Posts filed under "internet"
15 fantastic data visualisations - Visualisations have become a normal part of the landscape. My favourite from last year was definitely was Toutapp, which gives you a visualisation of your inbox.
Distorted Lenses - is my latest site, best described as “Broken Kode for images”. Originally I used to use the excellent Asaph, but have transitioned over to Tumblr due to the lack of development on Asaph and the addition of a community via Tumblr.
I only got a chance to put this together over the weekend, so it’s still rough around the edges, but hopefully I’ll be sorting those edges out in due course. The design also gives a clear indication of what Broken Kode will be looking like in the not too distant future.
Humans TXT - Interesting initiative. I guess this is the equivalent of an artist signing their drawings, but since oftentimes a website is the work of several people, this is a nice way to give credit. Usually I include some of this information in my CSS file, but this is an interesting alternative.
I can’t get enough of Sandwich Video, which is the company run by Adam Lisagor. One of the things that I hate with a passion is a BAD advert, which is probably why I love a good ad so much. Adam has got one of those styles that you can easily distinguish recognise straight away. I suggest you have a look at the original Birdhouse video, followed by the Jawbox and finally the Square video as my top three favourites at the moment.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses - Probably the funniest shit I’ve seen on the net in a good long while. Honestly can’t stop laughing at this. (via kottke )
Sometimes there’s a Man - A rock opera for Back to Work . Love little side projects like this, that have such a nice polish to them
10 more useful iPhone tips & tricks - Seriously amazing list. If you have an iPhone, do yourself a favour.
Webstock Past Talks - Heard enough about these talks. Will definitely be checking them all out at some point, once things have settled down here before the wedding.
Browserling - cross-browser testing in your browser. Finally a website that doesn’t suck for testing out what everything looks like on all browsers (via brett)
Read & Trust - Now see this is interesting. It’s basically a much better 9rules from way back. For those who don’t know what 9rules was, it was one of the original blogging networks. The great thing about Read & Trust is that it appears to be run by someone who appreciates and knows what they’re doing. One of my biggest online failures was Inksmith. I loved the idea and it’s a shame it never came to be as i originally envisioned it, but I guess having something like this is the next best thing.
So I’ve been on an iPhone for a little over 7 months, and I’ve kinda stumbled my way through most things on my first iDevice. As of late, I’ve decided to sort myself out and by extension sort my iPhone out as well.
Email and Calendar Sync
The first thing that I sorted out was converting my email/calendar to a push notified Gmail account. The way you do that is not by using the Gmail option to creating an account, but rather using the Microsoft Exchange option on the iPhone which basically does that automatically. That I’ve found to be completely awesome as opposed to the Fetch protocol that I was using before, with my Mail app being updated every hour or something.
The next thing that I needed to sort out is my calendar options. I will use my Google Calendar on occasion, but will rarely use iCal really. In fact I probably use my office Outlook more than I’ve ever used my iCal application, it’s just not something I’m used to doing at home. Calendars are definitely something I do throughout the day, rather than the evening.
Photos Mess
The last part of the puzzle that needs to be sorted out is my photos. What a complete and utter mess these things are in at the moment. The thing is they’re also taking a whole slew of space on my iPhone as well. Ever since I migrated over to my new macbook install I basically put aperture…big mistake. Thought I was doing something clever. As it turns out I screwed myself as Aperture doesn’t allow for the files to be deleted from the iPhone when you’re synching. There are other options, but honestly I’m not all that enamoured by Aperture and it’s just as slow as iPhoto (so I’ve not gained much in way of performance).
I need to get a few older files from my previous back, get iPhoto up and running on my mac, migrate back to iPhoto completely and then clean up my photo folder.
iPhone Applications Purge
Once that’s done I just need to clean up my Files folder and also my Scanner Pro folder as it’s got a bunch of additional stuff that doesn’t need to be there, and I think my minimal setup is complete.
It’s also probably time to purge a few applications off the phone as well, as the number of applications creeps back up to 45, which obviously I don’t use all the time.
