Gino Carteciano

For people who are used to reading stories about people getting superpowers from strange objects that crash landed on Earth like me, Chronicle only offers the “found footage” approach as something new. In some instances, the “found footage” element totally feels forced and unnecessary. However, it does add some level of awe to scenes were the kids are using their telekinesis, even though most of these superpower scenes look totally fake, which beats the whole purpose of the “found footage” gimmick.

The plot is as basic as it gets: three kids gain telekinesis after dicking around with a seemingly alien object that fell to Earth; they dick around with telekinesis by scaring little girls and shoving an automobile into a lake with the driver still in it; they fly; and then, well, absolute power corrupts. It’s not as compelling as I thought it would be, but I did like the climactic fight scene presented through multiple perspectives. That was kind of cool.

Overall, I liked it. I like how it touches on one of our deepest and most secret desires: to gain abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Not everyone will get the urge to fight crime if they get superpowers. Most of us would probably just do what these Chronicle kids did: dick around until somebody ends up in the hospital — or in a casket. And that’s a scary thought. So thank you, Chronicle. Thank you for letting us shine a light on one of our most selfish and disturbing desires with the help of a tired storytelling gimmick.

By now, most of us have already seen the awesome extended version of the Avengers movie Super Bowl XLVI ad. Actually, I just finished watching it for the 17th time and I have a few thoughts (other than HOLY CRAP IT’S ONLY THREE MONTHS AWAY). Three thoughts to be exact:

1. Producer Kevin Feige keeps insisting that the Skrulls are not in the movie while the Internet says he’s a big fat liar. I think they don’t look like Skrulls but only because they’re not green. Can’t really see the details but they kind of look like giant alien barbarians. The Badoon, maybe? Maybe they’re creatures from any of the 9 realms, recruited by Loki or some other big baddie to dick around with Earth. I could care less which alien race this is as long as they look good — and by “good” I mean “nasty”.

“ALIENS ASSEMBLE! If we are indeed aliens.”

2. I just love the fact that Tony Stark is talking about the name of their little superhero club while enjoying a little drink in front of Loki. I think this is right before the God of Mischief chokeslams Tony through the window.

3. THE HULK PUNCHES A JET. YES.

I don’t know about you but at this point, what I feel about this movie is exactly what Kristen Bell feels about sloths. I’d probably shake and cry on my way to the theater.

If you haven’t seen the ad yet, here you go:

Along with the main Avengers vs. X-Men mini-series, there’s going to be a tie-in series that may not really be essential to the story but it’s going to be essential for those of us who love violence. AVX: Versus will feature two fights in every issue and I can’t tell you how much I love this idea.

This is the stuff that sets forum boards aflame. Who’s going to win in a fight between Iron Man and Magneto? How about Namor and the Thing? Forget the main story. Forget the introspective view of secondary characters as seen in previous event tie-in series. This tie-in series is all about the fights and man, I am pumped! Here are some of the bouts I would love to see aside from the announced Iron Man vs. Magneto and Namor vs. Thing smackdowns:

1. Captain America vs. Cyclops

There’s a good chance that these two opposing generals will come to blows at some point during Avengers vs. X-Men and they’ll probably talk a lot while doing it. But I still want to see an entire half of a comic book dedicated only to these two leaders exchanging punches and hurtful words.

2. Ms. Marvel vs. Emma Frost

I know most people hope and expect a girl fight between Ms. Marvel and Rogue, but we’ve seen that a millions times already. Can’t we have two hot blondes duking it out in skimpy clothing — preferably in the rain — and not worry about how their powers do not go well in a comic book fight for once?

3. Vision vs. Danger

If you haven’t heard, the Vision is back. The real Vision, not that punk in Young Avengers. Who better to welcome the returning synthezoid than the living, walking training room of the X-Men? I would love to see Danger and the Vision compute the hell out of how they can beat each other in a fight. Also, who doesn’t like seeing machines punching each other in the face?

4. Black Widow vs. Hope

I was torn between Hope and X-23 as Black Widow’s opponent but since Laura’s joining the Avengers side of the fence soon, I’m guessing Hope is a safer bet. Trained to be the ultimate survivalist and soldier by Cable IN THE FAR FUTURE, it would be fun to see how Hope would fare against the deadly Widow. Also, red heads! Yay!

5. Avengers Academy vs. Jean Grey School for Higher Learning

An entire school of superheroes-in-training going to war with an entire school of mutants. It would be fun and funny and cute and violent. It would be glorious.

6. Hank Pym vs. Dr. Nemesis

This is a battle to be fought in the arena of SCIENCE! Imagine all the weird gadgets and scientific mumbo jumbo involved in a fight between two of the smartest people on Earth. Personally, I prefer to see them locked in a SCIENCE RAP BATTLE.

Dr. Nemesis never approves of my ideas. :(

7. Red Hulk vs. Colossus

From the first teaser image we saw, we already know that a clash between these two titans is inevitable. It may not be the most compelling story, but it’s going to be the most destructive fight. Violence is the name of the game here so this fight needs to happen.

8. Mockingbird/Valkyrie vs. Dani Moonstar

If Moonstar somehow gains her Valkyrie powers back, I would love to see her take on the “official” Valkyrie of the Marvel Universe (if there is such a thing). That’s going to be some hot Norse chick-on-chick action right there. But I would also settle for a powerless Moonstar going toe-to-toe with Mockingbird. They can even call in help from their respective teams, the New Mutants and the New Avengers, for a bigger clusterfuck of fun. Bottom line is I just want to see Moonstar going Jack Bauer on someone’s ass.

9. Iron Fist vs. Psylocke

KUNG FU NINJA VIOLENCE!

10. Young Avengers vs. Gambit

Man, I really want to see a bunch of kids dressed up as the Avengers beating the gumbo out of Gambit.

Whichever fights are to be included in AVX: Versus, I would gladly pay to see it. This is why I love Marvel. Sometimes, they can be huge dicks. But sometimes, they roll out awesome stuff like an entire series based entirely on superpowered violence.

In FF #13, when asked by Valeria Richards how he can be sure that he will not die in the face of certain death at the hands of cosmic forces, this is Dr. Doom’s response:

He will not die because he is DOOM, Destroyer of Worlds. This kind of confidence is what I’m bringing into the new year.

2010 was not really good to me. It was bland at best. But 2011 was an entirely different story altogether. In 2011, I got my groove back. I met a girl and I was lucky enough to win her heart. We’re now in a 9-month relationship and we’re getting better at this whole being a couple thing everyday. I also got a new job that I didn’t know I wanted until I got it. Plus, I have two paid writing gigs on the side to boot.

2011 has been very good to me and I’m hoping 2012 will be better. I’ll be greeting the new year with DOOM-like confidence. In 2012, I shall be invincible. In 2012, gods shall not dare stand against me. I hope all of you will carry this same insolent swagger into 2012. Happy new year, everyone!

A dazzling new Blu-ray edition of “The Incredibles” was released  in April, and we screened the film at the final day of the Hero Complex Film Festival. In both settings, the 2004 movie continues to live up to its name. Hero Complex’s Geoff Boucher recently talked to Brad Bird, the writer and director of the superhero classic (as well as the director of December’s upcoming “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” with Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg) and got him to reflect on the Parr family, the secret sauce of Pixar and his soft spot for Sean Connery as 007.

GB: Pixar has become the gold standard among popcorn films as far as storytelling, and I’m wondering if the process of animation — and having the story locked in before the animators get to work — is one of the reasons. What I mean is, Pixar creators need to tighten the bolts on its plot and character before the animation process starts, while today with live-action films it’s not unusual to see summer blockbusters start shooting without a finished script.   

BB: I don’t know if that’s exactly true. We’re still tinkering with the story at the start of the equivalent of principal photography, which is the beginning of animation, when we’re still trying to find everything. We usually have a sequence that we know has to be in the movie, because it’s one of the big plot turns, and it’s usually 20 to 30 minutes in and it’s the shift from Act 1 to Act 2 or something that’s crucial. That will usually go into production first, because any version of the movie that would exist will have that scene in it. But the stuff around it — and often the opening — is what you do at the end, because what the opening needs to be shifts a little depending on the movie you’re exploring. So I would not say that we ever have  have completely locked scripts [at the beginning of the animating work]; they are in the process of being remade as the film is in the works. There are some films like “Toy Story 2″ and “Ratatouille”  where it is really last minute, chaos reigning, trying to get the stuff ready for the animators so no one was sitting idle and drawing a paycheck.

GB: Pixar is widely admired but, really, rarely copied. Why do you think that is?

BB:  Everyone in Hollywood says they wish they could do it like Pixar, but they really don’t. There’s no secret at Pixar, but there is a belief in letting people pursue something with passion and take chances, and most of Hollywood, really, doesn’t like that. It’s too scary. Some studio executives will say they love obsessive creators who take risks, but really most of them would rather play it safe. Projects cost a lot of money and people would rather follow patterns they know and make things safe and accessible. Hollywood wants there to be a math formula for making hit films. To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.

