Echo — even more “social” comments

August 3
2009
in Technology

TechCrunch is test­ing a new com­ments sys­tem, called Echo. Very inter­est­ing idea — there are two parts to it. For one, when you post a com­ment on an arti­cle, any accounts that you tie to it (face­book, twit­ter, google pro­file, etc.) get that com­ment as well. The more inter­est­ing part, is that com­ments from around the web (from sys­tems sup­ported by Echo) that refer to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, will get posted to the article’s com­ments. That, among other things, of course includes twit­ter, which means this will need some sort of fil­ter­ing sys­tem since a lot of tweets will just have a link to the arti­cle, and a word or two. All this is by the way seen in more or less real time in the com­ments, i.e. they get peri­od­i­cally updated, cre­at­ing sort of a live feed of comments.

Here is the orig­i­nal TC article.

The web seems to be hav­ing an explo­sion of social ser­vices lately — every­where you turn someone’s offer­ing a new way to share your expe­ri­ence, with even more peo­ple, and it’s always more and more “cur­rent”, “live” and “real time”. And with iPhone and other smart­phones becom­ing more and more com­mon, access­ing inter­net on the go is becom­ing a triv­ial thing, and every­one can pretty much post their lives on the web as they hap­pen. I don’t know if it’s such a good thing in the long run, but right now I’m find­ing the whole thing pretty exciting.

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Reflections and Accordion using CSS only, in Safari and Firefox

July 28
2009
in CSS

Using com­bi­na­tion of CSS trans­forms, tran­si­tions, gra­di­ents and :tar­get it’s pos­si­ble to cre­ate things that usu­ally require JavaScript — such as accor­dion and reflec­tions (in Firefox). Unfortunately, this only works 100% in Safari and Chrome (and I guess any other webkit using browser). In Firefox these ele­ments behave prop­erly, they just don’t have ani­ma­tions or gra­di­ents. As for IE, I didn’t bother with it at all.

Here is the page I’m going to go over. Feel free to dig into the code and if you’ve got any ideas on how to make it even sleeker let me know. Keep Reading

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Weekend Highlights — Google Wave, HTC Hero, King’s Quest and Screengrab!

July 25
2009
in else()

So this has been a pretty busy week. Of course the biggest news is me launch­ing this site… <crick­ets>… or maybe not. I guess it all depends on your per­spec­tive. As for the other inter­est­ing stuff — Google is send­ing out 100,000 beta invites to Google Wave in September; HTC Hero has been reviewed by every­one except me; Steam is hav­ing a sale on King’s Quest and Space Quests col­lec­tions, and you know I got it as soon as I saw it; and finally a small Firefox add-on that is going to change my life (not really, but it’s an atten­tion grab­ber, ain’t it). Keep Reading

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Mindblowing Photography — RAZOOMA.net

July 22
2009
in Art & Design

Andrey Razoomovsky is a Russian pho­tog­ra­pher who does some amaz­ing work. I stum­bled upon his work on DeviantArt and was blown away.

Art by Andrey Razoomovsky

Art by Andrey Razoomovsky

He’s done some of the most unique pho­tographs I’ve ever seen — they’re very imag­i­na­tive, have great com­po­si­tion, extremely detailed and per­fectly exe­cuted. If you do noth­ing else, you have to check out a col­lec­tion of pho­tographs enti­tled “Milk” — beau­ti­ful women dressed in milk — if that doesn’t spark your curios­ity I don’t know what will. A word of warn­ing though, most of the pho­tographs in this col­lec­tion are NSFW… then again that also depends on where you work.

Andrey has a DeviantArt pro­file, but his main work can be found on RAZOOMA.net. The site is in Russian but if you want to sim­ply see his work then just click the first link in the main menu (at the top) and go nuts — from there you can’t go wrong what­ever gallery you go to.

