8 + 2 = ☺

Okay, I lied. One more for 2007, but only because this is an early Christmas present from Microsoft, and when was the last time you got one of those?

Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2.

For as much crap as I’ve given the IE team over the years, I have to say I’m really happy with the path they’re on after reading this today. Rendering the Acid2 test correctly is a huge leap forward (”IE8 Standards Mode” or not).

Last year, IE7 wasn’t nearly the big expansive update I’d have hoped, but the improvements they made hit all the right notes for me at the time. They seemed genuinely concerned about the problems that made our lives harder, and took steps to correct them. And testing against IE7 has been more good than bad; it’s rare to get something working in Firefox and Safari that blows up in IE7. At most a few glitches here and there have required a bit of fixing, but nothing that has sucked away an entire afternoon like certain other past versions. (Now if they could just make IE6 go away once and for all, then we’d really be on to something…)

Using the past updates as a starting point and extrapolating, I’ve been cautiously optimistic that IE8 would deliver much more of the same. The lack of news hadn’t really been bugging me until I realized a few months ago that, oh yeah, they have been pretty silent lately haven’t they? No doubt last week’s news has something to do with the timing, but today I think we’re seeing the first signs of what I’d been hoping, and the associated video suggests there’s more to be revealed.

Obviously Acid2 is just one test, and there are other technologies that will become more and more relevant in the coming years. HTML5, CSS3, and SVG come to mind. But for the first reveal of what we can expect from the new browser, this is a welcome start.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Year-end

I feel like I’d better pop my head up and break the Web Directions-induced radio silence for the sake of getting at least one more post on here before the end of the year. So this will be a bit of a round-up of what’s been on my radar in the past month, in amongst all the craziness.

Web Directions North

The most frequent question in casual conversation these days: how are registrations? This year it’s going really well. I daresay WDN08 is going to quite a bit bigger than 2007. There’s still a lot — an awful lot — to do before the end of January, but the four of us putting it on are starting to feel the pressure lifting a little which is a nice pre-holiday treat. If you missed it, Digital Web is running their snowboard contest once again, and you have a few more days to get entries in for a shot at free tickets to the conference.

24 Ways

Drew and crew are back for another year of holiday cheer. If you missed it, over the weekend my annual contribution was published: Get in Shape, where I spend some time looking at the role of consistency, balance, and completion in design. Given last year’s colour analysis, you could be forgiven for plotting the next few years’ worth according to fundamental design elements like, ohhhh, say line or texture.

Suits

You’ve likely heard by now that Opera has decided to engage in legal proceedings against Microsoft. The main points seem to resolve to 1) Microsoft is limiting choice, and 2) they’re refusing to implement web standards.

I’ll reserve judgment on point #2 until I see what’s in store for IE8 as the steps forward made by IE7 give me some hope for what lies ahead. (It struck me IE7 was a quick fix to kill the biggest headaches, so I wonder what they’ve done with the year or so they’ve had since shipping.)

As for point #1, haven’t we seen this movie? Keep in mind that Opera is a commercial company. I think their proposed remedy of including pre-installed browsers in Windows is somewhat telling.

Eric Meyer thinks this is a case of very Bad Timing and though I’m not quite as concerned about potential bad reactions, I find myself agreeing.

Stuff and CSS

And in the other corner, Andy Clarke kicked off a dialogue about disbanding the current CSS working group as a consequence of the Opera lawsuit, making the perceived connection more clear in a follow-up post.

Reactions have been swift and passionate both on-site and elsewhere. For my part, I questioned the financing of such a proposal, but that’s far from my only concern. I think Maciej Stachowiak (Apple, WebKit) sums it up best: those of us in the trenches don’t get feature requests from the general web design & development community, but the browser folks do. Far be it for me to claim what I want is the same as what everyone else wants; the community is too diverse. Removing the people who likely have the most insight and do much of the work seems like a less than ideal course of action.

It’s a good discussion to have; there have to be better solutions.

