Julian's Blogtech

I remember the good old days of 1994. Back when your only choice of developing a web site was doing it by hand. Remember typing HTML codes like <b> and <table> and making it all work? Or, if you didn't know what those meant, you had to pay some developer $100+ an hour to do it for you. Seriously, back then HTML developers were in short supply and building a web site was expensive. The magazine/conference company I worked for, Fawcette Technical Publications, paid more than $100,000 to build its first web site, which was a pretty rudimentary one.

The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008.

Our collective obsession with social-networking sites continued in 2008, as did their search for a viable business model.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to sit down with a designer possessed of a rare talent. We were both part of the same team and he was creating some UI elements that I was to wire up. As I sat there (in awe) watching him work I realized that much of his considerable skill was rooted in fundamentals not unlike the art of programming. Of course, there are design skills that are intuitive that can't be "learned." But, that can also be said of the logical clarity found in a really elegant data model or a brilliant inheritance tree. I am certainly no designer, but I have observed the more creative among us for several years and have gained some insight into their world. In this article I'll share some basic principles that can help raise your design acumen and improve the experience of your users.

2008 was a successful year for us and for Smashing Magazine. Reviewing what has happened on Smashing Magazine over the last year, we could have told a couple of impressive stories that happened here and there, but we won't do that. Instead, we would like to take a rather critical look back and discuss what we've done and what has changed in 2008.

Microsoft has long been worried about Linux competition in the server market. When it came to ordinary PCs and laptops, however, it knew it had little to fear.

But that was then. Now Microsoft may fear Linux on the desktop as much as it does the Mac. It's finally taking Linux seriously as a desktop operating system, and it has designed Windows 7 to kill it.

Though the quest to acquire Yahoo dominated news surrounding Microsoft's Web strategy in 2008, another story was brewing quietly behind the scenes that could be even more significant for the company in the long run -- its move to offer hosted business productivity services.

The company makes much of its revenue from selling software licenses to enterprises. Those customers are starting to see value in using software that's hosted remotely on the Web -- or in "the cloud" -- and less in building out expensive IT systems in-house, which is becoming even more cost-prohibitive now as economies around the world falter.

Todd Pierce recently put his job on the line.

To meet the computing needs of 16,300 employees and contractors at Genentech Inc., Pierce took a chance and decided not to rely entirely on business software from Microsoft, IBM or another long-established supplier that would have let Genentech own the technology. Instead, Pierce decided to rent these indispensable products from Google Inc.

Microsoft is moving forward on two fronts with its MVC (Model View Controller) software development platform for the Web, providing design assistance and readying a release candidate of the technology.

The Microsoft ASP.Net MVC platform enables developers to build MVC applications using the .ASP.Net framework. Serving as an alternative to ASP.Net Web Forms, ASP.Net MVC provides separation of concerns, support for test-driven development, fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript, and intuitive URLs, Microsoft said. ASP.Net is Microsoft's technology for building dynamic Web applications.

Working in IT isn't always pretty -- we can't work on the cutting-edge technologies all the time. Some of us have to get dirty -- in some cases, literally.

Unfortunately, dirty jobs -- whether you're being chained to a help desk, hacking 30-year-old code, finding yourself wedged between warring factions in the conference room, or mucking about in human effluvia -- are necessary to make nearly every organization tick. (Well, maybe not the human effluvia part.)

Deep Earth is a project created at the intersection of Microsoft Virtual Earth, Silverlight 2, and open source. Hosted on the Redmond company's open source repository CodePlex, version 1.0 of Deep Earth is available for download as of December 17, 2008. According to Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth tech evangelist Microsoft Live Search, Deep Earth is a marriage of Virtual Earth and Silverlight UX. The solution is designed to deliver an entirely new level of visualization when it comes down to both maps and geospatial data, courtesy of the DeepZoom capabilities brought to the table by Silverlight.

"DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience."

More evidence that Microsoft and open source are learning to peacefully coexist comes in the form of a developers conference in London, UK InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues points to the Open Source .NET eXchange, an event for .NET developers who use open source.

The agenda includes topics such as "ActiveMQ and NMS," "Fluent NHibernate" and JQuery. Rodrigues, curious about whether the event was Microsoft-driven, says he spoke to Microsoft's Robert Duffner. Though Duffner acknowledged his team knew about the conference, he said the whole thing was more about the .NET community "scratching an itch."