GB: ”The Incredibles” really brings a smile to the face of any die-hard comic book fan — it’s such a lively and loving satire of the comics that we all grew up with. At the same time, the movie is completely satisfying to that wide general audience that has only a vague sense of superhero lore. Did that take special care on your part? Did you try to create a movie that would thrive with both those constituencies?   

BB: If you worry too much about that, you’re just bound to fail. You have to kind of go into stories with a strong sort of “I’m doing this” sort of attitude, or else it comes off as sort of tiptoeing. I didn’t know that much about superheroes, and the funny thing is when I go to things like comic book conventions, I get asked a lot of questions by people who assume that I do know, so they refer to things and the chances are probably 999 out of a 1,0o0 that I have not read it, you know, issue No. 47 of “Atomic Man.” I got my superhero stuff secondhand from movies or television, which is practically heresy to a comic-book guy. But I did have affection for superheroes.

GB: Talk a bit about the process of finding your heroes then… 

BB: When I first started toying around with the idea, I tried to come up with brand-new powers for the characters, and I realized very quickly that all of them had been done unless they were stupid, like, “He drools on people.” The comic-book superhero genre is so vast and so sort of trodden-over that some guy out there could have self-published a hundred issues in Omaha. Someone, somewhere had done just about everything with powers. Just as quickly as I realized all the powers had been done, I also realized that I wasn’t that interested in them. I was interested in how it interfaced with family or having a life and getting up in the morning. And then very quickly I said, “Well, if you were to have powers based on family members and their position in the family” then that would be a very interesting way to get into the movie: Dads are supposed to be strong, so I made him strong; mothers are supposed to be infinitely flexible, so I made her infinitely flexible; teenage girls are insecure and a little defensive, so I had her be invisible and gave her force fields; 10-year-old boys are energy balls and race everywhere, so I made him super fast; and babies are unknowns, they could be the next president of the United States or a bum — or both.

GB: I showed some old James Bond  films recently to my young son and he said, “Wow, these remind me of ‘The Incredibles,’ ” which made me smile.

BB: Wow, I lucked out, I got to him first! Yes, I really love the Bond films and they had a commitment to very caricatured worlds.  They did this crazy stuff with absolute conviction but with wit at the same time, fully aware of how preposterous some of this stuff was. I remember my mom saying about “Goldfinger” that she was home and in bed before she realized the extent that her leg had been pulled…. I think if you’re willing to do something crazy but with bravado you can win the audience over and certainly the Sean Connery films — Bond at his best — were great at doing just that. Sean Connery with a seagull on his head and he throws that off and infiltrates the base and then peels off his wetsuit and he’s got a dinner jacket on. That stuff is catnip.

GB: The humor was compartmentalized in those films, so they wouldn’t undermine the scenes of peril…  

BB: Absolutely. Connery had the right exact attitude. In the action scenes he looked like he was genuinely afraid rather than of being a hard-ass that he’s not worried. He was wonderful at portraying genuine fear, and I feel that Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford kind of took their cues from him on how to sell action on a screen. Part of the reason “Die Hard” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and things like that work so well is that the actors really get that people don’t want invulnerable heroes. It’s far more interesting to see heroes who are afraid and then go ahead anyway.

GB: What are some of the other compass points you had for this film, as far as tone or the action sequences?

BB: One of things that people get wrong is they toss off too many witty comments — and this is really true in animation — and we tried to avoid that like the plague in “The Incredibles.” When you’re in danger, be in danger, don’t be making wisecracks and tossing things off. You don’t need to be sweating and crying but at least show that you’re worried. I tried to do that in “Iron Giant” as well. The trouble we have in animation is that the medium itself encourages the audience to believe that people can’t be hurt. The coyote falls off a cliff and he dusts himself off and goes after the roadrunner again. So in these films I made sure that people saw that when something happened, it hurt. We had that problem in spades with “The Incredibles” because not only were they animated they were also superheroes. The challenge was showing people that do amazing things but still have feeling.

GB: I remember the scene where Mr. Incredible is being held captive and he believes his family is about to die. There’s a real wrenching emotion to that sequence; there was nothing flimsy about that peril or the weight of consequence.

BB: Thanks for saying so. You know, in the prologue of the film, there’s a moment when Mr. Incredible positions himself in front of a hurtling train and, for a fleeting second, he winces. “It’s quick, maybe a second long, but it’s a shot to tell everyone that ‘This is going to hurt.’ Those little touches, if you are diligent about them, they get the audience really involved, because that’s the reality that they know. This is blown often with superheroes. There was some movie with Will Smith where he kind of deflected things that have real weight behind them; you can do that, you can deflect them, but don’t discount the weight or the fact that your inertia is going to be affected by it. What that does is announce to the audience that this is a special effect. I know that sounds funny coming from me, because on “The Incredibles” this was a movie that was announcing its cartoon-iness the whole time, but we were really trying to get people worried when the missiles were surrounding the jet plane, for instance, and that was a challenge the animators were really into. We loved that it was difficult, because we knew if we did it right, it would be something amazing and unusual.

– Geoff Boucher

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Moebius: The Hero Complex interview

by Jim Mroczkowski

All right now, children, all right. Everybody settle down. Hushabye, now, hush. Gather ‘round. You’ve all had a busy summer, full of Frost Giants and Decepticons and cartoon Nazis, but all of that is over now. All of the movies have come out, and all of the teasers have been teased, and the Con has Conned. Everything has happened, and it’s time to wind down. It’s time to put on your jammies and put away the spoilers and sexy movie mutants and their Cuban Missile Crises for another year. All that’s left to do is quiet down, and let the autumn and its events wash over you.

Shhh, shhh.

Goodnight, Comics.

Goodnight, Marvel movies. You worried us for much of last year, then you turned out to be pretty rad.

Goodnight, Norse gods. You ended up being more interesting and less ridiculous than I ever would have imagined when forming my comic-buying behavior in 1985, when I thought I wanted nothing to do with you. You were so good in your own movie that I saw it twice, and then you showed up in another movie to remind me of a connection between you and the Nazis that had not occurred to me since Mrs. Carter’s Social Studies class. You got me to fall down the wikipedian rabbit hole, where I learned that Adolf Hitler took the time in 1941 to go on the record calling Odin worshippers “inexpressibly stupid.” To put it another way: when Grandpa was my age, Odin worship was still on the table. This factoid is on track to inspire an incredible Thanksgiving argument with Dad about religion.

Goodnight, Ryan Reynolds. Better luck next time. You are still very charming.

Goodnight, post-credits sequence. We all knew you were there, but you made us wait for you anyway, with 48 ounces of cola sloshing around inside us. You made the world look very different to my impatient friend, who doesn’t know you exist and who will ask me to confirm a rumor he heard about an Avengers movie six months from now.

Goodnight, Mark Ruffalo. See you next year.

Goodnight, 2012 announcements. You were so exciting, you were almost worth Paul’s life.

Goodnight, Mockingbird TV show on ABC Family. You sound like you will bother several people if you ever end up happening, but I am pulling for you anyway.

Goodnight, Cable.

Goodnight, all the hard work Duane Swierczynski did rehabilitating Cable. Please try not to punch the Watcher on your way out.

Goodnight, Kevin Bacon’s ascot. We will never meet again, but you made the difference between good summer and great summer.

Goodnight, day-and-date digital. After almost a decade of dithering, it sounds like this is going to be your year to put the pirates out to sea.

Goodnight, Borders.

Goodnight, guy who was always sitting in the middle of the floor in the manga aisle of Borders, reading all the books for free. I’m not one to point fingers.

Goodnight, 52 Reboot. We have said every possible word there is to say about you, and you haven’t even happened yet.

Goodnight, Batgirl. A lot of people got to see themselves in you for a long time, and that can’t be taken away.

Goodnight, Death of Spider-Man. You were the perfect ending to a story I didn’t want to end.

Goodnight, Fear Itself. They’re already beating the drum about what happens after you. There never seems to be time to sweep up the rubble and play some softball these days.

Goodnight, tie-ins. You completely overwhelmed me, moreso than ever before. I surrender; just spare my family.

Goodnight, San Diego. I am completely cowed by the very thought of booking a hotel in you, but who knows? Maybe we will meet again one day.

Goodnight, Legend of the Hyatt Bar.

Goodnight, Hall H. I didn’t hear much about you this year, actually.

Goodnight, steampunk Ghostbuster cosplayers.

Goodnight, Comics. We have packed a lot of living into this summer, and it technically still has a month left in it. For now, though, the sun is setting. Here’s to the quiet.

Jim Mroczkowski ZzzzzZZZZZzzzzz.

The joint action by MI6 and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters had agents insert into the magazine an encrypted version of “The Best Cupcakes in America,” published by the Ellen DeGeneres talk show.

