The Best of the Internets

Opera Mini is here for your Windows Phone!

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I love that Opera is building its browser for as many platforms as possible. OS X and Windows of course, but they are also on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Java ME, Bada, Windows Mobile, Zeebo, and now Windows Phone.

Go Opera go!

The Web is not Poor Man’s Native

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Chris Wilson is dead-on with this post. The web isn’t native, but it can do native-like things really well and with less friction for our users.

The web… excels at just-in-time interaction, as it IS hassle-free. But it’s a natural progression to enable users to move that onto their home screen, and let them get notifications and other engagement features if they so desire. This is still the web, though – I don’t need to have the NYT app open just to read the article at a link I followed. There are also app-like behaviors you may want occasionally too, e.g. a “what’s near me?” app. There’s an assumption that app-like behaviors demand native, and that the web is for documents.

Making Accessible Futures

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Sounds like this was an awesome workshop!

George Williams, one of the workshop organizers and author of the chapter “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012), offered the example of the curb cut, which, as he says in his chapter, was designed to facilitate wheelchair users crossing the street, but “became recognized as useful also to other people such as someone making a delivery with a dolly, a traveler pulling luggage on wheels, a parent pushing a child in a stroller, or a person walking beside their bicycle.” Williams urged us to recognize the broad benefits of accessible design, while also raising questions about the “universal” in universal design.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Everyone has special needs and not all of them revolve around disabilities.

There will be another Accessible Futures workshop this Fall. If you have the opportunity, you should go.