Zigfu Dev Kit for Kinect and Unity3D Zigfu (YC S11) is happy to announce the commercial launch of our ZDK for Unity3D bindings. Full information is available here: A trial version is available with a watermark. You can buy a dev license with your credit card through our site to eliminate the watermark. Features: - Compile to Mac, Windows, and Web Player using the Zigfu browser plugin - Compatible with OpenNI/NITE and Microsoft Kinect SDK computer vision libraries - Calibration-free Skeleton Tracking - User selection methods (first user found, hand raise) - point-cloud to particles effects - Hand gesture detectors (push, swipe, steady, wave) - Plenty of Samples Scenes to get started If you have our kinect browser plugin installed ( you can try our examples compiled for the Unity3D Web Player up at FAQ, tutorials and more examples to come.
Email Design Guide Content Focus your message Some of the most effective emails have one clear message. If you have multiple messages to send, try breaking them up into a series of emails. Be concise Reduce the length of your email until you can simplify no more. Create a hierarchy Put the most important information first for people who are short on time. Break it up Use headings and bulleted lists to divide content into sections that are easy to understand. Link out If you have a lot of information to convey, link to a page on your website (or someone else's website) where subscribers can learn more. Templates Start from scratch Sometimes it's easiest to start from scratch. Save your template Instead of starting over every time you send an email, create a template you can use and modify again and again. Identity Label it Make sure the reader knows who the message is coming from by putting your logo or name at the top of the email. Color Pick a palette Choose just one or two colors for your emails. Images
Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailChimp Hunch The Fab Four technique - Responsive Emails without Media Queries The Fab Four technique to create Responsive Emails without Media Queries I think I found a new way to create responsive emails, without media queries. The solution involves the CSS calc() function and the three width, min-width and max-width properties. Or as I like to call them all together: the Fab Four (in CSS). The problem Making responsive emails is hard, especially since email clients on mobile (like Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook.com) don’t support media queries. That last approach has been my favorite so far. Once all the blocks are stacked, they don’t take the full width of the email. I’ve been looking for ways to solve this problem for a long time. A solution Remembering width, min-width and max-width On top of the calc() function, the solution I found involves these three CSS properties. If the width value is greater than the max-width value, max-width wins.If the min-width value is greater than the width or max-width values, min-width wins. (Answer : the box would be 480px wide.) Demo
Hooking Users In 3 Steps The truly great consumer technology companies of the past 25 years have all had one thing in common: they created habits. This is what separates world-changing businesses from the rest. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter are used daily by a high proportion of their users and their products are so compelling that many of us struggle to imagine life before they existed. But creating habits is easier said than done. I’ve learned these methods from some of the best in the business and put together an amalgamation of them that I call “Habit Testing.” Habit Testing fits hand-in-glove with the build, measure, learn methodology espoused by the lean startup movement and offers a new way to make data actionable. A prerequisite to Habit Testing is having some kind of product up and running. Once you have a site or app live, you can begin collecting data. Be realistic and honest. Each user interacts with your product in a slightly different way. Photo credits: Robby Mueller
Foundation | A Responsive Email Framework We know building HTML emails is hard, especially responsive emails. That's why we created Foundation for Emails. Get away from complex table markup and inconsistent results. Email marketing is good for your business. Common UI Patterns to Build Faster You can use these UI patterns in your designs to quickly get your email into shape. Emails that work in all of the major clients, even Outlook There’s no need to worry about inconsistent spacing and odd rendering issues with your layouts. View our compatibility chart → The ZURB Email Stack will make you an email pro Upgrade your email workflow to save time be more efficient. Learn more about the ZURB Email Stack → Inlining CSS is was a pain It used to be that every time you had to make a change to your email, you had to copy the contents, open the inliner in your browser, paste it in and inline. Check out our web inliner →
Instagram and Optimizing Favicons Something interesting and cool happened with photo sharing service Instagram in the last week. No, I’m not talking about Facebook buying them for $1,000,000,000.00. I’m referring to Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, and the talk he gave at AirBNB entitled "Scaling Instagram." In his presentation, Mike discusses the technical hurdles faced by going from 0 to 30 million users in 2 years. Very cool indeed. As all good presentations are, the slides contain minimal text, allowing the speaker to drive the conversation. One part that really interested me was when Mike was speaking about early performance and load problems Instagram had. Instagram’s Favicon Problem Ahhhh our friend the favicon! While slide text is sparse, it appears that the favicon for the Instagram website was not present on opening weekend. There are a couple of reasons that a favicon can result in a 404. So what’s the problem? In fact, it caused Instagram such a problem that Mike states: Tip 1: Make sure it exists. Or does it?
Increasing Usability for E-mail Newsletters E-mail marketing has been very popular in the past ten years and it still is, most likely because of its relatively reduced costs, low amount of work required and quite large potential audience. E-mail marketing is a direct way of sending commercial messages to a group of people by using the e-mail as the main and only channel. E-mail newsletters are not always sent because a company needs to sell a product, sell ads or request donations, but is sometimes meant to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness. There are many usability guidelines for e-mail marketers to follow and in the past couple of years the number of guidelines has actually increased, as users request more and more from providers and tend to ignore poorly designed layouts. Time is also an important matter today; more important than it was ten years ago. Subject line What can you learn from here? E-mail marketing: when? In my opinion the key to e-mail marketing is branding. Scanning, not reading Responsive (again) Typography
Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software Jorge Jimenez – Graphics Programmer Blog Free technical plans, books, patterns, software... | Craftsmanspace