Update: an insightful late-entry essay to add to the heap, The future of web standards.

Zen Mini-update

Back in October I decided to change the submissions process of the css Zen Garden to either yes, you’re in, or no, thanks for trying. The new way didn’t sit well with me, I’d forgotten that I often don’t/can’t include great work for some reason or another. Rejecting them outright was a problem.

So, another quick change to the publishing process, and we’re back to the old way. All designs are published, but the ones that don’t make the cut are put on the Other Designs list (accessible from “All Designs” in the top paragraph of text). While I was at it I decided to use the metadata for the newer ones that have it, so there’s now a country and date listed for each of these.

A big link list may not be as elegant as the previous categorized designs, but it’s sustainable — I still make a yes or no decision, but at least these the ones that don’t make it have a place to go.

Presents. Did I mention there were presents?

And to end on a positive tone, I’d like to share a few sites I’ve been enjoying lately.

I Love Typography popped up a few months ago as a well-designed new type blog. It was an automatic add, but it’s managed to keep me engaged with great material like font creation case studies. Then little while later I noticed Nice Web Type, which hasn’t been updated much yet, but hits all the right buttons in terms of subject matter. One to watch anyway.

Two personal blogs that stood out this year are Ongoing and rc3. Both are written by programmers, both frequently dive into coding minutae I can’t hope to follow, but both also cover much broader subject matter more frequently in literate and well-considered fashion.

And a brand new find (as a result of a link to Web Directions, if I remember correctly) is FAIRspot. Part blog, part gallery, part directory, it’s kind of like CSS Beauty without the CSS part. Lots of great stuff coming through their RSS feed.

---

That’s likely it from me in 2007. It’s been a fairly light year for writing on this site, but that’s just cause I’ve been busy elsewhere. Good problem to have.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

WDN Roundup

So there are a few pieces of WDN news that we wanted to put out there. I’ll make this quick, cause I wouldn’t want you to miss ’em by skipping an overly long post:

• The most urgent news is that our early discount ends Friday November 30th at midnight. As of December 1st, the registration price is our full and final price. If you’re thinking of coming, you might be wise to get in on the discounted price and pocket the difference. (Which is basically an extra day at Whistler…)
• In speaker news, last week we quietly added Douglas Crockford to our lineup. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is a talk you’re not going to want to miss.
• And finally, in sponsor news, both Media Temple and Microsoft are already on board for 2008. You might remember Media Temple’s blowout closing party from last year? Get ready for the sequel. And those of us at Whistler were thrilled to use the Garibaldi Lift Company as a home base and filling station thanks to Microsoft’s great support. We’re doing that again too.

Things are shaping up, we’re almost done adding events and speakers, but stay tuned, there’s even more yet to be announced.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Babble

One of the odd quirks of running a site available in multiple languages is that I receive email in a language other than English from time to time. Not often, but with enough frequency that it’s something I’ve had to think about.

Short of learning the language, there’s no sound way to deal with these messages. Babelfish is notoriously bad for anything beyond simple word translations. But with a bit of effort, and reasonably intelligent parties on both ends of the inbox, it can kinda-sorta work. Here are a couple of quick things I’ve tried doing to help preserve the meaning of my message.

• I use short sentences, and simple English words, avoiding slang entirely. I try not to flex my vocabulary skills or write highly structured prose that requires an English major to decipher. I also used to avoid contractions, but it seems like most translators know how to deal with those, and I’d imagine that purposefully joining two words together could lead to less ambiguity for the translator. (ie. there’s no need to ask “does that ‘not’ belong to ‘is not’ or ‘not mine’”?)

• I run my own words through Babelfish. If any English words remain in the output, I try and re-write to use synonyms instead. This one is particularly frustrating for the person on the other end, because they’d likely turn to Babelfish as well, and I’ve just demonstrated it can’t translate those words. They might be able to figure out my intent in context, but given grammar differences between languages, I wouldn’t rely on it.

  On the other hand, not all languages have their own words for things, and some simply use English words instead. How do I know which is which? I usually don’t.

