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,…
The W3C has today announced its brand new validator, named Unicorn for reasons they do not explain. The new validator combines four other validators into one: Unicorn combines a number of popular tools in a single, easy interface, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, which…
Yes, it’s a tired title already. But it’s based on the third installment of the popular What the F**k is Social Media NOW? slide show that’s been recycling around the web again for the last couple weeks. As such, not including it here almost makes me seem like I’m clueless.…
Patrick H. Lauke is the Web Evangelist at Opera Software and ran the Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Last week (July 13) he gave a talk to the Institutional Web Management Workshop on HTML5. He lead viewers on a general history of HTML5, through an overview…
Back in November, the W3C released a handy tool aimed at helping developers quickly access information from various W3C specifications (W3C Cheatsheet for developers). The features were pretty straightforward: This cheatsheet aims at providing in a very compact and mobile-friendly format a compilation of useful knowledge extracted from W3C specifications…