Also while I’m talking about iPhone applications, there are a couple of serious keepers for the forseeable future:
- Piggie: This is a direct change from MoneyBook
- Simple Note: Just can’t believe I did without this application for so long. It’s basically the gmail of notes. I’m finally bloody organised enough to have all of my notes with me all the time in a way that is clear and synced across my machines. Game changer.
- NightStand Central - The only alarm application that you will ever need. Or at least till something simpler comes along, but I have to say I love this application and the way it uses the hardware is excellent.
Anil Dash - See that’s what I’m talking about, a bit of good old fashioned blogging. Also I miss browsing blogs and getting design ideas or things that they’ve done. In this case, the ‘Read Later’ button which links to Instapaper. That’s pretty damn cool. For the longer posts, definitely a must, need to get onto that.
So, the first part of this experiment is complete. I’ve basically spent the last 3 weeks blogging solidly on the ‘Kode. It’s been a mixture of links and opinion columns and random thoughts. in that time I’ve not tweeted at all, in fact it’s all been on here. So the next step is to see which of the two platforms garners more attention in general. Obviously on Twitter it’s just going to be that, a whole bunch of links with very little commentary, but lets see if that platform is any good at generating traffic towards this site.
I’m just curious how powerful twitter is and if it has effectively killed blogging as I know it (I believe it has, but I’d like to make sure). So it might be a little quiet over here. If you are looking for the same type of content, then I’d suggest you head on over to @khaledaboualfa for a little bit of the same, although I’m sure I’ll post things on here as well (just no where as near the level of the past 3 weeks).
If you’ve not been to the Google Chrome Webstore, go have a wonder around there and come back. Interesting no? It’s basically a big place to find interesting things on the web that let you do stuff. Some stuff is optimised for the Google Chrome browser, others not so much.
One of the things I’ve found is that whenever you go to a new service there does seem to be the choice of signing in using your google account, which is INCREDIBLY useful and generally a major hurdle already passed to get to use something.
The first thing I’ve installed is the Graphic.ly application. What can I say, I’m a comic geek, so this seemed like the natural thing to do. I still don’t like reading comics on my computer (I’ve ever really done that for one thing, and that’s because it stopped being published in English, and so I was forced to find another method to finish off the story). The interesting thing here isn’t Graphic.ly itself, it’s the fact that I’m trying it in the first place.
The service has been online for like a year or something and this is the first time I’m actually using it. Why? Because it’s there and it was easy. In fact I’m already reading a comic with art by the great Rick Mays, whom I’ve not read anything of any substance since Kabuki Scarab (one of the best mini series you’ve probably never read).
It just kind of proves a point of what the store is meant to be about, slowly but surely letting you discover stuff that was already there, now it’s just a hell of a lot easier to access.
http://www.brokenkode.com/thoughts-on-the-google-chrome-webstore
The Web Designer’s Guide to iOS Apps - This should be an interesting read. Not heard much from anyone about this, but I’m sorting out my wishlist, so this is definitely on there.
http://www.brokenkode.com/the-web-designers-guide-to-ios-apps
For all those wondering what the hell is going on the ‘Kode and this larger (than normal) number of posts in such a short time, it’s basically an experiment I’m going through for the month of December. Today was a bit of an off day, on account of me being out of the country so to speak and not having the time.
Ultimately my goal is to post about 3-4 posts a day and try and break my all time record of 51 posts in a single month. Yeah I know, it’s not quantity, it’s quality, well I’m striving for both. I’m striving for something fun and random, where the signal to noise ratio is decent.
I guess the reasons is because I’m actually enjoying blogging again. Not this limited 140 character BULLSHIT. Sorry but twitter has killed off any meaningful communication on the web as I used to once know it. There are some great sites out there, but by and large there is too much short spurts of noise. I was happy to acknowledge twitter killing the blog comments. You can see it all over, but what I am generally opposed to is the lack of creativity in people’s posts. It’s like all their energy has been devoted to something less meaningful.
I don’t care people communicating in the way they way, it’s just such a shame that it’s nearly killed the way that I used to like reading. So this is my attempt to rekindle the act of blogging for the sake of blogging. Putting an idea forward, and DEVELOPING it in more detail. There is limit in these things (at least for me) and I’ve spoken about this before. 4 paragraphs or thereabouts is about the correct size.
