Shiny Thing Make It All Better

NEW shiny thing make everything all better, say clever science man yesterday.

Science man say shiny thing is telly and books. And good for seeing photos of you and everyone, and also naked people who do mucky things.

Science man say shiny thing ‘changes game’ and now all the other science men must go away and be sad.

Science man say: “All things everyone have are rubbish. Look! Telly and books! That will be £400 please thank you.”

Nikki, a girl who has had 27 birthdays and works in a big building, say: “Oooooooooh. It do telly. I will see telly on it and make it help me buy nice hats.

“And look! It fit in bag where I have keys and little talkie box and red goo I put on face.”

Tom, all grown-up man from busy place, say: “I very busy man who need see telly on big metal tube that take me to busy job.

“But look! It also play game! I play noisy game on metal tube and be happy.”

And Bill, really, really old man who sits in chair all day, say: “It make words happen by pointing at it. Oooooooooh.

“I will make it help me say clever words to newspaper about gypsies and Pakistan.

“AND IT DO TELLY!”

How to Block Flash

ClickToFlash IconI wish I hadn’t waited so long to install the ClickToFlash plugin, it totally improves the web experience.  The idea is simple, all flash animations are paralyzed by default ;-)  To view flash, including videos like youtube, etc, you have to click to play.  A lot healthier for the laptop, no more CPU running at 100% nor mindless distractions when you’re trying to absorb valuable content.

Moving the computing experience off-screen

Some great ideas here:

Originally featured here.

How you must use a website

I find it surprising that any website would insist that its visitors use it in a certain way, let alone codify rules in the form of a usage policy.

Leading the pack for usage policies is Etsy, that has a page called Dos and Don’ts, which needs 10,292  words to tell you how it wants its website used.  Good luck!

Making the web more readable – in one click

Picture 1

The Readability bookmarklet is by far the most useful bookmarklet I’ve used.  A must try for anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time reading stuff on the web :-)

53% of Brits creating and actively sharing content online

[first direct's] research has shown over 80% of Brits use social media once a month and 53% are now .

Wow, that is really significant.  I guess they mean 53% of the 80%, but still that’s a much higher figure than instinct would suggest.

Roundup of open source e-ecommerce solutions

A nice and comprehensive roundup of e-ecommerce solutions, check it out.

Generate refined images from rough sketches

Photosketch – this is quite an interesting technology that was recently demonstrated at Siggraph 2009 – basically the technology takes very rough input sketches tagged with identifiers and turns them into refined photo collages.  Watch the video:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

Google doesn’t use keywords meta tag

Amazing.

The Five Most Common Arguments for Native iPhone Development

I have a lot of customers who are confused about the pros and cons of selecting web versus native development solution for the iPhone.  And now that Google has clearly bet the farm on all mobile development going web with HTML5, it’s good to hear some other opinions on the matter.

This article gives some valuable insight:

  1. Offline Mode — The ability to continue to use an application when you are not connected to the Internet.
  2. Findability — If you’re not in the App Store, people won’t be able to find your application.
  3. Performance — Javascript on mobile is too slow to use for application development.
  4. Device Attributes — The need to access things like the camera, gps and the accelerometer.
  5. Monetization — The ease with which people can and will buy your application.