Would a Pune-style bomb blast have happened in a Chinese city? Or a 26/11? Or any of the scores of terror attacks that India has been subjected to over the years?

Migrant flamingos and migrated family fly into Mumbai every winter.

Fear of virus is overshadowing government appeals to businesses to resume operations

In a rare finding, an Indian grey wolf (Canis lupus pallipes) was documented for the first time in Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in Chamarajanagara district. The wild animal was documented by Sanjay Gubbi of Nature Conservation Foundation, and his team, while camera trapping for studying leopards.

South Western Railway, along with the state government, is likely to operate the first train to West Bengal to ferry migrant workers on Sunday.

If you thought Zoom meetings only mean business and living under lockdown means missing out on all the fun, meet some Bengalureans who are making the most of both.

Child rescue team stopped the wedding of a minor girl from Arkalgud village after a whistle-blower dialled the child helpline.

A group of parents have written to the Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education as well as to chief minister Pramod Sawant, expressing their anxiety over the decision to conduct the board exams during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus scare seems to have kept criminals at bay with the police registering on an average three first information report (FIRs) per day across 25 police stations instead of an average of over seven FIRs last year.

Actress Jessica Biel has revealed that she cold-shoulders the glitzy celebrity lifestyle.

They dazzle, but they ain’t diamonds.

Independence day might still be around the corner but that surely doesn’t mean the celebrations cannot begin.

Now they’re all turning out to be all-rounders.

Salman Khan has always been the manmedia loves to hate.

Aishwarya Rai is thus the clear choice for our concluding section, which talks about the drop dead gorgeous celebs.

When it comes to partying its the sassy, saucy Pooja Bedi who epitomises the spirit of having fun differently.

Sunita Williams chose an off-beat career and touched the skies.

Cinema halls owners are also focusing on sprucing up their theatres to attract audiences.

A touch of vintage.

There are several families in the city that can boast of having an envious collection of these beauties on wheels.

Ms Katrina Kaif thought she was being her usual cool as cucumber self.

With the destinies of Bollywood’s movers and shakers changing every Friday, to assess star ratings is no easy feat. And that’s where the Times Celebex powered by zoOm! is going to make a difference.

The total number of Covid-19 cases in the national capital climbed to 6,542 after 224 more people were infected by the coronavirus, the Delhi government said on Saturday. The fresh cases were reported between 4pm to midnight of May 8.

A woman was arrested from northwest Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar on Friday for allegedly supplying e-cigarettes and other psychotropic substances to the minors during the lockdown .

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) released its academic calendar and notified that the students will be returning to the campus between June 25 and 30. The varsity stated that the examinations will be completed by July 31.

Delhi Police has arrested AAP MLA from Devli Prakash Jarwal and his aide, Kapil Nagar, for allegedly abetting the suicide of a doctor who used to run a water tanker business in the area. The doctor, Rajender Singh, had accused Jarwal and Nagar of extorting money from him for letting him run the business.

With daily-wage earners now rushing back to their villages in special trains, there’s consternation in business circles about a manpower crunch. Assurances of continued salary till work begins in right earnest haven’t kept the migrants back, according to traders. Normally, the migrant population returns to the villages for the harvest period in late summer and comes back soon after, but this year, traumatised by the pandemic standstill, they are likely to think twice before returning to the cities.

Delhi Police claimed to be dissatisfied by the response it got from social media platform Instagram in the case of ‘Bois Locker Room’, where a group of male students made sexual threats to girls and carried on salacious conversations about their female schoolmates. On Saturday, Delhi Commission for Women also sent a second notice to police on the case after a girl student alleged receiving threats.

A severe dust storm and strong winds hit Delhi and the national capital region on Sunday as the weather took a sudden turn.

Yesterday was my last day at Happy Cog. Today, I’ve started my own practice again.

...so, yeah. That paragraph doesn’t do much for, you know, context, does it? Consider that the TL;DR version, and let’s try again:

If you ever talk to me on the phone, you should probably know that I’m a bit of a pacer. I guess I should blame it on the nanosecond-long attention span, but I can’t really sit at my computer when talking to someone at length. More often than not, I’ll simply pace back and forth in the kitchen. Our pearlish-gray kitchen tiles form some rather, well, comforting diagonals, and I’ll just walk along them from one corner of the room to the next. Still not sure why I do it, to be honest. I suppose tracing those pixellated little laps frees my mind a bit, a mundane, repetitive little charm that helps me better focus on the discussion at hand.

Having that routine provides not a little symmetry when a major life change happens. I was walking those elliptical loops when I agreed to join Airbag Industries. And I was making my kitchen laps yesterday when Greg and I had my last phone call as an employee of Happy Cog.

