Great animated video that breaks down exactly what drives people to succeed and be all they can be. Although I was mainly thinking of open source as I watched this, I can see the idea working in other industries. Really interesting and fun to watch.
Yesterday, at the Google I/O conference, the search behemoth released, among other goodies, the brand-new Google Font API. This new API lets developers easily embed fonts into their pages for usage with the CSS font-family directive. And it’s really drop dead easy to include a font.
You can insert any font in Google’s catalog simply by linking to it as if it were a stylesheet:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> </link>
After this initial step, all you need to do is use the font as you’d normally do for regular, web-safe fonts:
body { font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, serif; }
Easy as can be, right? Oh, and here’s the kicker: the behind-the-scenes voodoo allows browsers all the way down to IE6 to take advantage of linked fonts!
The catalog is pretty barebones right now, but this is Google, and this is sure to be a project that will soon gain traction and favour among the Web Development community. I’m sure pretty soon the list of available fonts (which are all open-source, by the way) will grow exponentially.
What does this mean for the upcoming CSS3 @font-face directive? It’s potential is definitively great, however browser adoption and legal issues have prevented it from becoming as commonplace as other CSS3 novelties. Will Google change the way we think about typography on the Web?
So last time I wrote a little about the conceptual and practical challenges of adding emailing capabilities to the SAPO Campus platform. I was adding some final touches to the design proposal for the new feature, and it’s pretty much done by now, so I thought I’d finally put it out there, and discuss some finer points of the design.
As email clients go, this solution is pretty much standard, so no revolutions here. I went to some length discussing this on the last post so, if you haven’t read it, go do it now. It’s the least you can do. The best I can do then is try to make the whole experience not suck. Part of this is still up for grabs, since I don’t know yet how fast and responsive the interface will be. For now, I’ve focused my efforts into making it as simple and clean-cut as possible: Email in general has evolved into one hell of a gargantuan system, with lots of features most people don’t really give a crap about. So my main task involved getting rid of as much feature-creep as humanly possible. I thought about the features most people use on their day-to-day emailing and put those in the front row, and hid or altogether scrapped the more obscure ones. (…) more after the jump ›
- SAPO Campus (my full-time project nowadays) is supposed to provide this wonderful set of happy magical fun tools to a University. It’s a tough crowd, we’re aware of it. On one hand you have Internet savvy students, skipping class for a few Farmville dollars, and on the other, teachers and support staff, most of them struggling to get this “social networking facemagazine thingamajig”. Oh, and everyone in the middle. While we’re convinced we already offer some very compelling tools that should please both ends of this crowd, there’s this one thing that some (yours truly included) consider pretty damn central to the whole “unified” experience: an email client. While we’ve kept pretty much silent on the matter, this has always been on our list of awesome-must-haves (yes, i’m hyphenating it). Albeit pretty old, email is still pretty much central to the whole Internet experience, and the Gods, in all of their godliness, would surely scoff at a PLE which failed to provide at least a simple email client.
After much discussion and back-and-forth of ideas, I think we’ve finally nailed it, and, let me tell you, this is going to be wayyyyyy better than the iPad. Ok, not better, but still pretty damn close. (…) more after the jump ›
Great information design video. On the other hand, watching this made me feel kind of scared about Facebook. If this trend goes on, soon enough Facebook will be the Internet. Oh well.
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