• Speaking of grammar, without knowing the language I can’t adequately fake its sentence structure. English words fall in a particular order, but that order doesn’t necessarily make sense in other languages. I can get a hint of how different they are by translating my words to the language and then translating that result back to English, which sometimes gives me clues on how to re-phrase my sentence.

  Here are a couple of quick round trips I did from English to Dutch and then back again:

  Yes. You have my permission to use a screenshot of the site.

  Ja. U hebt mijn toestemming om een screenshot van de plaats te gebruiken.

  Yes. You have to my authorisation use screenshot of.

  Yes. I grant permission to use a screenshot of the website.

  Ja. Ik verleen toestemming om een screenshot van de website te gebruiken.

  Yes. I grant authorisation to use screenshot of the Internet site.

  The first time tells me that “you have my” isn’t translating as well as I’d like, and the usage of “site” seems to be problematic. By changing them around, I get a result that seems to make more sense after coming back to English, and one that Faruk tells me is a passable Dutch translation to boot.

  Not to say it will always work that way, but with a bit of extra effort it does seem possible to create sentences that retain your intent.

After all this though, it’s still tempting to consider explicitly stating I used Babelfish for translations to, you know, avoid sparking international incidents.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Detect This

Reason #429 why your browser detection script needs to be trashed.

On Greg’s say-so, I thought I’d check out the Starbucks card designer. Mixing up my morning coffee with creative UI design seemed like a winning combo.

After waiting a couple of seconds through an unskippable Flash intro (who still does this?!), I found the button to “Get Started”.

Except rather than actually doing that, I was stopped dead in my tracks by an error message that my “Browser version does not meet minimum requirements”.

I’m using Camino, which is of course functionally similar to Firefox. If they were testing for features rather than parsing browser strings, I wouldn’t have received this message. So even though it’s entirely likely my browser of choice is capable of treating the site the same as Firefox, they’ve locked me out. No “I know I’m living on the edge, let me continue anyway” link in sight.

Normally when sites do this to me, I can happily live without their service and just go somewhere else. Today I happened to have Safari loaded at the time and I was still curious, so I dumped the URL into the address bar. Another browser, another error message.

Keep in mind that Safari was listed as a supported browser. This error message tells me I don’t have cookies enabled. Except, I do. Suspecting a frame, I viewed source which revealed that the white area is pulling a page from an extrenal site into a frame that presumably runs the card creation app. (Who still does this?!)

The actual issue stems from the fact that Safari allows me to specify if I want to accept cookies with the options “Always”, “Never”, and “Only from sites I navigate to”. The latter is clearly the only sane choice for users who stop to think about it (and for all I know, it could be Safari’s default behaviour). So the framed third-party application was denied cookie access, and clearly they have no fallback position for cookies being disabled. And I was shut out once again.

Okay, so what can we learn from all this? Your browser detection script better not be testing for specific versions of specific browsers, because there are too many out there, and they’ll all (finally) updating rapidly enough that your script will be out of date in months.

If you absolutely 100% cannot launch without some sort of message to users who choose a different browser than you’ve tested in, do not lock them out. Throw up a warning message to cover your bases. I, the crazy non-standard browser user, can take it. But let me proceed anyway. This is literally 5 seconds worth of work, what justification is there for not including a link that will let me do it?

The cookie problem is a bit more complicated to tackle, especially for a third party service provider, but we do know about server-side sessions and APIs now. There are ways around it.

Otherwise, you’re just foiling your copywriter:

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Exporting the iPhone

It’s been a tough few months for those of us on that other 95% of the planet that isn’t inside the borders of the United States. Escaping iPhone news has been next to impossible, with no relief to be found in the form of announced launch dates in any other country.

The good news is that the situation has been changing over the past few months, and having been subjected to continuous scrutiny since the late June launch, it’s mostly a solved problem. This afternoon saw a watershed moment when the first freely available open source iPhone unlock hit the scene.

