This weekend I’ve been playing around with a few new HTML 5 design conventions, nothing major, just experimenting. I stumbled across a link to the developer build of Chrome for Mac . Always eager to try out what’s being developed to make the internet more epic, I of course downloaded it.

While many sites of course have their bugs, especially ones that rely heavily on intermixing Flash and HTML element, overall I am beyond impressed by this browser so far. Since it’s not an official release yet, I can’t say that this will take over today as my main browser; but I can say this: I can’t fucking wait until it is official. The speed by which pages are rendered, as well as the general cleanliness of the interface has me waiting in anticipation for the official release of Chrome for the Mac. It’s stated to come out by the end of the year we keep hearing, and honestly it can’t come soon enough. I’m madly in love with innovation, and this certainly is that!

I also can’t wait to see Microsoft’s, Apple’s, and Mozilla’s next response to this. Let’s make the entire internet run stupidly fast please! INTERNET CHEST BUMP!!

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

So I’m working on a video player.
Big deal.

So I can change the color of the controls of the video player.
Big deal.

So I can change the colors with CSS.
Whoa.

Thats right. Click through to read more.

Over the weekend I was flipping through the latest issue of AdAge and ran across the following ad:

It caught my eye because it was all made of HTML and I was really curious what page they had decided to use the source from. (I was kind of secretly hoping they had used some random website and there was going to be some unexpected stuff hidden in there.) About halfway down the page I was greeted with a surprise when I saw “BenPalmer_Success” as part of a path to a video file (it was actually a link to a file within the Wordpress assets folder). More curious now, I kept reading the black portion of Mao’s face …

Lo and behold, it turned out to none other than our Ben Palmer talking about getting paid for success over at the AICP video blog.

All in all it’s pretty awesome and random. Plus it looks like it’s also going to be on a t-shirt ...

A friend just IM’d me a link to a new type of cross-browser text replacement technique called typeface.js which allows for any HTML text element to be rendered in the font of your choice. Now the most common of these live-text to rendered replacement techniques is the awesome sIFR, but typeface.js is notable cause it’s only javascript.

At first I was about to write it off since the examples section of the project site shows images, but when I took some time (oh what has the internet done to our patience) to read through the background (and view source), I realized this is a pretty great and new approach to achieving this effect.

The javascript reads from the glyph information of any font you specify, which you need to add to your server after being converted using their conversion process(conversion), and then renders out the font using your browser’s vector drawing capabilities! Pretty rad indeed. Definitely something to keep your front-end eyes on.

Soon after the release of Plainview, we starting hearing about issues viewing pages that employ browser sniffing to look for compatible browsers, sites like abc.com where Safari is allowed, but Plainview is blocked. There was even suspicion that we were using an custom user-agent string which was causing trouble. Well, we weren’t, but we are now. Turns out that the sites mentioned, and many others it seems, are looking for “Safari” in the user-agent string, and WebKit does not identify itself as Safari out-of-the-box so these sites would believe Plainview to be incompatible. This is bad mojo. Apple recommends looking for “AppleWebKit” not “Safari” to ensure compatibility with WebKit powered browsers, and even offers some code to help out.

However, I hardly expect abc.com and their ilk to switch detect scripts overnight. So the next build of Plainview will include a tweaked user-agent string to identify itself as “Plainview (like Safari)” which seems to fix the issues with abc.com and hopefully others as well.

Hi, I’m Kenji. I do some front-end development around here, and I thought I’d help you get to know your new barbariangroup.com!

It’s been a relief to get this site finally out the door and in front of all you nice internet people. As Rick said (to some perhaps-deserved derision), it took over six months to bring barbariangroup.com version four (internally codenamed Merrimack) to fruition. That’s a crazy long time, sure. But we’re a small, busy shop, and couldn’t blow through this in a month. Not while continuing to pump out high-quality projects for Kashi, CNN, Adobe, TAP Project, Motorola, etc etc. We approached the barbariangroup.com version four redesign as seriously and as carefully as we would any content-rich client site, and as such, it took some time. And some people.