Originally, the magazine had instructions on how to make lethal pipe bombs, as well as articles by Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

According to The Telegraph, a similar Pentagon operation was blocked by the CIA, who claimed the magazine is more valuable as a source of intelligence. The attack was launched from Britain instead.

Al-Qaeda reissued the magazine (bomb-making instructions included) two weeks later and issued four more editions. According to one of The Telegraph‘s sources, British intelligence “was continuing to target online outlets publishing the magazine because it is viewed as such a powerful propaganda tool.”

As amusing as the story may sound, one has to question whether changing the magazine’s content in such an obvious way was the best course of action. It gave Al-Qaeda a clear warning its website had been hacked, probably making the organization a lot more cautious.

Image courtesy of Flickr, lamantin

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Whenever you bring up the idea that the cycle of innovation must, at some point, come to an end, you inevitably evoke the memory of Charles Duell. For the uninitiated, Duell was the commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in 1899 supposedly said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

We can all have a good laugh at Duell’s expense now (even though he may never have actually said that), but perhaps we shouldn’t. After all, isn’t Duell’s sentiment generally true in a lot of cases? For instance, have cars really changed that much since the ’50s? Sure, they’re more fuel efficient and they now have OnStar systems and USB ports, but they’re still basically the same — four tires that you operate with a steering wheel. They still (mostly) run on gas. They’ve been perfected, but are they fundamentally different?

Or take toasters. Is the toaster you could buy in 1971 really all that different from today’s? For all I know, toaster technology may have advanced dramatically since then, but as a consumer, there’s really not much difference. It took a minute or so to make toast 40 years ago, and it still does today.

So why do we expect social media to be any different? Simple. It’s because we have just come off a big spurt of growth and the natural inclination is to assume that’s going to continue forever. That’s just human nature. And that’s why this year’s South by Southwest conference is a bit of a comedown. Back in 2007, SXSW was the launching pad for Twitter. In 2009, it was Foursquare. This year? Nada.

But we’re not just having an off year. We’re at a new, more boring stage in the development cycle.

Such thinking runs counter to the ethos of social media, I realize, but consider that social media has really only been around in its current form since 2005 or so. The real innovation that spurred the social media movement is microblogging. Before Facebook added status updates, fewer people were blogging and responding to blogs. Every innovation since then has basically been a refinement, including:

• Twitter: a network devoted exclusively to microblogging
• Foursquare: mobile microblogging with information about your location
• GetGlue: microblogging about TV programs
• Instagram: visual microblogging

If the latter is the big innovation of SXSW this year, I can hypothosize that micro video blogging will rule in 2012, but this is more tweaking than anything brand new. (While 12seconds.tv ultimately failed in its micro video blogging endeavors, perhaps it was ahead of its time.)

Perhaps you object to this on the grounds that tech is somehow immune to the toaster innovation phenomenon. But what about personal computing? The industry took a quantum leap in 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh, but, seriously, how different is your Mac or PC today? Yes, the graphics are a lot better and it’s a hell of a lot faster, but there hasn’t been another innovation quite at the same scale as the graphical user interface. The iPhone was also a big jump for mobile in 2007, but all the smartphones since then have basically run with the idea of a touchscreen and mobile apps. The iPad? It’s nothing new: Tablet PCs have been around for 20 years. Apple just basically introduced a larger version of the iPhone. The iPad is very well designed of course, but, in the end, the device’s success is a feat of marketing.

So where does this leave us? Maybe with a more realistic sense of where social media is going. Yes, it’s going to be even more prevalent in 10 years. Yes, there will no doubt be lots of cool new technologies that bring microblogging to new arenas, but you’re not going to see another Twitter or Facebook. Maybe everything that could be invented hasn’t, but, in social media, all the important things have.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, susoy

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There are three people in this story called Terry, two of them former Monty Python members. If I don’t pay attention I might mix them up.

For several years, Terry Gilliam was working on a big-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s satanic-messianic twist on Just William, the almost unbearably funny novelGood Omens. Several times it looked like the project was going to get rolling, several times it got stuck in heavy, development and financing mud and, despite some wonderful wheel spins that sent spray flying all over the media, it never get unstuck. Sometimes Johnny Depp was supposed to star, sometimes Pete Postlethwaite, and always we waited patiently.

Late last year, Rich and I heard a few voices telling us that Good Omens was on the move again, and we tried to find out what was going on. Unfortunately, we were looking in the wrong places. The new Good Omens was not being prepared for cinema, it was going to be a TV project.

Last week, a “semi-official” Terry Jones fansite reported that Jones and his current co-writer of choice, Gavin Scott, were “in talks” to write a new version of Good Omens. Within days, Pratchett himself took to the stage at the SFX Weekender and announced, at least sort of officially, that Good Omens was now headed to TV as a 4-part series.

Scott, if you don’t recognise his name, was a writer on Small Soliders and The Borrowers, as well as Jones’ upcoming feature film, Absolutely Anything.

One might assume it would be headed to Sky in a similar manner to the last few years of Discworld adaptations, but that’s not yet confirmed.

I guess this news explains what Gaiman and Pratchett were toasting last September.

It’s a shame that Bill Milner and Will Poulter are probably a bit too old for this film now – they’d have been perfect just a couple of years back. Maybe the TVmakers will go the full William and just hire Daniel Roche.

The designer in question, whose identity is currently (and fortunately for said designer) unknown, created a website for a chiropractic firm, Winona Chiropractic Center, and also provided hosting services the site. When the firm allegedly “failed to pay any of their total web design bill, despite repeated attempts by their web design agency to collect,” the designer, who claimed to have “a childish sense of humor,” hijacked the site as his or her own personal billboard of bitterness.

“Please note that I have waited years for this business to pay,” stated the “new and improved” version of the site. “I have hosted their site for free since about 2007. This is me giving up.”

The rant continued, “Personally, I wouldn’t trust a doctor of any kind who couldn’t pony up for what, in the grand scheme of things, is a small charge for their web design. Do what you will, though.”

The site gathered some attention starting with a Reddit thread or two; but apparently, the piqued digital creative responsible suffered from an acute fit of remorse late in the afternoon because the page has now been entirely removed.

The Internet being the slice of magic that it is, we’re able to reproduce the page here:

Click for large version.

We certainly do agree that the designer’s actions were childish, but the long-simmering rage that builds when deadbeat clients refuse to pay their bills can cause folks to go a little bonkers after a few months, to say nothing of a couple years.

Web devs and designers, we want to know, has a client ever refused to honor your invoice? Vote in the poll, and in the comments, let us know how you handled the situation — especially if your solution was particularly mature, effective or at least funny.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, clintspencer

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On February 2 around 4 a.m., the Internet will run out of its current version of IP addresses. At least that’s what one Internet Service Provider is predicting based on a rate of about one million addresses every four hours.

Hurricane Electric has launched Twitter and Facebook accounts that count down to what it has termed the “IPcalypse.”

Every device that is connected to the Internet gets a unique code called an IP address (it looks like this). The current system, IPv4, only supports about 4 billion individual IPv4 addresses.

As PC World‘s Chris Head explained in a blog post yesterday, some of these addresses are reusable. The problem, however, is that their one-time use counterparts will eventually lead to the complete depletion of IP addresses.

Fortunately, some smart folks foresaw this problem long before we did and invented IPv6, a system that invokes both letters and digits to handle 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (shall we just call it “a zillion?”).

Hurricane Electric’s doomsday campaign encourages other Internet service providers to transition to that system. Fortunately, the Internet Society‘s Wiki assures us that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist during the transition despite being largely incompatible. Software and hardware developers are working on transition mechanisms, and most operating systems install support for IPv6 by default.

Since many of us still have some canned food and bottled water stacked up in our basement from the Y2K era, we should be OK either way.

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One of the joys and privileges I had during my time at Filmation was checking out what artists in other departments were creating. I especially sought out the background painters and layout artists, marveling at their work. One day after work, I spied blue pencil drawings sticking out of a folder lying in the open dumpster next to my car. After a quick check for possible witnesses, I dove in and retrieved a treasure of 1st season Masters of the Universe background layouts.

Katie Goldman is a cute little first grader who lives in Evanston, Illinois. She’s 7 years old and loves Star Wars. For a while she carried her Star Wars water bottle to school and then, one morning, she asked for the pink one instead. She told her mother that some kids at school had bullied her, telling her that Star Wars was for boys. Heartbroken, she resolved to fix the problem by backing down instead of calling them womp rats.

Read more…

I’ve recently come across new web apps and plugins that can save bloggers a lot of time and maybe a bit of sanity.

These all come highly recommended for the serious blogger, but are sure to get a new comer excited about the possibilities of customizing and improving the blogging experience.

Featured below are new ways to snap the web, edit your code, curate tweets, organize upcoming posts and even get more readers. Enjoy!

