“Urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand— but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact.” —
John Thackara, from In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
(via jayparkinsonmd)
Making browsers faster: Resource Packages -
What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — css, js, images, anything else — in a single http request at the start of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do.
A simple, elegant solution that will be implemented in Firefox 3.7 and, I imagine, Safari shortly after.
(via lkm)
Yesterday, Jason Kottke linked to The Times’ list of 100 Best Films of the Decade.
Just as I did above, he linked to the Printer Friendly page. On the myriad of blogs I read, I see this more and more. Presumably, it’s done because there is no single page.
The Times has no ads on their printer friendly page, so they are losing out on quite a bit of ad revenue. I’ve seen this list linked to on a number of websites, and they all link to the print page.
Some news execs will perhaps take notice of this, and say, “We better put some advertisements on our print page!” Of course, you, clever reader, know that the reason everyone’s linking to the print page isn’t too avoid some non-intrusive ads, a better stylesheet, and more photos. Nope, you’re simply pissed that this list is paginated into nine different pages.
I very much want this poster, but I don’t think it’s available anywhere. It looks like this was made for a now-shuttered restaurant named Pastrami Jack’s in Eden Prairie, MN.
This poster was illustrated by Sam Soulek and accompanied several other fantastic posters. The campaign was by FAME of Minneapolis.
This came my way via beeriety via robot-heart via behance Various Posters on the Behance Network
Jason Snell understands how to use Twitter:
Twitter is a conversation. Twitter accounts are people. Give your Twitter account a personality, even if it’s for a brand.
It takes two people to make a conversation. Make sure you’re responding to replies on Twitter when appropriate.
Twitter should be more than a self-promotion machine. Twitter accounts should be of a followable volume and add value over, say, RSS.
Twitterers love tidbits, breaking news, links to interesting stuff. Don’t be afraid to make your feed more valuable by linking elsewhere.
Twitter is instantaneous. Ask a question, you’ll get answers. Use it to make FAQs for a story or upcoming interview, or as quick polls.
Don’t forget the individuals. If you tweet as a brand, mention individual writers by name. Writers, mention your brand. Virtuous circle.
Summary: Tweet for your brand like you’d tweet for yourself. Reply to comments. Have a personality. Share links. Mention friends by name.
I debated whether this is unfairly reposting content, but these are too fantastic to not be collated somewhere.
Permalinks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Sum
You probably shouldn’t use XHTML, but in case you do and you want that closing slash a la <br />, then do the following:
HTML tags inserted which have an EMPTY content model now place the value of the TM_XHTML variable before the closing ‘>’. If you want these tags to use the minimized (XHTML) form, go to Preferences -> Advanced -> Shell Variables and set TM_XHTML to “ /”.
—TextMate release notes
Tumblr appears to be stripping my Markdown headings of their HTML tags in the Dashboard. Why? I don’t know.
Here’s a test:
My coworkers and I were some of the first to receive the new iMacs, getting them around the same time that Apple stores did. Here are my thoughts after using one for two days.
The Magic Mouse feels too sticky at first but it quickly gets that thin layer of oil from your skin so your fingers don’t stick when scrolling. It sits very low on the desk, and so is most comfortable with the forearm parallel and close to the desktop surface. It seems to track very well and I can’t tell I’m using a wireless mouse which has not always been my experience with Bluetooth peripherals. The click action of the Magic Mouse is a bit deeper and much crisper than the Mighty Mouse. Compared to the previous two iterations of Apple mice, this mouse actually has a top surface that clicks.
The new mouse weighs less than the wireless Mighty Mouse and also has better balance—the Mighty Mouse is decidedly balanced toward the rear.
My greatest complaint with the new mouse is that the left- and right-side edges are not rounded at all. Unless you have very large hands, the edges will likely dig a bit into the sides of your palm. If you have small hands you might find it unbearably uncomfortable, but it has not been a deal breaking issue for me. I wonder if this wasn’t a bit of an aesthetic decision, as the top piece does have an attractive slope to it.
