I wasn’t really sure why if someone had a laptop and a desktop (or just a laptop) you’d want to bother with an iPad considering it’s app based and doesn’t have all the power and flexibility of a laptop.
The one thing that does look amazing about them though is the idea of iPad versions of books and magazines. I think the promo video showed a sports mag with video and audio incorporated and it looked amazing! Here’s another exampled that popped up on Twitter today by Penguin Books. I’m not sure if its just a concept but the idea it could be used for learning and for kids development is another reason it could be great!
I just hope that eventually, as other tablets get better (if they do!), people will be able to get these great apps on more than just the iPad. Don’t want Apple taking over the world!
As explained on my homepage, this design is temporary whilst I’m looking for a new job (If you know anyone, then why not contact me) and working on a more substantial design. I’m looking into using a fluid grid system and keeping things clean and simple whilst utilising some nice CSS3 properties to add some depth – we’ll see.
The reason the blog now looks like this is purely to tie it in with the homepage as it previously looked like the picture below – couldn’t have left it like that. I just did a very, very quick re-skin and tidied things up a little.
Now, I’ve not worked in the industry as long many of the commenter’s and therefore I don’t have the depth of experience that many of them have, but I do have few things to say about the point.
I generally think that it’s more important that designers understand how to design for the digital platform properly, rather than being able to code HTML and CSS. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s been plenty of reviews of the Manchester leg of Speak The Web over the last week and I thought I’d say a few words about what I got out of the night.
All four speakers gave quality, relevant talks and I managed to take something away from all of them.
As you may or may not know I study Multimedia Computing at MMU and a few months ago I attended a Web Standards talk by Chris Mills from Opera. The talk was aimed at people who were new to, or had only a little understand of the topic but it was still quite informative and a big step forward for the MMU computing department.
Until the release of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum last week (and subsequent blog posts) the new curriculum had slipped my mind so I thought I would quickly stick out a post about it.
I haven’t had a full look at the curriculum but with just a quick scan I spotted the following articles:
The history of the Internet and the web, and the evolution of web standards.
The Web Standards model – HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Information Architecture—planning out a web site.
Colour schemes and design mockups.
The basics of HTML
You can see that the content looks very promising and is something I’m hoping my university are supporting because I know how much further ahead in this game I would have been if I could have be taught some of this at uni.
I’m certainly going to look through the 23 articles released to date and see what I can gain and I think most web designers/developers should have a look too.
This part of the Web Design resources series is all about Firefox extensions. Now obviously Firefox isn’t the only browser out there but it’s pretty much the only browsers with a decent array of Web Developer tools to use.
IE has the IE Developer Toolbar which is similar to the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and Opera are currently releasing their beta version of their browser with Dragonfly, their version of Firebug. These aside, there just isn’t the same wealth of add-ons for other browsers as their is for Firefox so I’m going to share some of my most used add-ons in the hope that you will discover some new ones.
There must be literally hundreds of web design books on sale right now but I’m pretty sure that a lot of them aren’t always as good as they’re cracked up to be!
In light of this I’ve compiled a list of books, most of which I’ve been able to use, to hopefully help people make the right choice when choosing a decent book.
The majority of these books are great for people who are new to the industry or who want to learn about the principals of standards based design incorporating better usability and accessibility along the way.
This tutorial could probably be found anywhere on the net but seen as I’ve been through the process myself I thought I would put up some of the information I’ve found.
note: This is a tutorial based on Windows XP. If you are using Windows XP Pro and have IIS running on your machine you will have to stop it before running XAMPP. Mac users should check the extra information section at the bottom of this post for some links I’ve found for doing all this stuff on a Mac.
