Disqus - Latest Comments for fineartdavid

Re: Dropbox wasn’t hacked

David Owens — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:44:39 -0000

You can use an authentication app rather than your cell phone

https://twofactorauth.org/p...

Re: How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

David Owens — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 04:01:03 -0000

Seems like The Wire gets pretty close to that, maybe The Sopranos. Both amazing pieces of television.

Re: Evernote for iPhone and iPad Gets Places View, Homescreen Customization and More

David Owens — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 04:28:42 -0000

I'm a premium subscriber, but I think the background switch should be free. I agree it is fair to charge to add features or remove marketing and advertising, but the patterned background serves no purpose and is just distracting and annoying.

Re: JSLint Error Explanations - Unexpected dangling '_' in '{a}'

David Owens — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:19:55 -0000

Thanks - that's what I had missed.

Re: JSLint Error Explanations - Unexpected dangling '_' in '{a}'

David Owens — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:15:11 -0000

Hi - thanks for putting these articles together, they're really helpful. It looks like you have nomen: true for both examples. Which is correct?

Re: Facebook’s ‘Like’ Translated Across the World

David Owens — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:27:43 -0000

Yeah, Facebook is wrong. Your list is fine. I guess they use that because it takes up less space.

Re: Facebook’s ‘Like’ Translated Across the World

David Owens — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 06:52:56 -0000

The Polish one is not a very good translation. "Lubię to" means "I enjoy it", as in "I enjoy being a pedant". A better translation would be ""Podoba mi się", which is closer to "It pleases me".

Re: Achieving Good Legibility and Readability on the Web

David Owens — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:06:52 -0000

The trouble is that the "very few" who do change this particular setting are probably those who are most harmed by designers ignoring it.

Some people like to increase the text-size without scaling the rest of the page and IE won't do that for pixel-based font sizes. Last time I checked this was even the case for IE9.

Re: Achieving Good Legibility and Readability on the Web

David Owens — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:27:18 -0000

I'd suggest using real text over Loren Ipsum to test readability.

You can't really "read" the fake stuff so it can make you think fonts are clear when you might have problems with real copy.

Grab some from WIkipedia, but make sure you haven't picked an article that is offensive to the client!.

Re: Catching the domain spam…

David Owens — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:36:51 -0000

I got the same thing this week. They even had the cheek to offer me the domain for a discount because I didn't bite the first time.

Recently we contacted you regarding INSERTDOMAINHERE.com. We noticed
that you viewed the offer but did not make a purchase. We would like to offer
you one final opportunity to secure this domain for just $39.97 a full 60% off
our regular rate. To purchase please use this link for the discount:

http://www.desirabledotcoms...

If you are not interested there is no need to reply. We will not contact you
again regarding this domain.

Thank you.

Desirable Dot Coms
Desirabledotcoms.com

Re: How to Set an Expires Header in Apache

David Owens — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:19:52 -0000

A nice trick is to append a revision number to the static assets. That way when they are changed the latest version still gets served even if the expires header hasn't ... er ... expired because the file name will be different.

Of course this means that the paths to those assets need to be updated too. It seems to me that this would be an ideal thing to do using an Ant script at build time. Maybe using an SVN or similar build number.

Re: Carbonite Introduces Premium Backup Services For Small Businesses

David Owens — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:18:08 -0000

Nevermind downloading from it, you have to get it uploaded first. Even a small digital agency would produce big enough Photoshop files to make that a real chore on most ISPs upload speeds.

Re: UNESCO World Heritage Site #81: Major Town Houses of the Architect Victor Horta

David Owens — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:47:23 -0000

You need to go inside Horta's buildings to really appreciate them. The use of light and space is incredible. If you get a chance, visit the Horta Museum.

Re: Why Windows 7 Will Revolutionize Your Browser Testing

David Owens — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:34:31 -0000

I had a couple of times when I tested a website that it looked different in IE7 native and IE8 IE7 compatibility.

But that's part of the fun! Two new browsers to test instead of one.

Re: Why Corporations Don’t Upgrade IE6 and How Chrome Frame Could Help

David Owens — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:25:58 -0000

Besides, accessibility support in IE6 is poor to say the least.