What this means is that, with the minor exception of the visual voicemail feature, the iPhone’s entire feature set is usable on any compatible carrier, anywhere in the world. (Compatible in this sense meaning GSM and not CDMA networks. In Canada, that means Rogers/Fido. Outside of North America, GSM is fairly common.)

But the methods that enable this are ever-changing, and the general process isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re worried about owning a useless chunk of $400USD plastic, this isn’t for you. If you’re worried about legal formalities, you’d best avoid it. If you have any reservations at all, best stop reading now. That being said, here’s how you too can have your own iPhone, no matter where you are on this planet.

There are basically three steps to follow, each of increasing difficulty.

Buy an iPhone

This part’s easy. You can walk into an Apple Store next time you’re in the US and simply throw down cash and walk out with it, the same way you’d buy an iPod. You don’t need to sign up for service or enter a contract to get it. As far as Apple is concerned, establishing a relationship with AT&T is entirely up to you. (This is how I did it).

Obviously the geography is a factor however, so you may need to pursue the other option. Check craigslist or eBay. With the recent price drop, there are a lot of sellers looking to recoup their losses, so you’re not likely to find many good deals at the moment. Over time the prices will presumably even out a little. But if you can’t make it to the US any time soon, you’ll have to buy through someone else, which means paying at least some markup.

Activate It

Activation is an iPhone-specific concept. A brand new iPhone is pretty but useless — in order to even see the basic menus and included applications, you need to first connect it to AT&T and activate it by attaching it to a contract.

This one’s a bit harder to crack, but again there are some choices. If you have a mailing address in the US (via a sympathetic friend or family member), you can sign up for pay-as-you-go service through AT&T. This basically means a charge to your credit card, and credit toward a US phone number you can use while you’re in the country. Handy if you’re in the country a lot, and it also has the side effect of activating your iPhone. Though, make sure to read the terms of service to find out what you’re getting into.

That’s probably the easiest choice, but there are other methods which completely bypass AT&T. Even if you do it that way, you’re most likely going to need one of the other software methods as backup while unlocking the phone later. There are a bunch of applications and processes out there that will make short work of the activation process. Some are described here, others you might need to do a bit of googling to find. Which one you use depends on your platform and your comfort levels, but I’d recommend doing some research and familiarizing yourself with the latest methods, as things are still changing fairly quickly.

If you stop here, you’ve activated everything except the phone. iPod, Safari, calendar, mail — it all ought to work over wifi at this point. Which is cool enough, sure, but if you want the whole enchilada, you need to keep going.

Unlock It

The standard practice amongst North American wireless carriers is SIM locking consumer phones to their respective networks. In many (most?) other countries this is relatively unheard of, but since the iPhone originates on this continent, it’s relevant to the discussion. Historically, unlocking a SIM locked phone to work with any carrier is usually possible, though it’s not always easy, or even officially-sanctioned by the manufacturer.

Anyway, the iPhone has no official unlock method as of yet. In the past few weeks, some hacks have surfaced that allow unlocking. When I say hacks, I mean hope you like soldering. Then there was the slightly less intrusive TurboSim method which basically became unavailable after they (rapidly) sold out. But what most people have been waiting for is a less invasive software-only unlock method. A service launched early this week that was offering just that, for the low low price of a hundred bucks. But it’s moot now.

The various gadget sites were ablaze with iPhone news this afternoon. It first came out around 4pm my time (GMT -8) that a free software hack was about to be released. Then came the files, and then finally instructions and confirmation from multiple sources that yes indeed, this was the real deal.

Right now, the most current method of unlocking the iPhone involves some pretty serious command line hacking. If you don’t already know what ssh and chmod do, hold off. (If you do, even then you might want to hold off. It does work, but it’s a bit hairy around the minicom part. )

There’s work happening toward a much more automated unlock method that should make the process a snap. Given the speed at which things are happening at the moment, it’ll likely be available within hours of this post. Monitor Engadget or Gizmodo for the latest.

