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Nielsen vs Clark – they’re both wrong

Great middle ground arguments from Jason Mark in this recent controversy about mobile web experiences:

The truth is when working on mobile you should always look at the site analytics and make smart decisions based on what you find. If you find that your mobile users use the site in a significantly different way than desktop users, check out Nielsen’s guidelines and see which apply to you. And if you find that your mobile users are accessing the same content as desktop users then consider a responsive design.

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A call for open, free access to academic research

David Willetts, a minister of state for universities and science in the UK, is calling for more open access in academics:

Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration

If you ever worked in an academic environment or just wanted to read some scientific studies, you probably know this is currently an outrageous mess, not only in the UK. Because most research gets published in very expensive journals and magazines, a huge amount of publicly paid academic research and its outcome can’t be accessed by the public.

So yes:

Moving from an era in which taxpayer-funded academic articles are stuck behind paywalls for much of their life to one in which they are available free of charge will not be easy.

But they basically have Jimmy Wales on board, so it looks like this isn’t just the usual politician jibber-jabber.

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Announcing Sketch 2.0

Remarkable update to Bohemian Coding’s Sketch app. It’s like Photoshop but with only the UI design related features included:

We wanted to provide a real alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop or Fireworks and we believe we have succeeded. It’s an ambitious goal for sure but if you’ve been using Photoshop’s vector capabilities combined with Layer Styles, we think we may have something better.

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The origins of the blink tag

Funny story from Lou Montulli, who is the credited inventor of the <blink> tag. As suspected of generations of web designers, it involved a bar and much alcohol:

It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

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