1. Pixlr Grabber

Capture the web quickly and easily. Pixlr Grabber is a browser extension for both Firefox and Google Chrome developed by Pixlr, a slick web based image editing solution.

The Pixlr Grabber extension helps you take screenshots of selected portions or entire webpages. You can then save to your computer, upload to the web or immediately share your screenshots with friends.

2. Code ‘n’ Run

This simple web application enables you to connect to your own server via a secure FTP connection and edit your website code.

The interface is extremely minimal and user friendly, perfect for use on an iPad. Code syntax is properly highlighted and multiple files can be worked on quickly and efficiently.

3. KeepStream

The Twitter app I’ve been waiting for is finally being developed. KeepStream is a new startup that aims to help you organize your favorite twitter updates. You may have noticed it in the latest DotSauce Link Roundup.

You can select tweets from your public timelines, your own stream, a search, a Twitter list or your starred favorites. Tweets with links in them can optionally feature full titles and short descriptions of the destination pages.

Tweets are saved within a nicely formatted list that is shareable and embeddable. Here is a live example:

4. Editorial Calendar

This new WordPress plugin provides a clean calendar view of your posting activity. Browse your live posts and quickly create drafts for posts you’d like to schedule at a later date.

Using this plugin definitely beats selecting dates manually from the new post page.

Get in a rhythm and manage your posting schedule with this great plugin. I’m sure it’s going to be one of the next best essential plugins for all blogs.

5. Sharedaddy

Hot off the presses! Automattic has just announced this exciting social sharing plugin today.

Sharedaddy is for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs. The plugin places buttons below your post that enable readers to quickly share posts on social networks, bookmarking services or directly to a friend’s email. The option is also available to add additional services.

View this video for a quick walk-through of the Sharedaddy administration or see the plugin in action below this post.

Stay Tuned For More

I hope you found these new apps and plugins for bloggers as useful as I did. Stay tuned to DotSauce for upcoming collections of useful new apps for social media and business soon.

If you have friends who are fellow bloggers, consider being one of the first to put the new Sharedaddy plugin to good use. Thanks!

5 Incredibly Useful New Apps for Bloggers

This is not your father’s world wide web. Thanks to soaring smartphone sales, new tablet devices like the iPad, and the burgeoning trend of connected devices, individuals are accessing and experiencing the web in a very different way than they were even five years ago.

The desktop browsing experience is also undergoing radical change, thanks to the evolution of JavaScript frameworks and the push for standards successors such as CSS3 and HTML5. It’s an exciting time to be developing or designing for the web.

Even for the seasoned developer, it can be difficult to know where to start if you want to embrace the new technologies of HTML5 and support new devices like the iPhone, Android-based smartphones or the iPad without neglecting users on older browsers. Fortunately, the collaborative nature of the web means that lots of developers and designers are working out best practices and solutions toward these problems together.

One of the most interesting new projects aimed at giving designers and developers a starting template for integrating HTML5 and other modern features into their sites is HTML5 Boilerplate.

Created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian, HTML5 Boilerplate is the product of more than two and a half years in iterative development, and it’s chock-full of best practices and techniques for creating cross-browser compatible websites that will work with legacy browsers (which means IE 6) while also being HTML5-ready.

To be clear, HTML5 Boilerplate is not a framework. It’s a template that can be modified and used for your own projects. You can use as much or as little as you want and make your own additions and subtractions. Still, it’s one of the most robust and well-commented starting points we’ve seen for setting up a solid HTML5 base for your projects.

One of the best things about HTML5 Boilerplate is that the source is openly available under a public domain license; you can use it and integrate it into your own projects in any way you want.

As a result, a ton of awesome projects have already used HTML5 Boilerplate alongside other techniques. Just check out this page on GitHub to see a sampling of some of the HTML5 Boilerplate-infused spin-offs.

Check out these additional tools, projects and resources to get the most out of HTML5 Boilerplate:

• The Source Itself – Available on GitHub for your watching/forking/commenting pleasure, this is the source for HTML5 Boilerplate. You can keep up with the latest changes, ask questions and make suggestions. You can also check out the various forks from around the community.
• Paul Irish’s Official HTML5 Boilerplate Screencast – Nettuts+ published this awesome 40-minute screencast that Paul Irish created to walk you through HTML5 Boilerplate. It shows off all the features and offers some awesome tips. Definitely check this out.
• Add 960 Grid System to Boilerplate – One of our favorite CSS frameworks is Nathan Smith’s 960.gs. It’s easy to add 960.gs to Boilerplate to create the best of both worlds.
• Use it with WordPress – Sam Sherlock created a really great WordPress theme that combines HTML5 Boilerplate with the Thematic WordPress theme framework. He has also infused many elements from the new default WordPress 3.0 theme TwentyTen.
• Some Tips To Keep in Mind – This collection of tips from Brian Blakely are good points of reference.

We’re really excited to see how HTML5 Boilerplate evolves and how other projects choose to integrate the template. It’s a terrific starting point for many designers and developers who just don’t have the time to pull all the little bits and information together when getting started with HTML5.

Are you using HTML5 in your designs? What tools are you using to ease the process? Let us know in the comments.

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools You Should Try
- 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter
- 10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams
- 11 Delicious TextMate Themes for Designers and Developers
- 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now

Images courtesy of HTML Boilerplate.

More About: 960.gs, divya manian, HTML5, html5 boilerplate, paul irish, Web Development, web development series

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Meet Eater is a “real garden that feeds on social interaction.” It is an experiment in human interaction and design, focused on rebuilding the connection between human being and plants.

Here’s how it works, according to its creator:

“Meet Eater is rigged up with a system to register physical contact and social media interaction. Watering is triggered by human contact and nutrients are delivered when you start hanging out with it on Facebook. Of course the novelty of such a project could draw more attention than is desired. If the plant becomes over loved it will call for quiet time via the Facebook page, just as you or I would.”

Technically, this garden (which you can visit at The Edge in the State Library of Queensland) requires food, water and nutrients, just like any other plant. However, those elements entirely depend on people becoming Facebook fans of Meet Eater and talking to the garden via Facebook wall posts. Meet Eater even replies to wall posts with its own distinctive (and definitely human) voice.

Meet Eater is a project by designer Bashkim Isai as part of a course at the University of Queensland, Australia. The experiment has been running for 72 days and has accumulated more than 1,200 fans in that time.

We’re thrilled by the novelty of this social media experiment. It utilizes the best elements of social media — interaction, conversation, connection — to make us rethink how we interact with the world. We don’t think we’re making a stretch by saying that our society takes for granted the important role plants have in our ecosystem. Meet Eater takes concepts such as the tweeting plant to a new and more personal level.

What do you think of the Meet Eater project? How do you think social media affects our perception of the ecosystem around us?

[via All Facebook]

Images courtesy of The University of Queensland

More About: facebook, Facebook wall, gardening, Meet Eater, Plant

For more Social Media coverage:

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It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes are outdated or updated now.

Looking back over these previous theme articles, you can clearly see how and why WordPress has rapidly matured into the CMS powerhouse it is today. With all of the features that have been added and improvements made with every new WordPress version and with its ever-increasing popularity among the design and development community, the quality of free themes is evident. Developers are continually pushing WordPress’ boundaries, giving us today’s outstanding free theme collection.

Today, we present a fresh collection of useful WordPress themes. Please notice that some themes are a bit older, but they are included because we haven’t featured them last time. This round-up picks up where we left off last year: most themes below were released between June 2009 and August 2010. We’ve also split this collection into the following categories: gallery and portfolio themes, themes for bloggers, e-Commerce WordPress themes, clean themes, magazine-style themes, minimal themes, mobile themes; pre-launch themes; and finally “Themes That Take WordPress Beyond.”

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #2 is Successful Freelancing for Web Designers, 260 pages for just $9,90.]

Gallery And Portfolio Themes

Cumulus (Free version) (demo)
Cumulus is a very clean and calm portfolio theme. It contains a large block for featured projects and images and a nifty blog posts navigation in the sidebar.

Imbalance (demo)
Free wordpress theme in modern-minimalist style. Imbalance is a very user friendly, jQuery powered theme which looks really well under any browser and OS. Perfectly fits for your blog, online magazine or portfolio websites. It is optimized for high-loads, contains WordPress 3.0 menu support, Twitter widget, jQuery-based gallery and WP Post Thumbnails support.

Shaken and Stirred Theme (demo)
This theme is perfect for you if you’re in need of a gallery/portfolio website or if you just want a website with a unique grid layout that not many websites have taken full advantage of yet. “Shaken Grid” uses the jQuery Masonry plugin which “arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid.” The result is a gap-less layout even if you have varying post heights.

AutoFocus+ (demo)
The theme is designed on an 800px, 8 column grid layout that truly allows your images to shine. The theme boasts a sharp typographic approach with a 22px baseline grid, and a Garamond/Helvetica (Times/Arial for you PC users) font stack that’s much easier to read.

