| 4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover Mar 28th 2013, 23:59 SternisheFan points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     |  | Festo's Drone Dragonfly Takes To the Air Mar 28th 2013, 23:15 yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode Mar 28th 2013, 22:32 Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox Mar 28th 2013, 21:52 MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices With Explicit Warrants Mar 28th 2013, 21:11 Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants Mar 28th 2013, 21:11 Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks Mar 28th 2013, 20:29 msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents Mar 28th 2013, 19:50 sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? Mar 28th 2013, 19:07 ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | When Your Data Absolutely, Positively has to be Destroyed (Video) Mar 28th 2013, 18:31 Here's a corporate motto for you: "Destroying data since 1959." Timothy ran into a company called Garner Products (which doesn't use that motto as far as we know), at a security conference. While most exhibitors were busily preserving or encrypting data one way or another, Garner was not only destroying data but delighting in it. And yes, they've really been doing this since 1959; they started out degaussing broadcast cartridges so broadcasters could re-use them without worrying about old cue tones creeping into new recordings. Now, you might ask, "Instead of spending $9,000 or more to render hard drives useless, couldn't you just use a $24 sledge hammer? And have the fun of destroying something physical as a free bonus?" Yes, you could. You'd get healthy exercise as well, and if you only wanted to destroy the data on the hard drives, so what? New drives are cheap these days. But some government agencies and financial institutions require degaussing before the physical destruction (and Garner has machines that do physical destruction, too -- which is how they deal with SSDs). Garner Products President Ron Stofan says in the interview that their destruction process is more certain than shooting a hard drive with a .45. But neither he nor Tim demonstrated a shooting vs. degaussing test for us, so we remain skeptical. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Razer Edge Gaming Tablet Reviewed Mar 28th 2013, 17:50 adeelarshad82 writes "After being tweaked and polished for months with the help of feedback from pro gamers and enthusiasts alike, Razer's Project Fiona has finally come of age. Re-named as Razer Edge Pro, this gaming tablet is way more than a mere plaything. Razer Edge Pro is a beast which packs a dual-core Intel Core i7-3517U Ivy Bridge processor with 8GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE graphics card with 2GB of dedicated memory. All this in a small 7 by 11 by 0.8 inches wide frame which weighs only 2.14 pounds. Comparing the Razer Edge to anything else is tough, considering that it doesn't necessarily have a true competitor. However in a series of performance comparisons with other powerful tablets and ultraportable gaming laptops, Razer Edge performed better than the tablets but wasn't at par with ultraportable gaming laptops. For instance when comparing scores from 3DMark 11, the Edge Pro scored 2,503 points at entry settings and 504 points in extreme mode putting it ahead of both competing tablets, the Microsoft Surface Pro (1,055 Entry, 206 Extreme) and Samsung ATIV SmartPC (1,044 Entry, couldn't run at Extreme mode), but behind the gaming-focused laptops, like the the Maingear Pulse 11 (3,868 Entry, 724 Extreme) and the Razer Blade (3,458 Entry, 716 Extreme). What's baffling is that with all accessories incuded (gamepad dock and the console dock) the final price of the tablet is a cool $1,870, which most expensive than not only the two tablets tested but also the two gaming gaming laptops compared. It remains to be seen whether the Razer Edge Pro is something special or just on the edge of it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Interviews: James Randi Answers Your Questions Mar 28th 2013, 17:12 A while ago you had the chance to ask James Randi, the founder of The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), about exposing hucksters, frauds, and fakers. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. In addition to his writings below, Randi was nice enough to sit down and talk to us about his life and his foundation. Keep an eye out for those videos coming soon. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | The Man Who Sold Shares of Himself Mar 28th 2013, 16:36 RougeFemme writes "This is a fascinating story about a man who sold shares in himself, primarily to fund his start-up ideas. He ran into the same issues that companies run into when taking on corporate funding — except that in his case, the decisions made by his shareholders bled over into his personal life. This incuded his relationship with his now ex-girlfriend, who became a shareholder activist over the issue of whether or not he should have a vasectomy. The experiment continues." The perils of selling yourself to your friends. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | The FreeBSD Foundation Is Soliciting Project Proposals Mar 28th 2013, 16:04 Professor_Quail writes "Following a successful 2012 fundraising campaign, the FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project proposals for funded development grants. Proposals may be related to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system, and will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit, and cost-effectiveness. The proposal process is open to all developers (including non-FreeBSD committers), and the deadline for submitting a proposal is April 26th, 2013." The foundation is currently funding a few other projects, including UEFI booting support. