Twitter for iPad Review

If you're a Twitter user with iPad, maybe you've been waiting for this for a long time. Twitter just released the official Twitter for iPad app [iTunes Link] and it's remarkable.

The new app interface is a series of panes that can be expanded and retracted, opened easily without the need to click on any fiddly buttons. Simple navigation options down the left of the app allow you to flick between your timeline, mentions, DMs, lists or searches. and the brilliant "slide to refresh" feature you'll probably already know and love from Twitter for iPhone app (now it's universal, runs on both iPad and iPhone).

The size of the iPad screen means you can read articles, or view photos and videos while still keeping the rest of the app's functions in view, there're some neat touches that allow you to view information quickly. When you click on a link in a tweet, the internal browser slides in from the right to display the article, photo or video. Also, if a tweet uses a hashtag, then clicking on it will bring up that tweet and others underneath that use the same tag. Follower suggestions are another useful feature. If you select a user's profile it suggests similar users to follow further down the page, that is a good way to find interesting people to follow. Also, there are several ways you can follow tweeted conversations: using a two-fingered drag, you can take a peek at the chain of messages. If you just tap on a tweet and it's a response to another tweet, you'll see the chain of messages in a full pane.

Now let's start a new tweet. As shown in the screenshot below, you'd be surprised how much you'll appreciate large, readable text. The text entry field looks like a notepad, which is an apt metaphor for writing on the iPad. Also on the text entry field are buttons for attaching photos from your iPad photo library, tweeting your present location, or shrinking URLs.

The settings for the app are rather simple, which I also find to be refreshing. Other than adding or editing accounts, there are two other buttons: Services and Advanced. Services lets you set up your image service, video service and read later service (Instapaper or Read It Later). Advanced has buttons for setting image quality, show hashtags in trends, enabling TextExpander, and turning sound effects on and off. There's also a button for installing a Safari bookmarklet - tapping it directs you to Safari, where you're given directions on how to set up the bookmarklet.

This new Twitter app makes it much easier to read tweets, get at the content contained within, and to see user's details and the flow of conversations. However, there are a few minor glitches that need to be addressed. The internal browser is slow to open a linked article, although it’s smooth once opened. It can also be harder than it should be to close exposed panes when sliding them back to the right. Sometimes they get “stuck” midway, requiring an extra slide to get them off the screen. Anyway, it's really nice to see Twitter team and Loren Brichter have carried on Tweetie's legacy of UI innovation with Twitter for iPad. Great job guys!

Pencil Tip Micro Sculptures

Brazilian born, Connecticut based, Dalton Ghetti carefully crafts the tips of pencils into amazing micro sculptures. These miniature masterpieces are a side project for the professional carpenter, who has been perfecting this art for the last 25 years. 

Flipboard: It's Your Personalized Social Magazine

You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.

You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.

You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.

This's the words that how Robert Scoble describe for the new "killer app" on the iPad which is hot trending and making big waves on the internet today - Flipboard. The world's first social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. It turns your account into something that looks like a magazine, also you can build a custom magazine which means you can turn every single person you follow into Flipboard, including lists. It will turn that into a beautiful magazine-like interface that is easier to read than any other reader. Switch on Facebook you’ll see your friend's status messages, articles, photos and videos, all laid out like a newspaper in a way you’ve never seen it before. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments, also you can "like" the item or comment on it.

Disco Chair

Disco Chair was created by Kiwi & Pom, a London design studio. Here are some technical details from the project’s initiators:

Commissioned by Wallpaper* Magazine, the Disco Chair is a bespoke illuminated furniture concept. Constructed from 200 linear metres of Electroluminescent wire, the chair transforms into a neon rainbow when powered. A pulse setting enables the chair to flash on and off creating an instant disco installation.

This amazing chair could do wonders when it comes to creating a genuine disco atmosphere during a party and completely change the mood of a dull interior. I like the crazy idea behind it, even though its target is not that numerous.

A Simple Way to Create Nice Tweets Screenshots

If you want to embed tweets in web pages, which way is better? Using Blackbird Pie or screen capture tools? Blackbird Pie is such a cool feature from Twitter but still has some bugs (i.e. profile image in the tweet will break if the user changes profile pic.) So as Amit said, screenshots is still the best way to embed tweets in your websites.

