The spring 2012 Field Notes release is so effortlessly charming that it feels something like Field Notes coming full circle. Draplin has always been fascinated by the working-man no-BS design of old farming equipment, manuals, and almanacs. Now Field Notes is paying a more direct homage to that influence.

In a post full of quote worthy paragraphs, he makes the case for bigger type, layouts that don’t train users to ignore ads, and what it used to mean to have a “personal site.”

I like it. It’s very Zeldman, but more than that, it’s interesting.

Sounds like good sense to me. Shame that TED is too spineless to make it available:

We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So here’s an idea worth spreading.

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Another big privacy / security win for Twitter. They’re using a new feature in Firefox called, appropriately, “Do Not Track“:

Do Not Track is a step toward putting you in control of the way your information is collected and used online. Do Not Track is a feature in Firefox that allows you to let a website know you would like to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes including behavioral advertising. It does this by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header every time your data is requested from the Web.

Can anyone even imagine Facebook doing this? I hope this finds its way into WebKit. “Do Not Track” is also available as an option in Safari 5.2, which is available to developers right now. (thanks, Jesper)

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.