Monthly Interesting Links Roundup (June 2009) - 2

By Johan Douma

Love the second add:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/An-Old-COOT.aspx

100 year old photos from Russia (colour and all). Yes they are a century old; it’s explained on the second page.
http://www.socyberty.com/History/The-Incredible-Century-Old-Color-Photography-of-Prokudin-Gorsky.797569/1

Webkit (Safari’s engine) everywhere, I wish it will happen soon. If it ever will…
http://gizmodo.com/5271098/every-mobile-browser-should-give-up-and-just-go-webkit

Google Wave 2 weeks ago, and now Opera Unite. My prediction: Wave will work. Unite will Fail
http://wave.google.com/ - http://unite.opera.com/

Convert *.pub (M$ Publisher) documents to PDFs on Mac:
http://www.pdfonline.com/
I had to do it this weekend, and it works perfectly.

Firefox is overtaking IE in Germany. Firefox 40% and IE 38%
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/273248,firefox-nearly-overtakes-internet-explorer-in-germany.html

Yeahhhh
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robotjohnny/3629069606/sizes/o/

Better QuickLook plugins (eg look into archives):
http://theappleblog.com/2009/05/06/four-useful-quicklook-plugins/

The Quality of Open Video compared to H264:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/update-on-open-video-quality/

Everybody is talking about Open Video; but Audio is now native too, no plugins needed… Anyway here’s a simplistic example made in javascript and html:
http://evilbrainjono.net/piano.html

Photo Lettering is back. Relaunch in digital in November
http://www.idsgn.org/posts/introducing-photo-lettering/
http://www.photolettering.com/

5 rotten things about clients. Funny!
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/5-rotten-things-no-one-else-has-told-you-about-the-clients-youll-work-for/

Plan tweets in advance:
http://www.wintech-italia.com/apps/tweetoftheday/

Another site to find the name of a font:
http://typenav.fontshop.com/

Chrome might be the fastest of all browsers by far, but it doesn’t seem to care about ram usage; sometimes going over 1.2GB of Ram. Obviously, it hasn’t been built to be used on old machines.
http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory

The guys from SitePoint/99Designs have done it again, now for full websites. I don’t mind you guys, but I think spec work is degrading.
http://flippa.com/

Apparently road fatalities in the NT are not uncommon with aboriginal people sleeping on the road at night…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/23/2606238.htm

5 Pet Peeves Designers Have With Developers
Erm this is a bit extreme I think; this is probably about uber nerdy geek developers… I hope I’m not this bad…
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/5-pet-peeves-designers-have-with-developers-and-how-to-avoid-them/

Microsoft, setting email 10 years back:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2799/microsoft-to-ignore-web-standards-in-outlook-2010/
According to them, they use the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users. Fair enough. But email is an open standard, Microsoft makes it sound as if it has to make it own standard.
What about web standards and emails displayed in other email clients? Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a somebody using Apple Mail or Thunderbird it’s going to be unreadable… It’s all about themselves, ain’t it???
A standards compliant Word would make emails ‘composed in word’ work in other email clients. From other clients, emails would display correctly in Word. Why is Microsoft still not following standards?

Microsoft, again:
You can only win $10 000 if you use IE8, and only IE8, nothing else.
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/

State of IE article. Looks like we’re not going to get rid of IE6 soon.
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/06/state_of_the_br_1.html

And for those interested in all the things that will be possible on the web sometime in the future. You’ll need Firefox 3.5 (some might work on Safari 4 too)
Shadows:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/text-shadow/

Javascript to edit images, no server needed
http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/mdemos/imgmanip/image.html

CSS 3D transforms. Try the demo, and don’t forget to select some text on the page
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/3d-transforms-isocube/

Open video in the background, CSS mask (yes, real masking) using a vector image (SVG, not some pixelated jpeg/png/gif), javascript to turn the video frame around (no it’s not the camcorder that’s being rotated).
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/tristan-washing-machine/

Colour profiles are now a enabled for images. Not for CSS colours though. It’s not like any other browser does it anyway… So it’s still useless for website designs…
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/color-correction/

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