Category: Authoring

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My other iPad is a Kindle

Zeldman.com as seen on Kindle

The new Kindle has a lot going for it. It’s inexpensive compared to a full-featured tablet computer like the iPad; you can slip it in your back pocket, where it’s more comfortable than an old-style paperback; and it includes a Webkit browser. This last point is where folks like us start to give a hoot, whether we’re fans of epub reading or not.

The flavor of Kindle’s browser concerns us because it affords us the ability to optimize the mobile viewing experience with a single line of markup. You can see this in action in the photo at the head of this article (published and discussed on Flickr).

I made no tweaks for Kindle per se; the Kindle is simply responding to a line of markup I’ve been putting into my web pages since 2007—namely, the viewport meta element, which controls the width of the viewport, thus enabling mobile devices with a limited number of pixels to focus all available pixels on your site’s core content (instead of, for instance, wasting part of the small screen on a background color, image, or gradient). The technique is as simple as web design gets:

meta name="viewport" content="width=770"

(Obviously, the value of “width” should be adjusted to match your site’s layout.)

I learned this little trick from Craig Hockenberry’s Put Your Content in My Pocket (A List Apart, August 28, 2007), which I naturally recommend to any designer who hasn’t seen it.

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Authoring CSS CSS3 HTML HTML5

HTML5 and CSS3 virtual classes

IF YOU’RE BONING UP on HTML5 and CSS3, you’ll want to consider two remarkable learning experiences taking place live on the web this summer:

Learn HTML5 with John Allsopp

Here is a great educational opportunity that’s also an amazing value. Experience eight structured sessions, two live Q&A sessions, private discussion forum, practical exercises and more, from one of the world’s best and most experienced teachers of standards-based design. All for just US $9.95. That is not a typo. Live classes start 26 July 2010.

Learn CSS3 with John Allsopp

And the hits keep on coming. This virtual classroom led by Allsopp includes twelve structured sessions, three live Q&As, and more, for just $14.95. It’s the perfect complement to any other reading or training you may be doing, at a price that’s impossible to beat. Classes start 16 August.

A Book Apart Discount

As if this deal wasn’t great enough, participating in either course earns you a coupon code good for a 20% discount off Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers, the A Book Apart inaugural pub that’s taking the web design world by storm. The discount is good through September 1st. No, you can’t apply it retroactively to a book you’ve already purchased. (So if you’ve already bought the book, buy a second copy—one for home, one for office. Or get it for a friend. Or don’t buy it. What matters is your health. Are you eating enough? You look thin.)

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A Book Apart Authoring HTML HTML5 Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

HTML5 For Web Designers Sells Out

HTML5 For Web Designers, by Jeremy Keith

The first printing of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers has sold out.

For a book about web forms, semantics, and the history of markup, it’s done pretty well:

  • The book sold 1,000 copies during the first hour of pre-sales.
  • It sold 5,000 copies during the first 24 hours of pre-sales.
  • The first printing sold out within two months.

Haven’t ordered yours yet, and now they’re sold out? Not to worry: a second printing is in the works; orders will ship the week of July 26.

So where’s my book, already?

We ship worldwide. Orders generally ship within 3 days and take 7–10 days to arrive. Some orders take longer, typically because of hold-ups at your local post office, over which we have no control. (Intriguingly, foreign orders shipped quickly, in many cases arriving much sooner than US orders.) We have expedited all remaining shipments to get you your book faster.

We ship via US Postal Service, so no tracking numbers are available.

If you ordered before June 30 and still have not received your order, please be patient a few more days, and thank you for bearing with our learning curve. We know a lot about web design, but we’re still getting the hang of interpreting what mail houses and the US Postal Service mean by “guaranteed fast shipping.”

If you need to speak to someone about your order, write to us.

I want an ebook, not a dead tree! What gives?

Stay tuned; we’re working on ebook versions. Follow @abookapart to learn when they’re released.

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SlideShowPro adds HTML5

Todd Dominey at Happy Cog.

Most of us web folk are hybrids of one sort or another, but Todd Dominey was one of the first web designers to combine exceptional graphic design talent with serious mastery of code.

