So this is kind of typical. As you can see in the last link i have a little bit of a dig at Google for lacking in the design area and failing to take real care of the detail in designing beautiful user interfaces. And then what do they go and do… go and deploy a well crafted, uniform interface across all of it’s major products and apps.
After the introduction of Google+ they started to roll out a few updates but you can see the clear initiative here is to create a uniform and standard interface covering all major products. To be honest I think it’s all great. Today we started using the new Gmail and Calendar themes which are great. For us using Google Apps For Business it creates a more professional looking application and creates a confidence with our users that web applications like Gmail are as good if not better that traditional desktop applications. There’s been plenty of great stuff coming out of Google this week. I’m just looking forward to getting stuck into Google+.
Google go all designy on us
The details are not details, they make the product
A nice piece from @AuthenticJobs on how details make a product.
If the mantra of real estate is location, the equivalent of design is arguably details.
This follows a similar ethos to that of Apple and they shows some sexy examples of good design details in action. If only Google would take this kind of approach with products like Gmail and other apps which currently lack that added care for detail in design.
Judging from Facebook’s recent acquisition of Sofa they’re clearly seeing details details details a core factor in the evolution of they service.
HTML EMAIL BOILERPLATE v 0.4
This website and its sample code creates a template of sorts, absent of design or layout, that will help you avoid some of the major rendering problems with the most common email clients out there — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc.
from @SeanPowell
ICANN approves new web suffixes
Brands and corporations will soon be allowed to register websites with custom domain extensions.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal at a meeting in Singapore despite fears that opening up new suffixes could cause some confusion.
So soon we could see websites like http://itunes.apple or http://mail.google. But it’s aint going to be cheep though.
According to Mashable
The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000.
It’s definatley an interesting twist.
This made me lol today: Hotmail is better with IE8
Just a bunch of meaningless words from Microsoft that have no relevance to anything. What’s new…
LOL!
Scrapy – An open source web scraping framework for Python
Not sure how well this works but is sure sounds like it could be useful.
Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.
Hashify.me – Cool but what for?
I’d love to know what you’d use this for. It’s cool and geeky but i’ve no idea what you’d use this for.
The source links might be useful to implement in you own project though.
Showoff.io – The easiest way to share localhost over the web
Whether your a freelance developer of web designer Showoff.io is a sweet application to help you share your localhost on the public web. Perfect to demo a site to clients without having to setup any sort of format hosting.
Showoff creates a tunnel between your laptop and the web.