The pixel has always been the smallest unit in screen-based design. Because it’s been indivisible, it is the concrete unit of measurement among screen-based designers. The phrase “a pixel is a pixel is a pixel” has been adopted to help print designers not used to fixed-screen density understand the concept. Because of this consistency, web designers have adopted pixels over points and other units to build websites.

Now that hardware is changing and pixel densities are growing, pixels are struggling to find relevance as the stable unit they once were. Browser zooming is one thing and has been covered on QuirksMode. But what is a pixel on high resolution devices today? Why does the 640px × 960px iPhone 4 claim to be 320px × 480px in the browser? The truth is that there are two different definitions of pixels: they can be the smallest unit a screen can support (a hardware pixel) or a pixel can be based on an optically consistent unit called a “reference pixel.”

The hardware pixel

Most of us are familiar with the hardware pixel. It’s the smallest point a screen can physically display and is usually comprised of red, green, and blue sub-pixels. Light from these three sub-pixels is mixed to create the colors we see. Because the hardware pixel relates to a physical element on a screen it cannot be stretched, skewed, or subdivided. These properties make the hardware pixel like the atom: the unit of design on which we build everything.

The reference pixel and splitting atoms

Things are changing for the pixel. The w3c currently defines the reference pixel as the standard for all pixel-based measurements. Now, instead of every pixel-based measurement being based on a hardware pixel it is based on an optical reference unit that might be twice the size of a hardware pixel. This new pixel should look exactly the same in all viewing situations. The beauty of using a reference pixel is that it takes proximity to a screen into account. When using a phone that you held close, a reference pixel will be smaller on the screen than a projection you view from a distance. If the viewer holds their phone up so it is side-by-side with the projection, the pixel sizes should look identical no matter the resolution or pixel density the devices have. When implemented properly, this new standard will provide unprecedented stability across all designs on all platforms no matter the pixel density or viewing distance.

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Mozilla moved to version 4 from 3.6 almost a year ago on March 22, 2011. Not even a year has passed and just a few days ago, Mozilla has released its 2 digit browser version. This version is intended to make updates and extension management easier on the end-user. Version 3.6 will lose support in April leaving 10 as the only currently supported version. Some other major highlights in Firefox 10 include:

• CSS 3D Transforms are now supported.
• The new HTML5 <bdi> element, bi-directional isolation, allowing isolation of parts of text with a different directionality has been implemented.
• Updates to Canvas, DOM3 Events, DOM4, JavaScript, Full Screen API, Page Visibility API, SVG, and WebGL.
• You may now specify a fragment of “top” for the href attribute to create a link to the top of the page. This used to work, then went away for a while, and now it’s back, for compatibility with the HTML5 specification.
• The console object has two new methods, console.time() and console.timeEnd(), which can be used to set timers on a page.
• Handling of the position property on elements inside positioned <table> elements has been fixed.
• In the past, when element.setAttribute() parsed integers, it would report an error if the integer included any non-numeric characters (for example “42foo”). Now it correctly truncates this as the number 42, in accordance with the specification.
• Minor interface changes.

*These snippets have been pulled from the Mozilla website*

• Firefox Releases on Wiki
• MDN Overview: Firefox 10
• MDN Overview: Firefox 9
• MDN Overview: Firefox 8
• MDN Overview: Firefox 7
• MDN Overview: Firefox 6
• MDN Overview: Firefox 5
• MDN Overview: Firefox 4

Here is a timeline of support status and release dates of Firefox in the past year. Firefox has had several releases as a result of adopting a rapid release development cycle

As a software development project manager at Beacon, I’m also proud to say that I’m both an NPR and data geek, so I was elated to hear a story this week that united all of my passions:  Google Searches Are A Window Into Our Culture.  The tool “Google Correlate” is actually a fascinating window into how people are searching for not only one specific term, but an entire web of other related (or maybe not-so-related) terms.

The political example given in the story was somewhat predicable (Democrats– veggie-loving, fitness buffs; Republicans– meat-loving, weight-loss program participants), but my own searches turned up some interesting results on Google Correlate.  I am just starting work on a new website redesign for a well-known business school and was wondering what kind of associations I’d find if using terms related to that school (thinking I might be able to use this information with regard to site design and features).  Here’s the terms I tried:

• business school– while many of the U.S.’s top business schools are listed, I was surprised to see the appearance of “art schools” and “art colleges” as correlating terms.  Wonder if my client has considered cross-promotion with this demographic?  Could a more “artsy” site design have benefits in this area?
• management school– like the “art” association listed above, I was suprized to find “hospital association” as a correlation with “management school.”  Perhaps another marketing opportunity here?  Would a site feature that included possible hospital careers be helpful to these visitors?
• mba school– oddly, this was a much more common search term in Utah than any other state.  Not sure how we can leverage this, but I’m sure we’ll bat it around for a while!

Also, don’t miss the comic book on the Google Correlate site – fun!  The most important point that the comic book emphasizes and bears repeating here– “Remember:  Correlation is not causation.”  Google doesn’t attempt to explain the correlation between terms, just show it to us in a manner for us to interpret and leverage.  Happy correlating!

