If you're an iPhone (or iDevice) user you probably have a lot of applications on your phone. In fact, if you're a typical iPhone user, you probably have way too many applications on your phone. Happy to encourage your app addiction, many popular websites like Facebook and Wolfram Alpha offer native applications through the iPhone App Store. However, others like Gmail and Google Voice are only available as web applications.
PBDH has recently launched a 5-piece update of BECU's in-branch motion graphics. These short spots are now showing on LCD displays at many of BECU's Northwest credit union locations...
categories// Community, Design, Interactive, New Work, Social Media
At the time of its standardization, XHTML marked a major leap forward in standards for the web. Gone were the days of sloppy markup and broken pages due to unclosed tags. Strict syntax was the way of the future! Strict syntax promised to lead us to bigger and better success.
Well HTML5 is here and all that is out the window. HTML5 promises us more power than we've ever had before, but as far as markup syntax is concerned, it's sort of like moving from Dick's Drive In to Red Robin—both will get you your burger fix, but one has over a dozen overwhelming options vs the other's concise selection of four.
Today I'm going to focus on the nth-of-type selector. This selector is similar to nth-child except it allows us to restrict our selector to a specific element type, which is often more useful than applying the style to every element regardless of type. Internet Explorer doesn't support this selector, but with a little trickery we can fool it into doing what we want.
Google's recent experiment of pushing aside its classic, simplistic white look for all users might have appeared to be a nod to Bing. In fact, it's the next step in an evolution that has been a long time coming and is a core component of Google's future.
For my first post, I'm going to talk about drop shadows. Drop shadows are something designers love and developers hate. A well placed drop shadow can really add some depth to a design, but they are notoriously difficult to implement. I'm going to share an easy solution I've been using to implement drop shadows which doesn't require images, Javascript, or hair pulling and only necessitates a slight compromise of your standards.
Lala.com is gone. Or soon will be, as Apple decided to shut down the music service website on May 31.
I haven't used Lala.com that long, and I guess I should have known that Apple, after purchasing the company in December, would either wrap the site's functionality into future versions of iTunes or shut it down to stop it from competing with their existing service. I should have known it was doomed.
I'd only spent about $60 there, and I only had a few hundred songs in my online collection, but I had visions of Android running Flash 10.1 on my Nexus One, allowing me to access my music (including over-represented Scottish pop tunes) from anywhere at any time.
But it was not to be, and instead I find myself going through the seven stages of grief (albeit at an accelerated rate) over Lala's closing. To wit (based on the stages as articulated here):
1. SHOCK AND DENIAL
You will probably react to learning of the loss with numbed disbelief. You may deny the reality of the loss at some level, in order to avoid the pain. Shock provides emotional protection from being overwhelmed all at once.
I got the e-mail with the news last night. I was up late, and I saw the e-mail right before bed. I shook my head and couldn't believe what I was reading.
My sleep was fitful and non-restive.
2. PAIN AND GUILT
As the shock wears off, it is replaced with the suffering of unbelievable pain. Although excruciating and almost unbearable, it is important that you experience the pain fully, and not hide it, avoid it or escape from it with alcohol or drugs.
I woke up this morning with a pit in my stomach, thinking about how all my Web-based Dropkick songs were going to disappear into the ether.
3. ANGER AND BARGAINING
Frustration gives way to anger, and you may lash out and lay unwarranted blame for the death on someone else. Please try to control this, as permanent damage to your relationships may result. This is a time for the release of bottled up emotion.
As I walked to my car, I became furious at Apple. How dare they stop me from getting to MY music? How could they stop me from using the cloud-based service that I had encouraged so many of my friends to use? Why did this happen to me?
I angrily updated my Facebook status and drove to work.
4. "DEPRESSION", REFLECTION, LONELINESS
Just when your friends may think you should be getting on with your life, a long period of sad reflection will likely overtake you. This is a normal stage of grief, so do not be "talked out of it" by well-meaning outsiders. Encouragement from others is not helpful to you during this stage of grieving.
I mentioned it to co-workers, who seemed largely indifferent. I received some Facebook status comments, but nothing seemed to help. I already missed Lala.com, and no one was going to make me feel better.
:(
5. THE UPWARD TURN
As you start to adjust to life without your dear one, your life becomes a little calmer and more organized. Your physical symptoms lessen, and your "depression" begins to lift slightly.
Lunch came around. I had tacos, and I felt a little better.
6. RECONSTRUCTION AND WORKING THROUGH
As you become more functional, your mind starts working again, and you will find yourself seeking realistic solutions to problems posed by life without your loved one.
There were other ways for me to listen to Teenage Fanclub. CDs. MP3s.
Maybe even... iTunes.
7. ACCEPTANCE AND HOPE
During this, the last of the seven stages in this grief model, you learn to accept and deal with the reality of your situation.
