Flickr credit: lwr
If you, like me, enjoy good use of typography, check out the support for control of OpenType font features via CSS coming in Firefox 4:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/
These are some of the minor nuances in typography… but they can add up to make a site or document just look that much better! I’m looking forward to trying them out once FF4 becomes available..
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Would you like to receive a notification when you are mentioned on Twitter? Or more importantly, would you like to receive a notification when someone mentions your Twitter ID (or your company’s ID) and uses a keyword like “fail”?
Over on the Tropo blog, my colleague Chris Matthieu wrote up how you could do this in literally one line of the Ruby programming language. You need a free Tropo account, naturally, and you need a Twitter account you want to monitor. Chris shows the steps you need to go through to set up an application and connect it to a Twitter account.
While it’s cool to be able to get text messages of mentions (something Twitter doesn’t support directly), what I personally think is more interesting is the ability to send a message when certain keywords are found in a tweet. For instance, what if someone started tweeting:
Just had a major #FAIL with @company services.
Wouldn’t you like to know when that happens right away? Easy to do if you are sitting there with Tweetdeck open (or some other client)… but not so easy if it is some time when you are away from Twitter.
Chris shows you could do this easily in Ruby:
if $currentCall.initialText.index("fail")
(autorespond or send sms or place call etc.)
end
Putting that together with his first example of sending a SMS, your code could look like this:
if $currentCall.initialText.index("fail")
message "Mention: " + $currentCall.initialText, {
:to => "tel:+14805551212",
:network => "SMS"}
end
That’s it!
For more info, check out Chris’ post and then sign up for a free Tropo account to try it out yourself. Sending and receiving SMS messages, Twitter messages and phone calls are all free for folks developing apps on Tropo.
Full Disclosure: Yes, this post talks about a service (Tropo) ultimately from my employer, Voxeo. I do write about such services from time to time. 🙂
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Today Jeremiah Owyang and the gang at the Altimeter Group released an interesting research report into The Two Career Paths of the Corporate Social Strategist. Actually, it really is the ONE career path as I doubt very many people want to be relegated to the “social media help desk”!
Good stats and thoughtful recommendations… definitely worth a read if “social media strategy” is even part of your job role! I know I’ve marked up a few items here and listed some actions for me to take…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Lately I’ve been doing a great amount of experimentation and testing with CSS – and seeking to understand more of the goodness that comes with CSS3 as more and more browsers support both HTML5 and CSS3. In that experimentation, I came across this great video from Nettuts+ about how to create shadows with CSS3. I thought it was quite cool and recommend it for anyone else playing around with CSS3:
Now… if only all the browsers out there would fully support CSS3!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or subscribing to my email newsletter.
Kudos to Facebook for their effort today in encouraging people to vote in today’s US election! Opening a Facebook window today, it was hard to miss the encouragement to vote:
After I voted this morning and clicked the “I Voted” button in Facebook, I had the opportunity to post that to my Wall along with a message (which of course I did):
And now whenever I go back to my browser and look at Facebook again, there is that box at the top of my NewsFeed counting away the number of Facebook users who have pressed that button… approaching 4 million users when I took the screenshot…
… and passing by the 4 million mark in the time it took me to write this post.
All in all it’s very cool to see!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
That was the question Mashable asked last week in a post “Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist?“, reporting on a recent presentation by Scott Brinker, president and CTO of ion interactive. Both the Mashable article and the transcript Scott posted to his Chiefmartec.com site make for useful reading. He describes a “Chief Marketing Technologist” as:
“… someone who has a hybrid between business and technology, a strong background in engineering and IT, is an early adopter of technology, but someone who also understands the pragmatic realities of scaling technology. But most importantly, someone who brings those skills and combines them with a deep love and passion for the marketing mix. This is a technologist that reports to the CMO, not the CIO.”
In his slides, he identifies 3 missions for the role:
It’s well worth a read, in my opinion. Given that my own role is a fusion of a technologist and a marketer, I agreed with many of his points.
The question is for you – do you have someone in your marketing team who is looking at the technology side of the picture and finding ways to enable your marketing team to be more effective, agile, stronger?
