Device-makers align around a wireless charging technology that works through tables to charge multiple devices—and it’s expected in products later this year.

For all the new features, functions, and blazing speeds of the latest mobile devices, most still share a common downside: limited battery life that eventually forces you to be tethered to a power cord and outlet.

Responsive design is a pretty well defined strategy, but how you come at it can vary quite a bit. Brad Frost covers the angles.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Responsive Strategy is a post from CSS-Tricks

Jeremy Church:

While em is relative to the font-size of its direct or nearest parent, rem is only relative to the html (root) font-size.

Jeremy tends to favor em, because of the ability to control an area of a design. As in, scale the type in that specific area relatively. I have tended to like rem because of the ability to scale type across the entire page easily, but I've gotten into issues where that wasn't good enough control so I could see moving back to em for that reason.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Confused About REM and EM? is a post from CSS-Tricks

Interested in applied learning and gaining real-life experience that complements classroom learning? Did you know you can receive academic credit and transcript notation for an internship?

First: Please schedule an appointment online using UMBCworks, stop by our office (Math/Psyc 212) or call our office (410-455-2216) for a 30 minute appointment. During this appointment we will review your resume and approve you to begin applying for internships using UMBCworks.

Next: How to find internships?

UMBCworks is a great tool to use for applying for internships.

Companies also come to campus. You can also use the great resources on our website. Please see the calendar (http://www.careers.umbc.edu/news_events/calendar.php) on our website to see when employers will be visiting campus, for networking events, for On the Road events, and For Lunch & Learn events.

There is also a list of resources on our website. (http://www.careers.umbc.edu/skills/intern/resources.php)

After you have obtained an internship:

If interested, please schedule an appointment so you can receive transcript notation, academic credit, and register for Practicum 98 (http://www.careers.umbc.edu/skills/intern/prac.php).

Registration for transcript notation, academic credit, and  Practicum 98 for summer internships will begin around the first week of April.

The practicum is a co-requisite to internships. A coordinator will help monitor the Practicum. You will also receive professional development via the practicum.

For more information, feel free to call/visit our office, meet with a specialist, or check out our website.

Dr. Eve Marder, Professor and Head, Division of Science at Brandeis University will be speaking at A Look Ahead XVII on April 29, 2014. Eve Marder pioneered the understanding of neural circuits, particularly how their properties and dynamics give rise to specific behaviors. During her talk "Individual Variability and Robustness in Neuronal Circuits" she will address her own transformative research and the opportunities ahead.

One of the big challanges for large companies, especially in the digital age, is establishing and maintaining brand consistency. A corporation like Sony for example, wages a daily war to ensure consistent communications across five continents.

Although we often think of publishers to be exclusively involved in news and magazine industries, all corporations typically publish thousands of documents per year; they include websites, microsites, reports (statistical and financial); there are point of sale promotions, internal communications, instruction manuals and legal documents. Increasingly, for reasons both economic and environmental, the emphasis is being placed upon digital delivery and especially mobile delivery.

Today Adobe announced that they’re integrating their Digital Publishing Suite with Adobe Experience Manager, in an effort to capture a larger market share of this growing sector.

DPS and Adobe Experience Manager make it significantly easier for publishers and brands to produce consistent, rich content for customers on mobile and the Web. — Nick Bogaty, head of digital publishing, Adobe

Adobe believe that the integration of the two platforms as part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, together with the combination of Adobe Analytics will streamline delivery, speeding up production and reducing costs for thousands of digital content publishers worldwide.

Centralizing assets is not a new idea. From the dawn of the Internet, corporations maintained extranets as repositories for multi-Mb PSDs featuring board-authorized stock photography and artwork. Designers would simply access the resources, regionalize it, and publish. Even now, companies use services like Dropbox to host assets available by invitation only. Many large companies, Twitter for example, even host public repositories of key assets such as their logo together with usage instructions, in an attempt to maintain brand integrity.

The difference with Adobe’s approach, is that they are serving the assets directly. Templates are designed allowing content authors to drag and drop assets—from text right up to video—into new editions of publications, from where they can be pushed out in a fraction of the time of the traditional process. Digital Publishing Suite is already being used by the likes of Condé Nast to speed up production, reduce costs and ensure consistency.

Adobe DPS is the go-to solution for publishing our magazine apps on mobile devices. The integration of Adobe Experience Manager not only enables us deliver a consistent Vanity Fair experience on multiple platforms, we have advanced our on-sale date by five days. — Emily Smith, director of operations for corporate editorial, Condé Nast

Initially this may appear to be another attack on the design industry from a large company intent on WYSIWYGing a design process. In reality, it empowers designers by limiting the role of artworker, providing a system that needs to be designed, and reducing the repetitive board-room approval process that plagues in-house teams.

It also strikes a blow for those arguing that a responsive solution isn’t always the best option by enabling native apps, distinct from a core website, to achieve similar levels of consistency.

It’s unlikely that Adobe’s latest move will affect the working lives of most freelancers or small teams, but in-house designers and consultancies that work with global brands can anticipate it playing a big role in the next couple of years.

Are you planning to use Adobe’s DPS in conjunction with AMC? How do you maintain consistency across platforms? Let us know in the comments.

Remove Image Backgrounds with PhotoScissors (Win/Mac) – only $9.97!