Tumble. The writings and findings of a web designer.

Brief is a clean and simple chat style that aims to fix one of the many missteps introduced in Skype 5.

Amazing music video loaded with guest appearances for Beastie Boys’ new track, Make Some Noise. Great way to tease the extended 30-minute version of it—a short film called Fight For Your Right Revisited.

(Source: New York Magazine)

Title track from The Stuyvestants’ Brooklyn’s Finest album…

25 tracks of blood, sweat, and tears…backed by a serious passion for hearing and creating great music. Come join music producer Allan Cole (Algorythm) and record collector Darien Victor Birks (Flwrpt) on a journey through the sound of Bed-Stuy.

So good. Great logo, too.

Boot company, Palladium, filmed a documentary about the rebirth of Detroit titled, Detroit Lives. I’ve never been to Detroit, but its rapid decline and hopeful recovery is a fascinating subject. Plus, this type of dual-purpose edutainment/advertising is one I can live with. (via Tyler Shick)

Peter Belanger photographed the cover of the September edition of Macworld with an iPhone 4 and did all the post-processing on the phone itself. He normally uses a 60MP camera. (via Gruber)

Hey, you! This tumblelog’s been quiet for a minute, but I recently made a couple updates that are worth touching on.

Ads by Yoggrt

Not one for ads in general, I’ve caved in and joined the Yoggrt ad network as a publisher. Really, though, I don’t see it as “caving in” because they’re some of the classiest around — small (160x90 pixels), unobtrusive, well-designed, and the advertisers tend to relate in some way to the content I publish. I think I’ve also managed to integrate it into the sidebar pretty well, too.

New Web Clip Icon

With the arrival of the iPhone 4 (and the iPad, for that matter), my old 57-pixel Web Clip icon wasn’t looking too hot my home screen. So, I whipped up a new 114-pixel icon, uploaded it, and tested it out. Quick and easy, right? Unfortunately, no. The new icon was showing up crisp and clear on the “Add to Home” screen, but once it was added to the home screen, it was blurry and pixelated. Thinking the apple-touch-icon meta tag was wrong or outdated, I investigated further only to find jQTouch was still handling everything correctly. Does the icon have to be in the root directory? Nope. Looking around, I noticed some people were using 129-pixel icons; so I scaled mine up, but that didn’t fix the problem either.

Thinking I was going crazy, I finally came across a post by Walt Dickinson mentioning the same problem. Apparently, if you’re using apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag (which I was) to make your web app look more like a native app (fullscreen, no Safari chrome), there’s a bug in iOS4 that distorts the icon on the home screen. Ugh, really? Nevertheless, I removed the tag in favor of a crisper looking icon. So, until they fix it, it’s basically just a bookmark to the mobile site.

Tidying Up

Aside from these, I’ve cleaned up a couple other minor things:

• Updated social network links: removed Facebook and Brightkite, added Dribbble and Gowalla
• Recent authentication changes to the Twitter API caused the ‘recent tweet’ box on my About page to return blank — it’s fixed now
• Pushed the logo a little to the left
• Updated my @font-face declarations to make them more compatible
• Changed the two photos of me to ones taken this year

And that’s it. I’m looking forward to being a part of Yoggrt network for a couple reasons, but mostly because I’m hoping it reinvigorates my posting habits, particularly with more original content. We’ll see.

simplebits:

This is a wonderful tool. Enter a URL and replace its fonts with any of FontFonts web fonts. Hmm, this site looks rather nice with FF Dagny and FF Meta Serif replacing Helvetica and Georgia.

Kinda diggin’ my site with FF Kievit Web.

Louis Harboe has recreated the iOS4 icons in Pure CSS. These are incredible, and totally resolution independent. (via webkitbits)