Julius Mattsson

It is something I have given some thought to myself actually — the fact that there are so insanely many rip-off chicken shops in London. The logos and names are all reminiscent of each other, to the point of turning into a parody. Meet Mr. Chicken, who designed most of the logos.

Uber seems to be a promising service, in its aims to personalize the cab experience and provide it with some more depth. From Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

I know because I just ordered an Uber car on my iPhone in midtown Manhattan in the rain, and a big black SUV picked me up in about five minutes. Same great service as in San Francisco. I watched as it located a driver and saw the car move towards me on a street map (see screenshot). My driver, Yosef, was friendly and courteous. He told me he had to pass a rigorous test on his knowledge of New York city streets to become part of the Uber fleet. Everything was charged to my Uber account, and I saw the amount pop up on my iPhone at the end of the ride. I rated Yosef as a driver, and he rated me, and my ride was over.

HTTP Archive lets you see a range of different statistics from a spread of websites. There’s some interesting nuggets out there for sure, like a site using almost four megabytes of CSS.

It’s the first time I’ve seen the rotate CSS feature pulled off in a design. The site also accommodates different resolutions using media queries.

I stumbled across this Javascript framework today called sausage.js which seems to be a clever way of sorting out navigation within a page. It lets the visitor see where they are and also quickly jump to another passage. Seems like a clever idea for any site with word heavy content.

I like Quora (although I generally need two tries to get the spelling right). It’s done a good job at quickly establishing a solid presence with my internet surfing. The Weji blog has a new post offering their analysis on what they did right.

Via Kevin Rose:

You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that’s what the Tokyo Apple stores became. Staff brought out surge protectors and extension cords with 10s of iOS device adapters so people could charge their phones & pads and contact their loved ones. Even after we finally had to close 10pm, crowds of people huddled in front of our stores to use the wifi into the night, as it was still the only way to get access to the outside world.

Al Franken, a democratic senator, on the battle for net neutrality (at SXSW).

“Let’s not sell out. Let’s not let the government sell us out. Let’s fight for net neutrality. Let’s keep Austin weird. Let’s keep the internet weird. Let’s keep the internet free.”

We launched the new Smile Machine site today, featuring Tom’s branding work. It’s pretty nice, if I can say so myself.

A site that might be able to help you with the serious problem of deciding which movie to watch — also check out the blog.

Matt Might details some tips and tricks to developing iOS web apps that mimic native apps as much as possible to provide a seamless experience. I’ve been playing a bit with web apps and while a good way of quickly getting something out there, I still see speed as one of the biggest drawbacks. Manifest caching looks like a step in the right direction, though.

From Seriouseats.com, a site solely dedicated to food, comes a documentation of ordering all of the possible variations of burgers from the Californian burger chain In-N-Out.

“So, are you just trying to order everything on the menu?”
Sh*t, I thought to myself. The gig is up.
“Yeah…,” I said sheepishly.
“Awesome! I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I started working here!”

Microsoft has launched an IE 6 countdown site. Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

Faster, thinner, (a bit) lighter, and now available in white. I’m so going to get one.

Update: Engadget has a nice comparison of the new features (still no word on memory though).