Secrets is a new project from the creator of Quicksilver. It tracks hidden preferences in many Mac applications and provides an interface to them through a unified Preference Pane.
Some of these hidden preferences are no doubt hidden for a reason, but I’m sure there is few little things everyone would like to adjust. Take a look at a list of all of the documented preferences or download the software here. But be warned: not for the faint of heart.
This website has a huge collection of fonts which are all free to download. I have downloaded a bunch and they all work great, and seem to have all the special characters included as well.
The only problem I have with this site is restraining myself from downloading hundreds of new fonts, which I will probably never use. Of particular interest to me was the Blackletter Revival collection. I started looking at these typefaces when I was designing our wedding invitations, and I think they are beautiful.
The entire collection is great, but I am particularly fond of Jaecker-Schrift. Check out this gorgeous eth character from that font.
Go get yourself some new fonts but don’t go crazy; you know you’ll never use them all.
When you immerse yourself if the world of HTML, CSS, PHP, etc., its easy to forget that there is another half of the universe that deals almost exclusively with Flash. Web standards and accessibility advocates argue that Flash sites are not good “web citizens”, due to the proprietary nature of the software used to create and view them, their inability to be indexed by search engines, and their dodgy, often non-existent support for assistive devices, such as screen readers.
In an article at A List Apart, Dan Mall wrote:
There’s a belief within the web standards community that Flash is part of a different world. While all approaches have limitations and drawbacks, Flash has been scorned to the point that many refuse to acknowledge its benefits. Ultimately, this has led to the creation of a virtual separation among web designers; those who use Flash use it exclusively (leading to a saturation of full-screen, “Skip Intro”-rich Flash sites on the web) and those who don’t ever give it a second thought.
I believe this to be true, and while I used to enjoy working with Flash, I have to admit that I’ve fallen into the latter category recently.
That is, until this evening, when I viewed the WHITEvoid website. The interface is really intuitive, responsive, and fun to use. Environments like this simply can’t be created with traditional web technologies.
You really should go have a look yourself. For those who care, the site is using Papervision3D, which is an open source 3D engine for Flash.
Robotlab : bios bible (2007) on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Interesting. A robot writing the Bible. Check out the sweet font its capable of creating.
Things – task management on the Mac
Very sharp looking task management / GTD software from Cultured Code. Still in beta. Just what I need: One more layer of technology to separate me from what I should actually be doing.
Fluid – Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard
Fluid turns any website into a stand alone app on your Mac. So if you have a site that you constantly keep open, it can run in it’s own little world outside of your browser.
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
Need some usability guidance for a web/interface project? Check out Yahoo’s tried-and-true suggestions.
Neatorama » Blog Archive » The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos
Follow the evolution of popular logos over time. I think “Kwanon” should have stuck with the original.
aRILLO
I dig the sharp vector style here. Interface could use some work though.
Pushing Paper Out the Door – New York Times
After filing a year and a half’s worth of documents last weekend, going paperless sounds awfully appealing. The $400 price tag on the Fujitsu ScanSnap is, unfortunately, not quite as appealing.
Mint is a web analytics service that I have really been wanting to try for a while but haven’t been able to bring myself to. Although I think the price tag ($30 per site) is very reasonable, I can’t quite justify spending money to find out that the only people who visited my site in the past month are my mother and my brother, and even then, only because I set my URL as their home page.
Regardless, Mint seems to be a great service, and I have heard nothing but rave reviews of it. Shaun Inman, the man behind the cool, flavorful service, recently posted an image on Flickr describing the logic residing just beneath the surface of the Mint logo:
Beautifully Euclidean.
‘Cloud’ is a sculpture created for a British Airways terminal by the London art and design studio Troika. You really have to take a look at it to fully appreciate it, but I think the concept alone is pretty novel:
…we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.
I love that they took the “Flip-dots”, something simple and mechanical, that has been around for quite a while, and turned them into a work of art that is so high-tech.
For those of you using Backpack with an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should check out iBackpack.
PermalinkThis is a great little web utility that I think I will be getting a lot of use out of. Basically it is a bookmarking service, but it is super easy to set up and use. To sign up, all you need to do is provide a user name. You don’t even have to give them your email address. If you are scared that people might find your page and think you are weird for having bookmarked 23 pages regarding the migratory patterns of small rodents, then you can set a password, but that too is not required.
The magic happens with a little javascript bookmarklet that you drag to your bookmarks bar, and whenever you see a page that you want to save for later you just click on it and it adds it to your list, like so:
What’s great is that, as opposed to actual bookmarks saved in your browser, you can access them from anywhere, and create them from anywhere. So say you are up late reading articles online and decide to call it a night, you can just add all of your tabs to Instapaper and finish reading them the next day at work. If, you know, you were into that sort of thing.
Instapaper is written and hosted by Marco Arment and you can get it here.