Being so good at both design and development that you could easily earn a fine living doing just one of them is still rare, although it looks like the future of our profession. One of the first serious designers to embrace web standards, Todd was also one of the few who did so while continuing to achieve recognition for his work in Flash. (Daniel Mall, who came later, is another.)

Finally, Todd was one of the first—along with 37signals and Coudal Partners—to abandon an enviably successful client services career in favor of full-time product development, inspiring a generation to do likewise, and helping bring us to our current world of web apps and startups.

A personal project that became an empire

In Todd’s case, the product was SlideShowPro, a project he designed for himself, which has grown to become the web’s most popular photo and video slideshow and gallery viewer. When you visit a photographer’s portfolio website, there’s an excellent chance that SlideShowPro powers its dynamic photo viewing experience. The same is true for the photo and video gallery features of many major newspaper and magazine sites, quite possibly including your favorites.

SlideShowPro

But deliberate lack of Flash support in the iPad and iPhone, while lauded here on February 1, 2010 as a win for accessible, standards-based design (“Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first”), presented a serious problem for developers who use SlideShowPro and readers who enjoy browsing dynamic photo and video galleries.

Mr Dominey has now solved that problem:

SlideShowPro Mobile is an entirely new media player built using HTML5 that doesn’t require the Flash Player plugin and can serve as a fallback for users accessing your web sites using these devices. But it’s not just any fallback — it’s specially designed for touch interfaces and smaller screen sizes. So it looks nothing like the SlideShowPro player and more like a native application that’s intuitive, easy to use, and just feels right.

The best part though is that because SlideShowPro Director (which will be required) publishes the mobile content, you’ll be able to provide the mobile alternative by simply updating the Flash Player embed code in your HTML documents. And just like when using the SlideShowPro player, because Director is behind the scenes, all your photos will be published for the target dimensions of these devices — which gives your users top quality, first generation images. The mobile player will automatically load whatever content is assigned to the Flash version, so the same content will be accessible to any browser accessing your web site.

A public beta will be released in the next weeks. Meanwhile, there is a video demo. There’s also an excellent Question and Answer page that answers questions you may have, whether you’re a SlideShow Pro customer or not. For instance:

Why mobile? Why not desktop?

We believe that (on the desktop) Flash is still the best delivery method for photo/video galleries and slideshows for it provides the most consistent user experience across all browsers and the broadest range of playback and customization options. As HTML5 support matures across all desktop browsers, we’ll continue to look into alternate presentation options.

Into the future!

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37signals’ Jason Fried live today on The Big Web Show

I have known 37signals CEO Jason Fried since he was a young copywriter who reminded me of me, only smarter and more confident. Like many of you, with a mixture of awe and pleasure, I have watched him change our industry, along with book publishing and business generally. Dan Benjamin and I are delighted to announce the mercurial Mr Fried as our guest on The Big Web Show. Join us today, 1 July 2010, for the live taping at 1:00 PM ET.

Jason’s official bio is brief, but he can write at length when he wishes: see Rework, Getting Real, and Defensive Web Design, each a classic, and to each of which he was principal co-writer and guiding force. Besides saying no to meetings, contracts, and VC money, Jason and 37signals are famous for godfathering a speedy, iterative form of web application design; for gifting the industry with Ruby on Rails; for creating a suite of beloved (yes, really) business productivity web apps; for mastering and then abandoning client services in favor of making stuff; for somehow, in the midst of all that busyness, churning out tons of fine content on their popular blog; and for being roommates with the equally fantastic Coudal Partners.

Can’t wait to interview Jason Fried in front of a live internet audience today. Hope you’ll join us.

The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Photo © John Morrison – Subism.com

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Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

Hot dang! Use fluid grids, flexible images, and CSS media queries to create elegant user experiences that fit any browser or device’s viewport. By Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition.

A List Apart: Responsive Web Design

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More Mod on the Digital Book

Embracing the Digital Book by Craig Mod.

A Reading Heatmap: Key passages illuminated by layering all readers’ highlights for the same text.

LAST MONTH, he wowed us with Books in the Age of the iPad, a call to make digital books as beautiful as printed ones. This month, Craig Mod is back with Embracing the Digital Book, an article (or blog post if you must) that begins as a critique of iBooks and Kindle and moves on to discuss the e-reader of our dreams, complete with reasoned social features:

I’m excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book.

