Facebook is great. It’s powerful. It’s connecting. I’ve been a user for about 7 years but now I rarely log in. Why? Well, at some level, all social networks turn into a popularity contest. About 70% of my friends on Facebook I no longer talk to or see. At one point I was in a relationship with…
I beg for a lot of shit, quite often. Most of the time, I jest. Now, I am serious. On tuesday an external hard drive of mine that due to a slightly strange situation was the only piece of equipment that had my work and composition files on it was destroyed. The quote for repair is over $1000 and I…
The biggest features I see that @virb needs right now is an easy image hosting, and custom HTML. Virbdesigns.com is pretty much on hold until those happen, but I’m going to hack the first theme to use an existing theme for now.
Two weeks ago, when I posted our launch roadmap, I said we would be sure to update you if there were any deviations to the plan. The release of the new Virb is a very important day for this small team. Because of this, we have decided to push our public release date back by 12 days.
Additional…
It’s been interesting going through work that’s several years old. Much of it doesn’t exist anymore. Gone. Vanished. All that hard work, thinking, stressing… poof. It’s a nice reminder of what’s important, and the reality of the ever-evolving web. A lot of this junk is just temporary.
Sometimes this depresses me when I think about what we do. Architects build monuments that last for centuries. Authors craft stories that, if well told, live forever. But the web is so transient, so fleeting — how long can anything we make really stick around? Will any of my work survive even the next 5 years? It’s a different kind of craftsmanship; it only meets the demands of the moment. Makes me wish I built furniture instead.
So Hulu announced Hulu Plus a couple of days ago. At first glance I was excited that it would be going on my iPhone and iPad and the $10 didn’t seem too bad initially. Then I learned that none of the shows I watch ON Hulu are in Hulu Plus (Burn Notice mostly) - Um..okay. Then I learned that on top of paying $10/mo I will still have commercials. What? Some say that if you are complaining about Hulu Plus costing $10/mo with commercials that I haven’t looked at my cable bill in awhile. Uhhh actually that is PRECISELY why I’m complaining about yet ANOTHER stream to get TV content and having to deal with money hungry execs. Is anyone forcing me to get Hulu Plus, no, obviously not. I probably won’t until the selection is bigger. Hell, I don’t even mind supporting Hulu or their commercials. Most of the time they are highly relevant to my interests even. It’s not really about that. I have Netflix subscription, I have a cable tv bill that is $65 with recording. And now Hulu thinks that Hulu Plus is valuable enough between these two to charge $10/mo + commercials? Not for me.
This will be quick and dirty. Seeing some people making comparisons to the new Virb.com direction and Squarespace.com and how Virb will be different. Here are my thoughts.
Squarespace is awesome. It’s awesome because it opens the doors to letting anyone and everyone to have a website. Drag and drop. That’s cool. I’m a web designer and I think that’s cool. You’d think that I would hate Squarespace for taking away opportunities but the truth is that it opens doors. Themes, a platform. A one-stop hosting, and website building spot. For me though, it falls short in one specific area. After opening up two 14-day trials to test out some ideas on customization, they really don’t have a quick in, quick out (for designer/developer) to customize a site. Can you customize Squarespace? Yep. Is it relatively painless to do? Sure. The point here is that it’s not as easy as it could be for someone who does know what they are doing and just wants to provide a post-project solution for the client to update their own content/site design. Look at Tumblr. It’s pretty easy to customize Tumblr. One file, one template. Done. I’m hoping this is how Virb goes about customization. Give me one file, one template, and all the documentation to make it work, and I’ll be set. And this is how I think Virb will be different from Squarespace.
This is, of course, all hypothetical, unfortunately I don’t have a clue how custom themes will work with Virb.com yet. But you can bet your ass I’ll be there either way. http://virbdesigns.com
It is my honor to present Sencha Touch, a brand new HTML5/CSS3 app framework for touch devices. I have secretly been toiling away on this for the past few months, and let me tell you: it is an incredible relief to finally be able to discuss it.
Sencha Touch represents a new era of mobile web app development. Firstly, the number of visual components we have included is, as one friend put it, “incredibly ambitious.” We have tabs, carousels, forms, lists, buttons, toolbars, maps, overlays, and more — all with myriad options for manipulating their design and UX. And, most importantly, all built entirely with web standards like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript.
On top of the actual components, we have a robust data package (inspired by Ext JS), that is essential for developing content-based applications. We provide simple ways to get data via Ajax, JSONP, or YQL, and let you easily bind that data to components like lists or render it into HTML templates. I built a data-driven app for Kiva, a fantastic non-profit micro-loan organization, in under a week.
And lastly, there’s the style/theme layer. This has been my real brainchild within the project. I fear it may take some time for developers to really see how much power is in there, and I hope to explain a bit of it in some forthcoming posts and screencasts. At its core, the theming/CSS system is based on Sass, an abstraction layer for CSS that adds things like variables and functions. To give you some idea of its potential, check out the source of the Android theme we’re offering, which is written in under 30 lines of code (check out a preview here, in a WebKit browser). My other favorite part of the styling layer is that it is resolution independent. Through a combination of CSS3 and relative sizing, we have managed to make our UI elements (like buttons and toolbars) the same physical size across devices with different resolutions/DPIs. It’s somewhat hard to describe how unique this is, but I think people will see the benefits of this very soon.