Fotofolio Landscape (demo)
A nice dark WordPress theme with sidebar navigation and jQuery-powered lightbox for images. A good choice for photographers who want to feature their works in an online portfolio.

FolioGrid (demo)
This theme contains a fluid grid-based layout, jQuery-based transitions and automatically resizing thumbnails. Also, you can choose between various page tamplates, and the theme has a widget-enabled area, too.

Mansion (demo)
Mansion is a free photoblogger’s theme for WordPress. It features a flexible-width thumbnail grid for both images and photo journal entries. Mansion is perfect for those who want to primarily showcase their photographs and occasionally write blog posts.

PhotoView (the link is currently unavailable due to server problems of the theme’s author) (demo)
PhotoView was designed for displaying photos and videos in a simple and clean manner. The theme has an integrated lightbox. Also, a PSD file is included for easy customization.

SimpleFolio (demo)
SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider. It has 2 different widget areas and threaded comments, and also supports paged comments and has 2 different page templates for advanced usage. The control of images is done from the post page.

Smashing Multimedia (demo)
This theme was designed especially for podcasters, photographers and users who can now easily embed videos and images, rate them and showcase them in their own WordPress-based blog. It has a parent theme and an easily customizable child theme. This WordPress Theme comes with layered PSD source files, a visual help guide and is fully localized ready for you to translate it into your target language.

Fullscreen Photo and Multimedia (demo)
Fullscreen is a free one-column photography and multimedia theme for WordPress that can be used for portfolios, photoblogs, videoblogs, and virtually anything else where you want your content to be front and center. It provides visual artists a unique way of presenting their latest work online using a minimalist side-scrolling homepage.

Brave Zeenat (demo)
A clean Portfolio Theme ideal for photographers, artists and designers to showcase their portfolios.

Monokrome (demo)
This grid-based theme is widget ready and has a Twitter stream and Flickr integration. The column width adapts to the width of the images and the width of the browser viewport.

Portfolio WPESP Theme (live demo)
Portfolio – WPESP Theme is a “minimalist” Theme based on the idea of portfolio created by DAILYWP. The Theme is a starting point in the creation of portfolios, using WordPress as CMS.

Selecta (demo, WordPress 3.0+ compatible)
Selecta’s rounded edges and bold, modern color palettes make for a fresh theme that’s best suited to blogs where video will be the main focus. The wider-than-usual frames around thumbnails and videos bring to mind the retro-cool of Polaroid photographs and old home movies.

Work-a-holic (demo)
Work-a-holic is a free two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators.

BlueBubble WordPress Theme (demo)
The theme is clean and simple, contains a theme options page, uses post image thumbnail plugin, has 2 widget ready sidebars and uses jQuery/PHP-based contact form with easy customization. Requires WordPress 2.9+.

WordPress Themes For Bloggers

Lap of Luxury (demo)
This theme uses gold in the logo, and white and black are used as the main colors. The 2-col theme contains a sidebar on the right that allows for a large square ad up top, and splitting into 2 columns below that. Comes fully widgetized. A special feature of this theme is the logo changer.

Katana (demo)
This theme has a simple layout based on anime or game niche. Theme will be suitable for blogs of such niches. Theme has features like featured post section, post thumbnails, banner ads, adsense, twitter widgets etc. Theme uses custom fonts for various titles. It has an intuitive theme option page which lets you configure the theme.

Koi Theme (demo)
Koi is a simplified version of N.Design Studio’s theme (2009 redesign). Key features: multi-level dropdown menus, social media buttons, threaded & paged comments, and sidebar widget plus three footer widgets. This theme includes an option page to manage dropdown menus, favicon, footer tracking code, and social media buttons. Requires WordPress 2.9+.

Bueno
Bueno is a clean, minimalistic design which sophistication in both its typography and structure. It uses a grid-based design, has integrated banner ad management, widgetized sidebar and 7 different color schemes. Also, the theme is packaged wth a .po file for easy theme integration.

Notepad Theme (demo)
The theme is inspired by the iPhone’s Notes.app. This new theme is widget compatible with threaded comments, social media buttons, and multi-level dropdown menus. It has been tested on WordPress 2.9 with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE7+. It also includes some nice CSS3 enhancement such as rounded corners and drop shadow.

Strukture (demo)

Peacekeeper (demo)

The Seven Five (demo)
A minimalist blogger/social theme including several customization and layout options.

Simplo (demo)

Galaxy (demo)
The Galaxy WordPress theme is a two column theme that supports banner ads and the WP-PageNavi plugin. Perfect theme for personal blogs.

Aparatus (demo)

Zexee (demo)

Cyangant Elegant (demo)

Obscure (demo)
A dark magazine wordpress theme suitable for any site nitche and best fit for community-based sites.

Designpile (demo)

Obscorp (demo)

The Side Blog Theme (demo)
A free blogging theme with all sorts of customization and content management options.

E-Commerce WordPress Themes

e-Commerce Theme: Kelontong (demo)
The theme has a simple layout, clean, professional look, is integrated with WP e-commerce and features a slideshow for products.

Dangdoot (e-commerce theme: free version) (demo)
Dangdoot is a free e-commerce theme for WordPress and requires the e-Commerce plug-in.

AppCloud (e-commerce theme: free version) (demo)
AppCloud is another free e-commerce theme for WordPress. (It too requires the e-Commerce plug-in).

Clean WordPress Themes

Blissful Blog (demo)

The Ideal Website
The Ideal Website is designed to fit Fibonacci’s Golden Section – otherwise known as the divine proportions. These measurements are said to be the most pleasing to the eye, and have been widely used for everything from judging beauty of a face, to the design of bank notes.

Un.complicated Theme (demo)
The layout is minimalist, clean, and organized into three 320px columns. This theme, are built on Starkers and implements the The Golden Grid. here is a wigetized sidebar, which looks like a regular three column row. I have also integrated twitter within the theme, using javascript. All the user has to do is find this line in the index.php page.

Voidy (demo)
Voidy is the perfect theme for your great blog. It is clean, clear and beautiful. It is minimalistic two-cloumn theme with the widgets all arranged in the right sidebar. Voidy was designed to make your content stand out and make everything else get out of the way.

Clear (demo)
Clear is the perfect theme for great authors. It is clean, clear and beautiful. It is minimalistic one-cloumn theme with the widgets all arranged at the bottom. Clear was designed to make your content stand out and make everything else get out of the way.

Delicate (demo)

Boldy (demo)
A free theme that includes support for WordPress 3.0 Menu Management, has in-built slideshows, jQuery-based forms and live form validation as well as a widget for Twitter.

Smooth (demo)

Inuit Types (starter edition) (demo)

Modernist (demo)
The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video.

Titan Theme (free edition) (demo)

YouAre Theme (demo)

Simple Organization (demo)

Neutra (demo)
Neutra is a simple and elegant theme for WordPress. Grid-based with focus on simplicity and typography.

The Erudite (demo)
A theme for writers who want readers, not visitors, traffic, click-throughs, CPMs or what-have-you. Carefully crafted typography and generous use of whitespace lets your writing shine. Version 2 includes a dark theme option.

Magazine-Style Themes

The Columnist
The Columnist WordPress theme is inspired by traditional newspaper layouts and the grid structures and typography techniques they employ. It has WordPress thumbnail support, widget support, CSS3 column structure, jQuery animations, custom fields for images and featured latest post area.

The Structure Theme (the link was removed because the pricing was changed after the article was published, demo)
The Structure Theme is a free WordPress theme with a modern minimalist design. There are 4 themes included with the Structure Theme download; a white theme, black theme, two column blog and a single column blog design. The theme was created with a simple and clean aesthetic meant to easily adopt the style of the content added to the site. The Structure Theme is also designed with customization in mind. Meaning, with a little work, the theme can be completely personalized to suit your brand.

Aurelius (demo)

Tanzaku (demo)

The WhatsUp (demo)

WPCount (demo)

Maimpok (demo)

Malleable (demo)

Furvious (demo)
A nice theme coming with 5 color styles, powerful admin framework and featured posts area.

Newspress (demo)

Minimal WordPress Themes

Modernist

Reptile

WP-Notes (demo)

Satoshi (demo)

Ulap Theme (demo)

Manifest
The goal with Manifest was to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets.

Miniml Press Theme (demo)

Functionalism (demo)

LifeStreaming White (demo)

Vostok (demo)
Vostok is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.

Mini (demo)

Mobile Themes For WordPress

iPhonsta WordPress theme (demo)
iPhonsta Theme is made for iPhone but it also looks nice on other mobile phones and gadgets. iPhonsta wordpress theme is an easy way to expand your visitor’s loyality by providing them with a mobile version of your website.

WordPress Mobile Pack
The WordPress Mobile Pack includes the following: a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user visiting your website; a selection of mobile themes; extra widgets; device adaptation; and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the website or write posts while out and about.

