Lisa Hannigan sings beautiful, is cute, funny, charming, nice (something you don’t often say about a musician) and she air-fistbumped her band members. The concert was nearly perfect and after the show she took the time to write autographs, talk with people and pose for photos. If she does come back to Vienna, I will definitely go and see her again.

Thank you Lisa.

Instagram makes a Polaroid camera. Funny.

If you read my weblog or my Twitter stream you may already knew that I won, according to Hardwrk, the worlds fastest MacBook Pro. Last monday I received it and I love it. A full restart only takes three seconds and Photoshop is up and running in under two seconds. Even compiling LaTeX is not a pain in the ass anymore. Everything else is also super fast. Whenever I have to do something on my old MacBook Pro (mostly move some files to the cloud or the new MBP) I fall asleep because it is so fucking slow. Thank you Hardwrk, I think I will be really happy with this for a very long time.

Polaroid made an app that copies apps that copied Polaroid cameras. Polamatic is available in the iTunes App Store and costs €0,79. Additional filter packs are available for €0,79 each.

This is the original size of the saved photo, which is 572×692 pixels. I hope they increase that size in an upcoming update.

The rise of tablets and smartphones of different sizes in the last few years brought up a bunch of new problems for frontend developers. In the past most developers and designers used fixed width in their designs, but these layouts break on small devices. Instead of developing a own layout for each device Ethan Marcotte brought us Responsive Web Design. Very similar to Ajax, Responsive Web Design is not a new technique but rather a combination of existing techniques in order to reach a very specific goal: Use the same markup and stylesheets for every device.

This book is kind of the bible of Responsive Web Design. Ethan Marcotte does not only explain how it works, but also why it works and why it is better than separate markup and stylesheets. It is not a book about mobile development (many things like bandwidth and performance are not covered in the book), it is a book how to optimize a layout for every device that exists and how you can optimize the experience using media queries.

Before I started reading the book I already had some experience with responsive layouts, I had read some blog articles and implemented some basic layouts. However, I learned a lot and I can recommend it to every frontend developer out there.

The one thing I was not able to agree with Ethan was how to define the breakpoints of your layout, i.e. when you have to add additional styles through media queries specific to a single device or a group of devices. I will try to outline my thoughts on breakpoints in responsive layouts in another article later today.

Marcotte, Ethan: Responsive Web Design. New York: A Book Apart 2011.

★★★★☆

To transition from a startup into a late-stage company that aims to be around for 100 years, Evernote today confirms it’s raised a $70 million Series D round of funding at a $1 billion valuation. Meritech Capital and CBC Capital were chosen to lead the round because they’re the firms that can help Evernote prepare for an eventual IPO.

Evernote is one of my favorite web services. Since I put a lot of my data in there I really hope it will last 100 years.

Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.

Dropbox is holding a new Dropquest thisnext weekend. This will be fun.

Vielen Dank! Es waren schöne Jahre mit euch auf Facebook. Bis auf Weiteres müssen wir laut dem neuen Bescheid der Medienbehörde alle Tätigkeiten auf unserer Facebook-Seite einstellen.

Die öffentlich-rechtlichen Medien dürfen in Österreich nicht auf Facebook vertreten sein. Das ist ein bisschen peinlich.

At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5″ technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If I can survive the separation, I’m going to do this for a year. Yeah, I’m serious. I’m not leaving The Verge, and I’m not becoming a hermit, I just won’t use the internet in my personal or work life, and won’t ask anyone to use it for me.

That’s bullshit (Garrett Murray has some great points). If you want to quit something for a year, I have compiled a list of things which are worth quitting:

• Smoking
• Drinking
• Eating meat
• Fast food
• Cars
• Eating anything with emulsifiers in it
• Hitting your children
• Sex without protection
• Wasting water and energy

Apple Gazette has 75 photos from the inside of Apple HQ.