Edward Terry’s Tweet3D lets you few any Twitter user’s most frequent topics as a 3D tag cloud. I’m not quite sure what kind of (undoubtably very clever) magic goes on behind the screens, but it appears that the topics are frequently used words. Somehow, Tweet3D extracts these from previous tweets and passes them to Cumulus to be displayed. Pretty nifty stuff!

Last week, when working on a game for a client, we decided raid the company’s snack machine and prototype the game using colour-sorted M&M’s in order to work out if was any fun and balance the game by adjusting variables. My random number generator supplied the randomness, Masterfoods the colourful candy. Great fun!

Thanks to Suzanne for the picture from her camphone.

I’ve been using this trick for years but it seems it’s never really been blogged about. When saving JPEG files using the “Save for Web” feature (”Save for web & devices” in CS3), the quality slider exhibits some strange behavior. Increasing the quality setting by a single percent usually adds only a little extra file size (about half a kB for the test file I used). Going from 50 to 51 with the same file added a full 10 kB. There’s also quite a difference in image quality between 50 and 51. In fact I feel 51 looks pretty good and is the optimal setting for most web projects. Anything above that is a waste of bandwidth, except perhaps for photography portfolios and such.
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On June 14th 1997 I started my first full-time job at NOB Interactive, the internet branch of Holland’s (then) biggest audiovisual company. This means I’ve been a professional web designer for ten years now, to the day. From HTML 3.2 with lots of frames to tableless semantic XHTML, from 28k8 modems to broadband, from Futuresplash Animator and animated GIF to Flash 9. It’s been lots of fun and I hope to be able to keep doing this for a long time.

Every once in a while ideas pop into my head. I can’t help it. Most are crap, but some warrant further investigation. Problem is that I do not have the technical knowledge to look into some of them and create proof-of-concept type applications. I’m pretty good with WordPress and actionscript, but other than that I’m pretty much lost. One of my ideas would require using the Google Maps API for instance, others need somewhat sophisticated database operations or SMS interaction, or… who knows.
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Chi Nederland, a Dutch association of human-machine interface specialists has published a short interview they had with me. It deals with interfaces, Flash and other usability issues. Enjoy!

Man. I thought the Web Developer extension for Firefox was extremely cool, but this very useful add-on to the world’s best browser is an even better equipped toolbox for front-end developers. You can tweak every little code detail right from the browser and see the results instantly. I found the option to temporarily disable individual lines of CSS code to be very useful. A must have for web designers.

We had another one of those infamous screen resolution debates at work today, which reminded me that I once made a little javascript that sets the browser window to specific sizes, and reports the current available content area. I copy-pasted this page together a few years back and was quite surprised to find it still works, even in IE7.

Javascript browser resize and size detection

Please keep in mind that setting your browser to a say 800*600 on a 1024*768 (or better) screen will not give an accurate indication of the available space if you’re designing for users with an actual 800*600 screen. Those users will probably have maximized their browser windows. At it’s maximized setting, the margins are slightly different and the windows taskbar comes into play.

Ever since I (and everybody else it seems) read a guide on some blog about about how to write compelling blog post titles, I keep seeing posts like this. One of the tips was to compile a list of some sort. The top 10 reasons to use a PC over a Mac. Or the 20 most popular blogging topics. 5 pop singers who shaved their heads. And it works. People apparently like lists. Here’s one with 50 great website designs from last year. Enjoy!

In my daytime job I’m a Flash developer. But when it comes to creating websites I don’t think Flash is the way to go. Not just because Flash has some serious accessibility issues, but mainly because Flash-only websites are very search engine unfriendly. They usually consist of only one HTML page, and most of those contain no readable content. So Google, MSN and Yahoo will have no clue as to what your site’s about. I’ve been pondering things you could do to fix or at least improve this. I’ve played around with a few of these ideas and techniques, others are still on my to-try list. Please let me know if you’ve come up with other solutions or have anything else to add.
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