Update: The first automated GUI version is out now. In order to use it you’ll need to accomplish a jailbreak, install BSD subsystem and SFTP (I did so using Installer.app), and SFTP into the phone from a computer. Still not exactly plug and play, but if you’re determined and knowledgeable (or know someone who is) this ought to be a lot easier than the command line scripts I used last night.

Update #2: owing to my reluctance to do anything on the Edge network I hadn’t actually tried using wireless data until this morning. Turns out there’s an extra step to get that working, which should be easy if you’ve made it this far. You need to go into Settings > General > Network > EDGE and replace the Cingular/AT&T information with that of your local carrier. You’ll need to look up those settings, but in Canada you can find them here.

It’s been over two months in the coming, but as of tonight I now have an iPhone that works on Rogers Wireless, my local carrier. And theoretically when I travel, I’m also able to buy a prepaid SIM card and swap it out to cut down on roaming rates.

There are a few gotchas you ought to be aware of before attempting. The biggest concern is, what next? Will Apple attempt to re-lock the phone in the next software update? No one knows. If you’re the optimistic sort you could read into this recent statement by an Apple marketing person as leaning toward laissez-faire unlock management from the company (though it’s already been clarified…) They do make money no matter where the phones were bought after all, it’s only AT&T that’s missing out on most of the recurring revenue. Who knows how it will play out though. I’m going to wait-and-see as new versions of the firmware are released before upgrading so I don’t break anything. The good news is that the development community is super active, so I’m betting that no matter what screwballs get sent out from Cupertino, there will be a workaround sooner or later.

Update #3: More and more is becoming clear about how the unlocks and future firmware updates will interact. See the newer post iPhone + Icons for more detail.

There are also reports that some people have lost the YouTube app as a result of the unlock. That problem appears to be addressed already (see Update 2), but I didn’t experience it myself, so it’s sporadic anyway.

If you’re an American iPhone owner, you probably still remember what June 29th felt like. To a lesser degree, that was what today felt like for the rest of the world.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Chalkwork Update

There’s a whooole lot of new stuff to see in the Icon section of this site. I released my initial set, Chalkwork Basic, earlier in the year with the intention of continuing the family at some point. And today it does, with a new set specifically designed with content and information management systems in mind. It’s called (creatively enough) Chalkwork Information Management.

I didn’t stop there though. The more I’m doing this, the more tricks I’m picking up along the way. I went back to the first set and gave some of the original icons a visual refresh. Subtle things that you probably won’t notice unless you have them side by side, but updates that bring the styling of the old set a little more in line with the new one, along with a couple new icons to boot.

Even then, I still wasn’t content to let it rest. Oh no, there’s more. I’ve noticed that it’s common for other icon sets to include minor variations such as “add” and “remove” actions as full-fledged icons within the set. I’m doing things a little differently. For select icons — roughly half of each set — a series of 5 actions is also provided: Add, Remove, Edit, Secure, Sync/Share. Every icon that receives one of these actions receives all five. There’s almost no editorial discretion over which might be more useful than others, just a huge dump of icon variations that are there if you need them.

To give you an idea of how many icons we’re talking about here, Chalkwork Basic originally had 70. Now there are 10 times as many. I count 177 base icons in the Chalkwork family, with an additional staggering 520 variations. All 697 are available in 3 different sizes. And 6 file formats. Yes that was a lot of work. Yes that post gushing about IconBuilder happened for a reason.

If you bought a copy of Chalkwork Basic prior to yesterday, please get in touch for a complimentary upgrade to the new version of the set. Everyone else, go check out the new icony goodness.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

iPhone + Icons

Given that the last two posts around here were about the iPhone and icons, you knew what was coming next, didn’t you? The latest member of the Chalkwork family is a mini-set of 16 icons built specifically for the iPhone UI. Once installed, your iPhone looks like this. Oh, and did I mention they’re free?

