Aug 15, 2011 – NEW YORK, NY – Everyone has at least one of them in their life. Someone who irritates you and makes life difficult. Maybe your newspaper carrier left your paper out in the rain again or your neighbor let his dog go the bathroom on your lawn again. Are you tired of the incessant demand to be social with people who just plain bug you?  Now you can strike back with Bugging Me, a brand new, FREE, amusing viral iPhone, iPad, and iTouch app that lets you match up the annoying people in your life with online comical bug cartoons…sure to make people laugh and to get across what you really think of people.  This app is perfect for those people who want to turn social networking on its head with wit and style.

Bugging Me is a product of Lounge Lizard Worldwide, Inc – a New York based creative agency specializing in the creation of new and innovative mobile apps and websites. The app is extremely easy to use, you simply pick a bug that represents the person who is bugging you, type in who or what is bugging you, then let the world know who is bugging you! You can launch your bug to your Facebook wall, Twitter Feed, or even email or text blast to all your friends! Some of the hilarious bug icons include “The Attention Seeker”, “The Backstabber”, “The Gossip Queen”, “The Cry Baby”, “The Egomaniac” and “The Hothead.”

SmokinApps.com gave Bugging Me 4 out of 5 stars and said, “All in all, this is a fun little, innocent app, because all these little bugs are very cute. The Know It All, for instance, is actually quite cuddly, especially seeing as it’s a bug! I think that’s why this app isn’t mean or nasty, it’s just a friendly nudge to a relative or a friend or even a teacher. The cartoons are very good and make this app!”

“Everyone has someone who gets on their nerves and bugs them,” said Ken Braun, CEO of Lounge Lizard Worldwide, Inc. “We created Bugging Me as a fun way for people to express themselves in a way that is meant to entertain. It could be a friend, a neighbor, a government official…even a celebrity. Now you can tell the world who’s bugging you.”

For more information on Bugging Me and download instructions for the app: http://www.whosbuggingme.com

If I am going to build a website to render reliably, I’m limited to Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia and a handful of other fonts.

Let’s face it. We struggle to explain the idea of web fonts to clients. The idea that they can’t choose any typeface they wish to convey their marketing message does not compute. We are speaking to executives that are used to seeing stylized Powerpoint slideshows, business managers that choose from hundreds of fonts in their word processors for daily reports, marketing departments that manipulate stylized type in Photoshop every day. It seems ludicrous even for those of us in the industry that we still have to jump through hoops for typography. There is a reason web designers and developers have been so frustrated. At its core, this simply isn’t a technical challenge. It’s a business issue that relates to rights management. Font rendering has been solved since the early days of the web. The problem is, type foundries, the companies that design the fonts we know and love, are for-profit businesses. In current implementations, browsers leave fonts unprotected when used in the wild.  Without some method for licensing fonts and preventing them from being downloaded and shared freely, the foundries could potentially see themselves in the same boat as the music industry.

Developers have not been standing by idly. Several stand-in measures have been taken to circumvent this hardship:

Shaun Inman created sIFR as a method for replacing text with a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Through the work of Mike Davidson and others, it saw three incarnations and had a long run in the design world.  It has two major drawbacks; it is intended to be used sparingly (not for full body text) and it is cumbersome to use.

Cufón is an attempt to take the efforts of sIFR in a new direction. It relies solely on Javascript and does not have a Flash plugin requirement. It is fast enough to work for large amounts of text, and takes significantly less setup time on the part of the designer/developer to get running. There are a few shortcomings. The most notable is that text-selection is not supported. Both sIFR and Cufón toArialalso suffer from copyright issues as they conflict with foundry license agreements in most cases.

There is one exception to the rule. Before Internet Explorer 4, Microsoft proposed a rights-managed format called Embedded Opentype. It prevents visitors to websites from copying and distributing fonts that they have not payed for, and has been supported in every MS browser since. In 2008, they even brought it to the W3C, a standards body for web technologies, and granted them the rights and licenses necessary to bring it to every browser. According to the Fonts Working Group, EOT or another comparable spec should make its way into a W3C Recommendation some time around the first quarter of 2010. Many of the foundries support Microsoft’s efforts. The problem? DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a dirty word in the computer world. Forming a new standard brings with it legal issues, implementation issues, and competitive issues between browser vendors. It is yet to be seen if any of the other browsers will implement EOT. The latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Opera seem to be heading in a different direction with adoption of the @font-face declaration and direct downloads.

The implementation of @font-face also puts an increased level of pressure on type foundries.  A new generation of web developers are going to have a lower barrier of entry to copyright violation. Through a culmination of this back and forth between foundries, browsers, and the developer community, it seems that we are about to see a big change in 2009/2010. In just the last few weeks we have seen a number of proposals trying to reach compromises in this space:

Richard Fink has published a format called EOT Lite which removes some of the concerns raised by browser parties involved in forming a standard.

A method for adding permissions tables to OpenType was made by David Berlow of the Font Bureau.

Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland have proposed a format called .webfont that is seeing some positive feedback from foundries.

How it will all play out is unknown at this point, but it does seem as though the industry is taking steps in a positive direction.

There is also the possibility that another independent team will bridge the gap. Jeffrey Veen has been spearheading an initiative with his company Small Batch Inc to bring a product called TypeKit to market. TypeKit is a platform for delivering real fonts to web pages in a way that targets the nuances of the specific browser a website visitor is using.  It avoids DRM, and includes free and commercial fonts that foundries have licensed specifically for this purpose. If it delivers on what it promises, it is sure to be a popular destination among the design crowd.