We need to step back for a moment and stop acting purely on style. There is no style store. Retire those half-realized metaphors while they’re still young.

Instead, let’s focus on the fundamentals. Improve e-reader typography and page balance. Integrate well considered networked (social) features. Respect the rights of the reader and then — only then — will we be in a position to further explore our new canvas.

Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod

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Authoring books E-Books interface ipad iphone

Roll your own iBooks with ePub

iBooks bookshelf in iPad. If you don't have cover art, iBooks will create it for you.

In A novel concept: Roll your own iBooks with ePub, Macworld’s Dan Moren tells how to create your own e-books as easily as you export a PDF or GIF from an authoring program like Office or Photoshop:

Earlier this week, Storyist Software released an update to its eponymous writing software that supports export directly to the ePub format, including the ability to add cover art, tweak formatting, and more. Likewise, the forthcoming 2.0 version of popular writing tool Scrivener is also adding ePub support.

In both cases, converting your file to ePub is as easy as saving it as a PDF or Microsoft Word document—you just pick ePub from the choice of export formats and hit the button. Voilà, the ePub file appears wherever you saved it. Drag that file into iTunes, sync your iPad, and you’re finished: your book will now show up in iBooks next to any other e-books you’ve purchased. Both tools also allow you to add your own cover art, and tweak the book’s metadata (author, description, genre, and so on).

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Crowdsourcing Dickens

As an experiment in new new media thinking, I recently crowdsourced a new new literature version of Charles Dickens’s musty old old old lit chestnut, Great Expectations—the familiar tale of Pip, Ms Havisham, the convict Magwitch, et al.

Creative excellence and spin-worthy results required a pool of 10,000 people who had never read Great Expectations. Fortunately, I had access to 10,000 recent American college graduates, so that was no problem.

To add a dab of pseudoscience and appeal obliquely to the copyleft crowd, I remixed the new work’s leading literary themes with the top 20 Google search queries, using an algorithm I found in the mens room at Penn Station.

The result was a work of pure modern genius, coming soon to an iPad near you. (Profits from the sale will be used to support Smashing Magazine’s footer and sidebar elements.)

Gone was the fusty old title. Gone were the cobwebbed wedding cake and other dare I say emo images. It was goodbye to outdated characters like Joe the blacksmith and the beautiful Estella, farewell to the love story and the whole careful parallel between that thing and that other thing.

Gone too was the tired old indictment of the Victorian class system, and by implication of all economic and social systems that separate man from his brothers in Christ, yada yada. As more than one of my young test subjects volunteered in a follow-up survey, “Heard it.”

In place of these obsolete narrative elements, the students and the prioritized Google searches created, or dare I say curated, a tale as fresh as today’s algorithmically generated headlines.

The results are summarized in the table below.

