Chris Eaton

It’s a little game to help you learn CSS selectors. Type in the correct selector to complete each level.

Very nice.

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Heidi Roizen has long time ties with the Apple universe, including a stint as Apple’s VP of World Wide Developer Relations from 1996-97. This is a great story.

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I don’t know about you, but I always find this frustrating. Here are two great examples of how to do it right.

[Via Pro Tools Expert]

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Quartz:

“What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time,” a Google insider told me in passing last month.

This change affects only Apple users who have upgraded to iOS 7, the latest version—but that’s 85% of iOS devices. They no longer have the ability to remain anonymous as they watch videos on YouTube or navigate their cities using Google Maps.

“Don’t be evil” indeed.

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[VIDEO] Wall Street Journal:

StoreDot Ltd., a Tel-Aviv based start-up, says it hopes to at least make the charging process faster–unveiling Monday a prototype charger that promises to take you battery from a tiny sliver of red to 100%, all in about 30 seconds.

My natural reaction is a healthy skepticism. That said, here’s an article from last October on StoreDot’s work with bio-organic LED displays, and another from November on biological semiconductors. There’s certainly some science behind the show. Video embedded in the post.

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This is an actively curated collection, with articles for beginners and those with experience. Terrific resource.

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Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich has stepped down, the company said on Thursday, after an online dating service urged a boycott of the company’s web browser because of a donation Eich made to opponents of gay marriage.

“We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act,” wrote Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker in a blog post. “We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.”

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Well written, easy to follow.

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If you in any way make your living, or hope to make your living, via the App Store, I think you’ll find this fascinating. For example:

I ran a simple query on my data to determine the distribtion of user ratings. I found that 60% of apps do not have any user ratings

I’m surprised by this. Zero ratings. Not one person took the time to rate 60% of the apps. To me, that means 60% of the apps never get found, never find an audience.

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Daily Mail:

Take a look at a map today, and you’re likely to see that North America is larger than Africa, Alaska is larger than Mexico and China is smaller than Greenland. But in reality China is four times bigger than Greenland, Africa is three times bigger than North America and Mexico is larger than Alaska.

The distortion is the result of the Mercator projection, the map most commonly seen hanging in classrooms and in text books, which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world.

Maps have always fascinated me and this is “old news” but if you have kids, go ahead and blow their mind showing them the Mercator map they are likely familiar with compared to other maps like the Gall-Peters projection.

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The reviews are starting to come in for Amazon’s new Fire TV and the consensus seems to be that it’s… okay.

People really like the voice search (but complain that it’s limited to Amazon and Hulu content). To anyone who has ever tried to search for anything using the Apple TV remote, this makes perfect sense. This is clearly how it should be done, especially if you have a product like Siri…

People also like the gaming functionality, though note that the controller feels cheap. Also something obvious for Apple to add to the Apple TV, though ideally with a much better controlling mechanism. 

Overall, sounds pretty “meh” to me. But at $99, I’ll probably pick up one just to try the gaming aspect.

rhiannaholly:

this is such a beautiful game

Confirmed, this game is beautiful. 

Mr. Men and Little Miss Game of Thrones. So good.

[via Fast Company]

Jeff Bezos is building up quite the gadget lineup.

Danah Boyd:

Although there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on.

This, if broadly true, would explain why I, being a woman, vomited in the CAVE: My brain simply wasn’t picking up on signals the system was trying to send me about where objects were, and this made me disoriented.

Fascinating research.

This is an incredibly clever idea that makes sense. Just took a teenage science whiz to think of it. Thinner typeface equals less ink. Read the post for details, but this is genius.

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I didn’t ask for games. I didn’t ask for photos. I asked for a streaming media solution that could do things right: Something easy to pick up, simple to use, and something that actually made the experience of playing and navigating through multimedia, dare I say it, fun.

Amazon promised all of the above with Fire TV, which the company unveiled Wednesday at an event in New York City. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t live up to its own hype. Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.

Ouch.

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When Amazon introduced the Fire TV yesterday, much was made about the ability to do voice search on the device. In the linked post, Kirk McElhearn walks through the process of doing the same thing on Apple TV, using the iOS Remote app. Cool beans.

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“Without getting into counsel’s discussions, I can tell you that as a rule, the White House objects to attempts to use the president’s likeness for commercial purposes, and we certainly object in this case,” he said.

Fucking morons at Samsung.

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After a nearly blemish-free record that culminated in a $3 billion acquisition by Google, Nest today issued a surprising halt to sales of Protect, its gesture-controlled smoke alarm. One of the device’s key features was that you could wave at it to turn it off. Turns out, sometimes people wave their arms around when there’s a fire in the house, too. Thus, as CEO Tony Fadell put it, “This could delay the alarm going off if there was a real fire.” Oops.

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amyphetamine:

(how USB cables make me crazy.)

This is quite perfect.

David Undercoffler on Tesla’s plans to debut a cheaper model in early 2015:

The newest model debuting in 2015 will be the third step, as its platform will differ significantly from anything else Tesla has built so far.

The plan for a mainstream model follows a strategy that Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk laid out in a 2006 blog post.

“The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium,” Musk wrote in a post titled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me).” “Then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.”

That post, written nearly eight years ago, laid out exactly what Tesla aimed to do.

In the world of startups, eight years seems like an eternity. It’s hard enough to think one year out, let alone a decade. Yet in the automotive industry, eight years seems like nothing. Very little used to change in that span. 

It’s amazing not only how far Tesla has come in the past eight years, but just how well they’ve been able to execute on that original plan. 

nevver:

Design Crush

Indeed.

evangotlib:

laughingsquid:

Superman Rescues Sandra Bullock From Space in an Alternate Opening Scene for ‘Gravity’

I wish today was Friday because this is the best thing on the internet this week.  GAME OVER.

Perfect landing.

“The opportunity to buy tickets to this year’s conference will be offered by random selection.”

Like Apple TV but with games and voice search.

Tony Schwartz:

Many retailers, for example, seek to save money by understaffing. The result is rushed, overworked and mistake-prone employees and higher turnover, which leads to unhappy, antagonized customers. The counterintuitive solution, Ms. Ton says, is to increase “slack” — meaning to have more employees available than are absolutely required at any given time of day.

QuikTrip, in contrast with most of its competitors, purposely overstaffs stores so that they can accommodate employees with emergencies or who are sick or on vacation. The result is happier employees and better-served customers. Ms. Ton cites one study of a 500-store retailer that found that every additional $1 spent on employee salaries resulted in an increase of anywhere from $4 to $28 in sales.

Funny that.