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I wrote a quick post to Google Buzz recently that dealt with a concept and issue that’s been rattling in the back of my mind lately. We consume so much information from so many sources that we’re bound to run into the same stories. The news that becomes popular does so because of it being shared, telling friends, sending it to others, and spreading the word.

Virality is the term that’s been associated with this for some time. Getting things to “go viral” is a key to success, but the value of any story is its exclusivity, or who publishes it first. The above concept image is a visualization of my thoughts on how this issue might be dealt with.

I call it – Flume.

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Since FriendFeed’s launch of a new still-in-beta redesign, there’s been much debate over some of the features and style changes – both on blogs, and within the service itself. While any change is sometimes met with reluctance and skepticism, as Facebook has realized with their latest changes, there’s a number of reasons why the aesthetic and functional revamps of FriendFeed are helpful for both its users, and for the proliferation of real-time data on the web. Here’s a breakdown of why I believe FriendFeed has made a lot of correct choices in their transition from data aggregation, to a broad conversational hub for the web.

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I recently started a Twitter discussion with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on the relevance and usefulness of the <small></small> tag. I’ve had this same debate with co-workers on why one would still use <small></small> over just using a <p></p> or <span></span> with an appropriate <class></class> or <id></id> to define the “smallness” of the tag. The one thing we both noticed is that no one uses the <big></big> tag anymore, so why should anyone use the <small> </small> tag? This seems to be only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining which element to use for an intended result. Let’s look at a few more instances of controversy in the realm of standards and semantics on the web.

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Ever wished you had one place to test your web designs in all browsers easily? Well thanks to IETester, it’s now possible to check your work in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Beta (and even IE 5.5 for anyone still living in the year 2000). It’s still in alpha, so it has occasional crashes, hiccups, and limited browsing functions. In spite of this, the app in its current release is already incredibly useful. The developer has a forum set up for feedback and bug reporting as well which should hopefully keep the project moving forward.

With IETester combined with VMWare Fusion, I can now test my work on my Intel Mac in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox without having to resort to remoting to other machines, using slower web-based visual checks, or using Virtual PC to test multiple IE versions anymore. It’s a fantastic setup.

Now if only there were conditional comments, and a version of Firebug for IE and Safari… Hey, a web designer can dream, right?

I just discovered the relatively new Labels feature of Blogger and I’ve been going through the archived posts and tagging them all with relevant labels. It very neatly auto-creates all the label pages and collects all the posts that reference that particular label. Very cool stuff. I’ll be setting up a labels list in the sidebar for easy searching through topics shortly.

UPDATE: Apparently since I have an old Blogger template I am unable to add the labels list to my sidebar. Rats!

I came across an article on Digg about an alternative way of showing a captcha using pictures of kittens. This got my brain thinking on how would I devise a better captcha.

My solution is this:

What about putting a sequence of UP, LEFT, RIGHT, and DOWN arrows over a grid pattern. Then the user would just push the arrow keys in the sequence shown. All of the angles would be impossible for a computer to decipher what combination would work – but a human could distinguish the arrows and press accordingly.

It would be like entering the Contra code as a captcha.

This would also work on keyboards worldwide, as non-western keyboards might have characters outside of the English alphabet – but all keyboards have arrow keys (as far as I’m aware).

This doesn’t solve the issue of accessibility for the blind however that all captcha’s suffer from. The best solution I’ve found is an audio file that reads off what’s visually shown. This presents another issue – what language would it be read in? What if you are blind and deaf? What if you have no keyboard? At what point do you stop?

A truly worldwide, accessible captcha – Is it possible?

A clothing fashion website I’ve been working on has just launched.
Take a look at their military inspired designs.

Poetic Rage Clothing, Co.

The first thing I thought of concerning Sparkle is customer support. If we design a site using Sparkle, and our customers visit the site, what sort of experience will they have if they don’t have Windows Vista? Imagine a Mac user on Safari. Or a Linux user? They will have no way to view the content. The app will just break.

Alternately, you would have to point those users (XP, Mac, Linux) to a special download of an altered or limited version of Avalon made for those platforms. It seems that downloading something with that large of a graphic framework would not be as simple as a Flash Player download.

You would download probably a 60MB+ file (just a guess) and then after install have to reboot before you can view the content. That’s a journey that nearly any non-computer savvy customer will not be willing to take. And most companies, large or small, would be hesitant to help them through.

Right now we can do a LOT with the Flash Player using the tools Macromedia provides, and a new install takes seconds, and without a reboot if users don’t happen to have it. In my mind, Sparkle’s features will be the best thing ever to hit application development for Windows Vista and future platforms. But for the web, Sparkle has a lot of limitations compared to Flash’s cross-platform ubiquity.