noisylime

Think Small looks at the trend of tiny second homes (500 square feet and under). Less house means less upkeep, energy, and waiting are required.

Minimal square footage means reduced maintenance costs, less upkeep and reduced energy consumption. Prefabricated and pre-built models can require little or no site preparation, which means no anxious weekend drives to the country to make sure construction is moving along. Add to this an element of instant gratification (once the planning stage is over, most houses go up in days, even hours, and many are delivered, turn-key, to the site).

There’s an audio slide show of a some different tiny homes too.

Reminds me of that Geico “Tiny House” commercial.

[via Signal vs. Noise]

From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:

• Access to office-style applications – Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet – perhaps Google should acquire S5 .
• Access to communication applications – GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM).
• Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?)
• Control panel to manage the domain
• Ads can be turned off
• Storage at 10GB/user
• Integration with organisation’s sign-on and email infrastructure
• Phone support

The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.

The giant elephant in this room is your company’s data sitting on Google’s servers. In the absence of an “Apps Appliance” sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this – increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google’s pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it’s not for everyone.

Zoho, for example, offers “in-premise edition” to run inside an organization’s network. Similarly, Zimbra’s collaboration app. It’s also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google’s offering. It’s feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.

The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it’s great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: “Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion.”

[via Ajaxian]

Wolfgang Bartelme (designer of this site) took the work by Justin Palmer and friends and created a Prototype Reference widget.

[via Ajaxian]

We've got a slew of new Nikon cams tonight, so let's get this thing rolling. First up we have the S50, S50c, 7.2 megapixel / 3x shooters with 3-inch screens, OIS, 1600 ISO, best shot selector, in camera red-eye repair, but the S50c has WiFi for email, image storage, and the rest of the fun stuff you can do with Nikon's Coolpix Connect 2 service. These will be available in April for $300 and $350.

The S200, and S500 are slightly less sophisticated, but look to be quality cameras all the same. You've got 7.1 megapixel / 3x optics, electronic image stabilization, up to 2000 ISO, 2.5-inch displays, best shot selector, in and camera red-eye repair. The S500 steps up over the S200's aluminum body with its own stainless steel finish (how DeLorean — shown above), as well as an anti-shake button that engages high ISO mode, image stabilization, and best shot selector at the same time. These will hit in March for $250 and $300.

Read – Nikon S50, S50c
Read – Nikon S200, S500

[via Engadget]

Gradients: a nutritious part of your Web 2.0 breakfast. Wouldn't it be swell if you could get all that goodness without opening Photoshop every time you needed a little gradient bliss? Matthew O'Neill explains how you can.

[via A List Apart]

I’m a sucker for novel inventions that solve real problems. Enter the Endurus XCR Boa by The North Face. It may not solve a problem that a whole lot of people face, but it’s a real innovation for long distance runners.

In The Perfect Human, Dean Karnazes — a man who ran 50 marathons in 50 days — shares his 12 secrets for success. Among them: Go laceless.

One of the biggest annoyances in long-distance running is lace management. After banging out 50 miles, it can be hard to squat or even bend over long enough to tie your shoes. The North Face recently responded to Karnazes’ complaints and came out with the $130 M Endurus XCR Boa. Its laceless upper is enmeshed in thin steel cables that connect to a tension dial at the back. A simple turn cinches the shoe onto the foot. No more slowing down to fiddle with laces.

I love it. Turn the dial to tighten or loosen the shoes. Neat thinking. And according to The North Face, “This unique closure automatically micro- adjusts with foot movement to eliminate pressure points, kind of like a suspension system.” Further reading about the lacing system if you’re interested.

[via Signal vs. Noise]

The 4D team has released demos for their 4D Web 2.0 Pack.

Ironically the demos are downloadable samples that focus on showing of ajaxian database applications.

The demos available are:

• Vacation Tracker: Losing track of time? This rich application manages your time off. See how little source code is necessary to build a powerful live web application.
• 4D Jukebox: See how you can get a full-featured media player app from 4D on to the web with this implementation of the 4D Ajax Framework. Less than ten lines of code drive this dynamic web application.
• Tech Support: A windows MDI application developed using the 4D Ajax Framework Client. This demo was built to show the power of the 4D Ajax Framework Client Development Environment. No custom code was necessary for the web portion of this demo.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I've been thinking a lot about icon design lately. As a way to get the hang of writing on this site again after the post-WDN lull, I figure it might be interesting to share some of the things I've been discovering. All going well, I've got two or three more similar posts in mind.

One of the more deceptively time-consuming things you'll do when creating an icon is producing out size variations. If you require a single icon in more than one size, the time you spend designing the first size is only about two thirds of the work you'll end up doing; the other third lies in tweaking it for different dimensions.

Aha, you might say — that's what vector graphics are good for. Why not just produce the icon in Illustrator or Fireworks and resize it the quick and painless way? Because vector graphics work best with sufficiently large resolutions; scaling between 20cm and 1m at 300dpi doesn't really require much thought. When designing for the low-res pixel grid, it's a whole different ball game. Vector doesn't scale down to lower resolutions as gracefully as one might wish.

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Need a name for your new web 2.0 company/web app… here is a name generator made to help you out.

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]