Hi Simon,

I'm not sure what you mean by suggesting that accessibility support in IE is poor. Two of the most well known assistive technology products, JAWS and Windows-Eyes are designed specifically to run on Windows and plug into Microsoft's Accessibility API.

It may also be worth noting that these technologies work across the whole OS, and not just the browser.

Check out The Paciello Group's article Google Chrome Frame - accessibility black hole to see an example of the difference between using the IE6 rendering engine and the Chrome Frame rendering engine.

Re: BBC Hovers On iPhone Apps Due To Apple Terms

David Owens — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:42:06 -0000

Lex makes agood point by saying that "it needs to be careful of its impact on this thriving new commercial environment".

If I remember correctly, the BBC had to close down large portions of its online service because it was replicating (and stifling) commercial competitors. In terms of preserving the license fee, the BBC always has to be careful not to become too powerful.

Article about closing of some BBC web properties:
http://www.theregister.co.u...

Re: Win one of FIVE copies of “Lost on Planet China” by J. Maarten Troost

David Owens — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:33:55 -0000

I'm fascinated by how much of what has influenced and shaped western culture has come from China. From the origin of paper, through wood-cut prints and our understanding of perspective to the plans for the planned eco-city, Dongtan (pity it will never happen).

All eyes will be on China to see what comes out of there in the coming years.

Re: So Much For Twitter's Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News

David Owens — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:31:26 -0000

Just saw your post - This looks very cool.

Re: So Much For Twitter's Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News

David Owens — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:29:20 -0000

I'm starting to sound like an evangelist here, but I'm really interested in what Zensify have done with their iPhone app. Showing trending topics for my social graph is far more valuable to me than Twitter's trends. Combined with groups it could become a really exciting tool.

Re: Serif Fonts Vs. Sans Serif Fonts: A Working Case Study

David Owens — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:59:59 -0000

You could maybe build a CSS font stack which takes advantage of the commonly installed fonts on each system.

If you specify one of Microsoft's new ClearType fonts such as Cambria at the top, you can reasonably assume that the vast majority of people seeing it will be Vista users and have ClearType enabled.

Next you could set a different serif font for the Mac, choosing from fonts which are typically installed there. Most Mac users woun't have Cambia installed so would get this font.

Finally, if you are really concerned about how a PC would display text set in Georgia, you could set a san-serif font as the fallback.

Re: Build Accessibility in the Workflow (London Web Standards Meetup)

David Owens — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:07:26 -0000

I could perhaps have been a little more clear on what I meant by that.

I was specifically thinking that the document landmarks in WAI-ARIA matchup quite nicely with some of the new html5 elements. For instance nav/navigation, article/acticle and complimentary/aside.

Gez Lemens has written a great introductory article at the dev opera website which is well worth a read.

Introduction to WAI ARIA.

(I've also added the links I mentioned to the London Web Standards Meetup page)

Re: Diagram: How the Air Force Response to Blogs

David Owens — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:14:22 -0000

I particularly like the transparency and sourcing considerations.

The only thing I would change is "Has someone discovered..." to "Have you discovered...".

That might not work for the Air Force where mission confidentiality is an issue, but for most companies any employee should be able to speak up on behalf or their organisation.

It doesn't always need to come from a PR department.

Re: 11 Useful Sources To Learn and Improve HTML Skills

David Owens — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:20:27 -0000

Two fantastic new resources which have just been launched are the Sitepoint HTML Reference and the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

Both are very up to date and you can be sure that the techniques demonstrated are the latest and greatest.

Sitepoint also have the Sitepoint CSS Reference for when you are ready to start adding some style and are working on a JavaScript reference.

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum also covers CSS with JavaScript to follow, but as well as that there are articles on accesibility, information architecture and various other aspects of web design and development.

Highly recommended.

Re: Goodbye, old 500 page.

David Owens — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:42:51 -0000

@Greg I think that if somebody wanted to spam the Carsonified team there would probably be easier ways of doing it. I imagine their email addresses are pretty easy to guess.

Besides giving me a CAPTCHA form at that point would undo all the good work you had done with the rest of the page.

Re: WordPress Plugin: WP-Brightkite

David Owens — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:56:05 -0000

Hi - The plugin seems to work well.

What I would like is a php tag to output just the url, without the image. That way I could make my own link to point to Google maps.

Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

David