I could say that the decision to leave has been difficult, sure—but that’s one of the most understate-y understatements ever if not, perhaps, the understatiest. I joined a little studio called Airbag Industries over three years ago, and it’s been a wonderful, insane, fantastic ride. After a few years of running a mini-studio of my own, I leapt at the chance to work with Greg and Ryan, two of my favorite (if personal space-challenged) people. From there, we took on incredible projects, watched the team more than triple in size, and eventually officially joined forces with Happy Cog, a studio I’ve admired since first picking up my now dog-eared copy of the orange book.

Throughout my tenure, I’ve been fortunate to work with people who are consistently at the top of their game. And I can’t stress that enough: everyone at Happy Cog is eminently professional, impossibly fun to hang out with, and just stupidly talented. It’s one of the first times that I’ve worked alongside so many craftsmen, if you’ll pardon the lack of an appropriately gender neutral term. Each project was an opportunity to ask ourselves how we could work a little bit better than last time, how to learn from emerging technologies and ideas, and build something truly great. Plus, you know, there was the occasional karaoke bout thrown in for good measure.

Re-reading that last paragraph just underscored how hard it is to leave. But in the past year or so, I’ve been feeling more and more excited about some of the opportunities that have been coming my way. I’ll be rounding out this year’s simply fantastic An Event Apart roadshow with appearances in DC and San Diego, and speaking at Future of Web Design NYC in November. And I’m unbelievably excited to be writing for A Book Apart on responsive web design, working with Jeffrey, Jason, and Mandy to produce a great little book.

So that’s why I’ve decided to leave Happy Cog, and go independent again. As hard as it is to move on, I’m positively exhilarated by the prospect of focusing on writing, speaking, and creating, hopefully with the occasional awesome client project thrown in. If that sounds interesting to you, or even if you’d like to chat a bit about how much Photoshop crashes or your favorite animated GIF, I hope you’ll get in touch.

Over the past few weeks, as my last day at Happy Cog loomed closer, I’ve been thinking about how most of our language around transitions has gotten wrapped up in books. You know: “turning a page,” “the next chapter,” and so forth. And there’s something comfortingly sequential about those phrases: we turn one page, and the next one gains focus. Thing is, the transition isn’t quite as forward-looking as the rhetoric implies: the previous experience shapes us, educates us. We’re always flipping back to a lesson we’ve learned before.

So that’s where I am now. I’ve just turned a page over, and it’s one I’ll sorely miss—but I know I’ll be referring back to it, and often. And in the months ahead, I’m excited to draw from those experiences as I do some writing of my own.

As I’ve said before, speaking at An Event Apart is a wonderful, terrifying experience. Wonderful because of, well, the insane caliber of the speakers—imagine taking some of the most fiercely intelligent designers, developers, and thinkers working today, and giving each of them an hour to talk about whatever most excites them about the web. And it’s terrifying because of, well, see above: standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Nicole, Dan, Aarron, and of course Jeffrey and Eric is, you know, slightly nerve-wracking.

Being part of this year’s road show has been one of the highlights of my career, traveling through five cities with my web heroes: the audience is fantastic, the speakers consistently wonderful, and I’ve learned something new at each show. Naturally, I’m excited and thrilled to be part of AEA’s newly announced 2011 lineup. I’ll be taking the stage in Boston, and then co-leading another installment of A Day Apart alongside Jeremy Keith. Hope to see you there, whether this year or next!

If you haven’t, you should immediately read Jeremy’s post titled A responsive mind. Not because he says some incredibly kind things about yours truly, but, well, of bits like this:

That’s the thing about responsive web design: you can’t just think of it as a sprinkle of pixie dust that can be applied to any site. It requires the right mindset. It requires that sites be built on solid foundations of best practice. If those foundations are in place—a flexible layout, flexible images, optimised performance—then responsive web design can work its magic.

There are so many wonderful, quotable points that I’m doing Jeremy a disservice by even excerpting that one. If you’d like to understand why a responsive approach would be right for your project (or, perhaps as importantly, why it might not), I urge you to read the whole thing.

Words to tattoo on your knuckles:

Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn’t felt my own, to a degree. It’s felt like I’ve been writ­ing for an audi­ence, post­ing stuff for oth­ers rather than myself. That’s arse-backwards. A blog should be about per­sonal expres­sion. The moment you start think­ing, and writ­ing, to please oth­ers then it’s a bind; it feels less like a per­sonal exer­cise and more of a job.

A beautiful, thoughtful redesign from Mark Boulton (and a responsive one at that). Go go, read read.

