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Google Releases Page Speed

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Google just released Page Speed, their competitor to Yahoo! YSlow. Both plug-ins for Firebug. Obvious requirements include Mozilla Firefox and Firebug plug-in.

So far it’s been pretty to look at. There’s 2 tabs instead of YSlow’s 1 tab. You can also Record Activity and measure page loading speed as well.

firebug

The one thing I do not like right now is that Page Speed creates 2 folders in my home directory on the Mac OSX. I’m not sure where the folders go in Windows systems yet. These folders just hold some cached items when you run the Page Speed to analyze performance.

page_speed_folders

Google’s Page Speed results are a bit different than Yahoo! YSlow. YSlow gives you “grades” and Page Speed just gives you green, red, or yellow signs. It also gives you an explanation of what you can do to make your pages load faster. Page Speed also does not give you the little icon next to Firebug that tells you how long it took to load the initial page. Something I actually like to know even if I’m not performance tuning my own website.

So far, Page Speed is a welcomed addition to the Firebug arsenal. Also check out SitePoint’s CodeBurner Firebug plug-in. It’s a great little reference for HTML and CSS. And Robert Nyman’s FireFinder for Firebug is handy search for Firebug.

What are your thoughts on Google Page Speed? Are you using both Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed?

Introducing Page Speed – Google Code Blog

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The Legal Minefield

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, law student or anything remotely close and/or in any way related to the law field.

That said, I do still have my own legal issues to be aware of. Recently, I have started up my own company, which brings even more legal nightmares. As for my design and development work, there are quite a bit of legal things that I needed to be aware of.

Copyright

These are pretty easy to register. At least in the U.S. it is. I’m not so sure about how other countries work. For the U.S. head on over to the U.S. Copyright Office’s website and do the online registration. It costs about $35 per copyright. This is good for just about all design work and also includes the programming code.

Licenses

These are the ones that have most recently driven me crazy. You can license your code, design work, photos, etc with various different licenses such as Creative Commons, MIT, GNU and many more.  There are a lot of resources available online for these and Creative Commons helps you pick the license you want to use.  My confusion comes from having both a Copyright and License on the same material. As a general understanding, everything I write and put on my website is Copyrighted. But at the same time, I have some code that is freely available for downloading and modification under MIT license both on my website and also on GitHub.

Another issue I am working on figuring out all the legalities of, is how to properly license out work to a client. I have seen quite a few articles online and even some books stating that it’s best to retain the Copyright for the websites I design and build, while licensing out the design to the client. That’s a great idea, but there’s no legal paperwork or explanation on how this whole process works. AIGA has a pretty good write-up for designers.

I’m still trying to figure this all out, but I have run into some good resources.

Additional Resources

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Disney Goes Green

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Disney Nature

Happy Earth Day!

Disney has gone green and launched Disney Nature (on April 21, 2008). Today is the release of the much anticipated movie Earth.  The movie is narrated by James Earl Jones and Produced by Alastair Fothergill of Planet Earth and Blue Planet fame.

Disney Nature has 6 more projects lined up for release through 2012.

  • The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos – Co-directed by Matthew Aeberhard and Leander Ward, and produced by Paul Webster (Kudos Pictures), this film will take viewers to mysterious lives of flamingos. Worldwide roll-out begins December 2008
  • Oceans — Nearly three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans. French co-directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud have set out to capture the full expanse of these waters that have played such a crucial and constant role in the history and sustenance of man. The deep and abundant oceans are places of great mysteries and dangers that this film will dare to explore. Domestic release 2010
  • Orangutans: One Minute to Midnight – Directed by Charlie Hamilton James and produced by Frédéric Fougea, this film tells the true story of a six-year-old male orangutan and his little sister, who must take an incredible journey to find a home and a family. Worldwide release 2010
  • Big Cats – Audiences will get to meet three mothers – a lioness, a leopard and a cheetah – as they explore their world on the great plains of Africa. Co-directed by Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill and produced by Alix Tidmarsh, this film will show how these magnificent animals survive on their power and their cunning, while they protect and teach their cubs the ways of the wild. Worldwide release 2011
  • Naked Beauty: A Love Story that Feeds the Earth – In this film, nature is ready for its close-up … a very close-up, as exacting macro photography takes us to the realm of flowers and their pollinators. Acclaimed filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg introduces us to a bat, a hummingbird, a butterfly and a bumblebee, demonstrating their intricate interdependence and how life on earth depends on the success of these determined, diminutive creatures. Naked Beauty is produced by Blacklight Films and Alix Tidmarsh. Worldwide release 2011

Press Release in PDF

Are you going to see the film?