WordPress Mobile Theme
This is a minimalist theme that can be used to target mobile users. The theme works with any mobile phone of any resolution. And with its light weight, it also drastically reduces loading times.

Möbius
Möbius is compatible with iPhone (and iPod Touch), Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm Pre and Symbian touchscreen mobile phones.

News Press Mobile
The News Press theme is a simple and elegant solution for creating an iPhone-friendly news, blog or other text-centric WordPress website. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, log-in, categories, tags, archives, photos and more.

Carrington Mobile
Carrington Mobile is an elegant mobile theme that supports advanced touchscreen browsers (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Pre) and that is also backwards-compatible with older mobile devices.

Pre-Launch WordPress Themes

BEBACKWP (demo)

Ice Breaker (demo)

Ready2Launch! (demo)

WP Blueprint

Themes That Take WordPress Beyond

GuruQ (demo)
GuruQ is a basic theme designed to be used for Q&A websites. Visitors post questions to the guru, and the guru answers via the WordPress admin screen.

P2 (Like Twitter in a Box)
P2 is a theme for WordPress that transforms a mild-mannered blog into a super-blog, with features like inline comments on the home page, a posting form right on the home page, inline editing of posts and comments, real-time updates (to display new posts and comments without reloading) and much more.

Driftwood Contact Manager (demo)
Driftwood is a contact manager theme built for WordPress. This easy-to-use theme gives you an effortless way to track interaction with your clients and contacts.

Aggregator (demo)
Aggregator is a theme that aggregates feeds of any kind in one place and in an attractive format.

GTD (private theme for teams to collaborate)

MiniCard (demo)
The MiniCard theme supports hCard and vCard microformats, it supports a ton of social networks, it can accommodate some portfolio items (optional), and it does much more, all from the dedicated theme configuration page.

LiveTwit (demo)

WordPress Theme Tools

Elastic Theme Editor
The awesome Elastic is a visual theme editor and engine for WordPress. It takes a completely innovative approach to theme development. To get an idea of what it can do, check out this video:

Divine (Convert PSD to WordPress)
Divine is a Photoshop plug-in that allows you to assign WordPress roles to your main elements (e.g. #footer, #header, etc.). The plug-in then prepares all the files you need. Once you set up FTP access, the tool uploads the theme automatically to your server. Look at this video for insight into how Divine works:

WordPress Debug Theme
The WordPress Debug theme allows you to check early on for any possible issues you might have with your WordPress installation. It is quite simple for now, doing only a few things, but it does them very effectively.

Starter And Blank WordPress Themes

Starkers HTML5 WordPress Theme Kit
Starkers is a bare bones WordPress theme created to act as a starting point for the theme designer… Free of all style, presentational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for your projects, as it’s a stripped-back version of the ‘Default’ theme that ships with WordPress

WP-Constructor
WordPress Constructor is a many-in-one theme. It contains 6 sidebar variations and three layouts (and you can create new is easy). You can configure colors and fonts. The theme also has post thumbnails (WordPress 2.9+) and navigation menu customization options (WordPress 3.0+).

Buddymatic Theme Framework
Buddymatic is a highly extensible theme framework for WordPress and WordPress MU blogs, including BuddyPress-enabled home and member blogs.

ET Starter Theme for WordPress
The ET starter theme lets you easily choose between a one-, two- and three-column layout. It supports the WP-PageNavi, Twitter Tools and Contact Form 7 plug-ins and also includes a built-in jQuery drop-down menu.

WordPress Skeleton Theme
The feature-rich WordPress Skeleton Theme has been developed to speed up and streamline your WordPress development. One of its outstanding out-of-the-box features is CSS support for the iPhone and iPad (both portrait and landscape); simply edit the iPhone.css and iPad.css files.

Paintbox CMS (demo)
Paintbox CMS is a grid-based CMS theme layered on my actual theme-canvas Paintbox. It comes with a smooth 960 grid layout plus some creative jQuery effects for content loading.

BLANK
Blank is a theme with all the functionality of a typical WordPress theme but almost none of the styling. The idea is that using this as your base theme is far easier than using one that is already styled.

(al)

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Post tags: themes, wordpress

Here are some shots of Katy Perry’s pictorial in the newest edition of Rolling Stone. You can get down on her music as much as you like, because honestly its pretty shitty, but you can’t get down on that body because it’s damn freaking rocking.

The hottest Athlete In The World? – Caveman Circus

Your awesome pictures and videos of the day – Ned Hardy

Avril Lavigne Bikini Nip Slip – Taxi Driver

13 most epic police fails of all time - Linkiest

Vroom! Vroom! Drunk Motor Boating!! – Boobie Blog

Britney Spears Still Making Weird Faces – Yeeeah

Hot or Not: Jayma Mays? – Moe Jackson

Natalia Vodianova uses lingerie to regain our attention – Guyism

Gallery Of Girls With Nice Knockers – DJ Mick

X-Games Boobs Flasher: Blinding Little Boys With Her B-Cups – Busted Coverage

Another South African Stunner Kerry McGregor – Uncoached

Alyson Hannigan – Talking Dirty for ‘American Pie’ Casting – NS4W

Happy Summer From Kelly Kelly – Don Chavez

Britney’s Nipples Back At Work – Speed Monkey

Another Miley Cyrus Upskirt Picture – Celeb Jihad

Jessica Alba Takes Her Legs To Paris – Pick Me Up News

Lady Gaga bikini nip slip – HQ-Celebrity

An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run.

And this is where we come in. Back in old days, Smashing Magazine used to publish lists after lists, with plethora of links that covered different topics all somehow related to web design and development. We have undergone quite a development since then, and are now publishing almost only in-depth articles — written by some of the best professionals in the industry. However, useful, carefully prepared and filtered lists are still useful, and therefore we keep publishing them as well.

Below you’ll find 50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers. Among other things, you will find recently released tools, useful reference sheets, articles and further resources. Such posts are prepared over months, each containing resources found, reviewed or bookmarked by the Smashing Editorial Team. We hope that at least some of them will help you improve your workflow!

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers
• 50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials
• 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

Typography

Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography (free PDF)
This eBook will help you better understand the foundation of typography and overcome common obstacles and problems when choosing type.

Web Font Specimen
This template lets you check the typography by analyzing the HTML-specimen in your browser. The specimen contains whole paragraphs in various line heights and font sizes, different headings, ordered and unordered lists, as well as italic and bold text. You can analyze the body size comparison that reveals aspects of the typeface that can’t otherwise be seen and study single glyphs, measure, grayscale as well as light on dark and dark on light previews. You may want to check out Good Web Fonts for the actual specimens of various legible screen fonts.

Font Anatomy Wallpaper
This wallpaper (1920×1200) covers the terminology of typography, showcasing indi­vid­ual parts of the char­ac­ters of the alpha­bet.

Web FontFont User Guide (PDF)
This Web FontFont User Guide contains information about typography aimed at different groups of people: web developers, system administrators and website visitors. You may want to consider giving it to your clients or colleagues.

AltFontPrev
This is a simple JavaScript bookmarklet that lets you view the font stack of any website and then deactivate each font with a single click. It makes it easy not only to make sure everything looks okay when certain fonts aren’t installed on a user’s system, but also to view the fonts included in the website’s font stack in a single click, rather than opening the source code. You can even specify a custom font, which makes it handy when you’re considering changing a design’s current font.

Typografix
This tool is an HTML re-processing script for creating beautiful typography. It corrects things like ellipses and smart quotes and adds tags for <script>, <pre> and <code> automatically. The en dash, for example, is created automatically when a hyphen is surrounded by spaces, and the em dash is created when two dashes appear in a row. Typografix is written in C#, requires Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Unicode Codepoint Chart
This chart is broken down neatly by type of character and symbol (and by language in many cases), with a visual reference under each category. From there, just click on the symbol or character you want and you’re brought to a page with detailed information about the character, along with a browser test page, an outline (in SVG format) and a variety of encodings and character sets (HTML entity, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8, etc.).

Bookmarklets

Quix
We have covered Quix several once already, but when one talks about bookmarklets, it is just necessary to mention Quix as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a powerful command line in your browser, some kind of shell that lets you use handy commands and shortcuts for a quicker and more productive workflow? That’s exactly what Quix offers. The tool is a clever extensible bookmarklet that lets you both access your bookmarks and perform various operations on other websites.

WP-Toolbar bookmarklet
This tool will save a lot of clicks as you edit or update posts on your WordPress-powered blog. The bookmarklet gives you quick access to the entire administrative back-end directly in your browser’s window. There is also a GreaseMonkey script that automatically loads the toolbar when you visit a particular website.

Print Friendly Bookmarklet
This bookmarklet strips advertising, navigation and all things that you don’t want to have when you decide to print out a page. It formats the content of an article or a document for great readbility and generates a minimal and clean PDF for printing.

