Analysts are estimating that Apple has sold 700,000 iPhones in the U.S. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, there were about 209 million U.S. Internet users as of March/07, 69.2% of the nation’s population. Making the reasonable assumption that the 700,000 iPhones sold were to people who already regularly use the Internet, that means 0.25% of Internet users in the U.S. will occasionally be using the Mobile Safari browser on their iPhones to visit your web presence, and that’s after the first four days of sales. Does that make you warm and fuzzy, or send a chill down your spine? At RD2, we couldn’t be happier.

Which Web?

The iPhone falls squarely in a facet of the web that has been growing for some time now, a sort of limbo between the “desktop web” and the “mobile web.” Apple recently posted their Development Guidelines for the iPhone which “read like a love-letter to standards-based design” as our local Adam Keys puts it.

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There are plenty of tools to help you plan, budget, track, and otherwise mange projects. They range from heavy scheduling tools like Microsoft Project and OmniPlan, to communication and organization tools like Basecamp and Backpack, to generalized tools like Excel, to even things as simple as Post-its. On a large project I’m working on, we’ve used all of these in some form or another; and while they’ve been a help, they all share a common flaw. You have to teach the tools about the project, and that only works if you already understand the project.

Tools only go so far, and that’s fine since no tool will ever be a silver bullet. In this large project I mentioned earlier, we bid overall for the work appropriately. However, when it came time to track our progress along the way, we started missing our internal deadlines. We were already pulling some late nights and even weekends working on this, so where did we go wrong? We had done all of the “right things” you’re supposed too… After a good night’s sleep, the answer presented itself.

Scissor Dagger in Black and White, originally uploaded by Jurica G.

Simply, we had done what had worked for us in the past. We had based milestones on page templates, while in fact the work centered around modules that, combined in different ways, formed the bulk of the pages. I’ve built a lot of my experience around building B2B web sites, some noteworthy blogs, and a little heavy duty content management system integration. To help us wrap our minds around a different paradigm, I printed out every single comp, whipped out a pair of scissors, and headed back to arts and crafts time.

Now instead of dealing with a half dozen page templates that shared a lot of resemblance to each other, we were dealing with more than a dozen modules, and even modules within modules. With this new perspective, we rebuilt the entire plan and discovered not only were we not behind like we had thought, we were actually a little ahead! You won’t find the “scissors technique” in any project management handbook I’ve heard of, but that shouldn’t stop you from adding a pair to your planning toolbox.

I’ve written before about the DFW Tech Community. Since then the monthly groups have continued meeting monthly, there have been two more BarCamps, and another MashPit.

Christopher St. John is at it again, putting Dallas on the tech hotspot map by bringing another un-conference concept to Dallas, the DemoCamp. The concept is simple: 5 people with 15 minutes each to demo working software only. Free for everyone to attend.

The first DemoCamp Dallas is happening Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 6:30-8:00 at Sabre Labs. Primary demo slots are already filled, but alternates are still be accepted. You don’t have to have a demo to attend, but if you’re thinking of coming, sign up on the wiki.

Oftentimes, we will need to design and even develop for unknown content. Maybe a client has a copywriter that is still in the process of producing the content. Maybe the project is a blog that will have regular content additions or a white paper template. When this happens, designers and developers do what we’ve been trained to do; reach for lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum, originally uploaded by missha

So what’s the big deal? Why am I picking on the placeholder text that has been used for over 400 years? The problem is not with the text itself; in fact, it excels at shifting the focus from content to presentation. The problem is that it only represents a single type of content, the paragraph.

Writing good content isn’t easy; a challenge that is only exacerbated by the hyperlinked nature of the web. What does good content look like? Good content is varied and rich, like the content on LogLogic’s site. Rich content is written using element beyond paragraphs such as bulleted lists, numbered lists, glossary lists, hyperlinks, emphasis, citations, quotations, pictures, pull-quotes, and data tables. Lorem ipsum, as-is, neither explores the design of these elements nor encourages their use.

Anyone familiar with markup semantics will recognize that most of the above list is represented in HTML as various elements. That’s not simply because I think in markup semantics; it’s because the goal of HTML isn’t to create web pages, but to create hyperlinked documents with rich content.

In case you couldn’t already tell, I’m advocating putting together new standardized dummy text, a richer dummy text, “Lorem Ipsum 2.0” if you must. Content changes and the design and implementation should be ready for it. We’d love to get some input on the format this should take, or better yet, even invoke the lazyweb. After all, the results should end up being creative commons licensed. We, the industry, need to get started on this right away; we at RD2 will be.

24ways.org, the web development tips and tricks advent calendar/blog has kicked off for the second year in a row. In the first story of the year, “Drew McLellan examines a method of enabling users to control their interface with a dynamic text trimmer, similar to that found in Safari RSS. Feeling bloated? Lose some weight at the touch of a button.”

