Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Dropbox Links Dropbox has made a clarification to there TOS. Link to their blogpost.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Browsers Google IMHO Mozilla So Firefox 5 is here. That’s great, I guess, but what’s new? Even on Mozilla’s own What’s new page for Firefox 5 there isn’t much. When I visit is during the writing of this post all I can see is that it’s apparently easy to customize Firefox with add-ons and plugins, but that’s hardly news.
The release notes lists a few minor features and the biggest one seems to be support for CSS Animations.That’s great, I guess, but why does that warrant a bump from version 4 to version 5.
Firefox used to be very slow when it came to releases. (It’s still very slow when it comes to actual usage.) This new fast release pace is probably to compete with Google Chrome, which has a very aggressive release cycle and fast iteration. I like fast progress, but I don’t like the devaluation of version numbers. If a small amount of features warrants a full version number jump then the users will quickly tire of updating.
The big difference in my opinion between Firefox and Chrome releases is that all tough they both nowadays want to bump version often, it irritates me a lot more when Firefox does it. The reason for this is that Chrome updates is absolutely silent. Nothing informs me that an update is available, it just installs. Once it installs nothing informs me that there has been an update, it just works slightly better than before. This is far less obtrusive and don’t have the same devaluating effect.
So great news Firefox, I guess, but a bump to 4.1 instead of 5 would have felt a lot more motivated. (The worst is that I recall reading/hearing something about Microsoft adopting the same aggressive versioning.)
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Apple Links Serenity Caldwell’s written a thoughtful article in MacWorld about Final Cut Pro X, titled How Apple re-cut Final Cut Pro for the better. One of many very interesting points:
Final Cut Pro X isn’t about alienating professionals: It’s about finding out just what a “professional” looks like in this day and age.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Apple IMHO You, my tech savvy readers, probably already know about Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro X, a totally ”rebooted” Final Cut Pro. This has been a very controversial move from Apple since it lacks a lot of the features that professional video editors need (and that the previous version, Final Cut Pro 7, had). A lot of bytes has been used to comment on the issue. One really good take on it is Jeffery Harrel’s blog post ”What went wrong with Final Cut Pro X”, and I won’t rewrite what he already written. If you’re unfamiliar with the FCPX controversy but interested in knowing more, read his post. You can also read numerous posts on Daring Fireball or listen to The Talk Show, Episode #49 to get John Gruber’s take on it. (Or just Google, a lot of people has raised their voices.)
Now I’m not a Final Cut user, so it really doesn’t affect me that much, but I feel a need to express my opinion. Some have argued that this is the latest in Apple’s ever-ongoing attempt to ”dumb-down” the technical world. Final Cut Pro X should, according to those expressing these kind of opinions, now be targeted at prosumers and normal users and be more of a pro version of iMovie and Apple is moving away from the pro market. (Clarification: This opinion is not expressed by those who I link to.)
I don’t think that this is the case. I don’t doubt that it lacks a few very important features and that Apple’s handling of this has been very, very poor. However I think that is what it is, poor handling, not evidence that they are abandoning the pro market. Marco Arment really said it best in Episode #31 of Build and Analyze; Casual consumers don’t spend $300 on software very often
.
That is a very important point. Pros are the ones that really pay for expensive software. Sure, the Mac App Store has made it a lot easier to impulse buy software, but nobody will impulse buy something that expensive. So even if the new price is a bargain compared to what FCP 7 used to cost it’s still to much money for the everyday Mac user who just want to edit some video he/she shot with his/her iPhone, especially since iMovie is basically free.
So isn’t it possible that Apple made a mistake? That they thought that prosumers and consumers would rush to this new product in such great numbers that losing the pros wouldn’t matter? Sure it’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that the huge mistake was to discontinue Final Cut Pro 7 on the same day that FCPX came out. If they had just let the two product coexist for a year or two (like with XCode 3 and XCode 4) I guess everyone would have happily migrated to FCPX as it got more and more great features.
I also think that the best solution for Apple is to admit being wrong in killing FCP 7 and put it back on sale for something like a year. If this is likely or not, I don’t know. Abruptly cutting ties with the past and head straight down the highway of tomorrow is a very typical Apple move. It will be very interesting to see if something similar will happen with Logic Pro in a not-so-distant future.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Hedningarna Photos 
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Links Music Social Media Apparently MySpace has been sold by Rubert Murdoch to a company named Specific Media. (My original source, Dagens Nyheter) One of the owners of Specific Media is reported to be Justin Timberlake.
The really interesting part in this, to me, is that I found out about it in a swedish daily newspaper. Dagens Nyheter is not known to be good at techie stuff. The news is even filed under economy, not technology. I have not heard anything about this in any of the international tech blogs I read or as part of any tweet.
To me this means that the tech world is no longer interested in MySpace. It’s considered yesterdays news and I couldn’t agree more. Goodbye MySpace.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Links This is great article from Interuserface on the usage of very simple geometric shapes (focused on mobile computer devices) as part of the branding.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Apple IMHO iOS Today I will be flying to Poland with the folkrock band ”Hedningarna” for a gig in Warsaw. I’m going to be their FOH engineer. (The guy that controls the sound that the audience hears). This post will not be about sound engineering or about Hedningarna though. It will be about the fact that this little adventure will involve a plane flight from Stockholm to Warsaw. During this flight I will really try out my iPad (and iPhone) as travel companion.