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Review: Apress Beginning iPhone Development

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

beginning iphone developmentI’ve been working through Apress’s Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. The has it’s own website where the writers host a forum and source code samples. It’s a great book to get you started with iPhone App Development. The authors do a great job walking you through the steps and explaining the lines of code you’re writing. They also keep updated source code and Errata. This book is for the SDK 2.0 and not the newly released iPhone 3.0 OS and SDK. It’s also important to note that book emphasis that you have some knowledge of C, Objective-C or at least pick up the Learn Objective–C on the Mac (Learn Series) book and work through that first. This is an introductory book. It is by no means a cookbook or a book on advanced topics for iPhone development. What the book does do really well, is give you a great foundation to build on. Instead of hacking together code and seeing what it does, the book shows you how to do things in ways minimize your future headaches and also give you some standard process of development.

Pros:

  • Great introduction to the SDK
  • Up to date Source Code for the book on the website
  • Book forums for asking questions and interacting
  • Great way to get started in iPhone development

Cons:

  • No sounds API examples or chapter
  • Needs some more XCode help as most developers are learning XCode for the first time.
  • Needs a bit more help on debugging iPhone code
  • More on device development

Upcoming Apress iPhone Development Books

Other Resources:

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Amazon Kindle 2 for Web Design and Development?

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Over the past couple weeks, I have been testing out the new Amazon Kindle2 for reference use on Web Design and Development. I went through the Amazon.com Kindle Store to see what books were available to get on the Kindle. I also looked at all the books to see if eBook PDF versions were available so that I could convert them to the Kindle. I was able to find a few Print books to compare with the Kindle and also some PDF books too. Here are some pictures comparing the same section of the books.

Kindle vs Print

I used 2 separate books for comparing Print to Kindle formatted books. Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards and Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery. They are both available on the Kindle Store and in Print format. The Kindle version of the book compared very well to the Print version. The only real difference I noticed was the loss of color pages if the Print version had them. Other than that, reading was very easy and comfortable. Images were the only concern, and Amazon managed to do a pretty good job at having it scale properly. You can change the size of the images that show up throughout the book if you want to see it bigger. The text formatting was interesting, as it’s fixed-width font and center-aligned. So every now and then you may only see 3-4 words per line depending on your font size choice. Overall, I am enjoying the experience so far.

Print vs PDF Converted

The book used for this comparison is Jason Baird’s The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. The book is published by Sitepoint and available in Print and PDF eBook format. I converted the PDF version of the book using Mobipocket Creator 4.2 Publisher Edition. It’s a free Windows ONLY application. The process is quite simple. Select the PDF, import it, fill out the required metadata, build the PRC file and copy it over to the Kindle via the USB cable. Once that’s done, you can begin reading your book.
Comparing the 2. The converted PDF did have some issues with images and their sizes. Not really all too surprising. The main part where it seemed to have issues, was with text inside of a box. The converted software takes the text out of the text box and creates an image for the text box. As for regular images. It’s mostly random. The screenshot of the Website in the book converted fairly well. However, as you will see in the next section, some images were not resized as expected. It doesn’t cause too much of a problem for reading the actual text though.

Kindle vs PDF Converted

For this comparison, I chose to use Jeff Croft’s Pro CSS Techniques book. It’s published by Apress and available on the Amazon.com Kindle Store. The Converted PDF actually reads very well. As I said before, the images sometimes tend to have resizing/scaling issues. One thing that the converted PDF does have issues with, is sidebar-type quotes or text. It tends to incorporate them into the book based on it’s location on the page instead of keeping them separate. So, that does take some getting used to. For standard plain text PDF books, it works wonderfully. I have not yet tried sending Amazon a PDF to convert and see if their results match up. I also haven’t tested other means of converting the PDF such as using Stanza. For the Apress books, since every one that I’ve gotten from them are all in grayscale anyways, there isn’t any issue of loss of color. For Sitepoint books though, I can see loss of color as an issue. If there is color-coded code in the books, I can see it become an issue. Since most of the Web Development books I found available are Apress books, I haven’t run into that issue.

iPhone App

The Kindle iPhone App is freely available on the Apple iTunes App Store. You can only read the books you purchase through the Kindle Store. As of right now, converting PDF files to Kindle format cannot be read on the iPhone. Here are some screenshots of CSS Mastery and Designing with Web Standards on the Kindle iPhone App.


A Small sampling of books available in the Kindle Store

Conclusion

Overall, I am enjoying using the Kindle as a reference material for Web Design books and Web Development books. I have converted all of the Sitepoint PDF eBooks that I have bought and also the vast majority of the Apress eBooks as well. Having them all readily available and search-able is really convenient. Also, the note-taking and highlighting capabilities of the Kindle are very easy-to-use and helpful.

Your Thoughts and Comments?

What do you think of the Kindle as a viable replacement for Print books, Textbooks or reference books?

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