Bookmarklet Combiner
This tool creates a master bookmarklet which can either run all bookmarks at once or display a menu at some area of the page. Nice service for users who wants to avoid using a special folder only to hold all bookmarklets.

The Printliminator
The Printliminator is a bookmarklet with some simple tools you can use to makes websites print better. One click to activate, and then click to remove elements from the page, remove graphics, and apply better print styling.

Bespin Bookmarklet
Using the Bespin Bookmarklet, you can replace any textarea you encounter with a Bespin editor, making editing the text much more pleasant.

CSS, HTML and JavaScript Tools

eCSStender
Extensions built with eCSStender simplify the design process because you can author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and rest assured that your design will work — even in IE6.

CoffeeScript
This is a little programming language that compiles JavaScript while simplifying the code that developers actually have to deal with. It works with current JavaScript libraries and compiles clean code, leaving even comments intact. Once developers familiarize themselves with how CoffeeScript works, they could potentially save themselves a lot of time and headaches with the simplified code.

#grid
#grid is a little tool that inserts a grid onto the Web page. You can hold the grid in place and toggle it between the foreground and background. To display the grid, just press a hot key on your keyboard, and you can set your own short keys to switch views.

Primer CSS
This tiny generator works online and has only one function: it extracts from an HTML page (copying and pasting will do) a framework of classes and IDs that can be used as the foundation of an external style sheet. This can be wonderful if you work by first doing the structure in HTML, and then the forms and colors in the style sheet.

CSS Usage
CSS Coverage is an extension for Firebug which allows you to scan multiple pages of your site to see which CSS rules are actually used in your site. Each time you run a scan, the CSS files that are included in the current page are shown with the number of times the rules has been found applied on your page before it.

JS.Class: Ruby-style JavaScript
JS.Class is a set of tools designed to make it easy to build robust object-oriented programs in JavaScript. It’s based on Ruby, and gives you access to Ruby’s object, module and class systems, some of its reflection and metaprogramming facilities, and a few of the packages from its standard library. It also provides a package manager to help load your applications efficiently.

JS Bin
JS Bin is an application specifically designed to help JavaScript- and CSS-developers to test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively. JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code, new tabs doesn’t). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

jQuery 1.4.2 Visual Cheat Sheet
jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet is a updated version of the useful jQuery Cheat Sheet. It includes all the reference you will need for jQuery 1.4.2 API.

Turbine
Turbine is a collection of PHP-powered tools that decrease CSS development time and help you avoid headaches. Among other things, it has a simple syntax, automatic packing and gzipping of multiple style files, OOP-like inheritance and templating features as well as a shell for experiments and debugging.

Jo: JavaScript Application Framework for HTML5
Jo embraces JavaScript’s object model and leverages CSS3 to handle as much of the presentation and animation as possible. It also provides a consistent and modular event model between objects and plays nicely with other libraries like PhoneGap.

Sencha: HTML5 Mobile App Framework
Sencha Touch allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touch screen devices.

Aloha Editor, The HTML5 Editor
Aloha Editor is an advanced browser-based editor that is faster than other editors and provides you with better and richer formatting in real-time in your browser.

JavaScript Regex Syntax Highlighter
Do you want RegexPal-style regex syntax highlighting on your webpages? This library takes care of it for you, so you can spend more time writing regular expressions and less time deciphering them. Currently, JavaScript regexes only are supported.

OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software
The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers.

sweet-template
Sweet (Simple WEb front-End Template) is a lightweight JavaScript template with high performance. It’s small, fast, easy to use, and, most important, extensible. It also can be integrated with jQuery.

jQuery Deconstructed
The Deconstructed series is designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype and MooTools. It breaks the physical JavaScript into visual blocks that you can easiliy navigate. Each block opens to reveal its internal code. Clickable hyperlinks allow you to follow program flow.

Alloy UI
Alloy is a UI metaframework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across all three levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.

Google JavaScript Style Guide
This document provides a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) that hold the style guidelines used for Google code. It covers general good practices for open-source projects and well-written and well-documented code. It covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.”

gleeBox
Gleebox provides a way to navigate web pages via keyboard. For instance, it allows you to hit the ‘G’-key and every link on the page will be highlighted. This application is available as an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome.

shellinabox
Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator. This emulator is accessible to every browser that supports JavaScript and CSS and does not require any additional browser plugins.

Juicer: a CSS and JavaScript packaging tool
Juicer is a new command line tool that helps by resolving dependencies, merging and compressing files. It can check the syntax, add cache busters to and cycle asset hosts on URLs in CSS files.

Jake: A Build Tool for JavaScript
Jake is a new build tool built entirely in JavaScript that runs on top of the CommonJS. As its name suggests, it is based on the existing and already popular Rake tool and benefits from the same simplicity.

Closure Compiler
The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Useful Online Tools and Services

ComparePSD (Win only)
This tool lets you compare two Photoshop files side by side and see every little difference. Look for differences by layer or by effect. You get a scaled view of the files, so you can see them next to each other and pick out differences more quickly. ComparePSD is available for Windows only and is free to download and use.

Secure Passwords Generator
The tool lets you enter parameters, including the length of the password, whether to include uppercase and/or lowercase letters or numbers or punctuation and whether to eliminate characters that resemble each other (such as i and l, 1 and I, and o and 0). Then, just select the number of passwords to generate, and it returns a list. It even includes phonetics for each password to make it easier to read out loud (in case you’re giving a password to someone over the phone, for example).

SwatchSpot: Random Color Swatch Generator
This tool creates random color swatches to inspire you. Lock in the colors you like and shuffle away the ones you don’t. Once you’re done, grab the color codes or download your palette.

Yuuguu: Instant screen sharing and web conferencing
This tool provides instant web-conferencing, online meetings and collaboration and enables you to work with your cusomers, partners and colleagues right away, without a single download. The free version allows for 100 minutes per month of web conferencing.

Web Form Recovery Firefox Plugin
Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash or server timeout you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Which loads faster?
This tool lets you see two websites load side by side in real time. Then it shows how long each took to load and the percentage difference.

Faary
Faary is an online form builder that operates with the help of text lines, and the form is generated as such. The tool creates an HTML form with CSS, which can be downloaded as a ZIP archive.

Scr.im
Scr.im lets you use a shortened URL to give out your email address safely and securely on forums. Just enter your email address on Scr.im and it will give you a link to a page with your email address, with security to prevent bots from viewing it.

Name Checklist
This tool will help you find out if your brand name, username, domain and vanity url are still available online or they are already taken.

Quora – Web Design
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. You can follow web design, usability and related discussions and ask your questions as well.

Todo.txt Command Line Interface
If you’ve got a file called todo.txt on your computer right now, this script is for you. You probably don’t want to launch a full-blown text editor every time you need to add an item to your to-do list, or mark one that’s already there as complete. With this simple shell script, you can interact with todo.txt at the command line for quick and easy, Unix-y access.

Note and Point
This gallery highlights beautiful Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint-slides on the Web (mostly Web design-related) which is great for inspiration if you are thinking about creating beautiful and attractive slides for your next presentation.

ManyBooks
This site offers a huge collection of public domain e-books, as well as other newer books that have been released in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in a variety of formats.

Tweetment
This service allows you to design sexy web pages for your tweets.

Browser Cover Generator
This simple tool generates a browser preview of an uploaded image and can add address bar URL, window title, shadow, status bar and various browser skins to the image.

Linkification Firefox Plugin
Linkification Converts text links into genuine, clickable links. To view and set options, you can use the Linkification right-click context menu.

Useful References and Guides

Design Is History
This resource showcases the evolution of design through time. It was created as a teaching tool for young designers just beginning to explore graphic design and as a reference tool for all designers. As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.

User Interface Style Guides
This page features some useful links to style guides used by large websites, corporations and news agencies (e.g. the BBC Style Guide), including editorial guidelines, quality guidelines and online standards.

Trademarkia
Trademarkia is a free search engine for U.S. federally registered trademarks on the Internet. They provide up to the minute contextual information about the current use of interesting business names, slogans, and logos through pictures, commercials, and conversations from Flickr, Google, Youtube, and Twitter for each U.S. trademark filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since the year 1870.

Icon Reference Chart
This chart, created by Jon Hicks, was created to collect the sizes, formats and the related information about icons used on different devices. At the moment it covers browsers, Android, iPad, iPhone, iPhone 4, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. And you can also download a template for iPhone and iPad icons. Useful.

OpenWith.org
OpenWith is a directory of existing file extensions and free tools to open them. You’ll find a free program for just about everything you would ever need to open, including source code, data files, disc images, spreadsheets and video files.

ScriptSrc.net
This site puts all the latest versions of script tags from the various JavaScript libraries in one place. Whether you use jQuery, swfobject, Chrome Frame, MooTools, Ext JS, YUI, Prototype, Dojo or Scriptaculous, you’ll find the most recent script tags here.

Colours In Cultures Chart
This map shows how colours are perceived in different cultures and nations across the globe.