Front-end developer Steffan Williams of Gridinator fame digs into some of the rendering inconsistencies across various browsers when dealing with percentage-based widths. Now, I don’t think this is a real problem for flexible, grid-based layouts or properly responsive designs. Some of these rounding issues won’t necessarily manifest themselves in your work, or at least not quite as noticeably.

I was, however, emphatically raising my fist in the air when I read this:

While I’m well aware that things don’t have to look the same in every browser, it just seems to strike me as odd that CSS3 features keep getting touted on the front of browser homepages, and yet something as fundamental as a percentage would be rendered incorrectly (or, rather, not as well as would be expected).

Emphasis mine. Much of the behavior Steffan notes was outlined by John Resig in 2008, nearly three years ago. There are some incredible inconsistencies at play here, and designers really shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of working around them.

In short, some broad consensus between the different rendering engines needs to be reached—and if it comes at the expense of pushing the Next Hot Bleeding-Edge Experimental Sexy CSS3 Feature™ to market, I’m all for it.

Since striking out on my own, much of my time’s been dedicated to, well, the book. But I’ve also been fortunate enough to collaborate a bit with Filament Group on one of their projects: namely, a large-scale engagement that requires a responsive approach.

Needless to say, I am having the time of my life.

We’re also learning a lot, too. A lot of discussions about approach and execution have come up, largely because processes for a lot of this stuff don’t exist yet. That will, with a bit of hard work and community discussion, change over time. Still, there has been a lot of brilliant stuff created so far.

Here’s just one example:

The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Check out the script, download it, and kick the tires a bit—feedback and tweaks are most welcome.

I realize that there are always going to be philosophical differences around responsive web design. But for me, the solutions-driven discussions are always going to be infinitely more interesting to me than the alternative.

I won’t lie to you: I might’ve pounded the table emphatically a few times while reading Mark Boulton’s latest entry:

We can now design effective adaptive layouts that respond to their environment. If these layouts are based on a system that defines its ratios from the content, then there is connectedness on two levels: connectedness to the device, and connectedness to the content.

Mark’s thinking about flexible, content-driven grids has me damned excited about his upcoming talk at AEA Boston, and you know I’ll be flinging fistfuls of lucre at my laptop screen whenever his new book’s available to preorder.

The web really feels fun again.

So that Trent Walton went and redesigned his blog. And it is responsive. And on top of all that? It is sexy.

I’ve been admiring the Paravel team’s work for some time, and especially their dabblings in responsive design; if you haven’t seen the Do Lectures site, give it a whirl. It’s visually and technically impressive, and is a joy to browse at any resolution.

But that’s not all: given Trent’s penchant for full-width, type-heavy headings, he and the team at Paravel decided to knock out FitText, a jQuery plugin to create full-width, scaleable headlines from, well, your headlines. I can’t wait to give this a whirl.

Of course, in the middle of this cornucopia of goddamned fantastic things, Trent has to go and drop beats like this:

My love for responsive centers around the idea that my website will meet you wherever you are—from mobile to full-blown desktop and anywhere in between.

Emphasis mine. That sentence—that sentiment—is so good, I want it tattooed on my knuckles.

(Hrm. Wonder if there’s a jQuery plugin for that.)

I’m doing a disservice to this lovely interview with Shaun Inman—one of my favorite designers and people—by quoting it, but, well:

How do you stay focused?

I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions…. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

“5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman”

This. Oh, so very this.

I’m sad to say that due to a personal matter, I’ve had to bow out of speaking at this year’s Mobilism conference. You might have seen PPK’s announcement to that effect, and I’m definitely disappointed I’ll miss the event.

Because let’s be honest: my absence isn’t going to do a damned thing to diminish how amazing this conference is going to be. Seriously, look at this lineup. Look at it. Learning from the likes of Scott Jenson, Stephen Hay, Jake Archibald, Lyza Gardner, and Jason Grigsby is too good to be true, and in Amsterdam? And if you haven’t already, watch Jeremy Keith’s epic mobile browser panel from last year, a performance he’s repeating again in May.

Yeah okay I’m officially depressed all over again about missing it.

Seriously though: while I won’t be there, you can be. If you haven’t already, go register for Mobilism 2012 in May. You’ll have one hell of a time.

I’ve always sucked at writing.

Not the words, mind you: those usually come easily. (When I remember to sit down and write them, that is; hellooooooo, sad and neglected blog.) It’s more the process of the thing, I guess. It’s a struggle for me to get ideas down quickly; I get intimidated by the promise of that final draft, of shipping, so I often feel every word needs to be perfect as soon as it’s typed.

