NEWS // Design

Web Sites Have Sex Appeal August 9, 2005 Men and women are very different in what catches their eye on the Internet, which means a website can appeal to one while unintentionally turning off the other, a university study showed.   website >>>

Macromedia drops FreeHand from bundle August 9, 2005 FreeHand, Macromedia's popular illustration tool, has been omitted from the company's upcoming developer suite, dubbed Studio 8.   website >>>

Book Review: “DHTML Utopia” August 2, 2005 Don’t be put off by the title: the DHTML here bears no resemblance to the stupid web tricks of the late 90s that allowed animated unicorns to follow your mouse pointer, or silly Powerpoint-like transitions between web pages. This book is the opening salvo in the latest battle in the Web Standards war - the battle for unobtrusive JavaScripting, or Unobtrusive DOMscripting as many call it, in order to rid it of all the negative connotations that “DHTML” and “JavaScript” bring. Combined with the non-standard XMLHttpRequest object, it’s sometimes referred to as “Ajax”.   website >>>

Sears launches online “shopping channel” July 25, 2005 Sears Canada is pioneering what could be the future of shopping: an e-commerce platform that combines TV-style shopping programs and online click and pay methods. The new website, searswebtv.ca, features an on-demand webcast, which links highlighted products directly to online shopping on sears.ca.   website >>>

Managing for Creativity July 20, 2005 Over many years, the leaders of SAS Institute have distilled a set of principles for getting peak performance from creative people. Among them: Value the work over the tools, reward excellence with challenges, and minimize hassles.   website >>>

Creative Commons Humbug July 18, 2005 Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair use" provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.   website >>>