Robin Sloan:

Okay, I’m going to argue that the futures of Facebook and Google are pretty much totally embedded in these two images.

With this great opening sentence, Sloan offers an interesting, forward-thinking piece on the Facebook vs. Google debate, from a unusual perspective: pictures.

So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

It also touches briefly on the importance of the Instagram acquisition and what brings together many of the projects and products that Google is working on:

(…) building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

Definitely worth your time.

More information for ESAD Web Talks is now posted.

It’s really happening. This Thursday.

During these past few months, most of the posts here had something to do with independent publishing and disruption of existing markets by technology companies. If you like that sort of stuff too, you’ll like XOXO, an arts and technology festival in Portland this September, by Andy Baio (of Kickstarter and Kind of Bloop fame) and my good pal Andy McMillan (creator of Build and The Manual)

XOXO is a celebration of disruptive creativity. We want to take all the independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love — the makers, craftspeople, musicians, filmmakers, comic book artists, game designers, hardware hackers — and bring them together with the technologists building the platforms that make it possible. If you have an audience and a good idea, nothing’s standing in your way.

The event is being funded through Kickstarter itself, and the lineup so far is amazing, with creators from all creative areas. Plus, they’ve got an entire gorgeous building to host the whole thing that lasts four days.

Although this is a perfect excuse for anyone to visit the US and Portland, I am deeply sad that I won’t be able to go. However, anyone can simply support the festival through Kickstarter. The $100 pledge rewards look specially tempting and much in the line of the recent interest in the subscription of physical goods.

For some time now, people who miss the point have seen Readability as an app that competes in the read-it-later space. That’s like viewing Andy Warhol as a failed advertising art director. Readability is a platform that radically rethinks how we consume, and who pays for, web content. It monetizes content for authors and its technology is available to all via the API. It scares designers, angers some advertisers. Its transformative potential is huge. Readlists are the latest free product to manifest some of that potential.

Bingo.

A playful, smart, and all-kinds-of-awesome name for an upcoming app by Panic.

Great new experiment by the Arc90 folks, of Readability fame. Make a list of articles from the web, put a title on that, and publish that list on the web.

Not only is a great way to share text playlists, but more than that, shows that the folks behind Readability see the app as more of a platform for reading than a simple app that runs on all your devices. It’s also a great example of the power of APIs, making Readability more prominent¹ and frankly, more interesting to people that care about reading and the web, who may want to build upon it. Such as me.

I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Porto 2012, a two-day event starting this Friday, May 4th. The staff was looking for a good balance between Drupal-specific talks and other topics in the fields of web design and development, so my talk has nothing to do with Drupal itself.

I came up with the title “Responsible Web Design” to bring together all the best practices and techniques for crafting a great web experience, including progressive enhancement, responsive design, feature detection and polyfills.

Check out the full programme at the website (I’ll be speaking on Saturday at 10:30) and show up if you’re interested — entrance is free.

Anwering the question “What devices (smartphones/tablets) and breakpoints do you typically develop and test with?” on .net magazine:

I’m a big, big believer of matching breakpoints to the design, not to individual devices. If we’re after more future-proof responsive designs, we should stop thinking in terms of ‘320px’, ‘480px’, ‘768px’, or whatever – the web’s so much more flexible than that, and those pixels are a snapshot of the web as we know it today. Instead, we should focus on breakpoints tailored to the design we’re working on.

When designing a responsive website for the first time, using predefined points didn’t feel right to me, because I felt the need to change things whenever the design required to, not when I reached iPad, iPhone, or any other device screen widths.

Almost a year ago, while writing Listary’s description for the App Store, I felt the need to preview how my text would look like, so I made a quick HTML and CSS mockup for that. Now I finally took the time to publish it so anyone can use it. Check it out on Github.

We’ve been preparing this for some time, and today I’m glad to announce a small one-afternoon event on web design at ESAD, with talks by Andy McMillan, Robbie Manson, Simon Collison, and The Standardistas.

Thanks to the school, the event is free-of-charge for everyone. It’s gonna be great. If you’re planning on attending, add yourself to the Lanyrd event page.