Old Great Expectations New Great Expectations
On Christmas Eve, Pip, an orphan being raised by his sister, encounters the convict Magwitch on the marshes. n/a
The convict compels Pip to steal food from his sister’s table, and a file from her husband the blacksmith’s shop. Pip thereby shares the convict’s guilt and sin—but his kindness warms the convict’s heart. Guy on girl
Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe, abuses him. Her husband loves Pip but is unable to protect him or offer him a future beyond blacksmithing. Girl on girl (multiple entries)
Pip meets Miss Havisham, an old woman abandoned on her wedding day, who sits in her decrepit house, wearing a yellowing wedding gown, her only companion the beautiful and mysterious girl Estella. Pip falls in love with Estella, but Miss Havisham has trained the girl to break men’s hearts. Guy on guy
Pip visits Miss Havisham until his apprenticeship with Joe the blacksmith begins. Pip hates being a blacksmith and worries that Estella will see him as common. Two girls, one guy
Mrs Joe suffers a heart attack that leaves her mute. A kind girl named Biddy comes to take care of Mrs Joe. After Mrs Joe’s death, Biddy and Joe will marry. Meanwhile, Pip comes into an unexpected inheritance and moves to London, where he studies with a tutor and lives with his friend Herbert. Dragons
Pip believes Miss Havisham is his benefactor and that she intends him to marry Estella, whom he still adores. Day by day, Estella grows more cruel. Pip never tells her of his love for her. Wizards
One stormy night, Pip discovers that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham but the convict Magwitch. The news crushes Pip, but he dutifully allows Magwitch to live with him—worrying, all the while, because Magwitch is a wanted man who will be hanged if discovered. Explosions
Miss Havisham repents having wasted her life and perverted Estella. She is caught in a fire. Pip heroically saves her but she later dies from her burns. Soon afterwards, Pip and Herbert try to help Magwitch escape, but Magwitch’s old enemy Compeyson—who happens to be the man who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar—betrays Magwitch to the authorities. Magwitch and Compeyson struggle. Compeyson dies and Magwitch is taken to prison. Gunfights
Pip now realizes that Magwitch is a decent man and tries to make Magwitch’s last years happy ones. He also discovers that Magwitch is Estella’s father. Magwitch dies in prison shortly before he was to be executed. Pip tells the dying Magwitch of his love for Estella. Fistfights
Pip becomes ill and is nursed back to health by Joe, whom Pip recognizes as a good man in spite of his lack of education and “class.” Pip goes into business overseas with Herbert. Eventually he returns to England and visits Joe, who has married Biddy. They have a child named Pip. As the book ends, the middle-aged Pip makes one last visit to Miss Havisham’s house, where he discovers an older and wiser Estella. There is the implication that Pip and Estella may finally be together. Anal
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Authoring Community content Design Ideas industry launches links podcasts Publishing

Hear This!

Dan Benjamin, creator of wonderful websites, apps, broadcasts, and platforms and longtime friend of A List Apart and your host, introduces a new venture.

5 by 5 Studios is a new internet broadcasting network, home to shows like EE Podcast, Tack Sharp, The Dev Show, The Ruby Show, and Utility Belt, releasing new episodes every week.

As part of the launch, 5 by 5 announces two new shows hosted by Dan:

NOTE: I’m pleased as punch to be the first Pipeline guest. Come hear us on Friday, January 29th, 2010.

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Chicago Deep Dish

Dan Cederholm and Eric Meyer at An Event Apart Chicago 2009. Photo by John Morrison.

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set
By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.
A Feed Apart Chicago
Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.
Luke W’s Notes on the Show
Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

  1. Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
  2. Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
  3. Kristina Halvorson: Content First
  4. Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
  5. Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
  6. Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
  7. Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
  8. Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
  9. Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
  10. Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
  11. Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
  12. Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
  13. Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2695

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17 Tweets

  1. http://webtrendmap.com/ by IA Inc. is farking amazing and beautiful. Congratulations, @iA.
  2. OH: “Type means the letters.”
  3. http://www.biggestapple.net/ is an exquisite new blog by a Wodehouse fan and non-designer (but you’d never know).
  4. My 5-year-old just spent 10 minutes showing me the correct way to massage her foot. My little girl is becoming a woman.
  5. HTML5 Super Friends declaration of support: http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/
  6. In the park with the kid and friends, watching the sunlit hours melt away. It is the mellow end of summer and our bodies know it.
  7. http://bit.ly/InfXh Installing Snow Leopard: What you need to know. Fewer options make for simpler installation.
  8. The difference between marriage and divorce is, in divorce, the person who’ll never have sex with you again has her own apartment.
  9. “HTML 5 and me” by Jeremy Keith: http://bit.ly/sOqt7
  10. Dreamed about Mackenzie Phillips and woke up with a $500 a day habit.
  11. RT @leeclowsbeard Every client wants something new. And three examples of where it’s worked before. (via @Coudal)
  12. #twitterwit is now in bookstores. It’s an honor to have my work appear in the same volume as real writers like Ashton Kucher.
  13. Laura Dern’s hair is the scariest thing in Blue Velvet.
  14. @sourjayne At a certain level, you don’t write a resume, you write a paragraph.
  15. @sourjayne A multi-page resume suggests you’re narcissistic or inexperienced. These are not desired qualities in an employee.
  16. @sourjayne A 1-page resume shows you’re aware the person reading it has no time to waste — proving you’re experienced + have people skills.
  17. Actually, Barnes & Noble, I think I’ll save *100%* on Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code.

Have another?

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