I've had a Kindle Fire for several weeks now.  In addition to being a soft southerner and an effete intellectual, I'm also a spoiled Apple user - so naturally I hate it.

[In case you missed it, this short piece appeared in Design Week on the 6th of January.]

In the spirit of Alan Kay, who said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, here are my ’predictions’ for 2011.

There’s a lot of talk about “paywalls”. It’s usually about newspapers, and it’s almost always just about news. It shouldn’t be.

Nor should Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of a pay-to-view model be regarded as an act of desperation. This could be the moment newspapers finally begin to get it right.

Am I willing to pay for a trusted digital offering that helps make my life better, more prosperous, and better informed? Definitely.

WITHIN minutes of speaking to the Queen, the Prime Minister had sent me a quick email. I wasn’t surprised. It was the fourth time he had been in touch in recent weeks. 

Yesterday we attended the invaluable Wired Sussex Media Jobs and Skills Fair. Rather than telling you what it's about, I'll allow the good folks at Wired Sussex to do it for me: "As well as recruiting companies there were also media course providers exhibiting; and in addition to the exhibitors there were separate sessions for students and recent graduates, for freelancers, and for more senior candidates.". We ourselves weren't actually there recruiting for any positions in  particular, rather we were just in the Made in Brighton section to chat to attendees and support Wired Sussex and local students.
 
We took along the hideous face munging software to attract the curious to our stall. This sparked a broad spectrum of emotions, ranging from a horrified student who (understandably) couldn't cope with having my face, to a very impressed charismatic man who was poking his tongue out at the screen and making odd noises. Andy had the fortune of munging his face with the Mayoress, which I don't think many people can lay claim to.

Last Friday I attended a CSS3 Wizardry Workshop run by local front-end web development company Clearleft. The workshop aimed to "blow our minds" with a day long set of lectures and exercises teaching myself and a few other front-end web developers the powerful new additions to the latest iteration of CSS.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the language used to determine the presentation of a HTML page. If you've ever viewed a website with CSS disabled then you'll know just how integral this language has become in laying out modern webpages. Browsers today support CSS2 across the board (though ask a developer about IE6's CSS support and you'll be met with a groan and a grimace), but it's the very latest browser releases that support CSS3 that are pushing the limits of how we can design and display webpages. To put this in context, have a look at Chris's personal website with CSS enabled, and then without it, below:

We started off with a look at the new selectors that can be used to grab any section of the HTML markup. Previously restricted to relatively simple selectors forcing us to target elements by their IDs and class names, we can now use these new selectors to attach styles to (naming but a few here) siblings, children and adjacent elements. These additions will allow developers to produce cleaner HTML without as many classes and ID names cluttering up every div, p and span declaration.