It’s been a great ride, working on this over the past few months, and I’m looking forward to seeing this library grow into the best mobile app framework around, web or native. For the jQTouch fans and followers out there, worry not — development is about to ramp up there as well, with help from my good friend Jonathan Stark, which we’ll be posting about tomorrow. For 9-bits follower in general, I apologize for the lack of posts lately (hopefully this helps explain) and promise I’ll be ramping up news posts again soon. And lastly, to everyone who has helped make this possible, including our early private testers and the rest of the Sencha Team, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you have any questions about Sencha Touch, jQTouch, or mobile web apps in general, feel free to send them here and I’ll try to answer them here on the blog. Now go download the thing and start building apps!
So I just finished watching Gary’s latest keynote, and it is definitely one of his best yet. I can understand why he doesn’t want to swear too much (his legacy) but it just makes it more entertaining for me.
I also have an issue with people like this Al Turccotte and many many others that I’ve seen literally @reply him saying negative things, I think it’s just a play to get attention from him (Which he gives). It’s disgusting really if you’ve seen any of his videos, you know that he cares, you can just see it on stage. And then to go and straight up say hes annoying, loud, obnoxious, or anything else negative is just sad.
I also wish people would give him a little break, I think people are taking advantage of his caring, sending him @replies and emails every day, all day. I can’t imagine being in his shoes, wanting to care so much about it all and having to answer all those @replies and emails and if he doesn’t he gets flak because he didn’t do it. When in reality, he has so much it takes him weeks just to get to your email you sent him a month ago. I know he would never complain about this, he loves that stuff. I’m just saying…put yourself in his shoes for a minute, is what you’re @replying or emailing him about something he hasn’t talked about yet? This has been a long on going thought of mine, finally just releasing it.
Read his book, watch his videos. He address a lot, and try what he says, if it doesn’t work AFTER that, then yeah, contact him and see what advice he has for you. Just my opinion though, the dude is cool and it would be awesome just to see him speak and really feel the energy in person.
The team and I are extremely excited to (finally) pull back the curtain on our upcoming reboot of Virb. Let me start by saying, this is not an announcement of a redesign or feature upgrade; this is a look at the forthcoming re-envisioning of our website and our business.
Course Correction
…
Overall it’s a nicely done app. Custom UI, unique layout, readable articles. I actually find it better to read it on the app than the site. Infact I rarely ever read Mashable. The app was featured and the icon looked promising and it was free so I figure why not.
There are just a couple of things I don’t understand and that could be just my lack of motivation to read Mashable daily - but I don’t really need a quick tab to see a list of authors. I also don’t care who made the app (an icon on nearly every page - top left etc). It’s cool to know who did (nclud) but not that necessary. I would have much rather there be an easier way to jump from category to category (Tech, Apple, etc) than to have the info or search icons or the authors tab.
That is just my quick two cents typed out via the tumblr iPhone app. First real blog post on here in what seems like years. A revival in order soon? Maybe!
Now testing: Pages
You can now add static pages to your blog, with a few very useful options. Head to your blog’s Customize page and click the “Pages” menu to get started. There are currently three types of Pages you can create:
- Standard Layout. Create a simple page with a title and body using your current theme.
- Custom Layout. Create a page with a completely separate layout.
- Redirect. Forward a route to a page on another domain. Useful for maintaining links when moving your domain name over to Tumblr.
Developers: Check out the Theme Docs for instructions on implementing the new
{block:Pages}tag.
Hello there, I’m Leon Gaban otherwise known as Lipton of Starfeeder.
Today I’m proud to say I’m a part of The Battle Begins team and their vision of supporting and enriching the gaming community at large with their gaming related apps.
I’ve ran very competitive and high-profile tournaments in the past. As one of my major roles here is to showcase our apps in action, I will be hosting, promoting and covering many exciting tournaments to come, be they competitive games from the past, or even games that are in beta ;)
My love for competitive gaming is the reason. As a tournament host I’ve experienced many headaches every time I’ve run one, and the Battle Center tournament management web app is the best thing since slice bread (or the laser mouse), when it comes to organizing and hosting a competitive gaming tournament. If you haven’t seen the tour check it out now, from automated brackets to intuitive participant management and a simple and easy to track communication system, running tournaments will now be a breeze.
On Starfeeder, I will continue to cover very specific topics about Starcraft 2. However here at The Battle Begins, I will be writing on a wider range of gaming news, topics and give my opinion on the state of the gaming industry and eSports.
So a little bit more about myself
The first game that gave me a competitive rush was Warcraft II, however once Starcraft was released it took my experience of competitive gaming to a whole another level. Watching the global eSports scene evolve was an enlightening moment as I realized the direction that competitive gaming was going, a future with a mainstream digital sports industry. I feel it’s still very much in its infancy and I’ll be covering a lot about its continued growth here on this blog.
Welcome, let the Battles Begin…
Comparison between “Head Disk Assembly” (HDA) from an IBM 3380 Model J storage device from the 80s and an SD card that we carry today
