Ideas, thoughts and solutions

This is a guest post by Miles Walker, a freelance writer and blogger who usually  compares car insurance  deals over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org. His most recent review looked at the best  car insurance quotes . Video games have always held some addiction, but now more than ever that addiction is growing. People are spending more time than ever playing the games, and game designers are constantly finding new ways keep it that way. Their efforts have a been a complete success, and some games have true addicts, addicts who play 24 hours a week or more. Visual enhancements Video games have come a long way since a certain duo of Italian plumbers started showing up in people's houses in the late 1980s. By leaps and bounds, video game graphics have become alarmingly sophisticated. Each graphical improvement increased a game's possibilities and added more depth to video games. Designers began thriving on this depth, making games with more achievements, unlocks, lev...

A few weeks ago Google released a tool that provides voice translation into several languages for free. This is a major breakthrough in democratizing voice translation technology that could bring us to an era where knowledge of foreign languages looses its importance. This is a bold statement, but I think it will happen in a few decades or maybe years. Nowadays fluency in several languages is important for several reasons including applying for a job, communicating with foreigners, travelling, education (especially for countries that don't publish enough books in their own language), accessing the internet and online resources and much more. In exception of some businesses and institutions that depend of high quality formal translations the wording required to understand a foreign text is relatively small. Most humans are not very dependent on high quality translations. For example, a tourist doesn't need to master the language of the country he's visiting, nor does an ...

1. Show the data without distorting it. 2. Present a large amount of data and remain coherent. 3. The technique used to create the graphic should not interfere with the user reasoning about the data.  4. Reveal both a broad overview of the data, but keep enough detail for the curious viewer.

During the past few years, I've noticed an increase in the use of customized and abstract top level domain (TLD) names, such as bit. ly , bu. mp , babyli. st , etc. Even Microsoft recently registered bi. ng , and .42 has also been created. (UPDATE: Thanks to commenter tjogin for pointing out that they in fact are all country TLDs. .ly > Libya, .st->São Tomé and Príncipe, etc.) Until recently, I believed that top level domains were few, and that each served its purpose ( .com for commercial use, .edu for education, .gov for the US government, etc). The increase in usage of non-.com TLDs made me think that they are not a limitation, but that we can change them almost freely, presumed we have the knowledge to do it (Please, correct me if I am wrong and forgive my ignorance). Isn't it possible to make TLDs optional (or hidden)? Then typing just the readable part of the domain - second level domain - (e.g. google instead of google.com ) could send you to the the a...

Inspired by Hemanth H.M's color clock project , I created my own color clock . The idea behind the color clock is to represent time in a hexadecimal color value, that can then be used to dynamically color something, like the clock background. For example 21:01:14 can be broken apart to: 21 which can be converted to C4 in Hex 01 which can be converted to 35 in Hex 14 which can be converted to 5C in Hex Putting all three numbers together gets us the color #C4355C . It has been built with Javascript and uses some CSS3 features for the design (the color transition and the radial background).

There are already many websites that have began using custom web fonts using @font-face to beautify their website. getfinch.com Bringing custom fonts to the web increases the range of possibilities for web designers, however it can also be a drawback, if the fonts aren't used carefully. Firstly, novice designer may try to use too many different typefaces on a single website, which can become distracting and disconnecting. It is important to realize when too much is too much. As a general rule, when designing a website I never use more than three fonts. Usually I select a font font the headlines and another for the content. If required I add a third font for lower level headlines, however I prefer to use different alternations of the same font. Secondly, by using too many custom fonts, the size of the website increases. Custom web fonts have the drawback of their size. Using three to five custom fonts on a website can increase its weight by about 0.5MB which is not negligib...

CSS3 is bringing many innovations to web design. One of these is the possibility of customizing the selection color of text, graphics and every other element of the markup. By default, on most browsers, the selection color is a blue and the color of text becomes white. It is now very easy to change this behavior and add a nice touch of color to your website. Changing the selection color can be achieved with the pseudo-element ::selection like this (a vendor prefix is still required for Firefox): ::selection {  background: rgb(131,209,222);       /* Webkit browres*/ color:#336; } ::-moz-selection { background: rgb(131,209,222);       /* Firefox */ color:#336; } This will change the default selection color to a greenish-blue and change the color of the text to a dark blue. The power of ::selection does not end there. It is of equal simplicity to define a different color for each element. In this example  the text of the first para...