In Moderation

The Evolution of Websites

alysonstrother — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:27:15 +0000

Found an interesting article of how 10 popular websites have (and have not) changed. Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, Nike, CNN… they’re all here.

www.greatpockets.com — Promoting the Nokia N95?

alysonstrother — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:15:24 +0000

Visit Great Pockets: a video experience promoting the Nokia N95. What could be perceived as a joke, the presentation slowly unveils its purpose for existence: the Nokia N95. I’ve never seen this approach been done before, nor did I particularly like it (a bit slow for my taste), but it did have me wondering what this was about.

If you have 5 minutes it’s worth checking out.

Sweet Sleeves from Barry’s Farm

alysonstrother — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:26:03 +0000

The laptop sleeves over at Barry’s Farm are pretty neat. Although I’m a fan of incase, I am tempted to buy one just for a good laugh. The keytar sleeve is too cool.

Price: $20-65

Visit: Barry’s Farm

Take me back… way back. Was I even alive?

alysonstrother — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:30:14 +0000

As I was attempting to organize my PowerBook this morning I came across this ad for 1977’s Apple II. Why do I have this? How did I get this? I’ll never know.

“The Apple II (sometimes written as Apple ][ or Apple //) was the first mass produced microcomputer and product manufactured by Apple. As one of the earliest and most successful home computers, it is widely attributed as the father of the personal computer industry and what sparked its revolution… it was notably the first to make a strong emphasis on the concept style and visual appeal in order to blend in as a common household appliance (really?). The Apple II was one of the very first successful personal computers and responsible for launching the Apple company into a major business success.”

How addicted to Apple are you?

alysonstrother — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:30:03 +0000

I’m not usually a fan of silly quizzes, but this one I couldn’t resist. What hurt me was “When did you buy your first mac?” Sadly it was 2003!

How addicted are you? Find out here.

Video: Trajan is the Movie Font

alysonstrother — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:37:52 +0000

This was pretty great.

Customize your Dock

alysonstrother — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:36:48 +0000

Matt Davey and Dan Philibin at Neuecreative bring us leoparddocks.net to customize the Leopard dock to your liking. Apple’s re-design in Leopard has received mixed reviews so these are nice, and some not so nice, alternatives.

One free week at Lynda.com

alysonstrother — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:28:21 +0000

Lynda.com is online training of a huge variety of software and design topics. Think of it as an all-you-can-eat buffet that takes place in the comforts of your own home, at the pace that’s right for you with an affordable price tag.

What they offer:

Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc)
Apple (Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Mac OS, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, etc)
Google (Blogger, Picasa, Search Engines)
Microsoft (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Office 2007, Windows Vista, etc)
Design Principles (color, typography, interactive design)
Web Development (AJAX, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, PHP, Ruby on Rails, SEO, etc)

Try one week free at: www.lynda.com/deke

iPhone-Touch Web Clip Icons

alysonstrother — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:57:26 +0000

A couple weeks ago Apple offered an update to the iPhone and iPod touch enabling users to now save “Web Clip Bookmarks” to their springboard (desktop). It’s really just a link to a website with an icon that’s a thumbnail screenshot of the page. However, since most sites don’t specify an icon, these webclips begin to look alike and that’s no fun.

You can create your own.

Design something simple within 57×57px
Save your icon as a PNG and name it “apple-touch-icon.png”
Upload to the root folder of your site (the iPhone/Touch will automatically look for it here)

*Apple also automatically rounds the edges and gives it that glossy look so don’t worry about that.

What if I don’t have a site, but want to create my own for other websites?

Drew McLellan explains how to set an icon for any site.

Rob McMichael provides his own step-by-step instructions based on Drew’s discovery.

I don’t want to design my own, but I do want customized icons.

Andy Pearson created a whole website to display and host Web Clip icons called iclypso.

I lucked out with my 3 most-visited sites having Web Clip icons, but I’ll be giving this a try with others that don’t!

New: iPhone and iPod double in size

alysonstrother — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:48:53 +0000

As if the Macbook Air, updated Apple TV, 5 applications for the iPod touch, and the new pink iPod nano wasn’t enough… Apple announced new models of the iPhone and iPod touch today. They’ve DOUBLED in size, which means double the amount of music, photos and videos customers can carry with them.

The iPhone comes in a new 16GB for $499 and the iPod touch is now a whopping 32GB for $499.

$499 for only 32GB? If you’re willing to pay that much buy the iPhone 8GB, save $100, and get more bang for your buck. Less memory you say? Were you really buying the iPod touch for its memory anyway?