Monthly Archives: May 2011

Being a commuter myself, this is an interesting read…

The daily commute to and from work can be a drag. Given the state of the job market, some workers are commuting more than an hour a day. But let’s get this: Our ride time shouldn’t necessarily be our dead time.

Interesting ideas..

Growing a business is an endless cycle of experiments. You get an idea about why some part of your business is going the way it is, you tweak things a bit to test your idea, and then you review the results. For a web based business like Think Vitamin Membership, Google Analytics is an awesome way to collect information while experimenting and study what’s going on with your web app.

Just spreading the word….

Google has used their insanely smart engineers to create an image compression algorithm that’s just as good as JPEG but 39.8% smaller. It’s called WebP and it’s pronounced “weppy”. You can create WebP images in Acorn, Pixelmator, ImageMagick, Leptonica and XnConvert. If you use Photoshop, you can also install the WebP plugin.

More interesting reading…

Even before the iPhone gave mobile data a much-needed kick in the pants, mobile developers were debating the merits of native applications compared to Web-based offerings. But in recent weeks the discussion has begun to sound like a cutthroat Darwinian test of survival rather than a geeky topic of development strategy. Mobiledia this week asked if native apps are “an endangered species,” while MIT’s Technology Review went a step further in examining “why mobile apps will soon be dead.”

Interesting article…

You’ve seen plenty of Labs features for Gmail highlighted, but Calendar has some pretty great Labs offerings, too. Since it’s been nearly two years since Labs were added to Calendar, we thought it was about time they got a bit more attention. Here are eight of the most useful experimental features available for Google Calendar that you can start using right now.

Mike Finch is a firm believer that “UX” is a verb- not a noun. It’s a process, and he believes that if documented and followed correctly, it’s a process that anyone can have a reasonable amount of success with. As professionals, we need to shout these solutions from the rooftops- not keep them as guarded secrets. To that end, Mike has outlined his personal process when designing for user experience and made this awesome poster for your office wall.

The bbPress plugin beta 1 is now available on the WordPress plugin directory. John James Jacoby tagged the beta release just this morning, which means you can grab it really easily, and help test to improve it for a full release.