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malevolent design weblog

Matt Round’s company blog, covering web development & miscellaneous linkery.

Mid-March Link Dump

Scott and Scurvy
A fascinating article about how fragile scientific progress based on an incomplete understanding can be.
Brizzly for iPhone
Good news: Birdfeed, my favourite iPhone Twitter client, has been updated and made free. Bad news: it now requires a Brizzly account, which I don’t need or want, so I’ve switched to Tweetie.
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
The murky world of patent disputes and stand-offs.
YouTube Closes Down For The Night
You probably have to be over 35 and in the UK to find this funny.
@font-face Generator
An online tool for converting fonts to the formats required by different browsers.
Email Delivery for IT Professionals
A handy guide for anyone involved in running systems that generate emails.
A Muppet Wicker Man
Not as funny as the Nicholas Cage remake, of course.
App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview
The only surprising thing about this is that it took Apple so long to make the change.
Can’t you see I’m Busy!
Flash games designed to look like innocent desktop applications.
Monocle
A JavaScript library for displaying XHTML-based EPUB books in modern browsers.
“Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
It remains to be seen if the improvement lasts (especially if other sites taking the same approach reduces the novelty factor), but it’s certainly thought-provoking.
“holy f*** i just learned something from AN ARTICLE FROM 1984”
Me too!

HTML As Native File Format For Word Processing

I think it’s time for web technologies to march into another territory: word processing. Yes, you can export web pages from most packages, but I’m talking about using HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. together as the native file format (optionally packaged in a Zip container I suppose).

As Mark Pilgrim says, HTML is the format of our age, it’s looking likely to dominate electronic books, and more and more content is authored primarily for the web. We could ditch unsuitable tools (I’m looking at you, Word), improve future-proofing, and completely sidestep the ongoing wrangling between complex formats such as Office Open XML and OpenDocument.

Is there a package already out there that focuses on dealing with clean, valid HTML and styling applied via CSS? There are somewhat limited web-based editors, and WYSIWYG web dev packages, but I haven’t yet spotted a lightweight, easy-to-use word processor based fully around web technologies.


How Subcontracting Works

Once upon a time, way back in the ’90s, there was a government cost reduction initiative with a budget in the millions.

The organisation managing it hired a large IT company to handle the web site (the key part of the initiative) for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The large IT company hired a medium-sized web development firm to create and host the site for tens of thousands of pounds.

The medium-sized web development firm hired a fresh-faced young(ish) web developer to produce the design, HTML templates, and some of the pages for a few hundred pounds.


Creative Hubs and Consumer Satellites

Judging from reactions to a certain imminent Apple product, I got the impression some people have a strange or incomplete understanding of their product line-up and target markets. The most useful and interesting way to break down their range isn’t into mobile/non-mobile devices or pro/consumer, but hubs and satellites. Apple themselves do this, judging from their online store (the iPad’s going to need space on that top row):

Apple online store product arrangement

Creative hubs are intended to be a user’s main machine(s), allowing you to create documents/images/videos/code/games/whatever using whatever software suits you. They’re fully-equipped with ports, storage, memory and drivers.

Consumer satellites are simplified devices focussed on consuming media and communicating. Both hardware and software are stripped down to the minimum requirements for a good user experience, and users have less freedom to tinker (whether you like that or not, it's been the norm for games consoles, DVD players, etc.). Devices are generally intended to be sync’d with a hub for adding content and ensuring there’s always a recent back-up.

When the product range is viewed this way, it clarifies (and, in some cases, justifies) Apple’s design choices and restrictions. It also poses an intriguing question: is there a viable middle-ground niche that would disrupt this clear categorisation? Could Apple sell an ‘iPad Pro’ with extra features (e.g. USB port, SD card slot, camera, multi-user support, cloud backups, drivers for printers and file systems etc.), creating something that can be a user’s main machine but still has the simplicity and limitations of a consumer device?


February Link Dump

In Almost Every Picture #8, Oolong
The famously-tolerant rabbit finally makes it to print.
60 minute website audit
A checklist that’s a handy starting point for assessing a site.
Sinclair ZX Days
Behind-the-scenes product development material. Abandoning the ‘Joy doughnut’ was probably a good idea.
Pixelwave
A native 2D iPhone framework, based on the Flash API.
Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube
The web desperately needs an open video format, but even if Google does this there could be years of strong patent challenges to deal with.
Mayor of the North Pole
This highlights just how horribly difficult it is to protect a web site from spam. Foursquare can throttle/ban suspiciously busy accounts, but there’s no way they can distinguish a real check-in from a fake one.
Life Below 600px
For me, the key thing to consider is whether you want to lead the visitor on a journey down the page before making choices, or present the main options immediately.
Classic Games Crusader - The Newsfield Years
A documentary about the publishing firm behind Crash, Zzap!64 and Amtix. A teacher confiscated my copy of issue 1 of Crash and never gave it back. I still hate her.
Clients From Hell: No-right-click script
I’ve encountered this kind of reasoning, and it’s always difficult to know what to say.
Plupload
A nifty upload hander that uses Flash/Gears/HTML 5/Silverlight/BrowserPlus to add features.
Bobby Van - Take Me To Broadway
The bouncy inspiration behind the Happiness and Come As You Are videos.
How to make The Internet (from The IT Crowd)
If you have no idea what this is referring to then you need to track down The IT Crowd, Series 3, Episode 4, “The Speech”.

Door Usability FAIL

What kind of mischievous fiend creates a large door, plastered with “AUTOMATIC DOOR” in big letters, that only opens if you notice and press a small button located to one side?

AUTOMATIC DOOR - PUSH TO OPEN

See also:


Other recent entries

19 Feb 2010 Harnessing Boredom
Or rather the desire to avoid it.
11 Feb 2010 ReadUnderstandWeb
Please note: this site is not ReadWriteWeb.
31 Jan 2010 Happy Birthday To MD
15 years in business. Blimey.
28 Jan 2010 Late January Link Dump
Sci-fi, data, comics, robots, dinosaurs and more.
26 Jan 2010 Revolting Listeners
thesixtyone’s controversial redesign.
25 Jan 2010 A New Look for ZenMagick
I made a logo and site template.
20 Jan 2010 Point and Shoot
First-person shooter game controllers.
18 Jan 2010 Mid-January Link Dump
Prisoners, music, transparency, newspapers and more.
14 Jan 2010 One Has Designed One’s Site
A book cover and web site combo.
08 Jan 2010 Posting Scores To Twitter From Flash Games
The easy approach.
07 Jan 2010 Now With Added Alien
A quick site refresh.
23 Dec 2009 Pre-Christmas Link Dump
Basketball, trains, cameras, URLs, drops, dolls and more.
16 Dec 2009 The Alien at the Bottom of the Garden
Interactive learning for Channel 4.
10 Dec 2009 Why I Deleted My Facebook Account
Anti-social networking.

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A year ago…

Mid-March Link Dump
Comics, URLs, screen readers, books and more.

5 years ago…

Validate While You Browse
Handy Firefox extension for developers.