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)

Develop for Windows, Mac or even Linux? That’s hardly the question asked anymore. We want to know iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad, or other mobile device. There are solutions for delivering to all devices plus the traditional desktop. In this session we will walk through how to achieve cross-platform deployment of Rich Internet Applications.

Thanks to everyone who attended RIApalooza 3 in Chicago, IL and to everyone with great questions.

How to Fix iPhone 4 Reception Issues

The last 20 seconds cover it… literally.

For the Iona Group’s company demo, we wanted to feature the iPad. But not just one iPad, we used 3. And we didn’t just put the same thing on each one but we used the Game Kit framework and Bluetooth for peer-to-peer communication between the iPads. Enjoy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGZf0Vgp-sY

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.