Internet Strategy, PowerPoint, presentation

Bye Bye Powerpoint November 24th, 2009

How many of us cringe when we’re stuck in yet another meeting with a Powerpoint (PPT) deck of text-heavy slides? Yes, I must admit, I’ve seen some presentations that kicked PPT up a notch, but they are few and far between. Many of us crank out the status quo PPT for many reasons – it’s easy, it’s familiar, it’s faster. Stop with the excuses! Let’s move the bar a little higher. After all, do you want to engage your audience and better sell your story?

Web Development, image optimization, performance

ImageOptim Image Compression Tool November 19th, 2009

Most of the time the tools used when creating and compressing images for the Web do a good job, but some of them leave behind some excess metadata that can increase the file size while providing no particular benefit. In particular, I’m thinking of Photoshop’s “Save for Web” functionality when it comes to PNG images.  There’s a number of command-line tools that can be used to help with things like this, but ImageOptim (for Mac OS X) wraps them into a handy GUI to make handling them easier.

Application Development, Web Content Management, Web Development, ASP.NET, Video

.NET Brightcove Video API Integrates with Sitecore November 19th, 2009

So a follow up to my post on Professional Video Services, here’s something I just found.

Social Networking, Facebook, Flickr, Google, search, social media, Social Networking, twitter, youtube

Social Search: What Are My Friends Saying – Right Now? November 19th, 2009

Through social media, we’re becoming more and more connected than ever before. We’re sharing opinions, posting links that we find important, and holding conversations in social spaces. Many of us consider our friends and social networks as a primary source for information, and especially trust their opinion over a stranger’s. For example, if I become a fan of a company and join their group or if I give a restaurant a rating, my friends are likely to take note.

Web Development, CSS, JavaScript, Microsoft, MSIE, Web Standards

IE9 Standards Support Work Underway, To Support Rounded Corners! November 19th, 2009

So Microsoft is starting to release information on the next release of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), IE version 9. The IE team posted on their blog about the ongoing progress … but it covers everything from some of the performance profiling that they’re doing (which is an interesting read), to their current performance in the Acid 3 test, to some of the new Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features that they will be supporting.

Technology

Digital Readers November 19th, 2009

When I worked for an online education company, I was quick to tell people that we also shipped books because at the time a 100% online curriculum had a slightly negative perception in the market. Most of my company’s curriculum relied on book-based learning. Books provided a certain immediacy, flexibility and ease of use that a Web page did not have. The idea was that the online portion would complement the offline version. The online learning could offer things that the paper version could not.

Interaction Design, Web Development, chrome, Google, operating systems

Google Unveils Chrome OS November 19th, 2009

Google announced their Chrome OS a few months back, but today they held an event to show off the first screens and explain some more of the concepts behind it as well as to open-source the project in advance of the 2010 release date. Engadget has more coverage of the event (including a gallery of screens).

Usability, User Experience Design, User Research

Spice of Life November 19th, 2009

How do you organize your spices? Depending on who you are, you might have a different answer. A grocery store organizes their spices differently than the normal person. In the grocery store it is important for the spices to be alphabetically sorted within each brand. They are grouped alphabetically within the brand groups because how else would someone find a particular spice? The grocery store is fulfilling particular user tasks.

Social Networking

Twitter November 11th, 2009

The number of tweets a day has risen from 2.4 million in January to 26 million in October. It will be interesting to see what this turns into in terms of relevance and sustainability.

Application Development, Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development, Video

Professional Video Services for Businesses November 11th, 2009

An unlikely source for cutting edge technology news of course, but USA Today has an interesting article discussing the future of online video for businesses. They point out that video has a huge and critical future for most everyone doing business online these days, and there’s several major players coming in that exceed the offerings by such commonly known entities from YouTube and Vimeo.

Specifically, pay services targeted for businesses include:

Technology, Flash

Flash CS5 and Multi-Touch November 10th, 2009

Has anyone seen the movie “Minority Report”? In it Tom Cruise plays a cop of the future who uses a computer that is touch screen based and voice activated. The vision of this futuristic computer shows the obsolescence of the keyboard. The level of interaction that is possible using a virtual touch screen is visually stunning. This isn’t anything new since Microsoft’s Surface has been around for a little while, but what’s new is that with the latest release of CS5, Flash will now support multi-touch and open the doors to a new level of interaction with Flash.

Inside RIA has a great primer for it: http://www.insideria.com/2009/10/getting-started-with-multitouc.html.

Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, User Experience Design, Business Decisions, Web Redesign

Does Your Web site Need a Redesign? November 9th, 2009

Choosing whether to redesign your Web site can be a difficult decision to make, especially when many organizations are cutting costs in the midst of the current economic downtown. A Web site redesign project usually requires a cross-functional team with members from multiple departments and strong internal leadership. The resources required for a redesign can be considerable, particularly for organizations which already have a lot of Web content or have multiple third-party systems integrated with their Web sites.

Application Development, Web Development, JavaScript

Google Releases Closure JavaScript Tools November 9th, 2009

This past week the “almighty” Google released what looks like a very interesting set of Web Development tools for JavaScript development. It’s a set of tools they’ve created to build rich user interfaces and increase the performance of the scripting involved.

The release consists of the following:

Web Development, Front-end Engineering, history, HTML

Brief History of HTML and HTML5 Looking Real November 9th, 2009

Just some random bits for those interested in the state of the HTML world.

First, there’s a great post and discussion over on Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Mark Web site on the origin’s of HTML’s IMG element. I knew that Netscape and Mosaic were credited with the expansion of the World Wide Web as we know it by making it a graphical environment as opposed to one that was pure text. What I didn’t know was that Netscape’s, then Mosaic’s Marc Andreesson was the one who actually posted first suggesting the IMG element. That was 1993.

Fast forward to today, and we have the Web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, commenting on the progress of the newest proposals to extend HTML, HTML5. There’s certainly plenty being said about HTML5 these days if you look for it. But purists might appreciate Tim Berners-Lee chiming in.

If I discuss HTML5, I guess I have to mention my article that was published a while back in Dr. Dobb’s via InformationWeek, “HTML5 Starts Looking Real“. Check it out.

Web Development, cloud computing, explanations, Video

An Introduction to Cloud Computing November 6th, 2009

CNN has posted a simplified explanation of what Cloud Computing is and published this handy explanation video.

Visual Design, Web Development

@font-face and OTF, EOT, and SVG Fonts November 4th, 2009

Jonathan Snook has written up a guide on how to implement custom fonts with more browsers than we have gotten accustomed to talking about in the past six months. Since the release of Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10 everyone has been excited about using @font-face even if the target would be the latest versions of most browsers.

Web Development, programming, ruby, ruby on rails

Ruby and Rails Ecosystem Whitepaper November 2nd, 2009

The folks at InfoEther have assembled a whitepaper describing the current state of the Ruby and Rails ecosystem.

The Ruby and Rails Ecosystem is a very large and robust community of companies, entities and individuals. This paper is meant to be an educational introduction for the layman, investor or business executive.