But here's a quickly way to creat a nice and easy screenshot image of any tweets from your address bar. - TweetQuoter. To turn a tweet into an image, all you have to do is open that tweet in your browser, replace twitter.com part of a tweet's URL to chen.vc. For example,

http://twitter.com/lyanghsueh/status/16009654938

becomes

http://chen.vc/lyanghsueh/status/16009654938

Now you can see a .jpg image of the tweet that you can embed in your websites or blogs, like this:

It's pretty simple and nice. you may have noticed, this little service copied the background from Tweetie, and the auther said he might allow customizations for the image in the future.

[h/t @labnol]

HTML5 for Web Designers

HTML5 is the longest HTML specification ever written. It is also the most powerful, and in some ways, the most confusing. What do accessible, content-focused standards-based web designers and front-end developers need to know? And how can we harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers? Jeremy Keith cuts to the chase, with crisp, clear, practical examples, and his patented twinkle and charm.

HTML5 For Web Designers is for people who create web content, who mark up web pages for sense and semantics, and who design accessible interfaces and experiences. Its goal - one it shares with every title in the forthcoming A Book Apart catalog - is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.

You can pre-order it now from the greatest publishers on the web, A Book Apart. It’s not a long book, by design. It’s got just enough to get you up to speed with the new shininess in HTML5.

Release Date: June, 2010

United Visual Artists: Speed of Light

the london-based art and design practice united visual artist recently presented a series of light installation titled 'speed of light'. the project was commissioned by virgin media to commemorate the tenth anniversary of broadband in the UK. the project was installed in the victorian bargehouse on london's south bank and made use of 148 lasers spread across six rooms. UVA used the beam of light that travels along optical fibers as the starting point for the piece. among the pieces created, UVA crafted a small sitting area that features a sofa, table and television screen made completely from laser beams.

image credit: UVA | via designboom

 

What is DNSSEC

Today, May 5 will be a good day to make sure your network is ready for DNSSEC. The last of the Internet’s 13 root servers will transition to DNSSEC. It could pose a problem for network administrators and users working with older DNS servers, routers, firewalls, and modems.

So, What is DNSSEC?

DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) is a suite of specifications which implement record signing to ensure the integrity of certain types of transactions.  It uses both asymmetric and symmetric cryptography for RR (Resource Record) or zone transfer transactions, respectively. To ensure the authenticity of information received by a resolver. Securing DNS with DNSSEC begins with establishing a chain of trust. Resolvers use ‘anchor keys’ to verify parent domains, beginning with the trust anchor. DNSSEC will increase DNS traffic with more requests and larger responses. Domains with high volume traffic should prepare for increased bandwidth needs.

What it means to you?

One of the problems the DNS system has is that there are various techniques which are hard to explain but which are pretty well understood in certain nefarious quarters which can be used to trick a computer into believing a forged answer when its resolver asks a question.

When DNSSEC is fully deployed, it’ll provide a method your computer can use to thwart that kind of attack. DNS responses will be “signed”, and your computer’s resolver will be able to check the signatures to make sure they match. So when you type www.yourbank.com.cn and get a forged answer, your computer will know it’s forged.

DNSSEC deployment is a world-wide change to one of the systems that holds the Internet together, and is not something instigated or under the control of Internode as such. However, trying to ensure that in the unlikely event that it causes you a hassle, you will understand it and be able to do something about it.

Sounds good, why are the articles doom-saying about it?

To answer that, you need to know a bit of DNS history: Until relatively recently, DNS responses have usually been limited to 512 bytes, and have mostly been carried by an Internet protocol called “UDP”. So various bits of infrastructure such as firewalls and home ADSL routers have been designed on the assumption that all DNS responses are 512 bytes or less, transported by UDP.

The problem is that the digital signatures required by DNSSEC tend to push the size of DNS responses past the 512 byte point. This shouldn’t present a huge challenge, because the DNS protocol has a mechanism for transporting larger responses by sending them over TCP instead of UDP. But the mechanism has been so rarely needed that many vendors haven’t implemented it. Indeed, large DNS responses have been so rare that some firewall vendors and some companies’ security managers have actively blocked them on the assumption that the only possible reason they’d exist would be as part of an attack!

For people using systems which don’t work correctly with large DNS responses, Wednesday 5th May 2010 will represent a bit of a flag-day. On that day, the Internet’s root DNS servers will start emitting the digital signatures needed to authenticate their responses, and there’s a reasonable expectation that people who aren’t correctly processing large DNS responses will suffer connectivity problems to random bits of the Internet. Most systems should be fine, but older firewalls and ADSL modems might suffer problems.