Scott Brinker’s slides are below:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Every since Apple released iMovie for the iPhone 4 I had been wanting to make a video start-to-finish on the iPhone 4 for no other reason than to see how it worked. Â I recently had that opportunity and the result is this Emerging Tech Talk interview with Phil Wolff from Skype Journal:
As other reviewers have noted (two examples: Ars Technica and MacLife), the iMovie app is very limited in terms of the kind of editing you can do and particularly in the types of titling and transitions. When you start a project you choose a “Theme” and that then establishes what titles and transitions you can use. I chose the “Modern” theme and the result is the titles you see.
It was rather frustrating in that I like to have “end credits” at the end of my videos that describe a bit about the video and also leave with a URL for people to go to. If you look at any of my other ETT episodes (like this one) you can see what I’m trying to do. With iMovie on the iPhone, as you’ll see at the end I wound up using a bunch of half-screen credits to get the effect I wanted to do.
One other frustration was that I couldn’t crop the video… and in my case part of my finger wound up being in the video.
While limited in editing, I will say that it was rather cool to do all of this on a mobile device:
Once I got the hang of using the controls on iMovie on the iPhone, it was pretty simple and easy to do. Apple does provide a FAQ with some helpful info.
I had to cut my ITEXPO trip short due to some family issues, but my intent had been to do the editing and publishing directly from the conference floor. Given the lack of good WiFi at the event, I’m not sure that I really could have done much uploading there… but I certainly could have done the editing – and even done that on the plane trip home.
Given the much greater power of iMovie on my regular Macs, I’m not sure how much I’ll personally use this iMovie on the iPhone. For the work involved, I think it’s much easier to transfer the movie over onto my iMac and do the editing right there. However, I can definitely see this as a way to do mobile video production and will probably wind up trying it out some more at future events.
If you want to try it yourself, iMovie is available from the App Store and costs $4.99 US.
If you have tried it out already, what did you think of it?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Right here in the screen capture:
If the fan on my MacBook Pro starts kicking in… or if it gets slow… or if I look at the CPU monitor and see it jacked to near 100%… all I have to do is open my Activity Monitor and…
99% of the time it’s an issue with Flash!
Now, granted, it’s probably not “Flash”, per se, but rather “a website that isn’t using Flash properly”. Or “a website that has a poorly written Flash app.”
But that’s perhaps the point… so many websites out there have poorly written Flash apps!
The good news is – and THE reason I use Google Chrome – is that I simply kill off that process and my Mac goes back to being snappy again. Still, it’s annoying.
How about you? If you’re on a Mac do you find Flash sites jack up your CPU?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
If you are, like me, interested in understanding more about how Cascading Style Sheets Level 3, a.k.a. “CSS3”, particularly as it plays a major role in the ongoing evolution of HTML5 particularly on mobile platforms, you will probably find this site immensely useful:
CSS3 has been in development for quite a while (intro from May 2001) and is still evolving (current status) but it represents a great advance in control over design of web sites directly in a browser.
With CSS3 one of the greatest benefits is the ability to replace images with in-browser elements.
What I’ve done is simply added an inline style to the <div> and then added multipled paragraphs inside of that div block.
CSS3Please.com lets you experiment with CSS3 directly in the browser… and then copy/paste the results over into a stylesheet for your site (or use as an inline style as I have here). It’s a cool tool for those of us interested in design.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
How are people using Apple’s iPad? What devices is it replacing for iPad users?
Back in early July, Mashable.com published an article “An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad” that made for good reading. The article reviewed data out of a study by Resolve Market Research and had a few gems. For instance, I found it fascinating that 38% of iPad owners said they would not buy a portable gaming device after owning an iPad. I’m not a big game-player, personally, and I can see the logic of this finding, given that the iPad reduces the number of devices you need to carry… it was just something I hadn’t really thought about.
Also interesting to note that for 37% of the iPad owners this would be their first Apple product – bodes well for Apple!
Now, three months have gone by since the Mashable post was published, which is in some ways an eternity in the consumer products space. It will be interesting to see whether these trends continue over time… in the meantime, it is just good to see more data out there on iPad usage.
P.S. The comments also made for interesting reading…
