ars technica: Safely whitelist your favorite sites and opt out of tracking.
“Many were more than happy to unblock Ars, but many others had difficulty doing so due to the complicated nature of many ad blocking solutions. Dozens of you asked for help, so here it is. In the first of many articles we plan to produce about these topics, we’ve attempted to collect information on how an informed Web user such as yourself can safely and responsibly whitelist websites that you support and trust.”
Matt Legend Gemmell: iPad Application Design.
“We already have iPhone apps on the iPad (they can run at their native size in the middle of the screen, or be scaled up to fit). That’s useful, but it’s not particularly interesting. Far more relevantly, we can bring desktop-class applications to iPad — but we need to rethink our user interface and design in general.” I wonder how iPad-specific apps scale down to iPhone?
Queness: Most Effective Method to Reduce and Optimize PNG Images.
Cute little trick.
Measuring Usability: Why you only need to test with five users (explained).
Makes a crystal clear case. Timely, too. Needed to test something.
ReadWriteWeb: Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests.
”Here’s what this all means in layman’s terms: Apple isn’t allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says ‘the ball is in Apple’s court.’” Sadly, not in wider public perception, but I think Jobs’ remarks are (as evinced by this and other articles) going to backfire on him. Reality had to punch through at some point.
All Things Digital: Video Interview: Jeff Smith of Mobile App Maker Smule.
”Smith is part of a small but vocal chorus of app developers who say they don’t want to move to Android, even though it is growing quickly. His complaints: He doesn’t like the way the store merchandises its wares, and he doesn’t want to have to create different apps for each handset Android supports.” Yet we see, time and again, those who throw up walls, refuse to adapt, are the ones who generally lose. Marked to revisit this in a year or so.
insic designs: Create Social Media Icons in Pure CSS.
Google Apps Marketplace …
... is here.
The Atlantic: Digital Rights Group Blasts iPhone’s Faustian Developer Deal.
”‘Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users’ ... [snip] ... The contract also strictly bans tinkering with any Apple products, a limitation that Lohmann points out could prevent developers from making apps that work with open source software.” Perhaps a bit of FUD; perhaps not.
Panic Blog: The Panic Status Board.
Brilliant. Via Bump’s Twitter.
PHP Zone: Use jQuery With Other Libraries Like Prototype and MooTools.
Timely. I’m running across more and more sites with just about every library under the sun being called on the home page, top of the page, uncompressed, slowing everything to a crawl. A corner-rounder in MooTools, a collapsible box in Spry, navigation in JQuery, Dreamweaver rollovers ...
Macworld/MacUser: Are Macs really cheaper to manage than PCs?
“Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage — they’re a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.” After switching back from PC to Mac a year ago, I concur wholeheartedly.
Macworld: iPhone app purge: Are template-based apps next?
“Template-based applications can be a handy way for a small company or blogger to get a branded iPhone application into the hands of users as quickly as possible. Apple reportedly doesn’t have a problem with this in principle, and seems to be focusing on applications that have very basic functionality.”
The March issue of FFDMag …
Flash and Flex Developers Magazine ... is available. There’s an article on iPad, for those interested.
appstorm.mac: How To Find Your Files Faster with Tags.
I should use tags more. I still have to wade through my backlog of photos and tag them all ...
After a week of playing with Woopra,
and comparing it to Statcounter and Google Analytics, I almost want to drop Google Analytics. Google’s consistently under-reporting the stats for the site, compared to Woopra and Statcounter. Woopra, they’re live stats - I can watch visitors’ paths through my site, and even label each visitor with a nickname. I know they’re real ... and I know that Google’s missing 10-15% completely. All three of these (Statcounter, Woopra and GA) tally by Javascript, so JS is not a factor here. Any JS based statcounter has to be missing hits (due to JS being turned off, page caching, etc.) anyway, which means GA is even more inaccurate. I’ll only use Google Analytics to gauge trends now - never again for definitive counts.
ConceptDraw MindWave.
A widget to make Google Wave perform collaborative mindmapping.
Javalobby: Search Engine Basics.
If you ever wanted a peek at search engine algorithms, here’s your chance.
cloudkick blog: 4 Months with Cassandra, a love story.
”We initially used PostgreSQL, but as we added billions of rows, the performance quickly degraded.” Some real numbers here.
NY Times: What Apple vs. HTC Could Mean.
“It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it [snip] The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”
ars technica: Why we tweaked our copyright notice.
Of interest to those concerned about meta-usage.
CNet: Finally: Gmail multitasks more smoothly.
“One example: In a message, clicking the ‘new window’ icon toward the upper left splits that conversation out into a separate window. When you send a reply, the window closes automatically (after a 10-second delay if you have the “undo send” feature enabled in Gmail Labs--a feature I recommend).”
Gizmodo: Apple Sues HTC For Infringing On 20 iPhone Patents.
“Apple’s asking for a permanent injunction, which would bar HTC from importing or selling phones here that use these patents, along with triple damages with maximum interest (read: a lot of money). As you can see, some of the patents are fairly broad, like “unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image,” which seems to cover like every touchscreen phone ever.” Here’s to open technologies, kids.
Ahmed Rabieh: 15 Helpful Flash Components to Make Charts and Maps.
Just for future reference.
MikeChambers.com: Relative Performance of Rich Media Content across Browsers and OS’s.
One of his observations: ”From these tests, Flash content does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows.” That is my observation, as well.
