Christopher Hill

Google’s superbowl advert: Parisian Love∞

When you think about it, it’s kinda hard for Google to create an effective advert about searching. However, they managed to pull it off. It’s been on YouTube for a while but was also played on the Superbowl commercial. Apparently.

jQuery plugin: Flip∞

” What is Flip? Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions. Try it “

jQuery plugin: Masonry∞

“Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.”

America is broke, and needs its old friends∞

“Barack Obama’s $3.8tn budget is a vastly complex affair. But one fact stands out plainly: in layman’s terms, America is broke. The federal government’s outgoings will exceed income by about $1.6tn this year; over the next 10 years combined, the predicted gap is $8.5tn.”

Nexus One finally adds Multitouch support∞

“Much more significantly, though, they’ve capitulated and enabled multitouch in Browser, Gallery, and Maps — great news and a big win for the Android community at large.”

Chrome OS Touch? Coming soon?∞

I would rather have Mac OS X on a iPad—I doubt we’ll see that in the next year or two, but I can wish. However, the Chromium devs have a quick demonstration of what they would like to see, and it’s very interesting.

Logos are dead∞

“They are a hangover from old-school thinking about branding. There is no desire by the public for a new logo. They are simply an old-fashioned approach to differentiating products or services [..] symbols invented to accompany brand names are a waste of time, money and effort.”

Google phases out support for IE6∞

“Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine. The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work “properly” with the browser.”

Fun with CSS3∞

It’s pretty cool the effects you can do with CSS3, no doubt. Even if IE doesn’t have a clue what you’re trying to achieve. This page tries to have some fun with the border radius propery.

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes∞

“A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.”

jQuery Hotkeys Plugin∞

I recently had to create just a small script which waited for arrow key presses and that was tricky enough. This plugin seems like a lifesaver to someone who needs to implement a lot of shortcuts.

Chocolate wars: the big four∞

An interesting graph of the biggest four chocolate companies: Kraft+Cadburys, Mars, Nestle and Ferrero. $82 billion was spent last year on chocolate.

Hang Me Some Tea∞

“If the Hanger Tea were to be submitted as an entry to tea-packaging-awards (if such a thing existed), I say it would win hands down! I can’t think of a better or more obvious way to pack teabags than this hanger & T-shirt design.”

Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone∞

“For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.”

There is no page fold∞

It’s true that there is no page fold in Web Design. We even blogged about it a couple months ago, Myth of the Fold.

A call for consistent display of alt text across browsers∞

I posted about Roger Johansson original post where Safari didn’t display alt text in place of broken images. Well, he talks about Steve Faulkner’s recent investigations into this matter and talks about a standard being set in place.

When Tomorrow Starts Without Me

When tomorrow starts without me, and I am not here to see,
If the sun should rise and find your eyes all filled with tears for me,
I know how much you love me as much as I love you,
And each time you think of me I know you’ll miss me too.

A new approach to China∞

Might Google stop censoring China or shut down its operations over there completely? Only time will tell…

10 PHP functions you (probably) never use∞

I read the PHP manual a couple years ago. It’s the only way your programming will improve and become more efficient. I did, however, forget or read the manual before their first function sys_getloadavg() was implemented which seems incredibly useful for large scale applications (even though you could just use shell).

Temporal User Interfaces∞

A couple of interesting techniques which help humans gauge how old something is and how we can transport that into good user interfaces. Although I do have one problem with their ideas in that an item may looked old if indeed it is old, but it may also look old even if it is new if it has been used a lot.