So join me on this journey to reclaiming the blogosphere. Cluster Fuck, Twitter Fuck.
5by5 Studios - Thought I’d post about the podcast network that I’ve been listening religiously for the last few weeks now. Dan Benjamin has really made a great set of shows with some very interesting characters. The ones that I love a lot include:
The Pipeline - Which is Dan interviewing a whole slew of great people
The Talk Show - With Gruber. Usually a continuation of what Gruber writes on his blog. Everyone’s got off days and I think Gruber’s was last week, so don’t bother downloading that one.
Build and Analyze - Great little podcast with Marco Arment, who’s my favourite iOS developer now, even though I don’t own Instapaper (don’t use it) but I love hearing his insights into the whole process. I wish the guys at Brushes took a page from him.
The Big Web Show - Typically love the guests, although I find Zeldman’s not as warm as Benjamin.
What I love about the website is the simplicity with which it’s been built, in terms of the url structure. You have the title of the podcast and then / the episode number. Beautiful. It’s probably the best podcast network currently on the web.
Google Chrome Ad - Fun ad, but I still believe it going to mainly appeal to the enterprise user and not people like me…even if I am a Google fan.
Been thinking about this for a while now. When Facebook first came about, I loved everything about it. As time has gone by however I have been moving slowly away from the service. I’ve noticed this trend with other people as well. It’s one of those things where a lot of the shine has gone from the service and now you’re bombarded with utter crap in the news feed, about farmville and other shitty game applications.
The thing is though, that FB still provides these words with a decent viewership, ie all of my closer friends that have made it into my circle of friends on Facebook, as well as the like 40 people that read this blog regularly.
Which in a round about way kind of brings us to that thing that used to be an integral part of every blog, the comments.
The annoying thing? Some of the comments about these posts remain on FB and not on this site. I guess the nice thing is that you have a series of places to share communications with, rather than a single location, but alas I am a nostalgia freak. I like what is old, and normally go back to the old on occasion to drink from that well.
Communication is now scattered. It’s all over the place, because there are a million and one places that are vying for our attention. While that is good in general for people to have options to find the thing that they like the most, it’s also makes things a lot more … spread out.
It’s not that I like living in the past, but I like to relive times that were generally fun. The time where blog comments were common place and people interacted with more than 140 characters is long gone. There are specific havens on the net where this continues, but as a blogging community that has left us I believe.
One of the reasons that I’ve had less time to spend on the net. I spend a few minutes here, and hour there, but ultimately I no longer live on the net like I used to. I tend to spend a lot of free time drawing (which is great) and I end up trying to relax from the day I’ve had.
You choose your battlegrounds, you choose your poison. I am not 100% into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Was never really into Delicious or Flickr. Don’t really like Tumblr all that much either.
I know that’s where all the kids are these days, but I feel that I am happy with this unique little part of cyberspace. It’s all mine, I control it’s destiny, it’s in my hands to build it or break it or change it. It’s not a competition, it’s a manner of expression, and after all that’s why we’re all here right?
While on the subject of Five Simple Steps, I am really enjoying the creation of these web design book boutiques. Notably obviously the Five Simple Steps boutique and the boutique as well. Books that I am looking to buy at some point are:
I thought this was interesting. Just surfing away happily, writing support request emails on the habari mailing list (trying to sort things out - Colin has been great in helping things get sorted out on the site), but I noticed this little icon in the already minimal Chrome toolbar. After I clicked on it I realised it was telling me about an update and that I needed to restart the browser. How excellent is that. The Chrome team really are paying a lot of attention to the detail for their browser which is excellent.
Broken Kode, there’s an app for that - not really, it doesn’t exist but if you like having websites as icons on your Iphone (you known by making a bookmark in mobile safari and then saving it to your homepage), the ‘Kode now has a customised icon just for that.
The way to do it is pretty simple, here’s a couple of links to help you with the “technical bits”, templates you might want to use and how to hide the address bar in mobile safari to show more of the site straight away:
Biolab Disaster - Damn that boy is talented. From the creator of Asaph (which runs my the Elsewhere part of this website) comes this excellent platform game, done in HTML5, CSS, Javascript and Canvas. Look mum, no Flash required.