Installation is a little tricky. You need to have AppTapp Installer and an FTP program. It’s a bit of manual file replacement, but nothing the audience of this site can’t handle. Full detailed instructions are included in the ZIP file along with the icons.

During the creation of this set, I was looking at Apple’s default icons closer than I previously had. They seem to be making a half-hearted attempt to use colour as an indication of the phone’s functions. Blue signifies an application that uses wireless data; Mail, Safari, Stocks, and Weather. Green means an application that uses mobile phone-specific features; Phone and Text. Orange is audio and video; iPod and possibly YouTube. And photo-realism means the icon either doesn’t do any of those, or isn’t categorized as doing just one.

It’s inconsistent enough that it obviously isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it also seems a bit too deliberate to be random chance. Just an interesting observation, and I decided not to follow it too closely, but I did make a few token efforts with the SMS and Phone icons in particular.

So, two questions are bound to come up. First, why not make these a SummerBoard theme? (Update: done! Read the addendum below.) Maybe one day. As near as I can tell though, today there’s very little way to provide credit to the designer of a theme. Right now it comes in the form of the theme’s name, “Chalkwork”, and the short text description accompanying it (which appears to be simply “made by X”). Given the growing list of themes already available, that’s just enough to ensure each individual one gets lost in the crowd. I’d prefer a way to grab the package directly from this site, which would obviously have the added benefit of more exposure for the rest of the Chalkwork family. I don’t think that’s so unreasonable. I’ll keep on eye on how Summerboard themes develop, and if a method of putting more emphasis on the designer emerges, I’ll give it a go.

And the biggie, what problems does all this custom iPhone hacking get you into? There are two separate issues here: installing custom software or hacking the phone in any way (which this icon set and the instructions to get it on your phone fall under), and actually unlocking the iPhone. With the former, you essentially void your warranty… if Apple catches you doing it. You may be able to get away with it if you’re able to restore your phone to factory state before bringing it in for service. But it’s a risk you need to be aware of if you do anything to your iPhone beyond officially Apple-approved interaction.

And for those who are interested in the separate issue of unlocking for use on a carrier other than AT&T, here’s a mini follow-up to my past post on the issue. Emerging news suggests that the firmware update coming later this week will cause serious problems for unlocked phones. Now to be fair, it seems as if it’s more of a by-product of what the update will do, rather than proactive unlock retaliation from Apple.

The iPhone dev team who created the unlock in the first place is on it, they’re promising a way to re-lock the phone shortly, followed by a post-update re-unlock. The long and the short of it is, don’t update your firmware when the new release comes out, give it a week or two, and watch what the iPhone dev team does to make sure you don’t end up with a useless iPhone. Which is just repeating what I said in the previous post.

Update: Thanks to a nudge from Thomas Finley who packaged one up for me, I realized it’s stupidly easy to create a SummerBoard theme after all, and so v1.01 now comes with a package you can drop into your SummerBoard themes directory. Still not as nice as tapping your way to a theme directly from the iPhone, but my concerns about proper credit remain. Bonus: now comes with a dock graphic and (quickly whipped together not very inspired) wallpaper. Look for another update that smoothes these over a little more.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

WDN in 2008

Aside from icons and iPhones, what’s been keeping me busy lately? Well you may remember, around this time last year we announced the first web conference in Vancouver.

And what a conference it was. 2 days packed with incredible speakers, great parties thanks to our sponsors Adobe, Media Temple, and Microsoft, and a pair of amazing days boarding (and skiing) up at Whistler.

So… are we doing it again?

We’d be crazy not to, wouldn’t we? We’re still working hard at finalizing a few more details, but you can get a good taste of what’s coming up at the end of January at our re-launched Web Directions North site.

I’m really thrilled by some of the speakers we’ve arranged for January; Indi Young’s going to be talking about User Experience, and we’ll have some copies of her brand new book Mental Models, the very first out of Rosenfeld Media. Josh Williams is coming up to talk about his experiences running a design business, and how the nature of doing so has changed for him. Kimberly Elam is covering traditional design techniques and how they relate to the web, you may have three or four of her books on your shelf already. We’re honoured to have Jeffrey Zeldman’s opening the conference, and Matt Webb closing it. And there are many more I haven’t mentioned, go take a look.

