Get The Knowledge – a collation of online articles by the people at Techdept. » Technology

What people love and hate about the iPhone 4S

TechDept — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:22:47 +0000

Here’s a look at what people love and hate about the iPhone 4S from ChangeWave Research.

As you can see, people love Siri, the ease of use, and the nice camera. They hate the battery life and the fact that it doesn’t have 4G.

By Jay Yarow and Jon Terbush for Business Insider, 01 Dec 2011.

It’s like steroids for web developers

TechDept — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:00:03 +0000

CodeKit automatically compiles Less, Sass, Stylus & CoffeeScript files. It effortlessly combines, minifies and error-checks Javascript. It even optimizes images, auto-reloads your browser and lets you use the same files across many projects. And that’s just the first paragraph.

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Occupy flash

TechDept — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:00:04 +0000

Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies.

Flash makes the web less accessible. At this point, it’s holding back the web.

The only way to truly force the web to embrace modern open standards is to invalidate old technology.

Join the movement

YouTube gets shaken up

TechDept — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:16 +0000

Watch the video

Uploaded by MinusLand for YouTube, 17 Sept 2008.

Discover mozilla popcorn.js

TechDept — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:00:17 +0000

Popcorn.js is an event system for HTML5 media developers. Think jQuery for video. You can leave the heavy lifting to Popcorn, and concentrate on what you do best: writing awesome code.

Popcorn Maker brings the power of popcorn.js and its plugin system to a graphical user interface, with familiar timeline controls. Completely free and open source, popcorn maker offers a collection of useful templates, but since it’s built from standard HTML, you can customize it to your heart’s content.

Who’s it for?

filmmakers
journalists
creative people of all stripes

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It’s official: flash mobile player is dead

TechDept — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:00:41 +0000

Adobe confirmed what reports were saying all morning: It’s done with the Flash Mobile Player and has now thrown its lot in with the HTML5 crowd — for mobile at least.

“We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and general manager for interactive development in a blog entry this morning.

The company that built Flash and famously fought with Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the necessity for its support on all mobile devices now contends that HTML5 is the right path for mobile devices and its developer partners. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms,” wrote Winokur.

By Lance Ulanoff for Mashable, 09 Nov 2011.

‘Invisibility Cloak’ uses mirages to make objects vanish

TechDept — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:10:09 +0000

Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas have hijacked one of nature’s most intriguing phenomena — the mirage — to make an invisibility cloak. It can hide objects from view, works best underwater and even has a near-instant on/off switch.

To understand how it works, you need to first grasp the basics of the mirage effect. This unusual experience, sometimes seen in the desert or on hot roads during the summer, can trick your brain into seeing objects that aren’t really there.

By Mark Brown for Wired, 04 Oct 2011.

Interesting new touch software from adobe – proto

TechDept — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:00:54 +0000

Adobe Proto, a new Adobe Touch App, lets you create interactive wireframes and prototypes of websites and mobile apps on your tablet. Communicate and share ideas with teams and clients using a touch-based interface.

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16 examples of steve jobs being a huge jerk

TechDept — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 09:00:04 +0000

When it comes to Steve Jobs, there’s the “Good Steve,” and then, there’s the “Bad Steve,” says biographer Walter Isaacson.

His mammoth personality could inspire those around him just as easily as it could tear them down.

Here are 16 examples of when he did the latter.

By Dylan Love for Business Insider, 25 Oct 2011.

A beautiful boilerplate for responsive, mobile-friendly development

TechDept — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:00:05 +0000

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. Skeleton is built on three core principles:

Skeleton has a familiar, lightweight 960 grid as its base, but elegantly scales down to downsized browser windows, tablets, mobile phones (in landscape and portrait).

Skeleton is a tool for rapid development. Get started fast with CSS best practices, a well-structured grid that makes mobile consideration easy, an organized file structure and super basic UI elements like lightly styled forms, buttons, tabs and more.

Skeleton is not a UI framework. It’s a development kit that provides the most basic styles as a foundation, but is ready to adopt whatever your design or style is.

By Dave Gamache for Skeleton, 2011.