Mike on TAP

Xeni Jardin:
Edmund C. Arnold, known to many as “the Father of Modern Newspaper Design,” died last week. The designer, journalist and educator was born in 1913. “If you look at a newspaper today, you are looking at his work,” says an anonymous BB contributor. Designers talk about his legacy here: Link.

(Via Boing Boing.)

The Ultimate Seat of Power. Fulfilling your wildest bathroom dreams. Completely iPod compatible. RotoRooter is about to give away this extreme “pimped-out john” in a sweepstakes that runs until the 2nd of April. Part of the prize includes the iCarta iPod stereo dock that offers high-performance speakers–and quality toilet paper dispensing–which we have previously discussed here on TUAW.

The winner will be announced on April 25th, National Plumber’s Day.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

The multi-readers get smaller and smaller, and this iMono SIM card packs more versatility into a small form factor than we’ve seen yet. It handles a veritable alphabet soup of flash memory cards, including miniSD, all types of Memory Sticks, microSD, SD, MMC Card 4.0, MultiMedia Card, MultiMedia Card Plus, RS-MMC (MMC Mobile), RS-MMC4.0 (MMC Mobile 4.0) and MMC micro. It also reads cellphone SIM cards. Plus, there’s no cover to lose.

I picked up a reader similar to this in Singapore recently, and it’s functioned well enough to find itself a permanent place in my road warrior’s bag. Not a bad deal for $19. - Charlie White

Product Page [USB Geek, via TRFJ]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Gamegum is an online community based on flash video games. Registration is free, and once you sign up you can submit games you’ve created as well as play “comment and vote-on” games that others have created.

Yesterday Gamegum made revenue sharing live on their site. Users who create Flash games and post them on the site can also put up adsense ads and earn revenue for their games. The percentage of time your ads will be displayed on your game depends on your “Gumpoints” are points users can earn for posting games, voting on games, posting in the forum and other activities on the site.

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Mike says, “Hey, I’m starting to really like Smashing Magazine!”

Coding or designing a page, it’s always nice to have some basic templates you can quickly modify or adapt to your needs. However, at least once you have to know, how to create this “universal” template. In this case tutorials prove to be an ultimate solution, particularly if you just want to get an idea how something works and where to start from. In fact, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel all the time – you can use existing solutions, modify and improve them and publish them as well – just the way other people did it for you.

In this post we’ve covered over 200 Ajax, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, XML as well as ASP, C++, Perl, Python and Java tutorials. You can also check out our list of Photoshop tutorials we’ve published before.

Update (27.01.2007): LISP and Ruby tutorials were added.

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Last year we’ve seen a lot of simple, even minimalistic designs, which impress not with the amount of presented information but with the way the information is actually presented. Complex layouts are giving way to simple 2-col- or 3-col layouts, which usually have large amount of white space without any content whatsoever.

Indeed, the importance of both white space and simplicity shouldn’t be underrated. Used correctly, they can enhance the performance of a web-site, improve readability and make a great first impression. Recently Mark Boulton has written an insightful article about Whitespace and its importance in web design. Very well written, it describes in a very simple, but clear way, how to deal with white space in practice and how to use it in your web-projects. We’ve collected some more articles on this topic. So what do we have?

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Hi Mike,

Being my first term teaching web design in an official format, I don’t have any students that I think would be ready for this, but thought maybe you could pass it on to some of your former or current/advanced students.

Go to – https://www.jobs.cmich.edu

It’s only a provisional gig, but might be a great opp for an advanced student.

Mike – We have an opening for a part-time Web Designer at LCC and wondering if you know of anyone who might be interested. The position is posted at the Human Resources web site.  Please feel free to contact Nancy Ernsberger (ernsben@email.lcc.edu, 483-1966) if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Paul Price
Director, Media Services
Lansing Community College
Lansing, MI 48901-7210
(517) 483-1692

Sometimes the best time-wasters aren’t games at all. Case in point: isotope2. It’s an engrossing Flash toy by Martin Jonasson that draws fun mathemagical patterns. You start out with a blank canvas and a mechanical arm. You can add segments to the arm (by clicking on the plus and minus buttons) and then adjust the speed and direction at which each joint rotates (by clicking on the joint and dragging up or down). With the right combinations, you can generate some very cool and very pretty patterns. You can zoom in and out and control the speed (higher speeds make for more angular lines), and you can also copy the “formula” for your pattern to share with your friends. Simple, but totally addictive.

(Via Download Squad.)

Video: Oscar nominee and his brother created Photoshop. Movie visual effects master John Knoll and his brother built Photoshop as the result of a hobby. At the time, Knoll was working full-time at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic. Knoll, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Pirates of the Caribbean II, talked with CNET’s Veronica Belmont about how he built the program.

(Via CNET News.com.)