Registration is open now, too. It’s a good time to get in at our best rate of $795 — the savings are like another full day at Whistler. Don’t wait.

Update: forgot to mention, we just launched the revamped WDN affiliates program, which in addition to earning you a free ticket, could also earn you an expenses-paid trip to Vancouver in January. Airfare, hotel, conference ticket all at no cost. Probably a smart idea to sign up as an affiliate… like, now.

(photo courtesy Media Temple)

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Moving Along

What’s up the the css Zen Garden? So reads the plethora of messages I get when the server goes down for a day. But lately I’m getting email of similar subject matter for a different reason: there haven’t been any updates for a long, long time.

Through 2006, publishing slowed down as my attention went elsewhere. Then I redesigned mezzoblue late last year. The Zen Garden support pages continued to live on this site (for historical reasons, explained here if you really want to know why), but under the old template. Due to the way I built the publishing system, moving those pages to the new template would have required some sleeves-rolled-to-the-elbow tinkering and a free month. That, as they say, didn’t happen.

Submissions continued to roll in to a frustrating backlog, guilt accumulated, and 2007 progressed. It would be a shame to kill the thing, so I didn’t, but I also haven’t been able to deal with the increasingly messy situation. Until now. You may have noticed a long-dormant RSS feed show signs of life this morning. Two new designs have been posted, both submitted some time in March, 2006. And I’ve started cracking away at the backlog, with more on the way.

What changed? I made things easier for myself. When I built the Zen Garden publishing system a few years ago, I created the capability to categorize designs by many different criteria; sounded like a good idea for the sake of the archives, but the time investment to do so wasn’t really something I carefully considered. Sure, evaluating a single design takes all of 2 minutes, but when I get 30 at once from a whole class somewhere in Tennessee, it adds up.

That actually hints at the bigger issue. When I first started this thing almost 5(!) years ago, the ratio of quality designs to those I didn’t think were strong enough to publish was pretty high, maybe 1 to 3. It’s always been about quality over quantity to me; strong and/or clever design work was added as an “Official Design”, everything else went to the “All Designs” list. I maintained that second list so I could publish everyone who contributed, something that’s always been important to me. But it’s also the root of the problem; submission quality has fantailed, and these days that ratio is looking more like 1 to 30. It’s great there’s so much enthusiasm still, after all this time, so many years later, but it just didn’t scale.

So. The big change: it’s now yes or no. You either get published or you don’t. The archive contains only what were formerly known as Official Designs. The rest, sorry, thanks for trying, keep submitting ideas if you like. (The previous All Designs is available as a historical archive, complete with old site design.) Yeah, I know it’s not ideal, and not everyone will be a fan of the new system. I’m not big on it myself. But it’s the only way the site will continue to be maintained, so it is what it is.

By making it a binary decision, I can actually reasonably hope to clear up the backlog and start processing new ones. I’m going to work at it from both ends; new stuff and old stuff alike will be published, regardless of original submission date, so if you have something to send in (or re-submit), please do.

And, one final question to address: why bother? The css Zen Garden had a good run, does it really need to keep going now, in 2007? I addressed this once upon a time (see “Is it still relevant?”), but here’s why I’m doing this: there are hundreds and hundreds of designs in the submission queue. New ones keep coming in almost every day. People ask me all the time when I’m going to update it next. After all this time, there’s still interest.

To many, the site long ago accomplished its original purpose. But others are stumbling across it for the first time, even now. They’re getting excited, and creating submissions of their own. Some of those are great, and I think great design ought to have an audience. So those are the ones I want to keep publishing.

Original post by Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

moourl.com

Cuter and less politically shady than tinyurl. This will be my choice in the future.

Original post by johan.bakken

The New(er) Typography

Counterless, Bold and mostly Geometric

Original post by johan.bakken

the human calendar®

Truly beautiful, funny and with a lot of details.

