A coworker turned me on today to Browsershots. If you’re familiar with Browsercam you’ll be happy to know that Browsershots is essentially a free version of browsercam minus the remote access and mobile device capture features. Considering Browsercam charges $59 a month this is a pretty big deal even if they don’t have all the features… yet.
Apparently Apple sold 3.75 million iPhones in 2007 however AT&T has only activated 2 million iPhone accounts. So what happened to that missing 1.75 million? According to Forbes it’s estimated a majority of those unaccounted for iPhones were probably hacked, unlocked and probably in use on some other network. That’s nearly half of all iPhones! Obviously there’s a problem with the one carrier option that Apple and AT&T rolled out with. Apple hopes to reach it’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008 - a very aggressive goal which they might be able to reach, but losing the extra revenue on the service plans has to be killing them. While AT&T was critical in helping Apple launch the iPhone It’s clear the long term business model is not sustainable and I doubt making users signup for an AT&T plan at point of purchase will go over well with consumers.
Yesterday was MacWorld Expo 2008 San Francisco and as was speculated by mac rumor specialists Apple released a new notebook called the Macbook Air. It’s a super sleek machine weighing in at 3 pounds. It has a 13.3 inch screen, and it’s 3/4 of an inch thick. It’s so thin folks it even fits into an envelope!
In the ongoing battle of copyright infringement the New York Times informs that AT&T and a few other I.S.P.’s have started to discuss the possibility of filtering for pirated material. The news comes from a panel at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) where a few third party filtering companies along with NBC, Microsoft, AT&T and others discussed the minimal success of preventing users from sharing and downloading copyrighted material. Currently, I.S.P.’s act as an open “data highway” allowing users to download and distrubute anything without looking at it’s contents.
From a consumer standpoint this sounds terrible. Just what average joe customer needs, his over priced I.S.P. starting to act like big brother. The real issue that keeps getting swept under the rug is that our concepts of copyrighted material are outdated and need to adjust to reflect the change in technology and world we live in today. Of course the record industry, media conglomerates and general owners of copyrighted material would beg to differ and this will continue to be a bloody fight for years to come.
Anyone who’s ever created an HTML email knows what a pain it can be to get the document to render properly across the numerous email clients out there. Because of the lack of standards for email clients to follow HTML emails are a nightmare to develop and I personally try to avoid designing them at all costs. In the past I’ve used Campaign Monitor which I found to be one of the best resource in easing the burden.
It turns out the guys behind Campaign Monitor in addition to running a great business are trying to do something about HTML email standards too. Taking a page from the Web Standards Project (WaSP) book they’ve created the Email Standards Project which attempts to do some of the same great things for HTML email that WaSP did for the Web. You can help by spreading the word.
Last week I attended the PhizzPop Design Challenge in Chicago. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and and it was pretty much a big marketing event to raise awareness of Microsoft Expression Suite and woo the creative web community into trying the product. I’m not one for attending events as such but I decided to give it a shot since I heard about it through the IxDA group. I was pretty much clueless as to what was to take place other than the vague description of designers competing in some type of challenge. The event was held at the Underground and I figured at the very least it would be worth attending for the free drinks.
If you haven’t heard the latest effort from our government to try and infringe on our rights you should read this post about the new bill called the “Safe act” proposed by the House of Representatives.
Our government want’s to keep us safe from all smut peddlers online by creating legislation that would enforce the monitoring of all publicly open WiFi networks for “obscene” image downloads. I’m all for keeping our children safe from pedophiles posing as 13 year old girls online but this clearly is not the answer to those problems. We don’t live in China nor a police state and I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to enforce such a ridiculous law. It’s guaranteed if this thing passed we’d immediately see a huge reeducation in public WiFi.
It begs to the ask the question, what lobbyist are behind this B.S? Telcos and ISPs seem to be the only ones who’d benefit from the bill.
Google recently added a new feature that allows you to easily embed Google Map Street Views in any web page just by copy and pasting some generated HTML. After you’ve drilled down to a street map location just click “link to this page” in the right hand corner. From there you’ll notice the second form field on the page reads “Paste HTML to embed in website”, that’s the code you want. Another cool thing to note: below the form field you’ll see another link that says “Customize and Preview embedded map”. This links to a new popup window that gives you a choice of selecting predetermined view port sizes (small, medium, large) or entering your own custom dimensions.
I’ve entered my office address and customized the view port sizes for my page layout. Here’s the example:
Looks like Adobe is working on a new product that would give designers another tool to help bridge the communication gap between design and development. The product is code named “Thermo” and after viewing a demo video it looks to be some sort of WYSIWYG product for flash/flex applications.
There is definitely a gap that needs to be addressed in product development between design and dev and with the advent of the “Rich Internet Application” a simple tool that would allow designers to work with data and specify functionality and behavior would be welcomed. As the demo illustrates you can start with a Photoshop comp, bring it into Thermo and then turn items into functioning components with just a few clicks.
On the plus side described in the video, Thermo supposedly will write code that’s reusable to developers, so the designer is actually creating a functioning prototype. This allows the designer to contribute more than just static comps. The problem is I’m a little skeptical on how usable the generated code from Thermo would actually be. And Is it realistic to think that a developer would use the code?. It reminds me of the garbage html and JavaScript that Dreamweaver would spit out. Sure, your front end developers loved using that stuff right?
At the very least It could be a powerful tool that would help convey the designers vision, regardless if the code was used or not. It seems like the product could be quicker and friendlier than using flash.