Today I decided to devote some time to learning what exactly this responsive web thing everyone is talking about is .  I found the perfect article on nettus about the topic.

The video broke down the mysterious new technology into human language and then shows some good resources and examples of how to implement it.   This video was so good that I even did a little test driving on one of my current projects and it worked like a charm.  Sadly this new technology does not work in IE8 and below but there are some solutions out there that claim to allow backwards compatibility.

One of the most important things to think about with this new way of handling different screens is how modular is your code?  It’s also very exciting to me personally given I have always been a big supporter of best practice and developing the right way with good clean hack free code and this will push others in the same direction if they want to keep up with the times.  Your code needs to be solid and clean enough to be completely detached from any presentation layers and remolded as needed.  This means no inline styles, no tables for layout, no outdated font or other tags, and developing with separating content and presentation in mind.

It’s an exciting step forward and I am glad I got past my fear of the unknown and seemingly impossible to learn that responsive web is not scary at all.  In all truth it’s one of the simplest things I’ve learned to date and it uses what you already know about CSS.  The more complicated parts of responsive web come with the UI and deciding what viewers experience for each device/screen size/orientation.

This headline jumped out at me today as I was browsing the web for new blog ideas:  The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage.  For years I was a fanatical and defiant IE user– perhaps it was the old MSCE loyalty in me– but eventually I went to the dark side and started using Firefox.

What was interesting to me about this article was actually not necessarily that IE continued to slide in popularity (duh), but that Chrome overtook Firefox (at least in that site’s stats).  The article’s claim that Chrome is now “the technologist’s browser of choice” is certainly food for thought.  Though I reviewed Google Chrome several years ago, soon after its release, I didn’t see a significant advantage versus the browsers I was already using and few of my clients were using it.

However, Beacon’s web developer’s often share their preferences for Google Chrome for its speed and performance and I’ve finally made the jump to Chrome as well.  I find that it is consistently faster and less buggy that other browsers, but what ultimately put me over the edge was an issue with AspDotNetStorefront’s HTML editor and newer browsers.  I administer many AspDotNetStorefront sites and simply couldn’t wait for an upgrade to 8.1 or 9.2ML to use the WYSIWYG editor in admin.  Since the editor continued to work in Chrome, I guess I’ve officially made the switch! Who’s with me??

There are several web browsers for us to use these days. One in particualar I really enjoy using is Google Chrome. It’s one of the fastest browsers out there and is very intuitive to use. It also has some great features, like the Chrome Web Store to purchase apps, extensions and themes for it.

You can download it here:
http://www.google.com/chrome

This is a commercial that recently came out for it that caught my attention.

Google Chrome: Dear Sophie

Based on data collected by Compuware’s benchmarks division, Google Chrome is the fastest web browser in the “real world” of desktop users. The data, collected over a one-month time frame, captured the results of 1.86 billion individual measurements on over 200 websites.

In the chart below, Google Chrome 12 has the fastest page load time (in blue) of 3.433 seconds. While, Safari 4 has the slowest load time of 6.149 seconds. The chart also shows perceived render times (in green) of browsers, which is the amount of time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser. Firefox 5 has the best perceived render time (in green) of 2.18 seconds, while Chrome comes in second at 2.374 seconds.

I personally use Firefox most of the time due to the number of Add-ons I have installed on my machine, but after reading this article I might have to make the switch to Google Chrome.

Here is the link to the full article found on LinkedIn, if you wish to read further.

After working in web development for several years, things have changed quite a bit. A majority of people now look to their smartphones or tablets (including me, after work). They are simple to navigate and everything is at our fingertips. Granted, we will always use desktop computers for work and complex tasks.

With all that in mind, it gives us the chance to create great things with new experiences and keep people interested at home or on the go.

Mobile stats are pretty astounding as you can see here:

Courtesy of: Microsoft Tag

Not only is this a great way to provide content for users, but also provides new ways for clients to engage with their customers.

The internet is an ever-growing jungle of information.  I found this graphic depicting some of the common activities on the web and the number of occurrences they appear every minute. Facebook, the social networking giant, has 695,000 status updates, almost 80,000 wall posts, and over half a million comments posted every minute.  By the time you’ve read this post, Google will also have received just under 700,000 searches.

(Click image for full size)
Source: Go-Gulf

As a developer I like to listen to music while I am working. I’m sure this goes for many people across professions so I wanted to introduce everyone to something I was recently introduced to, Spotify.  As a quick summary Spotify is like having an iTunes stocked with anything you’re in the mood for.  You can make songs available for offline access and even share with friends.  If by chance what you’re in the mood for is not available you can add your own files and retrieve them just the same.  You can use it anywhere and that includes mobile!  You also have a lot of features similar to iTunes like Library, Search, top lists and Playlists.

For 9.99 a month you get all that.  I have to tell you that it is worth every penny and I’ve only had it for 2 hours.  Just imagine being able to listen to anything you want instantly.  It’s almost as if you get Music Block from the possibilities.