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We’ve waited so long for it but in the end, and as cool as it is, if I find it just a little meh but at the same time I want one does that make me a bad person?
We’ve waited so long for it but in the end, and as cool as it is, if I find it just a little meh but at the same time I want one does that make me a bad person? Sure, I had hoped for something in-between the iPhone and a MacBook, in terms of size that is exactly what it is. But, I’ll be honest my first impression was that “it’s just a giant iPod Touch” (or iPod Touch 3GXL…)

It is running what is basically the iPhone OS, with slightly bigger icons, and plenty of space between them on the home screen. I mean plenty. A small child could thump their paw down on the screen an only hit one app. It has the general iPhone feel (flick/pinch/swipe etc) to the interface, with the exception of the OS X style dock, also with really spaced out icons (I wonder how many you can actually put on it?).
| Great |
Good |
So-So |
Price point Design Speed No Flash |
Delicious Library… err, I mean iBooks It runs iPhone apps (including those you already own) Tech specs - seem pretty good for the price Redesigned core apps Claimed battery life |
The Bezel The way iPhone apps run No Camera Additional cost for 3G The name. iPad? hmm… |
» Continue reading “So they called it the iPad.”
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How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell Sad thing is that this is all so true. From personal experience its all usually the direct result of a client and/or marketing department who thinks they know ‘web’ more than the people that they’ve employed to do ‘web’. Pretty sure I’ve experienced every step of this ‘hell’ process in the last six months (or less).
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As cool as the iPod shuffle is I still think it needs a screen of some sort, my not make things interesting and give it a touch screen. Sure it’d be fiddly as hell to use, but who cares.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanjrobinson/3976636819/
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Download Hundreds of @font-face Fonts If, like me, you’re considering adding a bit of @font-face spice to your site then I’d definitely recommend having a look at Font Squirrel. There is a stack of fonts, with new ones be frequently added, ready to be used. There should be a style to suit your needs in there somewhere.
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Why can’t my iPhone do this? Apple has has horizontal modes in some (but annoyingly not all) core apps, so why can’t they add it to the home screen as well?

Why can’t my iPhone do this? Apple has horizontal modes in some (but annoyingly not all) core apps, so why can’t they add it to the home screen as well? It wouldn’t necessarily have to be just like my mockup, which fits an additional 4 apps and drops the text labels (could get them to fit nicely), instead each individual icon could just swivel 90 degree left or right so they are the right way up when you’re looking at them. In horizontal mode you might also flick through your various home screens by scrolling up and down instead of left and right.
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Social Media Icons Need some *hawt* icons to show off your personal meanderings amongst the social interwebs? Paul Robert Lloyd has put together 50 icons (each in 4 sizes, 16px, 24x, 32px and 48px) covering all the common social networks out there. All very nice, very crisp, the only one I don’t like is the twitter icon… why does everyone use such any ugly shade of blue? These icons are released under CC Attribution-Share Alike licence.
Sidenote
I was sick all of last week, and have spent all my free time so far this week working on finishing Hahlo4 for it’s September 9 release. But I would like to share a couple of redesigns that went live in the last week. Matt Brett launched the latest incarnation of his blog/portfolio, similar dark brown/chocolate colour scheme as previous designs, but with a rejigged layout - very nice, as usual. And Tim Van Damme launched the redesign of his blog, Maxvoltar, lots of nice things in this one including the use of @font-face, the jQuery ‘masonry’ plugin for the positioning on the notes on the homepage, and on individual entries theres a magic static sidebar that appears from underneath the header as you scroll down. Very cool.
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Surely I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, I can’t sit on one design for too long, personally I think I’ve done well to hold out for nearly 7 months this time. If you’re reading this in your favourite feedreader, then you’re missing out on the interesting bit, you can’t see my *awesome* redesign unless you’re reading this in a browser, so, hop to it.
Surely I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, I can’t sit on one design for too long, personally I think I’ve done well to hold out for nearly 7 months this time. If you’re reading this in your favourite feedreader, then you’re missing out on the interesting bit, you can’t see my *awesome* redesign unless you’re reading this in a browser, so, hop to it.
Wait
Isn’t it only like 6 weeks since you last redesigned? No, the last redesign went live the week after Christmas last year, which means its over 6 months since I’ve redesigned. So there
Why
I’ve gotten into a habit of redesigning (or at least refreshing) around the time that I upgrade to the latest and great version of WordPress. This time around I knew 2.8 was just around the corner and planned to go live with redesign while I was upgrading. That didn’t happen.
I also needed to do something to escape/take my mind off/avoid certain other things, and a redesign is great for that. Only problem that brought was that I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to the redesign as I normally would.
» Continue reading “And then it was redesigned”
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Web fonts — where are we? Web fonts seem to be the topic of the moment, we all want to use cool, interesting fonts in our web design, but we can’t because that just not how things currently work. Will there be a solution? yeah eventually. Favourite part of this article is this bit:
Way back in 1997, Microsoft developed its proprietary EOT (Embedded OpenType Format — basically a compact version of OpenType, that permits sub-setting), that only supported Internet Explorer. Hoping for widespread adoption, Microsoft opened it up for all, and in 2007 submitted their EOT proposal to the W3C (for inclusion in CSS3). Later that year, the proposal was rejected, for, among other reasons, security.
A few things wrong there… firstly IE submitting a 10 year old idea, secondly they submitted it for inclusion in CSS3. IE doesn’t support CSS3, not even in the latest and greatest IE8. So to them it probably doesn’t matter that it was rejected.