Original post by johan.bakken

Flickr Uploadr 3.0

It’s finally finished!

Original post by johan.bakken

Stats, stats, baby!

Flickr introduces stats for pro users.

Original post by johan.bakken

Rhys Davelaar’s take on Styleboost

This is one ugly copy of the Styleboost design. Luckily he sends out a big thank you to gab.net.

Original post by johan.bakken

Johan Bakken’s tumblr

My "blog" is live. Thanks to Tumblr and my numerous webapp accounts. Perhaps this will turn into something useful some day.

Original post by johan.bakken

Flickr Uploadr 3.0

It’s finally finished!

Original post by johan.bakken

Stats, stats, baby!

Flickr introduces stats for pro users.

Original post by johan.bakken

Rhys Davelaar’s take on Styleboost

This is one ugly copy of the Styleboost design. Luckily he sends out a big thank you to gab.net.

Original post by johan.bakken

Johan Bakken’s tumblr

My "blog" is live. Thanks to Tumblr and my numerous webapp accounts. Perhaps this will turn into something useful some day.

Original post by johan.bakken

Finally, a battery cover for the PSP-2000 - PSP Fanboy

Original post by johan.bakken

Opera Mini 4 released

Hooray for Opera Mini 4 final!

Original post by johan.bakken

Drop.io

Beautifully simple private storage & sharing.

Original post by johan.bakken

Hide/Show desktop icons

Original post by johan.bakken

North American Man/Boy Love Association - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Original post by johan.bakken

Bullet Points: 8 Halloween Costumes Sure To Piss Everyone Off

Original post by johan.bakken

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Distraction Stoppers

Original post by johan.bakken

YouTube - Bo i grenland

Original post by johan.bakken

Coffee Diagram Follow-up | Lokesh Dhakar

Original post by johan.bakken

moourl.com

Cuter and less politically shady than tinyurl. This will be my choice in the future.

Original post by johan.bakken

The New(er) Typography

Counterless, Bold and mostly Geometric

Original post by johan.bakken

the human calendar®

Truly beautiful, funny and with a lot of details.

Original post by johan.bakken

Flickr Uploadr 3.0

It’s finally finished!

Original post by johan.bakken

Stats, stats, baby!

Flickr introduces stats for pro users.

Original post by johan.bakken

Rhys Davelaar’s take on Styleboost

This is one ugly copy of the Styleboost design. Luckily he sends out a big thank you to gab.net.

Original post by johan.bakken

Johan Bakken’s tumblr

My "blog" is live. Thanks to Tumblr and my numerous webapp accounts. Perhaps this will turn into something useful some day.

Original post by johan.bakken

Finally, a battery cover for the PSP-2000 - PSP Fanboy

Original post by johan.bakken

Opera Mini 4 released

Hooray for Opera Mini 4 final!

Original post by johan.bakken

Drop.io

Beautifully simple private storage & sharing.

Original post by johan.bakken

Hide/Show desktop icons

Original post by johan.bakken

North American Man/Boy Love Association - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Original post by johan.bakken

Bullet Points: 8 Halloween Costumes Sure To Piss Everyone Off

Original post by johan.bakken

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Distraction Stoppers

Original post by johan.bakken

YouTube - Bo i grenland

Original post by johan.bakken

Coffee Diagram Follow-up | Lokesh Dhakar

Original post by johan.bakken

moourl.com

Cuter and less politically shady than tinyurl. This will be my choice in the future.

Original post by johan.bakken

The New(er) Typography

Counterless, Bold and mostly Geometric

Original post by johan.bakken

the human calendar®

Truly beautiful, funny and with a lot of details.

Original post by johan.bakken

Flickr Uploadr 3.0

It’s finally finished!

Original post by johan.bakken

Stats, stats, baby!

Flickr introduces stats for pro users.

Original post by johan.bakken

Rhys Davelaar’s take on Styleboost