Redswish

Carefully crafted banter

Kindle Kindle Kindle!


5 Responses

It’s here! Not that I knew it was coming. The reason I’m so excited about this product that no-one else seems to have heard about is because I’ve been predicting it and hoping for it for years. Now unless I’ve been living under a rock – I’ve not yet encountered an electronic book. We’ve had digital picture frames, PDA’s and darn small laptops – but never an actual reading device that can be stuffed in your bag holding hundreds of books in the space of less than one. Which, if you haven’t guessed by the picture and my introduction – is exactly what Amazon’s new Kindle is. This is interesting for so many reasons – but a big one for me is that it comes from Amazon? I know Amazon are rolling in the Benjamin Franklins and unless my memory deceives me – their origins are planted in online book sales, but I just never expected Amazon of all companies…

Read the full article »

Is Social Networking Dying?


3 Responses

I’ve never been into mySpace or that dreaded Bebo… or any other faddish, pointless community socialising crap. Eek don’t hit me! I do however like Facebook. It still annoys me with it’s ‘pokes’ and irrelevant and annoying plugins that everyone splashes over their pages, although isn’t as visually unappealing and tacky as it’s rivals. I use Facebook as a tool to keep in touch and up-to-date with friends across the world or that I haven’t seen in years – not to create god-awful ‘band’ and ‘fan’ sites laced with horrendous colour schemes and poorly-built plugins that throw the page’s layout all to cock. Rant over. This isn’t personal, I don’t wish the downfall of such social sites; they provide mind-numbing entertainment for millions of teenagers all over the world, holding conversations with friends over a message board instead of picking up a phone or god forbid leaving the house. However, it seems to be an increasingly apparent prospect – social…

Read the full article »

Why I hate Flash sites


9 Responses

When Flash came along… Millions and millions of years ago, man created an invisible entity, a power to which the world would kneel down and worship and would change the lives of everyone forever. Some called it the ‘World Wide Web’, but by some it was known only as ‘The Internet’. In it’s early days of life, the Internet was slow and ugly and rarely reared it’s head in public. But over time it began to grow and flourish. It adopted HTML to promote it’s power and ideas, picked up CSS to fashion it’s wardrobe and used directories and Search Engines for PR. Soon, the Internet had a whole team behind it – a list of acronyms only a madman could contemplate. But something was missing. There was no movie producer, no director to push the Internet to the big screen. Until Flash came along. Hailed as the saviour, the messiah – the chosen one!

Read the full article »

CSS Horizontal Menu


19 Responses

I’m big into horizontal menus. I think the majority of the web community are. In my eyes their only pitfall is the general inability to expand past a set width if you wish to add more links in. But who wants to do that, anyway? I’m aware that there’s a multitude of different ways to create the classic ‘hover-over’ menu. Either with CSS or good old javascript, the way Dreamweaver used to throw it out, and possibly still does. There are several reasons why I choose not to use javascript hover-over effects; a) It’s ugly, just to look at. Little brackets and weird symbols and colons everywhere, b) In some way or another it’s going to want to attack your site’s accessibility, and we just can’t let that happen, c) CSS is just better. In every way. It’s cleaner, easier to apply and moderate and just stays out of the way in it’s little file. With javascript you’d either have…

Read the full article »