Check out the more colorful, animated visualization of browser support for the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features based on data from When can I use… Inspired by a General Dynamics postcard and an infographic on America’s wealthiest religions, this single-serving site is quite literally a rainbow that’s painting optimism for the future of web standards.
Each ray represents a feature, and the different bands of color represent the leading browsers, IE6 excluded (finally). More under the hood details here, praising the virtues of Sass and Photoshop-less, in-browser design. Kudos to Paul Irish (again!) and Divya Manian.
Remember my complaint about all the CSS3 syntaxes differing from one browser to another? It’s now addressed with CSS3 Please, a jQuery-based, in-browser editor that replaces multiple attribute values of the more complicated CSS3 syntaxes (from border-radius to rgba to @font-face) all at the same time, so you don’t have to.
In addition to syncing and normalizing changes across the necessary properties, it also sneaks in IE support for a few features via IE filters. Right now it helps you write the rules for: border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation and @font-face. A few more transforms like skew and scale are on their way, stay tuned.
You can preview your code on the box at the right side by toggling it on and off. When you’re done, click on the clipboard icon to copy the code.
This is a smart solution to a growing problem. However, even though I’m thoroughly grateful for this tool, I still want to axe the real problem, which is the inconsistent browser syntax. It’s unreasonable for a programming language to have redundant code, and while CSS isn’t really one, it’s still code. We’re still supposed to pride ourselves with efficiency, conciseness, and standards with any kind of code. We like to kick IE for constantly breaking standards; should we tolerate the same thing for other browsers just because they’re implementing cutting edge features?
What’s the hottest thing on the Web right now? Twitter, and a host of other dead-simple, single serving websites. If you plan on making a new web app, make it as simple as possible, if not simpler. Take Aviary’s Screen Capture service.
Just a short background: Aviary is a suite of web-based graphics applications, all named after birds. The branding concept is fantastic, if I do say so myself. The fact that they run on Flash and are essentially competing against the very maker of said platform—Adobe—is a very interesting feat in itself. It is, however, a bit premature as Flash remains hardware-intensive.
Screencapped Google.com because the doodle today looks extra-nice.
So, back to the dead-simple part. All you have to do is enter the URL of a website you want to screencap after Aviary.com and wait a few moments until Falcon, the simplified image markup editor, loads the image up. Crop, resize, add a few scribbles, and save your screenshot. Done!
Of course some people will need options, which the Capture page and the Talon Firefox add-on can provide. But that isn’t really Aviary’s achievement here. It managed to create a screenshot tool that requires nothing but entering a URL in the browser address bar. No need to wait for the app to start up, no need to remember special conventions to make sure the thing works properly.
Simple, elegant, brilliant. We will always have huge, complicated methods that will get the job done, but most of the time it’s the leaner, less intimidating tools that win us over.
When Obama Wins scours and displays tweets containing the phrase 'when Obama wins'
I’m fascinated by the single-purpose websites that have been cropping up for the past year. I’m not much of an internet historian to track down exactly when the first of their kind came out, but they officially entered meme status when Jason Kottke wrote about it back in February.
In the era of 140-character microblogging and 10-inch subnotebook computing, brevity is king. But these straight-to-the-point sites aren’t exactly the iPhone-friendly versions of our increasingly bloated, self-centered homepages and bookmarks. (That’s a different phenomenon altogether and worth discussing in a separate article.)
They’re in a different group themselves, in a peanut gallery of sorts, poking fun at the rest of the all-too serious internet population. Stop worrying whether websites need to look exactly the same in every browser, you should use tables for layout (give up?), Diet Coke will kills us, graphic design is art, Barack Obama is Muslim or muslin or President, or it’s Tuesday, April Fool’s, Christmas, or a leap year yet.
The color of the Empire State Building on November 11. On November 11 it was Purple, Purple, White. As of writing it's White, White, White.
Of course some of these one-trick ponies are web apps and mashups that do exactly one thing really well, whether it’s helping you look forward to the day when Obama wins, decide if you should bring an umbrella today, bitch and moan about our dear Adobe, or figure out whether Twitter, Gmail, the Apple Store, or some other site is down or it’s just you.
Not to mention spell definitely and other words correctly, insert angled quotes », «, ›, ‹, discover your IP address, and play a instant rimshot.
Visit A List Of Sites for more of the madness! Or go through them randomly ala StumbleUpon.
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