links for 2010-09-02

• Midnight Cassette System
  Another good source of free music!
  (tags: free music royaltyfree)
• Incompetech
  A nice source of free music!
  (tags: music royaltyfree mp3 media audio resources)

Dude, Best Viewed With a WTF??? What Year is This?

I love web standards, I do. I teach a class on them at a local university and extoll the benefits of everyone using them to create an open and accessible web. Why? They allow us to publish to an audience that is larger than any other ever assembled by man. Without them, the web would be a fragmented mess and it would be far less useful. Now, they also allow us to do some fantastically cool stuff, like the latest video from one of my favorite artists, Arcade Fire. Have you tried it yet? It’s worth a viewing, for sure. Check out the overview from Mashable, too.

But when I see things like this (which accompanied the aforementioned video):

I wonder… what are we doing? Sure, I know it’s a cool demo. Yes, it’s a fun and innovative use of technology… and hopefully we are learning things by creating these experiments… They’re lovely. But at what cost? Are we fueling some sort of Browser War II? Is rich media in this “post-flash” world (which I’m not really sure we are in), bound to ghetto-ize the cool sites and and force us to revert to the “Best viewed on a…” web mullet bumper stickers of 1999? Dude, I’ve been there… I have the scars to prove it and the burnt weekends and late nights of many a browser debugging session to recall not so fondly. Remember this? Am I detecting shades of it here, or what?

So, the next time you bash Flash or any other tech for not being open or taking too much CPU or whatever is the complaint du jour, take a look at this CPU output from my pretty much new 15″ MBP with 8GB ram… This was what was happening while that beautiful piece of open content was playing…

…

Yeow. Every piece of tech is capable of eating up processors, standards compliant or not. Just saying.

Oh and by the way, I did write a postcard to myself. Check it out.

links for 2010-08-28

• CSS3 Gradient Generator | Display:inline
  A sweet, easy to use and powerful CSS3 gradient generator
  (tags: css3 gradients generator tools)

Been a bit quiet here, sorry for the absence.

I have been really busy on another of my blogs, Float Learning. This year, my company has dove right into mobile, and specifically the world of mobile learning. I’ve been buried because of that, in case you couldn’t tell here.

We’ve been writing a ton of great stuff at that blog. You should check it out when you have a moment.

I promise to get back to posting here, and have a couple drafts nearly ready, but for now, I’m going to be mostly active on Twitter and may have some delicious links to post coming soon.

That said, I do have a couple milestones to share… It’s been 1 year since my URL shorteners went live at fnaweso.me and fnla.me… go use em and say hi, if you haven’t recently.

Also, this is my 500th blog post. Sweet.

links for 2010-08-10

• 5 Small Biz Web Design Trends to Watch
  Here are five current design trends that most small businesses can utilize to great effect.
  (tags: trends inspiration)

links for 2010-08-02

• Fonts for iPad & iPhone | Michael Critz
  A list of iPad fonts. The news isn't that great… there needs to be a way to install fonts on these devices.
  (tags: fonts ipad)

How to Fix iPhone 4 Reception Issues

The last 20 seconds cover it… literally.

When building a promo/reel becomes a stepping stone…

At The Iona Group and our new venture, Float Learning, we have been very busy seeking new opportunities and trying to reach new potential clients in a variety of interesting, non-traditional ways.

Mini sites. Bah, old hat. Social Networking… hmm, not as effective for a small marketing business as you might think. Demo reels? Been there done that. Carousel Galleries? Puhhhhleeazzzeee.

So, we’ve been thinking a little “outside the box”… cliche I know, but the things we’ve been working on are hardly typcial. Check this 3 iPad synchronized reel.

Or this multiscreen game featuring SMS interaction, mobile web and custom iPad development. We unveiled that last month at mLearnCon for the eLearning Guild..

Strange times, (and this economy certainly is a strange time) call for creative measures. We are definitely being creative. Its been a lot of fun working on efforts like this with the team we have at The Iona Group.

The very interesting thing about this is that after people see the demo, or play the game, not only do they want to talk to us more about our work, but often times they actually want to have a custom multiscreen demo or a mobile phone based game produced for them. It’s funny, but the portfolio pieces/demos we have created have actually become solutions that customers want for themselves.

D2WC, it’s a Wrap!

What a great conference. Excellent Sessions, a nice venue, and a great city. I enoyed meeting a few people for the first time and seeing some old friends, too. Dee put together an awesome event. Many thanks to her, and to my coworkers, Matt and Heather for making the long trip with me.

I’ve uploaded my slides from my presentation to SlideShare. You can view them here.

There are a number of event summaries popping up on the web, so be sure to view ‘em. I really liked seeing the Workflow Lab team in action and thoroughly enjoyed Seb’s two presentations as well. Chris Griffith got the attendees up to speed on mobile and Ben Stucki gave a mind opening presentation as well.

All in all, it was a fantastic event, and one that I hope continues next year as well!

The image of me presenting was originally uploaded by aaronjped to flickr. I enjoyed meeting you Aaron!

D2WC is fast approaching… A great conference for a great price!

From the site:

Kansas City’s first Designer/Developer Workflow Conference. June 19-20 in downtown Kansas City, MO near the Power & Light District. We have some of the best speakers both locally and internationally coming to talk on all things workflow. If you are a designer, developer or both, this conference is for you.

The speaker list is great, the organizer, Dee Sadler is a pillar of the Adobe community and the venue look pretty fantastic. What else can you ask for? Oh yeah, the price is amazing! Only $225.00! (I might know of a discount code or two, as well. Contact me for a an even lower price)

I’ll be there speaking on Designer/Developer collaboration… “Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus“. Don’t miss it!