I am totally in love with these 3D door stickers from Couture Deco. The material is described as 'trompe-l'oeil on opaque white fabric with satin finish.' The stickers are washable, fire and UV resistant, and highly durable. You can adjust them to fit with a scissors and they're applied with regular old wallpaper glue. My only problem with them is deciding which one to buy! See all the stickers ($279) available at Couture Deco. POST UPDATE: The retailer has LOWERED the price to $199!!!
Via.
Shark Knife (via Making Light)
Apple came out with updated Mac Pros and iMacs today. I’m an iMac man myself, so that’s what I checked out. Looks nice! Of course, The League of Internet Commenters is busy finding flaws and comparing it to similar offerings from Apple’s competitors. Hardware isn’t my strong suit, but I know half a thing about website design. So let’s look at the websites for Apple’s primary desktop computer, and the same from Dell and HP.
Apple iMac
Just wonderful. The URL is http://apple.com/imac
Here’s Dell Studio One:
Ummm ok then. The configuration page is the main page for the product. The URL is, of course, http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/desktop-studio-one-19/pd.aspx?refid=desktop-studio-one-19&s=dhs&cs=19
HP All-in-one 200xt series:
ClickToFlash blocked the only photo of the product; don’t worry, it’s tiny and dumb. The URL? http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=desktops&a1=Category&v1=All-in-One+PCs&series_name=200xt_series&jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/psg/desktops/All-in-One_PCs/200xt_series
Of all the places I never expected to learn anything cool about the Apollo astronauts, number one would have to be the blog run by ukinsurance.net. ("For many years we have provided buildings and contents insurance for home owners, landlords and business premises.") I mean, it doesn't exactly promise a light, zippy read, does it? But it delivers one, and this week's post on "The Apollo Astronauts' Fascinating Insurance Covers" actually is fascinating. It details the extraordinary measures taken to provide financial security for families of the Apollo crews, who were literally uninsurable: Before every flight, from 11 to 16, the crews would autograph and leave behind a number of commemorative post cards, the idea being that, should the flight end in an untimely fashion, the cards' value would skyrocket. ("No pun intended," ukinsurance.net notes brightly.) It's a weird, unexpected look into a neglected corner of our history in space. (Via Coudal.)
Above, a letter written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1956 predicting, quite accurately, aspects of the future of communications.
Link [via Letters of Note via dvice]
In what will surely become a landmark case -- or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet -- a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal. Judge rules that circumventing DRM is not illegal originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Radoslav Zilinsky’s 2007 artwork “The Worldâ€
A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages. Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site. (Found via Coolvibe.)
You’ve heard it plenty of times before: We’re at the precipice of a transition in the way we, as developers, do things. Leading the way are future standards like CSS3 and HTML5, both already partially implemented in 4 out of the 5 major web browsers, with IE9 promising support, empowering us with new ways of making interactive and rich user experiences.
Just how awesome is CSS3? Find out by checking out these 10 experiments and demos that push the capabilities of the specs.
This experiment presents our solar system’s planetary orbits (fast-forwarded, of course) by utilizing CSS3’s border-radius, transform, and animation. Additionally, hovering over the names of each planet on the right displays an animated tooltip using CSS (learn how to make CSS3 animated tooltips). You can read about how this experiment was developed from this walkthrough by Alex Girón, the creator of this stellar CSS3 demonstration. The animation, at the moment, only works on the WebKit browsers (Google Chrome and Safari).
Flash animated web banners are notorious for being intrusive in the user’s experience. Ad-blocking apps can turn these off by looking for all embedded Flash objects on a web page and hiding them. However, using CSS3 animation, these Flash ads can be mimicked in functionality, but will be harder to disable with third-party software. In this experiment, several ads were recreated using CSS3, and the results are almost identical to their Flash-constructed counterpart.
This is a robust animation sequence inspired by the Spider-Man animated television series in the 60’s. Making the sequence work involved using CSS3’s transform, @key-frame and rotate; a bit of jQuery was used to preload the images as well as HTML5 for the audio. The creator wrote an explanation of how the CSS3-Man animated sequence works, which will give you a general idea of the level of effort involved in this amazing experiment.
This demonstration is an animated sequence (based on kinetic typography) that explores a way in which we can replace rich animation components such as Flash or After Effects. This proof of concept chiefly utilizes advanced CSS selectors and CSS3 animation, however, it’s not purely CSS since JavaScript was used to toggle element classes on and off.
We often use Flash (or Silverlight) for rich and interactive web-based video games. This CSS3 demonstration is a puzzle game and a proof-of-concept of how we can use open standards to create games — though admittedly, not as facile as Flash yet if you compare it to Flash games on sites like Kongregate. HTML5’s <audio> element was used to embed the sound.
This demonstration is of stacked images that look like Polaroids. Hovering over a photograph transitions it smoothly to the front of the stack, making for an interesting interaction for presenting your photo gallery. The demo was made by leveraging transition, transform, dynamic psuedo-selectors (to animate the target element), as well as stylistic properties such as box-shadow for visual effects. Read the tutorial on how this was constructed if you’d like to learn how this was developed.
With HTML5’s <audio> and <video> APIs, which will enable us to utilize multimedia without dependence from proprietary plugins, we’ll eventually have a need for GUIs that provide our users with controls for the media we serve them. Though we could use static images in conjunction with other HTML elements (such as buttons) to build these interfaces, using just HTML and CSS to render media controls mean we’ll have a more malleable solution. This user interface for a music player was built using only CSS3 (gradient, border-radius, box-shadow and all that good stuff). Read the explanation on how this was contructed in this tutorial.
This demonstration, found in the ZURB Playground, takes vinyl album covers that, when hovered on, animates the sliding out of a vinyl record that contains additional controls ("more information" and "play"). This proof of concept could one day be used as an elegant web-based interface for a site that plays music when combined with HTML5’s <audio> API.
This animated cartoon sequence depicts a fast-forwarded cycle of day and night. It works on WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome) using the @keyframes CSS3 property for moving and transitioning PNG images.
WebKit presents the capabilities of CSS3’s animate property with a spectacularly smooth demonstration of falling leaves. Tip: Use your browser’s "view source" feature to read the source code of the demonstration — the code’s well documented with explanations of how it works. Read WebKit’s blog post about the animate property to get a better feel for all the possibilities.
Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.