(No, I’m not going to tell you how long it took to write this fucking blog entry.)

Anyway. So, yes: writing’s hard. But I’m learning how to make it easier. And, alongside a few friends, I’m working on something that might make it easier for you, too.

Last year, I had a long conversation with Mandy. She talked about this idea she had: an idea for a tool that would facilitate conversation, discussion, and, most importantly, iteration during the writing process. Not just an application, actually: more a set of features to support a workflow, one that would, if done right, make writing not just easier, but better.

She and Jason had already sketched out how it might work. Soon after, David joined our merry band, and turned our responsive prototypes a living, breathing application. And Rob joined our team recently, and has been, as Mandy said, effortlessly solving problems we once thought impossible.

I am beyond honored to be a small part of this team, and I can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on. We call it Editorially, and you can read more about it on our first blog entry.

Stay tuned.

Having a bit of a problem with my laptop lately, and thought I’d write up the problem in case it’s affecting anyone else:

So my MacBook Air (mid-2009, OS X 10.8.3) When my computer wakes from sleep, it doesn’t immediately reconnect to my wireless network. What’s more, if I open up the wireless menu in OS X’s menu bar, it doesn’t show any networks nearby. Zip. Zero. Zilch. It’ll scan for new networks repeatedly, but won’t see a single one.

But here’s where this gets really, really annoying: if I open the Network panel in System Preferences, all nearby networks are immediately visible without delay.

Given the weird inconsistency between the two menus, and that I can reproduce this issue consistently, I figure this is a bug: either with 10.8.3, or with my aging little laptop. Either way, I’d love to fix it. So if you’ve come across this problem and know how a workaround, suggestions via email or Twitter would be most welcome.

Update: Charles Gaudette suggested on Twitter that it might be a couple , and pointed me toward a page showing how to clear out corrupted plist files. Deleting the com.apple.network.identification.plist and com.apple.airport.preferences.plist files seems to have done the trick—thanks, Charles! And thanks to everyone else who wrote in or twittered suggestions at me.

A confession: I love working in Keynote. Love it.

(I’m speaking, of course, of Keynote ’09. Not the feature-stripped version that was released last month. Still, I’m hopeful it’ll improve over time, since it is so very pretty.)

It’s not perfect, mind you—after four or five years of use, the program’s got some not-insignificant stability issues, crashing way more often than I’d like. But after all that time it’s still one of my favorite visual editors: it’s great for quickly prototyping UI components, sketching out ideas for animation timing, and, yes, making slides.

Anyway: over the years, folks have said some very kind things about the visual design of my presentations. I don’t have any special knowledge about Keynote, mind, but thought I’d share a couple things I use in my presentations, in case anyone else finds them helpful.

First up: Magic Move.

Basically, Magic Move is a transition you can apply between two slides. If the second slide shares any objects—images, text boxes, or what-have-you—with the first slide, those objects will be, well, magically moved from one position to the next.

Here’s a very, very simple example:

As you can see, there’s just one object on both slides: a picture of my good friend Dwayne. The image is the same on both slides—you can duplicate the slide, or copy/paste the object to the second slide—but since its position changed, Magic Move kinda tweens the photo to its new position.

Now, I don’t use Magic Move a lot, usually preferring to just lean on simple dissolves between slides. But it’s great for managing more complex animations, like this one:

This animation requires a bit more setup, but the principle is basically the same:

1. In the first slide, the “screenshots” you see are basically a lot of tiny little screencaps, each containing just one element of the interface. (So there’s an image for the toolbar in Editorially’s editor, another for the discussion panel, another for the account menu avatar, and so on.)
   1. When I’m arranging complex flyouts like this, I’ll usually have a reference screenshot on the canvas as a base layer, and place the smaller screencaps atop it. Just to make sure everything’s aligned, that is.
2. Then, in the second slide, I move all those small images where I’d like them to end up.
3. Turn on Magic Move, and you’re left with a neat little flyout cross-section of an interface.

As with most things Keynote-related, Magic Move is pretty reliable…but the more you use it, you’ll probably run up against a couple idiosyncrasies. You can’t magicmove (oh god i’m so sorry) an object if it has any builds or actions on it; animated objects (YES MOM, I’M TALKING ABOUT GIFs) will just blink to their new position; and some objects might move completely counter to what you’d expect.

And as with anything animation-driven, it’s very, very easy to overuse and abuse: try to consider marrying the animation with what you’re actually saying, and ensure the visuals don’t outwhelm your words as you’re presenting. That said, Magic Move is a fantastic tool to keep near at hand—when used just right I think it can be, well, kinda magical.