What you should do?

Making sure your network and end users are ready for DNSSEC. Few Tips provided here may help you:

1. If you haven’t done so already, make sure your DNS servers, routers, and firewalls, can handle DNS requests with packet sizes larger than 512 bytes. Upgrade software and firmware if necessary.
2. Configure your firewall to allow DNS over RCP/53 and make sure “fragmented DNS responses over UDP or TCP aren’t blocked.”
3. If you support users’ home equipment, make sure it is also compatible with DNSSEC, especially if the device has a built-in DNS server. Install new firmware if necessary.

No one seems to be predicting that the May 5 DNSSEC changes will cause a significant Internet disruption, but it never hurts to make sure your network and your users are prepared. If you’re not sure, you can use the instructions at DNS-OARC to test if  your current DNS resolver can handle DNSSEC.

DNSSEC is undergoing a phased rollout and it won’t be ready for full use for a couple of years, but when the work is complete the security of the Internet infrastructure will be vastly improved. You can note that timeline on http://www.root-dnssec.org for other pertinent information about the deployment of DNSSEC for the root zone.

The State of Web Development 2010

Web Directions has issued a report on The State of Web Development 2010. In the survey, professional web designers and developers answer over 50 questions about various web technology topics. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

• Few respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use, but IE8 is the num ber one browser devel op ers test their sites in.
• Google Chrome has jumped dramatically as the browser of choice for devel op ers, to rank 3rd, at 17% just behind Safari at 20%.
• Firefox remains the number one choice by some way, but respon dents were split between 3.5 and 3.6 at the time of our survey.
• Firefox 3.6 was released only a week before the survey began.
• Over half of respondents now use Mac OS X as their primary operating system.
• Nearly a third of respondents (up from 16%) use Mobile Safari, while Android use is at around 4%.
• JQuery has become even more dominant, with nearly 80% of all respondents using the library, up from 63% last year.
• Desktop-??like application frame works, such as Cappuccino and SproutCore show little sign of wide spread adoption by developers. Perhaps the day of desktop-??like web apps is yet to come, or perhaps developers really aren’t look ing to build webapps which mimic the desktop.

When it comes to web development technologies, the big stories are CSS3, web fonts and HTML5.

• More respondents (45%) than not (44%) use CSS3 and experimental CSS, up dramatically from last year (only 22% then were using CSS3 and nearly 70% not)
• Last survey, only 4% were using font link ing using @font-face. This survey that’s climbed to 23%
• HTML5 is now used to some extent by around 30% of respondents, up from under 10% last survey

Most of the respondents develop to W3C standards and then try to work around IE. The decision has payed off now that new web standards are gaining wide adoption even in IE (9). The survey asked which CSS selectors the respondents commonly used and 80% or more indicated Class selec­tors such as p.classname {}, HTML ele­ment selec­tors such as p {}, ID selec­tors such as p#idname {}, and Descendent selec­tors such as p a {}. One major change from 2008's results was the increase in CSS3 and experimental CSS usage. Only 22% used CSS3 or experimental CSS properties in 2008, but now the users of those properties have surpassed the users who don't use them. The most used property is border-radius by a significant margin.

Also, these were the results when respondents were asked which programming languages they used on the server-side:

Check out the results to all the ques­tions, and you can down­load the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses in CSV for­mat or grab the PDF info­graphic overview.

“The State of Web Development” sur­vey is brought to you by Web Directions con­fer­ences, and Scroll Magazine, and con­ducted by John Allsopp

Albert Einstein's Desk

Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine's Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch -- to open doors and loosen tongues -- Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon's passing. But aside from one now-famous image (above), the pictures Morse took that day were never published. At the request of Einstein's son, who asked that the family's privacy be respected while they mourned, LIFE decided not to run the full story, and for 55 years Morse's photographs lay unseen and forgotten. Pictured: Ralph Morse's photograph of Einstein's office in Princeton, taken hours after Einstein's death and captured exactly as the Nobel Prize-winner had left it.

It's from a slideshow of photos taken at the time of Einstein's death but never published before last week. I'm telling you it is if you can convince yourself that the notes on the blackboard hold the key to time travel.