onfocus

Hey neat! James Taylor has some highly produced guitar lessons he's putting on YouTube. [via scottandrew]

"As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us. But our engineering strength is also our social weakness." uhoh, I'm guilty of this sometimes. [via mathowie]

A nice modal window kit for Prototype.

"Amplify's goal is to simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified API for various data sources." Looks like a write-once way to handle client side storage.

Filed for use: "...ultimate guide to 37 download resources for hundreds of [mobile] emulators and simulators."

Nice collection of the way popular iPhone applications have approached splash screens, user profiles, lists, etc.

"That's what the beer commercials are going after--the enthusiastic desperation of the underage drinker."

Interesting changes for ColdFusion within Adobe. CF development has been separated from Platform (ie. Flash) development.

Some strategies for dealing with persistant URLs, Ajax state changes, and the back button.

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

This is a good CBC show about advertising and they recently added an official podcast link.

Write an HTML5/JavaScript app and PhoneGap will turn it into a native app for various mobile devices including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Still in Alpha, but this looks like a great way to speed-up mobile site development. The form elements demo is impressive.

Another JavaScript charting library.

JavaScript visualization library.

"...none other than Corvallis stands out as the top city in the country for innovation — after you account for its size. New York is merely average." Some theoretical physicists are looking at new ways to measure the creative output of cities.

Awesome vintage terminal emulator with a hilarious incentive to purchase. [via waxy]

And apparently the Web is for complaining. [via seanyboy]

Some auto-generated ebooks based on top Stack Overflow questions in various categories.

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

Matt Cutts: "...we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Nice to see Google responding to the recent flood of criticism.

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.