Some pop out points:

• Design at the actual scale of the final device.
• Design for the product not the keynote.

Terry Chay wrote up Faster PHP fo shizzle—HipHop for PHP which does an excellent job of breaking down who HipHop will help, and who it will not.

I love vintage ads! Nothing is more inspiring to me than some 1920′s typography, and nothing is more hilarious than 1960′s car ads. So the Vintage Ad Browser is just about the greatest thing on the internet to me. Definitely take some time out to browse it and bookmark it, you will need this for inspiration one day.

Check out the Vintage Ad Browser

What do I think

Honestly I don’t have a fixed position on the issue of Sass, LessCss, or preprocessors in general yet since I haven’t used them. However I know what I want in a preprocessor. The first and biggest issue to me is syntax, I write CSS like Nathan, everything on one line. I know CSS, I have years of experience with it’s syntax, I don’t want to learn a new syntax. That counts Sass out, for now (a new syntax is being developed for Sass that is more tightly coupled to CSS).

The second is features. Ultimately this will be the deciding factor for any project. Right now Sass and LessCSS look similar, although Compass and Sass look incredibly powerful together.

Most of us have tons of experience with CSS and are reluctant to move to anything new (remember what it took to get you away from table based layouts?) regardless of CSS shortcomings. But nonetheless CSS does have a few large shortcomings that need to be addressed and it looks like preprocessors are going to be the answer for right now.

What is Tender?

It’s a support web app, I know sounds boring, and it is to be honest. But some of us have to deal with supporting things. Tender makes this incredibly easy and painless. Tender has some features which set it apart for me. Numeral uno is I can manage support requests from email, I hardly ever have to actually log into the website. Second is the integration with Lighthouse, my ticket tracking app of choice. When I first released Checkmate I encouraged people to post tickets to my lighthouse, it was a massive failure. However my Tender has been a success and has made responding to support requests much less painful.

Why Do I Care?

If you don’t support any software or services you don’t care, you shouldn’t care, and you should be happy you don’t deal with it. If you do, OR you SHOULD be supporting something(*cough* your WordPress themes *cough*) then you should care. Tender is an efficient, user friendly way to offer quality support. And this new widget is just an example of their commitment to making things easy for the users, who are the most important part of your software/service.

Go read his article Comment Design For WordPress 2.7

Whaa?

So what is Readernaut? It is a social community of well read people that make me look like I’m shuffling through old copies of Highlights magazine. It’s a place to catalog the books you have read, add new books, keep track of your reading, comment, and share insight on books. But most importantly it gives the dull act of reading a book a decidedly web 2.0 gradient vector icon feel.

I find myself checking the site for new notes concerning Anathem, or checking reviews of books I’m interested in. Adding recommended books to my “Plan to Read” list will be a huge savior to me in 2 years when I actually finish reading Anathem. The point being, I believe there are a few ways to use Readernaut, and not everyone will use it the same way.

The Experience

Readernaut is a sort of complex time line with various ways to filter information into what you are actually looking for. In a twitter like fashion you can start with the public time line and continue drilling down.

The site is pretty intuitive especially under the newest design. You have the timeline, your library, quick access to notes about your book, tags, contacts, and a profile. Each having their own options to organize the data. Books are organized with tags, which makes filtering your own books easy, but it also helps you find potential reading material. Which is where the real potential power of Readernaut comes in.

I haven’t fully explored the community portion of Readernaut yet(mostly because none of my friends are members) but I can already see massive potential in finding what like minded people are reading. Readernaut also integrates with Amazon, which makes finding, adding, and buying books so incredibly easy Appalachian mountain people may find themselves reading(it’s OK I grew up there).

It is hard to peg down the user experience because it is really up to the user how involved he(or she, women being allowed to read, who could’ve imagined?) will become in the site and community. It could be nothing more than bookmarking tool, or a full blown dating service depending on how you use the site.

Unfortunately you can’t just go sign up for Readernaut quite yet, and there are no invitations to give out. But you can sign up for an invite which are sent out pretty steadily as Readernaut grows. But if you are a reader(naut) then I would suggest trying the site out. It has re-kindled my love for reading along with Neal Stephenson and Ruby on Rails books. And leave me a message if you’re on it!

Every mad scientist needs his Frankenstein. Mine just happens to be a website. Grunt Labs is my ongoing experiment, a place to play, test, and generally ignore browsers lagging behind. Grunt Labs is also a sign of things to come for the blog and Grunt, but more on that later.

So what is it really?

