A project attempting to port the MESS emulation framework to JavaScript. This is noble work.

Guess who doesn’t have to watch these warnings? Pirates. ICE is essentially penalizing people who already pay money for DVDs and Blu-Ray by making them watch two stupid videos before they can watch their legally-obtained DVDs. Pathetic.

Don Hodges fixes Dig Dug’s kill screen. Either you’re interested in someone fixing a 20+ year-old video game’s biggest bug, or you aren’t.

Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera are none too happy about Webkit’s prefixes becoming a sort of organic standard, especially on mobile:

Opera, along with Microsoft and Mozilla, announced at a CSS Working Group meeting that we would support some WebKit prefixes. This is because too many authors of mobile sites only use the WebKit-prefixed version, and not even the standard, unprefixed one, when it is available. This leads to a reduced user experience on Opera, Mobile Firefox and Mobile IE, which don’t receive the same shiny effects, such as transitions, gradients and the like, even if the browser supports those effects.

The problem to me seems to be one of education and tools. Authors don’t use -o prefix because they either don’t know about it, or they don’t have a significant Opera user base. Ditto the other browsers. iOS is king of the castle on mobile, and that means Safari, and that means WebKit.

PNGPress, my PNG image compressor for Mac OS X, is available on the Mac App Store worldwide.

Good developers know that making images for the web is a constant battle between quality and file size. Great developers use PNGPress.

Try it and see for yourself. Here are some promo codes:

WHW94KHHE6A4 TNEMH4JKHP3M HXJEMTHHPLHW 3XFE7AWMYJMX 6ALNJWWWYJJ4

Good news on this Tuesday morning:

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

Software patents are a menace, but it’s understandable for companies to hoard them when the cost for not doing so could take down their entire business. This sounds like a pretty reasonable solution. For now.

Kid gloves are off, and I’m with Clark:

For all of Jakob Nielsen’s many great contributions to web usability over the years, his advice for mobile is just 180-degrees backward. His latest guidelines perpetuate several stubborn mobile myths that have led too many to create ‘lite’ mobile experiences that patronise users, undermine business goals, and soak up design and tech resources.

There are no mobile browsers, just browsers. Handicapping your site on “mobile” is a good way to bug your users and make your site less useful to them.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

I’m a complete sucker for Vonnegut.

At SXSW this year, I asked four people to comment on the New Aesthetic, which if you don’t know is an investigation / project / tumblr looking at technologically-enabled novelty in the world.

Consider it a companion / primer to the Bruce Sterling essay linked here previously.

I’ve spent an embarrassingly large portion of this week parsing Bruce’s 5000-word ramblerant on The New Aesthetic. Consider it required reading for anyone who makes or designs.

Personal favorite: DR. DOOMSDAY AND HIS NUCLEAR WISEMEN, which sounds a lot like a Warren Ellis story.

A working and feature-rich command-line interface for Amazon S3 and EC2. Pretty cool. via @joshu

A collection / demo of the “best” typefaces from Google’s web font directory. Well-curated and paired nicely. This is a great resource.

The image-set() function, which was submitted to the css4-images public mailing list earlier this year.

An HTML5-based massively multiplayer game using WebSockets. I’ve been wishing for something like this to exist for years now.

Authentic Jobs is adding a user-viewable metric for the response rates of potential employers. I love these guys.

A new iOS app from Adobe which helps you test websites you are developing locally on your mobile devices more easily. Currently free in the App Store.

Community is my favorite show on TV right now not titled “Archer” or “The Venture Bros.” and despite how little I care about ratings, it’s good to see the hard (and great) work of the cast & crew rewarded in the ratings.

Ruminations on what a product is and how to think about it. Lots of fairly big thoughts, here, and I like it.

Easy to use, and v2 can be implemented in ANY PHP application, not just CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter as a platform just keeps getting better.