Rungta’s Webmarks

Excerpts From the Diary of an App Store Reviewer ∞

Wow.

Roland Garros 2009 Draws ∞

Double feature this Sunday. The 2009 French Open Grand Slam gets underway in Paris while 20 super fast cars go screaming around the streets of Monte Carlo.

On the heels of his victory over Rafa in Madrid, will this be the year Roger Federer finally wins his first Roland Garros title, or is the Spaniard going to dominate on his favourite surface once again?

Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS ∞

Andy Clarke suggests and offers a universal, typography–only CSS file for IE 6.

I’ve been thinking of going down this path myself. No time wasted getting frustrated trying to fight work around IE bugs for the designer, and a simple, usable experience that works for the visitor.

Bits & Pieces ∞

Brand spankin’ new section on prateekrungta.com, designed to serve as a platform for me to share the numerous little experiments that catch my fancy from time to time.

Long time visitors would no doubt be aware of just how fragmented my site has become. At the last redesign, all this site had was my photoblog. Fast forward (almost exactly) two years and this site now hosts a photo blog, a link blog, tennis draw charts and a blogroll plugin, each debuting at different points of time. The design painfully shows the lack of anticipation for such expansion, as a result of which most new visitors are completely unaware of the rest of the site. Because of this, I’d decided not to introduce any new sub–sites (if you will) and make the situation worse, until I got down to redesigning the entire beast.

So, “Bits & Pieces” sat quiet and covered up in a corner of my hard disk for four long months. Hindi transliteration with copy–paste support, the bit that got me started on B&P in the first place, had been laying dormant for almost seven months though. The renewed interest in Hindi around here made me want to share “हिन्दी transliteration” and I decided to risk yet another section for the time being, with the hope that someone might find it useful.

P.S. – I’ve also (finally) created a global RSS feed for my photoblog + webmarks + bits & pieces, so go crazy.

Hypercritical ∞

A fantastic essay by John Siracusa on the importance of criticism, and how “knowing [what’s wrong] is half the battle”. Lots of quotable bits in there, but I’m going to go with this one on the extensive online analysis of the tabs in Safari 4 beta:

This stuff is what makes the Mac Web—and, by extension, albeit indirectly, the Mac itself—so great. At its best, it’s critics all the way down.

I find it ironical when some people accuse us—what’s the term, fanboys—of being critical of everything but Apple, because in my experience, the Mac faithful are amongst the most critical users one can have.

Web Advertising and Fusion ∞

Michael Mistretta, the creator of the Deck-like Fusion ad network has written a nice essay on the state of web advertising. He quotes Kyle Baxter:

Online advertising is broken. Web sites place ads to the side of content, and readers learn to ignore it; so web sites put ads in the header, and readers learn to ignore it; so web sites put ads in-line with content, and readers learn to scroll past it; so web sites use video ads and create ones that overflow into the content, so readers stop reading.

I think there’s a lesson to be learnt here for everyone. People don’t like being controlled. The harder you try to enforce things on them, the faster they’ll run away from you.

I Hardly Know Her ∞

You thought flickr was minimalist? Wait till you’ve browsed a flickr stream or two through IHNK.

So clever and well made that you almost feel stupid. Hats off to Justin Ouellette!