David John Mead

Slick future visions from Microsoft

Tonight I headed over to Office Labs from Microsoft. There you’ll get a glimpse into some of the “What If?” things being considered by going to the Envisioning section.

I particulary like the Productivity Future Vision video, which builds on the surface technology currently being played with-taking it the next step with ’smart paper’ (near the end of the video).

One thing I can’t get into is the whole false ‘perspective’ thing. I’m not sure why folders have to stack in 3D when the rest of the display shown work so well ‘flat’.

Technorati tags: future, vision, microsoft

HTML5 is not a big deal, really.

I’ve always been a big proponent of web standards.  Use semantic markup and validate your code are two things I always adhere too.

That’s why, I guess, I’m none too engaged by the wailing and gnashing of teeth around the current HTML5/XHTML2 conversation taking place across the web at the moment. Because whatever flavour of mark-up you use, you should always do those two things and there are still a ton of developers who don’t.

I switched from HTML4 to XHTML some time ago because I felt it gave me the structure I wanted in my coding.  It was virtually always served using a text/html MIME type so it was pretty much HTML4, but with XML syntax.  It just seemed cleaner and more structured and helped hone my trade.

There are still very few websites out there that are using XHTML properly (with an application/xhtml+xml MIME type) compared to the thousands of sites created by WYSIWYG tools that are barely proper HTML, let alone semantic or validated.  I would rather concentrate on cleaning those up and educating developers to code sematically and validate their code correctly going forward, before lameting XHTML2, which seemed on a hiding to nowhere from the get go.

The next freelance web site I build will probably be in HTML4, just to brush up. All subsequent ones will be HTML5.

Jeremy Keith has a great post outling the basics you need to know, as does Jeffrey Zeldman.  Both posts have links to various other sources if you want to dig deeper.

Technorati tags: html5, xhtml2, standards, web

UserVoice adds widgets and funding…

Listening, garnering feedback, and giving your users & visitors a greater sense of community is a cornerstone of this new web that we use daily.  A company that has been helping others to do this is UserVoice, whom I first wrote about over a year ago.

Today UserVoice made some great announcements including a widget that you can brand and include anywhere in your web site.  This white-label widget is different from the usual overlay form we’re used to seeing as you can include it inline on the page. Letting companies brand and change sections of functionality to suit their web site, it also “allows people to easily search, vote, and submit bug reports directly on the host site”, making it easier than ever to let companies interact with their customer base.

As well as getting substantial funding from Baseline Ventures, UserVoice has a new advisor in Bob Pearson. While VP of communities & conversations, Mr. Pearson led Dell’s Ideastorm, which is wildly held as the industry-leading approach to the use of social media.

All of this is great news, not only for UserVoice, but for the web in general, as it helps us take great strides in closing the gap between companies and their users, and that has got to be a big win for us all.

Moved to a new blog…

I’ve now moved the DavidJohnMead.com domain over to a new Wordpress blog. This is the last post over here at Blogger.

Though I imported all these posts into the new blog, I plan on leaving them here too, just for reference.

Please update you feed readers and bookmarks accordingly.

Be seeing you.

TweetFeed in beta

So there’s a new little site called TweetFeed (beta) that’s been pulling time away from my other online pursuits.

TweetFeed lets you build pages to display the latest Twitter activity around any topic or keyword. This means with a set of advanced search commands and a little tweaking to the HTML & CSS you can build pages like this one about power outages on September 14th (we are experiencing the after-effects of Hurricane Ike).

TweetFeed gives you a real nice set of operators, though it does take a little finagling to get some of my pages to show results.  I think a big part of this isn’t TweetFeed but more how people construct their tweets.

This might be a good tool to see how and why people are talking about you or your product or an event (if Twitter sorts out their XMPP service).

Why not sign up and give it a go.

PS – This would’ve posted last night but guess what. Our power went out at 10.30pm.

Technorati tags: twitter, feeds, tweetfeed, power, outage, tracker, conversation