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Uniloc Patent Case Against Rackspace Tossed for Bogus Patents Mar 28th 2013, 15:37 netbuzz writes "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for [Linux] allegedly infringing upon [Uniloc's] patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: 'In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.'" You can't patent floating point math after all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You Mar 28th 2013, 14:56 moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Il male incancrenito del "sistema" Italia Mar 28th 2013, 14:19 C’è qualcosa di profondamente ingiusto e sbagliato nel “sistema” Italia. Qualcosa di malato, incancrenito e incurabile. Franco Fiorito, alias “er Batman”, accusato di aver sottratto 1 milione e 400 mila euro di rimborsi elettorali per scopi personali, dal 27 dicembre scorso agli arresti domiciliari, è stato rilasciato oggi con un’ordinanza del GIP Rosalba Liso. Quel milione e 400 mila euro, finito nei conti correnti personali dell’ex capogruppo PdL alla regione Lazio e scialacquato per folli spese personali, proveniva dai fondi del finanziamento pubblico ai partiti. Soldi che paghiamo noi cittadini tramite le tasse. Fiorito, inutile sforzarsi nel trovare parole politicalmente corrette, li ha rubati allo Stato. Uno sperpero becero e puro di denaro pubblico. Il risultato? Nessuno. E’ libero. Mi viene il ribrezzo. Soprattutto se penso a quei piccoli imprenditori che lavorano onestamente, strozzati dalla crisi, esposti a ingenti somme debitorie verso gli istituti di credito, che vengono invece trattati come criminali. Sottoposti a un vero e proprio stalking continuo da parte delle banche e dei fornitori verso cui vantano uno scoperto. Telefonate a ogni ora del giorno, vere e proprie minacce di pignoramento di ogni bene, il calvario di dover sostenere interminabili procedimenti legali civili e penali. Destinati a sopportare, oltre che alla disperazione per aver perso tutto, anche l’infamia. Poi penso a gente come Fiorito. Intoccabile. Impunita. Che spendono sorrisi disgustosi a beneficio delle telecamere con l’atteggimaneto tipico di chi sa di essere al di sopra di tutto. Ecco. C’è qualcosa di ingiusto e sbagliato in tutto questo. Qualcosa che mi fa vergognare profondamente di quest’Italia.  | | Sony Reveals More PS4 and Dual Shock 4 Details Mar 28th 2013, 14:13 Yesterday, Sony gave a presentation explaining a bit about the new PS4 hardware, the development environment (Windows 7 based IDE), and the changes to the Dual Shock controller. From the article: "The system is also set up to run graphics and computational code synchronously, without suspending one to run the other. Norden says that Sony has worked to carefully balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough room for computational tasks. The GPU will also be able to run arbitrary code, allowing developers to run hundreds or thousands of parallelized tasks with full access to the system's 8GB of unified memory. ... The DualShock 4 controller that's standard on the PS4 eliminates one feature that was seldom used on the PS3 —the analog face buttons..." The trackpad will support two touch points, the rumble motors can be controlled more finely, and the analog sticks were tweaked for "reduced dead zone and better feeling tension that grips your thumbs." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Lawsuit Could Expose Whether Top VC Firms Are Actually Good Investments Mar 28th 2013, 13:31 curtwoodward writes "Venture capitalists like to project the image of wise kingmaker, financial alchemists who have a unique gift for spotting the Next Big Thing. They do not like having anyone see data about their performance, which has been generally lackluster over the past decade. This can be a problem, however, when VCs cash big checks from investors at public pension funds — taking taxpayer money sometimes comes with public disclosure. That's the crux of a court fight happening in California, where the state's massive university system is resisting attempts by the Reuters news organization to decode a complex shell game intended to hide the return data of two giants of Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Sony Reveals More Details On PS4 and Dual Shock 4 Features Mar 28th 2013, 13:13 Yesterday, Sony gave a presentation explaining a bit about the new PS4 hardware, the development environment (Windows 7 based IDE), and the changes to the Dual Shock controller. From the article: "The system is also set up to run graphics and computational code synchronously, without suspending one to run the other. Norden says that Sony has worked to carefully balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough room for computational tasks. The GPU will also be able to run arbitrary code, allowing developers to run hundreds or thousands of parallelized tasks with full access to the system's 8GB of unified memory. ... The DualShock 4 controller that's standard on the PS4 eliminates one feature that was seldom used on the PS3 —the analog face buttons..." The trackpad will support two touch points, the rumble motors can be controlled more finely, and the analog sticks were tweaked for "reduced dead zone and better feeling tension that grips your thumbs." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | $35 Indian Tablet Has Until March 31st To Ship or Be Cancelled Mar 28th 2013, 12:48 damitr writes "With a lot of fanfare the Indian Government had launched a $35 tablet named Aakash (The Sky). Despite skepticism, the government went ahead with the project. But delays in production and deployment of the tablet have left the project in risk of failure. The manufacturer has been unable to supply the required 100,000 units, and a deadline of March 31has been set. The new minister Pallam Raju says: 'Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem.'" For what it's worth, they did manage to ship 17,000 of them. It looks like meeting the deadline is impossible and the $35 tablet is dead. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | MySQL's Creator On Why the Future Belongs To MariaDB Mar 28th 2013, 12:06 angry tapir writes "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware). I recently interviewed Monty about what he learned from the MySQL experience and the current state of MariaDB." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Making Your Site Responsive: Mastering Real-World Constraints (A Case Study) Mar 28th 2013, 11:54 As UI designers, we're always interested in learning, reading user research, understanding best practices and keeping up to date on all the latest approaches and tactics for building websites and applications. One of the most exciting concepts we've started to apply to our thinking is the mobile-first approach, famously pioneered by designer Luke Wroblewski on his blog and then in his subsequent book. Generally, this approach provides a healthy way to gain focus, cut the fat and get to the heart of what's important — for both content and interaction. But what happens if you have an existing site or app that was built for desktop without a responsive or mobile strategy in mind? And more specifically, what if you, like us, don’t have the resources, time, or budget to start over from scratch in the near term? Despite being a design shop, we at Fresh Tilled Soil found ourselves in this very position. This is how we addressed it. The Challenge As a Web and mobile app UI design firm, we couldn’t very well ignore the problem for much longer and let prospective clients pinch, zoom, and squint on their phones to assess whether we were the right agency for them — particularly when we offer mobile Web and native app design services! So what to do? A design firm offering mobile and responsive design solutions should certainly practice what it preaches – especially with the data showing an increasing number of visitors accessing our site from their smartphones. Because we wanted to share the same information regardless of device type and maintain a single codebase, a responsive approach was the best solution. Though our resources were limited, we were fortunate enough to have several team members with a limited window of upcoming availability. We quickly assembled a small team with the goal of rapidly making our entire website truly responsive (though keeping a particular eye on our iPhone and Android users). Based on our analytics reports, these devices were by far the most popular among viewers of our site. Our research showed us that 51% of mobile visits were on iPhones, 40% were on iPads and the remaining 9% was broken up between various Android smartphones and tablets. However, we felt that a truly responsive solution where each of our layouts was fluid made for a better solution than just targeting specific devices. How To Begin - Identify Key Layouts to Address
As a group, we discussed what mattered most from a prospective client's point of view, then identified which layouts would need custom design and which could be handled directly in the code. - Focus On Screen Size Beyond Just Specific Devices
Once the custom layouts were designed and coded, we identified organic breakpoints between mobile and desktop for further refinement. - Account For New Device Capabilities
We updated graphics to support the higher resolution associated with retina displays. - Design and Code in Parallel
While the designers got to work on the custom layouts, developers began adapting the website to small screens, converting fixed widths to percentage-based. A designer and developer then worked side-by-side to further refine the typography, navigation and layouts in code, making improvements in real time. Our Process In Action 1. Streamline the Navigation Consider the limited real estate of a mobile screen and examine ways to simplify layouts. In designing for the mobile experience, the first decision we made was to simplify the navigation to a series of icons that represented each of the sections. We removed the large background image of our handsome CEO, Richard Banfield, and focused on making it easy to see the positioning statement and start any of the videos. 2. Identify Device-specific Use Cases Think about what visitors want most from your mobile website and consider how to make it easy for them to access. We thought it was important for clients who were visiting us for the first time to be able to easily contact us or access a map to our location. By envisioning this from the user's perspective, we decided this content was important enough to be in a prominent location on mobile devices. Simply showing this section when the device screen width implied a mobile resolution and setting it to not display on larger screens was enough to do the trick. 