Guidelines and standards manuals
Handy examples of guidelines and standards manuals used by companies and brands online. Also check Branding & Corporate Identity Design page.

Code Standards and Front-End Development Best Practices
This document outlines de-facto code standards in professional modern front-end development. The primary motivation of the document is code consistency and best practices. By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and mitigate risk of breakage in the future. Nice and useful overview.

Essential Tools You Always have Handy When Fixing a PC Problem?
This forum thread features must-have tools that you should keep loaded on your thumb drive when asked to deal with a family member of friend’s personal computer issue.

Project Management For Dummies
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. This page provides a nice project management cheat sheet that will help you handle your project management assignments, such as confirming a project’s justification, developing project objectives and schedules, and maintaining commitment for a project.

Expression Engine Reference Chart
A quick and useful reference guide for ExpressionEngine users. A PDF-version is available as well.

Computer Hardware Chart
A detailed and handy hardware chart for notebook RAM, desktop RAM, CPU sockets, hard drives, ports, processor card slots, processor card sockets, peripheral cards, desktop card slots and power connectors.

Corporate Identity / Logo Usage Guides
A collection of documents that illustrate how organizations and companies ensure that their branding remains consistent online and in print.

ASCII: The Pronouncation Guide
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as ‘a’ or ‘@’ or an action of some sort. The non-printing ASCII characters are rarely used for their original purpose. This page features an ASCII character table and includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters and the guide to their pronouncation.

Name Pronunciation Guide
Inogolo is a practical, easy-to-use website devoted to the English pronunciation of the names of people, places, and miscellaneous stuff. The site contains a searchable database of names with both phonetic and audio pronunciations in English.

Usability and User Experience

Hand picked UX related resources
UXMARKZ is a collection of hand picked UX related resources, updated daily. You will find interesting sites, articles, videos, images and slideshows from the field of interaction design, usability, information achitecture, user interface design and other. All submissions are moderated.

UX Myths
This ressource is supposed to help you build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs. UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take their word for it, the site shows you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

User Interface Design Patterns for Ideas and Inspiration
A user interface design pattern library. It is a collection of Web design patterns and best practices which helps you to find inspiration and design interfaces with great user experience. It is also a user interface gallery full of real world examples of our patterns.

Last Click

How Do I Win Rock Paper Scissors Every Time?
Now, that’s a handy resource: have you ever gotten tired of being crushed by Rock, cut to shreds by Scissors, or smothered by Paper? This graphic has information compiled about Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) from the World RPS Society, the masters of Rock, Paper, Scissors, to help you overcome your opponents and understand the strategies needed to win Rock, Paper, Scissors every time.

The Universal Packing List
This tool generates a custom packing list for your journeys. You have to provide some basic information about the journey and a packing list appears immediately.

Ex-blocker
The Ex-blocker is a plugin that hides any information about your ex online. The tool is available as a Firefox and Chrome extension.

Not Beans Again
An online tool that finds a recipe from your ingredients. Enter what you have got in your fridge to the “Ingrediometer” and see if the tool can come up with a recipe for you.

A Coder’s Guide to Coffee
As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance. But did you also know that coffee can be a damn tasty beverage? All you need is the appropriate amount of disrespect for the mainstream coffee industry and a desire to enjoy a better beverage.

Flipboard
Flipboard is a free personalized social magazine for your iPad. It allows you to quickly flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The emergence of tools like this is what will make iPad a truly useful and handy device for many people.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers
• 50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials
• 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: Coding, Design, tools, typography, usability, Workflow

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” So began the “letter from the founders” penned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the company’s securities registration form in 2004. Despite ever-increasing commercial success since that date, Brin and Page have kept to their word.

Google is an unconventional company with a huge stake in our online lives. It is a source of fascination for many, including us, but what really happens in the Googleplex? And what cool factoids and stats exist from the company’s relatively short past?

Here we bring you 10 fun facts about Google to quench our own thirst for Google knowledge as well as hopefully offer you a distracting diversion from your daily life.

1. The First Google Doodle

Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

2. Interesting Figures from the Google IPO

While the initial price for Google’s stock at its Initial Public Offering in August 2004 is an interesting stat in itself, there’s more to the story. The opening price for Google’s stock was $85 per share. At the time of writing, the stock price was $483 but has soared as high as $600 in the past year, making GOOG a rather nice investment for many.

A bonus factoid from Google’s IPO process is the value Google stated it hoped to raise on its S-1 form — as much as $2,718,281,828. It may just look like a string of numbers to non-mathletes, but 2,718,281,828 is actually the first ten digits of the mathematical constant ““e”,” showing that even as their company was planning to go public, the Google guys could still geek out with a bit of numerical humor.

3. The First Google Storage Was Made From LEGO

As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanford now showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

4. Google’s First Ever Tweet

Google’s first ever Twitter post was as satisfyingly geeky as you could hope for. The message, sent in February 2009, reads “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”

For anyone not fluent in binary, here’s a hint — it’s a well known phrase from the company’s homepage. Got it? Yep, it reads: “I’m feeling lucky.”

5. Google Rents Goats

This one isn’t actually one of Google’s infamous April Fools’ Day jokes: Google rents out goats. Yes you read that right. It rents goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ.

The operation of 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) is kind to the environment, and as Google puts it: “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

6. Google’s Impact on Language

While you’d think the news that the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary adding “google” as a verb to their lexicons in 2006 would thrill the search engine, Google was actually none too pleased with the development.

“We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services,” the company wrote in a blog post at the time.

The rationale behind the semantic displeasure was that Google had “a brand to protect,” and feared Google would “slip from trademarked status into common usage.” Now, four years later, we have to say Google was fighting a losing battle — just ‘google it.’

However, we’ve found some other Google-themed linguistic delights for you — a Google staffer is commonly referred to as a “Googler,” while a new team member joins as a “Noogler.” Nooglers also used to wear a colorful hat with a spinner on top. According to a former employee, those hats are now pretty scarce in some offices, instead: “Every Noogler gets a yellow smiley balloon and a nameplate.”

7. Google Is Dog-Friendly

Google is a super dog-friendly company. It proudly names “company dogs,” like Yoshka (described as a “free-range Leonberger”) pictured above. Yoshka accompanies Urs Holzle, senior VP operations and Google Fellow to the Googleplex. Less senior staff are also allowed to bring their dogs to the office.

According to Google’s “Dog Policy”, one indiscretion too many on the Google carpets, or aggressive behavior, means Lassie will have to stay at home in the future. Strong bladdered and friendly canines are more than welcome across the campus.

Unfortunately, cats are not quite as welcome. Here’s an excerpt taken directly from Google’s Code of Conduct: “Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.”

8. Google’s First Ever “Company Snack” Was Swedish Fish

Back in February, 1999, the chewy candy known as “Swedish Fish” became the first ever company snack (not counting beverages) that was ordered into the Google office.

Although a relatively small event, it has led to big things. Google is infamous in the industry for treating its employees to not just free drinks and snacks on tap, but full-on gourmet meals, three times a day at a plethora of on-site cafes and eateries, as well as regular BBQs during the summer.

Brin and Page have been quoted in the past as saying no Googler should have to go more than 100 feet for food, leading to snack-filled “microkitchens” that are liberally dotted around the Google offices.

In fact, the free food is said to be so tempting that Googlers risk the “Google 15,” similar to the “Freshman 15,” where they pile on weight soon after joining the company. Good thing they also have a Google gym.

Backing this up, here’s a stat from Google — “Bay Area Googlers consumed approximately 5,500 pounds of handmade chocolates from the snack bins in the microkitchens in 2007.” Wow.

9. The Google Logo Was Not Centered Until 2001

Google’s famously sparse homepage is considered a classic design in the online world. The Google logo, however, wasn’t actually centered on the page until March 31, 2001. As early users will remember, the homepage had a bias to the left-hand side, and even earlier — back in 1998 — Google sported a Yahoo-style exclamation mark.

10. Google Has a Company Dinosaur

By all accounts, there are many wondrous sights to be seen at the Googleplex, but one of the most arresting is surely the gigantic T-Rex skeleton — nicknamed “Stan” after a “real” dino found nearby — that looms menacingly at Googlers in Mountain View.

Joining Stan in the unique campus decorations is a scale replica of the SpaceShipOne, enormous Android-themed models, pink flamingos, a large LEGO man, Google-colored phone boxes and grown-up size ball pits. One thing seems for sure — just like the company itself — life at the Googleplex must be far from dull.

More Google Resources from Mashable:

- 10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings
- 5 Must-See Google Easter Eggs
- 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz
- The Small Business Guide to Google Apps
- 4 Surprising Google Wave Uses

Tags: April Fools' Day, binary code, burning man, dogs, Doodle, goats, Google, googleplex, googler, gym, ipo, language, larry page, Lego, noogler, office decor, pets, Sergey Brin, snacks, trending