Sketchboards with Adaptive Path

Flying up to SF on Monday to do some sketchboards with Adaptive Path. As long as I can stay in the trenches here and avoid the politics this gig might just work out.

Adaptive Path

First day working with Adaptive Path today. Man, they really do have their shit together. Also nice to be in a meeting with higher-ups at the company who have a realistic understanding of the current site, i.e. that it really sucks, from a functionality, usability, credibility, and well, pretty much every way except for getting merchants and advertisers to pay for its strong SEO. All that could change, presuming our CTO doesn’t kill us with unrealistic deadlines as we try.

The Spymaster's Lady by Joanna Bournne

Just finished a novel that would, if weren’t a romance, be getting serious critical acclaim. The writing is simply superb. I’ll spare you a thumbnail of the cover, but be warned it’s standard romance novel fair.

It’s a spy novel set during the Napoleonic wars, full of secrets and lies. The most striking thing about the book is the dialogue. Much of the book takes place in France, with the characters speaking in French. The dialogue is written in English, but with French sentence structures. The author doesn’t have to use “he said” or “she said”, the characters voices are so clear you can tell who is speaking. It’s not a story to read quickly, there’s no extra fluff and considerable subtext.

Here’s Cybil’s Review.

Gradient Headers Using CSS

link: CSS Gradient Text Effect

Nothing new, used the effect a year ago on the PSAS project with transparent gifs, but I’m posting it here as a reminder of how to do the “filter:” hack to get it to work in IE6 with pngs. Update: more thorough discussion of transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6.

There’s a good point somebody made in the comments about the text not being selectable, good thing to keep in mind, the link to the article would have been annoying to write without copy/paste.

My addition to the CSS would be to define the height in ems, not pixels, so that it scales with the text.

Wii VR

link: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

behind on my feed reading (again) but if you missed this one it’s a must see.