Contact information and directions were made more prominent in the layout for small screens, to assist clients who are visiting for the first time.
3. Simplify Existing Functionality Make sure your interactions work smoothly on smaller screens and retain their context. The portfolio section was simplified on smaller devices to only showcase six projects, and the portfolio detail images now appear above the thumbnails rather than over them to keep the context of the portfolio section. 
Interactions were simplified to make sure they would work smoothly on smaller screens.
4. Rethink Potentially Awkward Interactions If something requires a custom design approach, invest the time to truly optimize it. Some UI choices that make great sense on a desktop simply fall flat on a mobile screen. On the desktop version of our website, the team bios slide into view above a grid of team members, with each person's details appearing to the left of a larger head shot. Knowing that these biography layouts would probably have to anchor and jump much higher than the grid and would then require quite a bit of scrolling to read the bio, we came up with an altered design treatment that resembles a modal overlay. 
UI approaches that didn’t work well on small screens were given a different design treatment.
It was important to identify that the team section would need custom design early in the process so we could get started designing, testing and iterating. We used a div that slides up from the bottom of the page, covering about 90% of it. The bios were then shortened in length so that each bio could be presented without scrolling in both the portrait and landscape orientations on our target devices. 5. Use Tried-and-true Responsive Patterns Not every layout needs to be re-designed for a smaller screen. Sometimes making columns stack and letting their widths fit the screen is the optimal treatment. On our website, not all sections required custom treatments for smaller screens. Below the team area, the “Habitat” (article, workshops and events) section implements a more straightforward responsive approach in which the two-column layout simply stacks vertically. The detail pages for each of those items also use a similar stacking approach, and we made sure the option to register for a workshop was in a prominent location. 6. Removing Unnecessary Elements Always consider simplifying. If something on your desktop website doesn't apply to a mobile context, then maybe you can remove it. If you find it's an improvement, then consider ways to simplify the desktop layout as well. Toward the bottom of the page, our contact section was greatly simplified to only include a mobile-friendly contact form for prospective clients to get in touch. Since we already feature the "call us" and "directions" buttons at the top of the website, we were able to remove the address and map from this section. 
The contact section was simplified to remove duplicate elements.
Lessons Learned - Make informed decisions.
By making the website structure fluid, by testing and by identifying which sections could be reordered or re-structured to optimize for mobile, our small internal team was able to get started immediately and move quickly. - Teamwork is key.
Everyone was able to present their case for what to add, remove or change, as long as it came from a place of putting the user's goals first. - Don't over-formalize the process. As with many design projects, quick sketches and white-boarding sessions, followed by small changes to design comps and actual code, brought the bigger picture into focus without us getting too carried away with an overly formal process.
- Understand what devices your audience is using, but take a fully responsive approach.
Lead Designer Alex Sylvia says, "We were conscious to test on the devices our clients were using, but we also wanted the design to react organically. The only way to discover that was to interact with the site at various sizes." By using this approach while also testing on devices we knew our audience was using based on analytics, we got the best of both worlds. - Use the best technology for the job.
One of our senior UI designers, Alec Harrison, quickly spun out design comps for the team member treatment, using LiveView to immediately showcase the comps on his iPhone. This provided the right context for improving the design. - Collaboration is key.
