Monthly Interesting Links Roundup (June 2009)

By Johan Douma

Here’s for June. Enjoy!

Interesting graphic of the evolution of media
http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Management/market-of-information/
It doesn’t have any references, isn’t based on any numbers, probably just based on opinion. But it’s an interesting view, and it makes me wonder what’s going to be next, especially when, and how fast it’s going to be adopted.

Finally a solution to the web font problem that would work on all browsers, even if it’s not ideal yet, is it worth paying for?
http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/

Stats: IE7 users all update, IE6 users don’t update
Exactly what I expected… IE6 users have good reasons for staying with IE6 otherwise IE7/8 would have been installed automatically by windows update.
It’s going to take another 6 month, maybe even a year before it’s below 10%. We can’t drop support just yet I think.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3610/3588049466_5624ea3510_o.png

Beautiful Paper Art:
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/100-extraordinary-examples-of-paper-art/

Browser names
Remember this little story? Yes that’s how the browsers identify themselves when visiting sites. Not a joke.
http://www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
Announced last week, Opera 10 and all the future versions of opera will be named 9.80
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/

Browser sniffing users will be happy!

If WhatTheFont doesn’t work, try IdentyFont.
It’s a bit more work though.
http://www.identifont.com/

Make sure that the selected font looks good without Anti-Aliasing
The guys at Panic use Helvetica Neue Light on their site, and apparently it looks shit on all browsers but Safari on Mac.
Font rendering is not the same on every platform.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/08/truetype-font-variants-and-antialiasing/

Cool resume design:
http://theportfolio.ofmichaelanderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/resume-infographic.jpg

LiveSurface Image Library
Image templates of signage, tshirts, cd/dvd cases, bottles, cars, etc; including built-in 3D surfaces, masks, lighting.
It means: paste, scale, position your design and you’re done. There’s a video on the site that shows you how it works. It could save a lot of time to designers…
http://www.livesurface.com/

Pattern Cooler
Hundreds of patterns, each one with hundreds of variations. Don’t waste any time making your own, there’s a lot of choice here.
http://www.patterncooler.com/

World Map of Social Network Dominance
Looks like MySpace doesn’t dominate anything… And facebook is being used all over the world…
http://flowingdata.com/2009/06/08/world-map-of-social-network-dominance/

Awesome new things that can be done by Firefox 3.5 (all native, without plugins)
Content Aware Image Resizing
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/content-aware-image-resizing/
Blink detection
http://ajaxian.com/archives/finally-a-useful-blink-tag-detecting-your-user-blinking
Video & masks inside the browser, the mask is added afterward using css&javascript:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/add-ambiance-to-your-videos/

Safari 4 is capable of some sweet thing too, native video with reflection!
Try it in safari 4, it won’t work otherwise, and click on one of the trailers. Does not work in Firefox because the demo uses H264 instead of the open video Ogg format for the video.
http://www.satine.org/research/webkit/video/trailers.html

Bing, Ms’ new search engine
Bing stands for But Is Not Google, they’ve already spent $80 million on advertising and this is their first ad. They could have done better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4mH-0zriRM

Microsoft’s search engine usage jumps from 9 to 11%
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Microsoft-gets-Bing-bump-ComScore-says/0,339028227,339296844,00.htm

I guess this is mainly because of this:
IE7/6 forces users to use Bing as the default search engine. But according to Microsoft, it’s a bug.
How is it even remotely possible? An 9 year old browser forcing users to use as search engine which is virtually 2 weeks old? (opened to public 1st May)
I guess it would cut on advertising costs a fair bit to reach a lot wider audience! It wouldn’t surprise me if that bug was intentional. Microsoft, shameless yet again…
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/IE6-forcing-Bing-as-default-search-engine/0,339028227,339296759,00.htm

Category Interesting Links
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