position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Dropbox claims to be a very easy to use system to backup your files, sync them across several computers and share them with friends. I’ve had the pleasure of testing the beta and I can say it does achieve exactly that.

The thing that makes Dropbox so much easier than other systems is that there is no learning curve and no special handling required: just drop your files in a destined folder on your harddrive and the files are automatically uploaded to the Dropbox servers. Hook up another computer to your Dropbox and it’ll automatically download the files and sync them when you change them. The system comes along with a powerful web interface that not only offers access to your files from any web browser, but also lets you retrieve older versions of a file, or accidentally deleted files. Dropbox should feel very familiar to those who use SVN in their workflow, except that you don’t need to manually check-in and check-out files to keep them synced. A helpful feature is that before uploading an updated file, it will compare and check and only upload those bits of the file that were actually changed, saving a lot of bandwidth. Luckily, you aren’t confronted with any of the technicalities, it just “does stuff” and works and you don’t need to care.

Setup was surprisingly quick and painless. My only grief are the sometimes very slow upload rates (30kb/s when it could be much higher), but I suppose this will be improved during the beta phase. Also, I recommend that you don’t create and edit new files within your Dropbox folder, as its automatic upload does not have a delay and will start uploading before you’ve even given the file a name.

All in all I’m quite satisfied with Dropbox and I feel it will be something I’ll use regularly. Its ease of use guarantees that it won’t require your full attention or slowdowns to your workflow, making it one of those little tools you just won’t want to miss.

Check out the Dropbox screencast here and go sign up for a beta if you’re interested.

Graphic design has some amazing history to look back on. Eric Carl has scanned in a mid-70’s edition of the book World of Logotypes and put it in a Flickr photoset. Lots of beautiful logos, I really love the geometric precision in play, and all examples work perfectly with no color at all. These are really strong. Seeing this, I think we’re in kind of a sad state with all the companies running after the shiny web2.0 trend. But not all hope is lost, aclevercookie has a good collection of current logo redesigns, some of which are definitely good (and some bad). So, what do you think?

Just a few more hours and I’ll be off to the BarCampRuhr in Essen, Germany, for the weekend. If any of you are going to be there and want to meet up, let me know! For the undecided and the damn-why-didn’t-you-tell-me-earlier folks, there are still quite a few free slots if you want to go, too. I’m a first-timer so I really have no idea what to expect, but I’m told it’s going to be really great and omg-so-awesome. Well then, off we go…

I just love this so much. It reminds me of this as well. (via)

Well, after a painful 6 year wait between IE6 and IE7, it’s refreshing to see a first version of IE8 already available for download. Developers can go crazy testing the new and improved CSS 2.1 compatibility, and a bunch of other things most people probably won’t need (but they’re probably nice to have none-the-less). As expected, SVG support is still missing, but at least the browser may finally be catching up on the basic standards. For one thing, they are dropping the hasLayout issues according to this article.

Let us all rejoice: Microsoft has changed their mind on a earlier issue, and IE8 will use Standards mode by default instead of requiring a meta tag. At debate was their idea that we should add a special meta tag to our HTML to activate their new “really, really real” standards mode, in order to preserve backwards-compatibility with broken websites based on their old, buggy browsers. Of course, this sent a storm through the standards-loving blogosphere.

Microsoft’s new enlightenment is very, very significant news for web developers and the future of web standards and it’s amazing that they actually listened to developers. Get more info straight from the lion’s mouth.

Today is a good day. :)

(Thanks, neckCNS)

keming. noun. The result of improper kerning.
By Ironic Sans and available as a t-shirt.