Rather than designing independently, collaborating with a developer to make design decisions directly in code helped us reach an organic solution. Our lead developer, Sarah Canieso, had this to say about the process: "This project reiterated for me that responsive projects are very much a collaboration of design and code. It was a balance between the visual — where the design changed at different breakpoints — and maintaining functionality that would provide a good user experience across devices." The Impact Since launching the responsive version of our website, we've noticed the following improvements in mobile user behavior: - A 17% reduction in our bounce rate.
- An increase of time spent on our website — up to 3 minutes from just 40 seconds.
Additionally, we've received several compliments from prospective clients who have accessed our website for the first time using their phone. While a mobile-first approach gets to the heart of simplifying a site or interface for all resolutions, large and small, that just is not always possible. In a crunch, we feel the process we undertook helped greatly improve our site on smaller devices. And in the process, it made us even more knowledgeable about supporting various devices with a single codebase. (cp) (ea)
© Alex Fedorov for Smashing Magazine, 2013. | | Building Better Body Armor With Nanofoams Mar 28th 2013, 09:27 Zothecula writes "Given that scientists are already looking to sea sponges as an inspiration for body armor, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that foam is also being considered ... not just any foam, though. Unlike regular foam, specially-designed nanofoams could someday not only be used in body armor, but also to protect buildings from explosions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | To Prevent Deforestation, Brazilian Supermarkets Ban Amazon Meat Mar 28th 2013, 08:02 Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets, representing 2,800 members, says it will no longer sell meat from cattle raised in the rainforest, a step they hope will cut down on the illegal use of rainforest where huge swathes have been turned into land for pasture and soy plantations. Public Prosecutor Daniel Cesar Azeredo Avelino says consumers will benefit from the deal. 'The agreement foresees a series of specific actions to inform the consumer about the origin of the meat both through the internet and at the supermarkets,' says Azeredo. 'We hope that the big chains will quickly take action.' The supermarkets' pledge comes as part of an initiative by the Public Prosecutor's Office to deprive the meat producers of outlets and an internet campaign aimed at informing Brazilian consumers of the ethics of boycotting meat from Amazonian sources is also planned. Brazil's Greenpeace advocacy group says the growth of the cattle industry in the Amazon is the single biggest cause of deforestation. For decades now, Brazilian authorities have battled illegal logging and other activities that continue to reduce the rainforest and in January the Brazilian government announced it plans to prepare an inventory of the trees in the Amazon rainforest. The Forestry Ministry said the census would take four years to complete and would provide detailed data on tree species, soils and biodiversity in the world's largest rainforest. The last such exhaustive survey was conducted more than three decades ago but didn't help stop deforestation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Geeks On a Plane Proposed To Solve Global Tech Skills Crisis Mar 28th 2013, 07:06 judgecorp writes "British Airways' Ungrounded project proposes to shut 100 Silicon Valley 'gamechangers' in a trans-Atlantic plane and ask them to solve the world's tech skills crisis during a 12-hour flight to London. On arrival, the passengers will head into a conference where they will present their ideas to, among others, the UN. From the article: 'Ungrounded, as the project is called, will bring 100 “innovators” (Silicon Valley CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists) on a private BA flight from San Francisco to London. During the flight, they will take part in a “global hack” run by Ideo, a design firm which has made mice for Microsoft and Apple.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | CSS Matic: The Ultimate CSS Tools for Web Designers Mar 28th 2013, 07:01 
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SponsorsProfessional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications  | | Creationist Bets $10k In Proposed Literal Interpretation of Genesis Debate Mar 28th 2013, 04:21 HungWeiLo writes "A California man who believes the literal interpretation of the Bible is real is offering $10,000 to anyone who can successfully debunk claims made in the book of Genesis in front of a judge. Joseph Mastropaolo, the man behind this challenge, is to put $10,000 of his own money into an escrow account. His debate opponent would be asked to do the same. They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates. Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be 'scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.' For his part, Mastropaolo has a Ph.D. in kinesiology and writes for the Creation Hall of Fame website, which is helping to organize the minitrial. It's also not the first such trial he's tried to arrange. A previous effort, known as the 'Life Science Prize,' proposed a similar scenario. Mastropaolo includes a list of possible circuit court judges to oversee the trial and a list of those he challenged to take part on the evolutionary side of the debate." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | |
