A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.
You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.
Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.
It’s so great to see the initial UX work that James and I prototyped in a design sprint come to fruition in the form of a progressive web app!
In the case of this web-app, if the tablets go offline, they will still store all the transactions that are made by customers. Once the tablet comes back online, it will sync it back up to the server. That is, essentially, what a Progressive Web App is — a kind of a website with a few more security and, most importantly, offline features.
Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.
Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:
Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.
This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).
There’s something about this that I really like: a message transmitted via a modern communications medium converted into the oldest form of writing.
Dan Bricklin—co-creator of the original VisiCalc spreadsheet—turns his attention to responsive design, specifically for input-centric tasks.
A look at the degree of diversity in Android devices, complete with pretty pictures. The term “fragmentation” is usually used in a negative way, but there are great points here about the positive effects for web developers and customers.
You say fragmentation, I say diversity.
Details on how the BBC Responsive News team plan to eventually make their m-dot site scale all the way up to be the default site. This “planting a seed” approach works really well, not least for political reasons.
It’s something that The Guardian and The Chicago Tribune are working on too.
The guys at Cover Up are great: they make accessories for tablets and e-readers, so they have lots of those devices. They’ve made them all available for web developers to test on. Like I said: they’re great!
A great piece by Jason analysing the ever-blurring lines between device classes.
Mind you, there is one question he doesn’t answer which would help clear up his framing of the situation. That question is:
What’s a web app?
I know how Brad feels. I find it hard to muster any enthusiasm for any specific new device these days. But that’s okay. It’s more important to step back and see the trends and directions instead of getting caught up in the specifics of this particular phone or that particular tablet.
My remedy for device fatigue has been to take a step back and let my eyes go unfocused. Much like a Magic Eye, I can then see the hidden pictures behind the stippled noise that is the device landscape. This remedy helps me cope, gets me to stop caring about things that don’t really matter, and gets me to care about the broader trends the Magic Eye unveils.
Josh takes an-depth look at the navigation design implications of touch/keyboard hybrid devices, coming to a similar conclusion as Luke and Jason:
Unfortunately, the top-of-screen navigation and menus of traditional desktop layouts are outright hostile to hybrid ergonomics. Tried-and-true desktop conventions have to change to make room for fingers and thumbs.
Want to test for a hybrid device? Tough luck. Instead, argues Josh, the best you can do is assume that any device visiting your site could be touch-enabled.
Luke and Jason have done some excellent research (and put together some demos) into how the placement of navigation could be optimised for touch screens of all sizes. Turns out that the “standard” convention of having navigation along the top is far from ideal on a touch-enabled device.
There is an elephant in the Microsoft store.
Y’know, I think this comparison actually makes a lot of sense.