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
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
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).
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 |
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.
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:
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