I liked my iPhone from the second I bought it, however I think that my love for it started when I took a long train ride from Arvika to Falun two years ago. I had an Apple keynote video loaded into it and I’d just started using Instapaper. That long boring train ride with poor Internet coverage had never felt fater and less boring.
Now I’m hoping that the iPad will do the same for the plane ride. It’s loaded with a lot of articles in Instapaper, a few comics and some videos from Webstock ’11.
I will revisit this topic (although in a new post) once I’m back from the trip.
[…] week I wrote a blog post about my upcoming trip to Warsaw with the band Hedningarna and the fact that I would use my iPad as my main digital entertainment […]
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Facebook Google Social Media Google +Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most
(and with Google).
Apparently Google is about to launch a full scale attack on Facebook with their own social media community. I’m not a Facebook user so I don’t know whether there are any aspects of it that Google obviously would do better. However I can guess that they will have one thing in common, and that’s one of the mail reasons I don’t use Facebook.
The user is not the customer, the user is the product. I always prefer to be the customer.
Here a link to a video and an about page for Google+.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
on
and tagged it with Code HTML5/CSS3 So called ”Social Media Icons”, links to Twitter, Facebook, RSS-feeds, linkedin etc., are everywhere. You can’t possibly have missed them. They are definitely a big buzz and something that a lot of people want to have on their web sites. A while ago I designed and developed a site called Prinsessans Rockband that among other things needed some social media icons.
At first this seemed like a problem, all though a small one, since I’m first and foremost a developer. I prefer to leave the pixel-craft to others. Sure, I could find some sort of free or semi-free icons online and use them, but I really wanted another solution. I stumbled upon two great things that led me to an idea. The first great thing was Dan Cederholm’s article ”An all CSS button”. It’s a write-up on how to style links to look like real world buttons and is well worth a read.
This got me thinking, maybe I could use CSS3’s @font-face and find the original fonts for some of the social media logos. Especially Twitter, Vimeo and Facebook often use a letter (T, V and F respectively) for their icons. I had previously found the font that Vimeo used, so I started googling. In the process I found the second great thing; The SocialIcons font by ptocheia. It’s a font that replace the letters with the look of popular social media and web company’s logos. It was almost to good to be true.
I combined the ideas from Dan Cederholm’s article with the font and got my social media icons for Prinsessans Rockband. It worked great, but they were removed in a small re-imagining of the layout. However the idea is still useful and I will likely use it more in the future.
One problem with this is the degradation. For some icons is works just fine when the letters shows up in another font. A t in a light blue box is easily identified as a Twitter-logo etc. However, some of them (and a instead of the RSS/Atom-logo for instance) degrades less graceful. So for this article I re-wrote some of the code in order to make it degrade better. For this I used some jQuery-based Javascript and the font-face-function in Modernizr.
Let’s start with the basic html.
|
1 |
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrhenko" data-social-letter="a" class="socialicon rss">Subscribe to RSS/Atom</a> |
The thing worth noting here is the data-attribute for social letter. The data-attribute is one of the many new great things in HTML5. You can read more about it at HTML5 Doctor. The content between <a> och </a> is then replaced by jQuery.
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 |
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> (function ($) { $(document).ready(function() { $('.fontface body').children('[data-social-letter]').each(function() { var letter = $(this).attr('data-social-letter'); $(this).text(letter); }); }); })(jQuery) </script> |
So what this does is it finds every element that has a ”data-social-letter”-attribute, if it is the child of an element with the class ”fontface”. That class is set by Modernizr to indicate that the browser supports CSS @font-face. That means that if my browser doesn’t support this, the original ”Subscribe to RSS/Atom” text will remain and the degradation is thereby sort of graceful. Now all we got to do is set the font and do some styling in css.
|
1 2 3 4 5 |
/* Import the font. */ @font-face { font-family: "SocialIcons"; src: url("SocialIcons.otf"); } |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
/* Make it look like an icon */ a.socialicon { display: block; width: 40px; height: 40px; padding: 5px; line-height: 40px; font-size: 35px; border-radius: 5px; box-shadow: 2px 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.9), -2px -2px 12px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); color: #fff; text-decoration: none; text-align: center; font-family: "SocialIcons"; text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px rgba(19,65,88,.8); } |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
/* Use <a href="http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/">http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/</a> to generate great-looking gradients */ .rss { background: #e34d14; /* Old browsers */ background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #e34d14 0%, #f2780c 50%, #e34d14 100%); /* FF3.6+ */ background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#e34d14), color-stop(50%,#f2780c), color-stop(100%,#e34d14)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */ background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #e34d14 0%,#f2780c 50%,#e34d14 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */ background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #e34d14 0%,#f2780c 50%,#e34d14 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */ background: linear-gradient(top, #e34d14 0%,#f2780c 50%,#e34d14 100%); /* W3C */ } |
The result will look something like this:
So that’s the basic idea and a starting point. I hope it will be useful for you.
©
Replies and comments
Henrik Carlsson's Blog
4 augusti, 2011 01:44[…] is the first picture I’ve taken with my new camera that I’m reasonable happy with. More will likely […]