I deleted my angry Facebook status. It's OK. I will be OK.
Lala.com is gone, but the concept of my music living in the cloud is not. I have hope that, sometime soon, I will be able to buy Web songs for less than nine cents a song.
If you don't know by now, I am a huge, huge fan of UNIQLO. This casual fashion retailer based in Japan, but located all over the world, lives and breathes branding and marketing that is fresh, engaging, fun and just simply brilliant.
Here is another example of how UNIQLO continues to stay ahead of the game when it comes to engaging customers with their interactive campaigns. We've all seen various forms of Twitter being used to create word clouds and trend charts when typing in a key word. UNIQLO decided to take the personalization a step further by creating UTweet, which is a fun "tweet show" music video that features all the tweets with the key word you typed in and profile pics of the tweeters.
This intro is a perfect set-up to the "UT All Stars", which is their new collection of graphic tees of famous cartoon characters.
There is no real information to gain here like the other tools in terms of a Twitter trend and popularity, but it's a great example of UNIQLO's innovative and customized use of social media to connect customers to their brand.
Via CScout
I have started to take a Web Design class at Seattle School of Visual Concepts. We just recently had a class discussion on our first homework assignment that I thought was a refreshing look at what people like best about using the web, what there most common activities are, and what is commonly missing from their online experience. We were asked to create a mood board for the discussion.
I took a different approach by thinking of words that came to mind when asking myself these three questions using Wordle.
1. What's the Best part about using the Web?
2. What are your most common activities online?
3. What's commonly missing from your online experience?
Some Explanation for some of the words I choose:
I have a wondering, A.D.D. mind that most people in the creative world have, and the biggest thing that helps that is being able to educate myself on anything that comes floating in my head on a day to day basis. All I have to do is type a word or a phrase in a search box, and BAM! a whole crap load of things are a click away.
This is something that I have just recently been exploring. The main part of therapy that I lack in doing is blogging. Blogging is therapy, you have something to say and you eject it into the online world for further discussion. Some smaller parts of therapy online that I use frequently are the social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Within the last couple of years this part of the online experience has been getting stronger and stronger. If I want to learn about things from DIY projects to a new version of software, I can, and on my own time with sites like CreativeLive, Lynda, DIY Network, and even Youtube.
A couple things missing from my online experience:
Website have become a lot of reiterations of the same idea, and when I see something original it inspires me a great deal and gets me excited and motivated to learn new and better ways of getting a point across online. Originality doesn't really mean a whole new way of doing a site, it could simply be a new kind of rollover for a button.
No matter how fast things get, I will always complain that they need to be faster. It's just a simple fact.
One thing during the discussion that came up frequently was the idea of the web not being touchy feely. Personally I don't have a huge issue with this, and not much was really said about it, I did however share with the class a new site that I discovered called Toy-A-Day that can, in a way, give you the touchy feely feeling that print has.
One last thing that I got out of last nights class was a great sentence to ask clients and yourself early in the discovery process of building a site, I think this sentence alone can dig a lot out of clients and get to the reason a site is needed for them:
"What do people need to do on your site for business to be effective"
The intersection between "real life" and a Web presence can be subtle. To the general public, what, really, is Facebook other than Facebook.com? How is ESPN.com different from ESPN as a company?
With some clients, though, the difference is night and day.
Global Diving & Salvage, Inc., is, as the press releases note, "the largest diving contractor company on the West coast." It has an "international reach and a focus on marine construction, infrastructure support services and casualty response". All of that is well and good and impressive, but words alone struggle to capture the...reality... of what the company does. Divers spend hours and even days in cramped submersibles at depths that would crush an unprotected human body. They handle and clean up sensitive materials that can do serious damage to the environment. They work as a team in hazardous conditions every day.
Compare that to, say, me. I type quickly and I know some stuff about the Web. How do I help capture what Global does?
One of the ways PBDH tried to bring "real life" to a browser near you is by demonstrating the scope of Global's projects. Global's new Web site has advanced mapping features that highlight cross North America and even the world, allowing visitors to see highlighted projects as well as where Global is today.
And I do mean today.
Global Web admins have the ability to add and edit projects as progress is made through an easy content management system. Done with the job in New York? Upload some pictures and put it in the archives. Kicking off a new gig in Alaska? Link to a story from a news outlet or embed a video talking about the work. The Web site also pulls in the latitude and longitude information and uses that to accurately place the projects on the maps. Automatically.
This was pushing what we knew from a technical perspective and it was pushing what the available Web applications could do; we brought in a consultant who's been on the front lines of geomapping and he helped us create a custom-designed map that combines real GIS mapping data with project locations stored in the CMS.
The Web site didn't teach me how to weld underwater, but there's a bit more "real life" in this site than in most.