It’s also nice to see that Drew integrated the hAtom microformat this year.

digg 24ways

If you’ve listened to any mass media in the last 48 hours, you can’t help but heard the term “Cyber Monday,” a neologism used to describe the Monday following Black Friday which, according to users of the term, is the busiest online shopping day of the year as shoppers return to work and log online to continue the shopping frenzy. But in reality, Cyber Monday is actually nothing more than savvy marketing to promote online holiday shopping.

CNet recently published an article that looks closer at the actual numbers. Historically, so-called Cyber Monday has been no more busy than any other day and the busiest day typically falls between December 5-15. In 2005, the busiest online shopping day was December 5th, according to MasterCard’s worldwide data, a full week after Cyber Monday and Shop.org pinpointed December 12th as the date, two weeks after Cyber Monday.

So who invented this Cyber Monday? It wasn’t the mass media, they’ve just taken the concept and ran with it. Both the term and concept were invented before the 2005 shopping season by Shop.org, not to be confused with Shopping.com, an association of online retailers which include eBay, Amazon.com, Apple, AOL, CompUSA, and more than 600 others.

Business Week Online ran an article in 2005 about the phenomenon, exposing the half-truths and origins of Cyber Monday. Shop.org sent out an email in 2004 to their members, “suggesting that online retailers come up with their own marketing hook to match Black Friday.” In 2005, Shop.org published a press release hyping their new marketing invention of Cyber Monday.

I’ve worked online retail shipping for the 2003 and 2004 holiday seasons, so this information is actually comforting. My employer and I were not missing anything by not noticing these nonexistent trends. The online shopping season hits hard and fast. Your shopping season is shorter than brick & mortar retail due to the overhead of shipping time and you do several times the sales of any one store.

Now, while Cyber Monday is a good name for yet another promotion, it’s likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy, which is Shop.org’s goal of course. Many online retailers have “Cyber Monday” sales plastered on their home pages today and Shop.org’s own CyberMonday.com is ready to help you find each and every one of them.

The Subversion development team recently released version 1.4 of the Subversion client and server, which includes some handy improvements.

• `svn diff` can now optionally ignore whitespace and differences between platform end of line styles when computing the difference between files.
• OS X Keychain (OS X’s password store) support.
• Significant working-copy performance improvements.
• File size improvements when working with binary files.
• A handful of new command line options.
• More than 40 bugfixes.

It’s important to note that the Subversion development team warns that the working copy storage format, i.e. the “.svn” folders, has changed for 1.4, so if you are doing something along the lines of reading a working copy stored on an external drive from two different computers, both will need to be updated to Subversion 1.4. This limitation does not extend to clients using a server-side repository.

Most of our development these days happens on Macs, some G4 and some Intel. Either way, Metissian, the source for OS X binary builds of Subversion, hasn’t released new builds of 1.4 yet. I built my own copy of 1.4 using Dan Benjamin’s building instructions for Subversion on OS X for a PowerBook G4, simply substituting downloading the 1.4 release instead of 1.3.1.

However, recently I’ve transitioned to a shiny new MacBook Pro. When I went to use the same instructions to build Subversion 1.4, the configure step complained that I was missing the Apache Portable Runtime, a dependency of Subversion’s. Starting with Subversion 1.4, the Subversion team is distributing the dependencies separately form the Subversion source code. Once you download both Subversion 1.4.0 and its dependencies and extract them both to the same folder, Dan Benjamin’s original instructions work seamlessly.

Refresh Dallas, a local user group for web designers and developers, will have a speaker tonight talking about Microformats — a way to enrich content in web sites to have specialized meanings, which allow for pseudo APIs to be built.

We’ve been integrating these into our sites for several months now. For example, we integrated an address card into Rough Creek. Today you can use specialized search engines to find Rough Creek’s contact information, and it won’t be long before major web search engines integrate this functionality directly so that a search for “Rough Creek Lodge” would show a map and contact information at the top, without Rough Creek needing to register their information with each individual search engine.

Look forward to seeing you there!

When you think of the technology hot spots, what places do you think of?

“Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, Northern Virginia, Seattle, Boston, Portland, Austin, San Diego, Silicon Valley. Notice anything missing? Despite an abundance of geeks (TI invented the semiconductor here), Dallas does not normally appear on lists of leading technology communities. It’s up to you to change that.”

Christopher St. John, of Dallas, TX based Event Mirror, on the BarCamp Wiki.

Now, we do have our entrenched social and user groups in various states of decline and resurgence, such as Dallas PHP, Dallas Macromedia, and DFW Blogs. However, recently DFW has been super–busy getting its geek on, and is even turning the tables and inspiring events in other cities. Here’s just some of the latest events that have happened and new groups that you can get involved with:

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