It has been a long road to true web typography, but for the first time the end may be in sight. And that is something we won’t have to celebrate in Arial.

Now that the final version of Internet Explorer 8 is upon us, we thought it might be worth looking at what this latest release means to us as web developers, and how we can expect the web to change with new versions of Firefox, Safari, and Opera on the horizon.

For starters, IE 8 brings with it many notable bug fixes. The behavior of floated elements is said to be vastly improved, along with fixes for collapsing margins, getAttribute and setAttribute methods, and getElementById. Also of note, is the removal of the mysterious hasLayout property that has plagued developers for years, and CSS Expressions, which were an IE-only extension to CSS. You can also expect to see fewer memory leaks in IE 8, as Microsoft reports efforts to improve memory-management when dealing with scripts in their latest release.

Now, before we get too excited, we are still bound to supporting legacy browsers at some basic level – at least until we see a major change in market share – but many of the features listed below do lend themselves well to progressive enhancement.

Below is a list of features which we can expect to see being adopted in greater numbers over the coming months. Additions and corrections are welcome.

As you can see, there is a lot to be excited for. The industry is seeing progress that makes the web more powerful, pages more accessible, and developers lives simpler. Now that the technology is here, it is up to us to embrace it.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-in-internet-explorer-8/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/readiness/developers-new.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5)
http://developer.apple.com/safari/
https://developer.mozilla.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

Most people will acknowledge that their activity on the Internet has changed significantly since they first went online. The amount of data that the average user has to sift through nowadays would perplex the average user ten years ago. For every one email that you send out, three more seem to come in. Compare this to the early days of AOL when most people remember hearing, “You’ve Got Mail!” whenever a new item was added to their inbox. Imagine how annoying that would be nowadays with the constant stream of information being fed into our computer.

For simplicity I am going to break down the Internet History into only two chapters. The first chapter is the race to build the perfect search engine and the second chapter will be the race to build a tool to organize the real time web.

Although it wasn’t first to market, Google perfected search and is by far the largest Internet company. Google uses a system of spiders to crawl the Internet in an effort to create an index of every website and all of its content. The only problem is this process can take several days/weeks/months before Google even finds a new website. This is OK because first generation websites can afford this delay. However, during the Obama Inauguration, Twitter received almost five thousand tweets per minute. This infusion of data onto the Internet is very powerful because it allows people to collaborate in ways never before possible. Developers can now leverage data streams of real time content into their websites/applications.

The movement which is afoot on the Internet today involves social websites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous and Facebook which can all be traced back to blogging. The introduction of blogs and content management systems allowed for users to very easily create and edit their own content. This freedom resulted in the rapid growth of content on the web. Websites were being built by the thousands daily, which all led to Google’s current dominance. Google became so powerful because it was able to organize the content in a way that created value for the end user. Blogs unfortunately cannot keep up at the pace to which people wanted to create, so a new platform had to be introduced. Microblogging emerged as a powerful platform due to the fact that you didn’t need to be a great writer in order to generate content that people were interested in. It also allows for content to be created within seconds.

Google currently does not have a system or method of indexing such rapid creation of content. Don’t be tricked into thinking this realtime social data is not valuable based on the fact that Google is not indexing it fast enough. I would argue that it is perhaps more valuable because of the new search parameter of “Time”. Googles current algorithm to process PageRank is outdated in the sense that it cannot process pagerank fast enough. In order for a website to gain popularity and relevance in Google search results, other sources are required to write about and link to the original website. This is how PageRank is established and could also be Googles Achilles heal in their effort to index the Real Time Web. PageRank is not efficient when it comes to indexing breaking news on the scale that a social site would be. During the Mumbai attacks in India, I did a test and compared a Google Search for the keyword, “Mumbai Attacks” against a Twitter search for the keyword, “Mumbai Attacks”. I was able to get relevant real time results on Twitter that were few and far between on Google. I also went to see if The Drudge Report had any news on its homepage about the breaking news. The news broke on Twitter a good 30-40 minutes before I saw any posts on Drudge. This is ironic because Drudge came to fame in the late 90’s when it broke the Monica Lewinsky/Clinton story faster than any conventional news outlet. This gave the Internet respect when it came to breaking news. Less than 10 years later, static news sites are having a hard time keeping up with the Real Time Web. Twitter has a more collaborative infrastructure that doesn’t rely on one author which allows it to grow uncover stories quickly. There were thousands of people breaking the story compared to one or two writers covering a story at a newspaper. Crowd-sourcing the conversation and empowering civilian journalists is the what allows the news break so quickly. There is no way the old establishment can compete.

The web is flooded with new content every second and there is currently no way of it being indexed by the most powerful search company (Google). This is a huge problem as well as a huge opportunity for the modern entrepreneur. Companies like Twitter are more similar to infrastructure of previous generations that helped carry content (ie: AM/FM Radio) They are the infrastructure to which companies will be built upon. Using the data that people are feeding into the web via these tools will foster all new types of websites that could not be theorized even 5 years ago. It will be exciting to see the creative ways that the Real Time Web will influence the next generation of Internet Startup.

One such open source project is WordPress. Maintained by a community of developers and licensed under the Free Software Foundation GPL (General Public License), WordPress is a powerful content management system which can be easily extended beyond its main code base. This extensibility and open source license allows companies to leverage this software to create dynamic web sites which can be updated through the WordPress Administration portal. WordPress is one of the core technologies which Lounge Lizard leverages in order to provide companies with eye-catching web site designs and powerful functionality through the development of custom WordPress plug-ins.

To learn more about how WordPress can help your company, feel free to contact one of the Lounge Lizard brand tenders today.