rationale for hosting this event? The reasons have got to be more than just making a few quick tourism dollars or showing your city off to the world. If a city needs this kind of development, if it’s in sync with the city’s natural growth, then the Olympics can be a good thing. But so often cities haven’t taken into account the long-term benefit of their citizens when they’re putting together their Olympic bid.” -Gary Hustwit
The Olympic City is an ongoing photography project by Gary Hustwit and Jon Pack. They’re traveling the world, documenting the sites built for previous Olympic games. A book of their findings comes out later this month. We caught up with them to discuss what they’ve discovered so far.
Read: After the Olympics, Documenting What’s Left
[Images: The Olympic City]
(via pacificstand)
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Fast Wi-Fi on Flights May Serve the Airlines, Too - NYTimes.com
The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by the opportunities that high-speed broadband service presents for airlines themselves to essentially sell more things to the customers, whether the product is in-flight entertainment, food and drink, customized services to elite-status passengers or products at the destination, including hotel packages, sports and concert tickets, restaurant and theater reservations. On an airplane, you have a captive market, and with sophisticated technology, you can sell to passengers in very personal ways.
And, of course, flight attendants will be expected to become even more adept at using in-flight technology. The question is whether they will embrace the moment.
“We found consistently in our research, whether the markets were the U.S., Europe or Asia, that flight attendants are typically the least automated group within the airline work force,” said Andrew Kemmetmueller, the chief executive of Allegiant Systems, a technology development company that focuses on airline operations.
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Paul Irish on Chrome Moving to Blink ∙ An A List Apart Blog Post
What the Chrome team is up to. Worth a quick read and skimming of the linked docs if you haven’t had time to follow along lately.
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Soapbox Envy: CSS is not an amoral monster.
Quit thinking of pages as static, box-like things.
Hell, if you can, stop thinking in terms of pages, and instead think in terms of content. Unlike a memo or a broadcast, web media allow you to present things in whatever context you damned well please. If you want to split one page into twenty as circumstances might dictate, you can make something that does that.
Via
Starting the morning off right with Ben Henick’s punchy “CSS is not an amoral monster.” undercaffeinated.tumblr.com/post/498785314…
— Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb)At some point I posted this to the wrong account. Reblogging well after the fact.
(via tiffehr)
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Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion
Jeffrey Beall is a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, but he’s known online for his popular blog Scholarly Open Access, where he maintains a running list of open-access journals and publishers he deems questionable or predatory.
Now, one of those publishers intends to sue Mr. Beall, and says it is seeking $1-billion in damages.
The publisher, the OMICS Publishing Group, based in India, is also warning that Mr. Beall could be imprisoned for up to three years under India’s Information Technology Act, according to a letter from the group’s lawyer. Mr. Beall received the letter on Tuesday from IP Markets, an Indian firm that manages intellectual-property rights.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Some of my favorite lawbloggers are already posting critiques of the legality of the letter. And thankfully Mr. Beall agrees the suit, if brought, would have no merit.