Chances are the mobile phone tucked in your pocket, the lightweight laptop in your backpack, or the navigation system in your car are under a cloud.

That means much of your vital data is not just at your home, at the office or in your wallet, but can easily be accessed by hooking up to the huge memory of the Internet "cloud" with portable devices.

The CIO of Sudler & Hennessey talks about what the right applications for the cloud are -- and concludes that while office apps and databases may fit there, graphics intensive apps do not."There's a lot of buzz about this. Everybody wants to be connected to everything everywhere," said Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp.

Adobe Systems Inc. is facing increasing pressure from Microsoft Corp., which is using its deep pockets to challenge Adobe's dominance of Web design software.

Adobe's Flash software, which adds video and animation to Web sites, is at the heart of many popular Internet destinations. Retailers, media outlets and entertainment sites rely on Flash to make their sites interactive and to serve up advertisements.

Web host 1&1 has launched dedicated servers with Windows Web Server 2008, it was reported recently. The company, recognized as "the world's largest host by known servers", announced that all its dedicated Windows Servers will offer Microsoft's latest operating system and be equipped with a platform that "helps users to install comprehensive web applications with just a few mouse clicks".

Based on Internet Information Services 7 (IIS7), 1&1 explain the new operating system takes a modular approach to web applications and services and is "less vulnerable to external attacks and requires fewer server resources". It also offers a range of administration tools including the graphical IIS manager.

In December we asked few designers to come up with some creative, beautiful, memorable yet usable icon sets. Some designers had a tight schedule and couldn't get work done in time, but three designers agreed and delviered their high-quality Christmas icon sets - right in time before the deadline. In this post we are glad to release three beautiful high-quality Christmas icon sets - you can use them for free without any restrictions whatsoever.

You can use all sets for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

Anyone still questioning the efficacy of social network marketing needs to look only as far as the 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama rode a wave of social media support to the White House-using both established social networks and homegrown networking site My.BarackObama.com to build a database of millions of supporters.

"Sen. Obama's social media activities were not only grassroots, his campaign also advertised on social networks," says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Social Network Marketing: Slow Growth Ahead for Ad Spending.

Microsoft Tuesday said that the release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 is "just around the corner" and urged developers to get ready to test their sites with the new browser.

Elsewhere, the TG Daily technology news site leaked screenshots of what it said was the IE8 Release Candidate (RC), and said the build had been passed to Microsoft's closest partners last week."Developers, start your engines," said Dean Hachamovitch, IE's general manager. "There's now a sense of urgency. That's what 'the release candidate is around the corner' means."

But Hachamovitch declined to get more specific than that about when Microsoft would unveil IE8 RC, which is expected to be the final build shown to users and developers before the browser wraps up sometime in 2009. Last month, Microsoft committed only to a delivering the release candidate during the first three months of next year. Because the release candidate is near, Web developers should be prepping for the changes they'll need to make to accommodate the new browser as more users download and install it, Hachamovitch said.

If you're a professional front end web developer, you care deeply about web standards and professional best practices like semantic markup, unobtrusive JavaScript, and CSS. And you're used to seeing Microsoft's web products painted in a not very flattering light regarding these best practices.

It's practically cliche to see a litany of standards validation errors on a random Microsoft web site; especially ironic on web sites which are intended to sell the Microsoft web platform. And if you've been in this industry for any amount of time, you probably know people who have turned down contracts with clients who demand that the site be developed in ASP.NET or Sharepoint, because of a perception that "it's impossible to use ASP.NET to produce clean, semantic markup".

As we arrive at the last month of yet another year, it's time we revise and reflect on all the goodies this year had to offer. At the same time it's great to practice the tips and lessons learnt for the years to come! We have brought together a series of what we feel are some of the best tutorials of 2008 from around the web.

We're starting off with the most useful graphic design tutorials of the past year. In no particular order, read on to see 33 that have stood out in particular.

We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users' abilities to find and consume content.

Weirdly, though, we haven't been talking about the meat of the matter. We haven't been talking about the content itself.

Yeah, yeah. We know how to write for online readers. We know bullet lists pwn.