The mouse’s touch area starts just north of the Apple logo and extends to the edges and upper corners. In short, the area where your palm will be is not sensitive to the touch, and everything else on top is touch sensitive.
The keyboard is essentially the same as the previous Aluminum wireless keyboard, though this one takes one less battery. The keys seem a bit soft compared to the wired Apple keyboard I was previously using.
Setting the two up is pretty painless. If you forget to turn your mouse on during initial bootup, the following image displays until you figure it out.
This is one beautiful machine. The back is now all brushed Aluminum, foregoing the black plastic of the previous models. The display is stunning, as expected, and I very much like the 16:9 ratio. It seems to be a pretty pixel dense display which is a trend I can get behind. Interestingly, the monitor is not as “dark” as the display on the previous 24” iMac after being shifted to 2.2 Gamma. It seems that either the display is very different or the pre-installed color profile was tweaked by Apple to keep some of the shadow highlights lost in the Gamma transition.
That said, the top menu bar is pretty small—hopefully the next “big cat” release will bring resolution independence. The brightness range is much increased in the lower range, which is a great improvement. As the sun sets outside my office window at the end of a 12 hour workday, the older iMac’s least bright setting was often still blinding. This display can get much darker, and my brightness settings tend to be in the middle of the brightness bar instead of on the lower end. The sacrifice for this is fine-grained control—I find myself in between two brightness settings. Cinema displays have finer-grained “sliver” adjustments in their standard keyboard controls, which I find myself yearning for.
Obviously, the biggest change with this new machine is the increased monitor size. When I first sat in front of my old 24” iMac, I felt that I was looking upward too much. Increasing the display size would seem to make the viewing area too large, but Apple took two steps to prevent this. In actuality, the top of the 27” iMac’s display is lower than the top was on the 24” model. First, the different aspect ratio means the display is not much taller than the previous 24” display while adding a good amount of viewing area. Second, the silver “chin” on this new computer is much slimmer than the older model’s chin, meaning the display starts at a lower height off your desk.
I took some imprecise measurements and found that the top of the display on the new iMac is only 19 1/4 inches from the desk whereas the older 24” model’s display reached 19 3/4 inches from the desk surface.
The thinner chin also means the Apple logo is much smaller which looks a bit silly at first. But really, the smaller chin and logo demonstrates what it’s like to use this computer—everything takes a backseat to the big, beautiful display.
My favorite touch in the new iMac is the sloping base. Previously the base was a chunky piece of aluminum in equal thickness all around. The base on the new iMac slopes downward toward the user, which is aesthetically pleasing and seems more practical when in a work environment with papers and pens shuffling around.
My take in short: Because of the fantastic screen and great new peripherals, this is an incredible evolution for the iMac. This is the fastest and best computer setup I’ve ever used.
If the print magazine industry is struggling so much, why can’t I get a magazine by mail a few days after I subscribe? I can get a vacuum, tax free with free shipping in 2 days with Amazon Prime, but I subscribe to a magazine and have to wait 4-6 weeks to get an out of date issue?!
Then people in the print industry walk around like chickens missing their heads bemoaning this fearsome yet mysterious beast—“the Internet”—that is killing their business. Here’s why your business is dying: it takes too fucking long and you aren’t trying hard enough.
“Within supported apps, such as Preview, you can scroll in any direction.” —
In other words, it won’t work in Photoshop. Using the Mighty Mouse, a Photoshop canvas will not scroll at a diagonal.
Macworld on Apple’s new Magic Mouse.
UPDATE: It looks like this does work in Photoshop, but it still doesn’t feel all that smooth. It seems kind of like making diagonal lines on an Etch-a-sketch. Sure it moves diagonally, but it doesn’t feel like you can draw a straight line across.
The problem is likely related to the “preferred networks” you have stored. Move your home network to the top of the list and take a minute to clean out some of the crud that’s built up from coffee shops and hotels.
To do this, go to System Preferences, Network, click Advanced, and reorder/delete the appropriate “preferred networks.” Alternatively, you could trash some of your preference files related to this.
More information and original solution from this Apple discussions thread.
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