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Using CSS3 @font-face to “fake” multiple font weights

July 21
2009
in CSS

CSS2 spec­i­fies addi­tional font weights, beyond Normal and Bold. In par­tic­u­larly there are 9 font weights in total — 100, 200, 300, 400 (nor­mal), 500, 600 (bold), 700, 800 and 900. Unfortunately browsers still some­what lack sup­port for this fea­ture, but more impor­tantly fonts lack sup­port for this. Many fonts how­ever, still come with only nor­mal and bold weights. Moreover, based on a few tests, even pro­fes­sional fonts that come with mul­ti­ple weights (such as thin, light, reg­u­lar, bold, heavy, etc.) don’t actu­ally sup­port these weights in the same way as the CSS2 spec­i­fi­ca­tion dic­tates, in other words they can’t be used out of the box like that.

For exam­ple, I have the Arno Pro font (a nice serif font from Adobe). It comes in 4 weights — reg­u­lar, bold, light and semi­bold. Each is encap­su­lated in its own file with a dis­tinct name, e.g. ArnoPro-Bold, ArnoPro-Smdb, ArnoPro-Light, etc. I don’t know much about how fonts work but based on a bit of read­ing I’ve done, for a font like that I should be able to declare a style that uses “ArnoPro” font-family and based on the weight I assign to a par­tic­u­lar ele­ment it would use a dif­fer­ent ver­sion. For exam­ple, ArnoPro-Light for 200, ArnoPro-Regular for 400 or nor­mal, and so on. However, based on a few tests I’ve done that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact “ArnoPro” font isn’t rec­og­nized at all, only if I spec­ify explic­itly “ArnoPro-Smbd” does it rec­og­nize the font. And of course when it’s done like that all but the reg­u­lar ver­sion are stuck with one weight, i.e. font-family:ArnoPro-Smbd; font-weight:normal looks exactly the same as font-family:ArnoPro-Smbd; font-weight:bold.

In short, the sit­u­a­tion is less than ideal. However, there may be a at least a par­tial fix.

Using @font-face, which was intro­duced in CSS3, you can sim­u­late the extra font-weights by assign­ing the spe­cific fonts to each weight. This is a kind of a hack, and one that will not work in all browsers. In fact, I only man­aged to get it to work in FF3.5. I think IE only sup­ports this for their pro­pri­etary font for­mat, which I didn’t used, and for some rea­son it didn’t work in Chrome 2 either (which I thought sup­ported @font-face), but I didn’t inves­ti­gate this fur­ther, at least not for now. Keep Reading

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Good Ol’ Games

July 19
2009
in else()

As my inau­gural post I decided that I’m not going to blab about myself, that’s what the “About Me” blurb in the footer is about. Instead I’m going to talk a bit about my favorite dis­cov­ery of the past few months — GOG.com.

GOG.com

GOG.com

GOG.com (Good Old Games) is a site ded­i­cated to the great PC games of yore. It’s a com­mu­nity site for peo­ple who remem­ber the days when an entire game could be fit­ted on a sin­gle 5.25″ disk, and who still love to play the clas­sics once in a while. They (gog.com) also sell many of these clas­sics for down­load. Their cat­a­log is always grow­ing and much like Steam they always have one sale or another going on, which is frankly putting a load on my credit card so I’m always torn between lov­ing them and hat­ing them. One other thing worth men­tion­ing about GOG.com is that all the games they sell are made com­pat­i­ble with mod­ern Windows OS — XP, Vista, 7, so there’s no need to worry about installing DOSBox or other such soft­ware. So far from my expe­ri­ence they all work fine.

And as a web designer I also appre­ci­ate their site design — it’s very well done, light, slick and fast, if a bit too gray for my taste.

Anyway, if you miss such clas­sics as Fallout, Earth 2150 or Under A Killing Moon (any Tex Murphy fans in the house?) you should check­out GOG.com.

P.S. And no I’m not affil­i­ated with gog.com, just a big fan, that’s all.

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