Grunt Labs is a repository for all my downloads(at least the good ones), projects, ideas, and general nuttiness I can come up with. Ever since I launched Checkmate I wanted a separate site where people could go get downloads and support. Grunt Labs will be integrated with Lighthouse in the future enabling issue tracking and all the goodness Lighthouse has to offer.

Playtime!

Grunt Labs is also a playground for me to stretch out my code and try out new things. It uses CSS3 and jQuery extensively and it is important to note this is an ongoing project. As I learn new things, better ways to code, and browsers evolve, the site will change and evolve into what I hope is ridiculously impressive.

The Design

The design is very basic and sparse. This is partly because of the crazy javascript going on and partly because the site is meant to change for each project. At this point the project pages don’t change much besides the background. That will change and vary from project to project.

The Code

The code consists of mostly basic html and CSS and the skeleton of the site was built on top of the Blueprint CSS Framework. Things get interesting when I mix in some CSS3 elements. To see the site in it’s full glory you’ll need Firefox 3 or a Webkit based browser like Safari.

Then comes in jQuery. My favorite javascript framework by far. This was my first push into the world of full page animation, and already I can see different ways of doing it. The page obviously uses some Coda style popups, full page animation, but it also uses some more subtle things. Some elements are dynamically added and removed via javascript. I’ve got plans for much more javascript in the near future, but that has to wait on something being released ;)

I think I’ll save explaining more about the javascript in detail for another post.

What is Ubiquity?

Ubiquity strives to do just that. And in my experience is on its way. Ubiquity is still a prototype, an impressive one, but still a prototype (is prototype the new beta?). Your mileage may vary with how useful you find Ubiquity right now, as it has limited capabilities in this version, from Mozilla:

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more.
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism

I don’t use that stuff

Now if you’re like me, that is actually quite useful already. If your not like me, maybe you should be trying harder. The second bullet is the eye catching one for me. Like Quicksilver, Ubiquity supports a what I’m going to call, a plugin architecture. This has potential to extend this prototype far beyond what it is currently capable of.

I’m using the term “plugin architecture” loosely here, and Mozilla refers to new commands as “subscriptions“. You essentially go to a site that contains a script, and subscribe to the command. You can then use the command like any of the built in commands.

The lowdown

So what can it do? Honestly the best way to find out is to download and use it, but I’ll give some highlights here.

• Email — Seriously? I can already do that. No you can’t. Yes I can. Not like this. Oh. Ubiquity allows you create emails while still on a page or import things such as maps without ever leaving gmail. Impressive? If you ever email it is.
• Translate — On the page. There are countless times when I want to know what is being said on a page about one of my themes, but I’m far too lazy to copy and paste into babel. Problem now solved.
• Search — You can search a plethora of sites directly in Ubiquity, no longer do you have to open google or go to youtube. And yes moving the mouse to the upper right corner wastes my time.
• Define Terms — Ever been reading a Merlin Mann post on 43folders and didn’t know what a word meant? Highlight and define right there in your browser.

That is a taste, a small portion, an itty bitty of what Ubiquity is capable of. Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, yeah they are all there too.

But what about the masses?

The down side to ubiquity is that some people probably won’t “get it“, much like people don’t use Quicksilver to it’s fullest. For me it is an easy transition into using the command line interface because I use it daily already. But what about the people who don’t? I’m curious to know what they think of Ubiquity. With people spending more and more time in their browser I believe this is the future. Things are changing in browsers as evident by Google’s Chrome and Ubiquity, and I for one am happy about it.

The Awesome Video

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Update

ReadWriteWeb just released a huge list of custom Ubiquity commands. Check out the some of the power Ubiquity already has.

Personally I love the site, mostly. The sub pages are all beautifully rounded and organized well, although it seems like someone forgot some margins here and there. For the most part it looks like they just transferred all the content over without restyling it. Which is fine, a lot of it is technical and doesn’t need to look “cool” it just needs to be readable. I like the colors and menu, not much to say there, they just work.

Ok, on to the bad parts. The homepage. To me it looks like a jumble of disconnected elements. Together they don’t work, like a pasted together web-page from stock vectors. I don’t want to be a tie wearing rock star with cheesy fonts. The shiny ‘Download’ button comes out of left field. What are the diagonal lines above the resources area supposed to be? I mean other than utter crap. Why the god awful gradient background that looks like someone compressed it to retardation? And the rounded menus look great, why abandon rounded elements on the homepage and only the homepage? The hovers are cool and flashy but totally unnecessary and look like the old mootools homepage(which no longer uses flashy animations).

Update: So other than the homepage, it looks good. And as I was writing this John Resig announced they are going to fix the site, as I am not the only one with complaints. Here’s to hoping for a much improved look.