I finally joined the “Upgraded to Firefox 3″ club today and so far, I’m pretty happy with it. However, I was happier after I came across 12 Quick Hacks for Firefox 3 written by Preston Gralla for Computerworld. The article provides some hacks and features to make FF3 a bit more usable and FF2-like for those of you who are resisting some of the changes. I immediately implemented #3: Having Gmail Handle mailto: Links and #6: Shrink the Back Button, and I’m looking forward to utilizing the Get Web Details (#5) feature for developing.
Christy Gurga is junior designer and programmer at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.
theMechanism worked closely with the Ansari X PRIZE Foundation right up until Burt Rutan won back in October of 2004. We continue to support X PRIZE Founder, Dr. Peter Diamandis’ recent efforts, including the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE and the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, which will help the world to both live and travel more efficiently in the near future. The reason I mention this is because I accidentally stumbled on Peter featured in an excellent (and Freely downloadable) series at iTunes called TED Talks.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started in 1984 as a conference to bring together people from those three worlds, and is an “invite only” event.
Dr. Peter Diamandis speaks about Stephen Hawking experiencing Zero Gravity. To hear him speak so vividly and excitedly about this unusual event is inspiring and encouraging.
As designers and thinkers, it’s our duty to try to learn how to apply ourselves to helping the planet. Taking some time to watch and be inspired by Peter, Philippe Stark and John Maeda (to name only a few) at the TED Conference, is a great start.
Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. Dave’s still trying to figure out how to get an invite to TED, but he’s getting closer…
In an earlier post, I wrote "I agree with Bjørn that the lack of an API-generated legend is problematic, though one could be constructed via HTML adjacent to the chart." However, it turns out that creating a legend is a bit more difficult than I initially thought. The difficulty was brought to my attention via a post to the Google Charts API Google Group that requested help in writing a PHP function to determine the hex value of interpolated colors. Since I figured this would be a common problem, I wrote a PHP 4 class that will hopefully solve it. You can see the tmMapLegend class in action below with the map produced in the earlier tutorial. Learn more about the class and download it here: http://themechanism.com/barkode/code/tmmaplegend/.
States carried by the Republicans in all four elections
States carried by the Democrats in all four elections
States carried by the Republicans in three of the four elections
States carried by the Democrats in three of the four elections
States carried by each party twice in the four elections
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London.
For those of you using the star seven CSS hack to target current or older versions of WebKit, this parsing bug has been closed in the latest WebKit nightlies. Acid3 specifically tests for this, so any browser that wants to be compliant with Acid3 will have to fix this CSS parsing bug.
… Yet, there is no crying in baseball, and I am not sure there was ever a time in history when it was socially cool, outside of Russia, to play chess. There are other unnatural mysteries that confound me, like why people use Sacajawea coins or why there wasn’t a sequel to Dances With Wolves. Billy Joel’s words ring true, “surviving is a noble fight”.
The upward trend in interracial marriage suggests there is hope for the world. Yes, maybe we will all sit by a pool on a sunny day wearing hyper-color T-shirts, sipping on bubble tea without the bubbles. Until then, we survive. And for those us who are finishing the race, we look back at the two basics which sustained us: hope and good design.
Hope may be dashed in some parts of the world with the ongoing war, the ever growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the writer’s strike, but that is short-lived. For all that hope requires is a flashlight strong enough to beam through the darkness. Then people dream again of pools and bubble tea.
Design is a far more fragile matter. Our sense of quality comes from design. A well designed argument enriches our lives, a well designed hair style can inspire a generation, and a well designed automobile can help attract the opposite sex. Unfortunately, an argument can be shattered with bullets, a hair style can be combed over, and an automobile can be destroyed by a jealous lover. Without design we’d have no sunny days, no pools, no hyper-color shirts, and no bubble tea, as these were all inventions of designers. (Thank you G-d, for the sunny days).
So this holiday season, hug a good designer. Because if design dies, we pin our hopes for survival on hope itself. And I ask you this, what would we hope for?
