Brighkite has rolled out a new home page today, and for those of us familiar with its old home page, gone are the sample check-ins and photos from your area. Instead, the home page is pushing its group text feature. In a blog post announcing the change, Brightkite acknowledges that…
We’re a week away from Microsoft’s beta release of Internet Explorer 9 (public beta, not just a preview release aimed at developers). This release promises extensive support for another “beta” standard, the incomplete HTML5 specification. IE9 is also supposed to come with broader CSS3 support, SVG support, and even embedded…
When Google changes its logo in honor of a holiday, someone’s birthday, or just for the heck of it, it sometimes gets some chatter. When Google created the Pac-Man logo, articles appeared of people trying to figure out how it worked, or commenting on tech support calls within organizations from…
In case you haven’t seen the Arcade Fire video, The Wilderness Downtown, you should take a look at it. Google and Arcade Fire got together to show off what Google Chrome could do with all the new gee whiz technology out there, and if you listen to all the major…
I regularly come across reports and studies that talk about how smartphones are a growing platform, outpacing PCs in some markets and/or demographics, essentially re-writing how we use the web. Most of those reports lack hard data or lack solid analysis of that data, however, and fall prey to best…
I will be speaking twice in September, both of them sponsored by Infotech Niagara. If you’re in the Buffalo area, these are great opportunities to boost my ego and watch me cruise abandoned plates for food. Developing Coding Standards The first event is Developing Coding Standards, where I will be…
If you are an avid reader of my blog (and you are, aren’t you?) then you might recall when I wrote the article UX Challenges in Touch Interfaces over at evolt.org. I discussed how users have become accustomed to using mice and developers have become accustomed to designing for the…
Last night I had the pleasure to speak to a class from the University at Buffalo School of Management about social media use in business. It gave me an opportunity to distill my experiences with clients and as a consumer into a far-reaching discussion in under three hours. Hardly any…
Facebook Places is out. It’s the Foursquare / Gowalla / Brightkite / Loopt / etc.-killer. Or so Facebook hopes. All of those services have some pretty clear controls in place to limit how much information you share. Granted, you can mess up even their simple privacy controls and share the…
Wired Magazine released an article on its web site yesterday, The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, that basically states that the web we’ve all grown to rely on for nearly twenty years is on its way out. There has been a lot of chatter about this over the…
In the last week there has been a lot of speculation over a deal Google and Verizon were working on regarding net neutrality. First covered by New York Times, refuted in part by Google and Verizon, and later presented as a policy document from Google and Verizon, quite a lot…
I’m going to make the assumption that if you are reading this you have at least a passing interest in typography on the web and have heard about Google’s new font preview tool. There are already plenty of articles talking about how easy it is, how Google hosts the typefaces,…