Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
A doctor who only does housecalls
Bringing back the housecall (kottke.org)
He’s got no office (housecalls only), takes appointment requests via SMS, email, or IM, handles some follow-ups over video chat, and specializes in the 18-40 age group without traditional health insurance. The goal, states Parkinson, is to “mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthy”.
Laura in Home § No Comments
Amazon Launches Digital Music Store
Amazon Launches Digital Music Store - New York Times
Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday, a move analysts say represents the first hint of real competition for Apple Inc.’s market-leading iTunes.Amazon MP3, as the new section of the Web retailer’s site is called, currently stocks nearly 2.3 million songs, all without copy-protection technology. Shoppers can buy and download individual songs or entire albums. The tracks can be copied to multiple computers, burned onto CDs and played on most types of PCs and portable devices, including the iPod and Microsoft Corp.’s Zune.
Songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents each and albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99.
Major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music have signed on to sell their tracks on Amazon, as have thousands of independent labels. The company said several labels are selling their artists’ music without copy protection for the first time on the Amazon store, including Alison Krauss on Rounder Records and Ani Difranco on Righteous Babe Records.
Laura in Music § No Comments
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
eMusic selling DRM-free Random House audiobooks
eMusic selling DRM-free Random House audiobooks - Boing Boing
Random House and eMusic have begun to sell DRM-free audiobooks on their site. This is pretty big news, since iTunes has an exclusive deal with Audible for ebooks, and Audible won’t sell non-DRM ebooks
Laura in Entertainment § No Comments
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
So I had surgery tuesday…
for the cataract that developed because of my partially detached retina 2 years ago. It went well and I’m back at work. Being able to see is kinda weird but my depth perception is all off because I’m not wearing glasses or anything over my right eye to deal with the astigmatism. But I can still type lol.
But am I terribly nerdy for wanting to photoshop out the floaters?
Laura in Home § No Comments
Personal History: Parallel Play: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Personal History: Parallel Play: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these “boxes” were—why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them.
Asperger’s Syndrome from someone who has it. This was the quote that rang closest for me although there was a story he told that sounds exactly like Pat.
Laura in Home § No Comments
Sunday, September 16th, 2007
um, Debra?
Laura in Comics § No Comments
Friday, September 14th, 2007
Prototyping for Designers
adaptive path » blog » david verba » Prototyping for Designers
I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between it’s current state and Bill’s vision for it’s future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.
The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those 3 iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.
Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in it’s current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.
Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design
10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design | 456 Berea Street
In case you’re wondering why I care (and why I think you should care) about the colour contrast of a website, it’s very simple. If text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have problems. People with colour blindness or other visual impairments as well as people browsing the Web under less than ideal circumstances (bad monitor, window reflections, sunlight hitting the screen) may not be able to read the text, at least not without difficulty.And you don’t really want that, do you? If you publish text on a website, as most people do, I’m guessing that in almost all cases it is because you want people to read that text. So colour contrast, whether you think about it or not, is important to you, your clients, and your end users.
Laura in Color, Webpage Design § No Comments
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
Web Design 101: Floats
Digital Web Magazine - Web Design 101: Floats
As browsers get better and better, creating layouts with CSS becomes easier and easier. A reliable workhorse in CSS layout options is the float property. Floats are not the only choice when it comes to creating layouts, but they are popular because they survive the unpredictability of designing for various screen sizes, resolutions, and browsers as well—or better—than some of the other choices.
Laura in Cascading Style Sheets § No Comments
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
iToner
Ambrosia Software, Inc. — utilities/itoner
Custom ringtones for the iphone
Laura in Software § No Comments
