It’s been a long time since our last “sweet links”–too long. So let’s get to it!

Planetarium

In anticipation of the pending release of Firefox 4, this CSS3 demonstration shows off the power of transitions. Until FF4 is released, check it out in Chrome or a similarly capable browser.

Apple’s Role in Japan during the Tohoku Earthquake

We love their products, but it’s behavior like this that can make you love a company.

Configuring the Viewport

An enormous amount of detail about the “viewport” in Safari on assorted platforms and how to make it play nice with your site or application.

Open Source Ampersands

Exactly what the title says: Mark Pilgrim put together a page of single-character ampersand fonts that can be used on the Web. Because…

D3.js

A new JavaScript library for manipulating Web documents based on data sources. Now we’re just dying for a need to use it!

How an Illinois Rest Stop Inspired a Web Page

The folks at 37Signals remind us that inspiration can be found anywhere in life.

iPhone and iPad now support TrueType font embedding. This is huge.

Jeffery Zeldman offers a quick run-down on TrueType support in iOS 4.2.

Elsewhere in the iOS Fonts world…

iOS Fonts tries to maintain a list of the fonts supported on the iPhone and iPad.

Google and Microsoft cheat on Slow-Start. Should you?

Ben Strong provides some interesting investigation on how Microsoft, Google and others violate RFC-3390 to decrease page load time.

Editorial SEO: Get an introduction and best practices.

An overview of SEO tactics for writers and editors by Rob Flaherty.

Farbzauber

Fun JavaScript technique for creating coloring book versions of your image.

Why professional logo design does not cost $5.

Jacob Cass explores what kind of logo you can get at what cost.

Design for content management systems.

Smashing Magazine offers some tips on optimizing your website design for a content management system.

Find your way with static maps.

Guidance from 24 Ways on implementing static maps using the same techniques you use for dynamic maps (and why you might want to do such a thing).

University websites do it all.

Based on our experience in the higher-education space, XKCD hit close to home.

Review the history of CSS Resets.

It doesn’t seem like CSS Resets have been around that long, but Michael Tuck starts a three-part series on them with a great history.

Ben the Bodyguard brings news.

Awesome site introducing a forthcoming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Chrome 7 overtakes IE7 to become the world’s third most-used browser.

Sitepoint’s latest data shows that Chrome is rapidly gaining usage.

Firefox Live streams warm fuzzies.

Finishing up with the cutest additions to the Web community this week, courtesy of the Mozilla Foundation.

You really should upgrade your browser.

We used to make nice little (actually they weren’t little, and as time went on, they became less nice) screens that suggested (demanded) that you upgrade your browser or risk having a less-than-optimal experience (or risk having absolutely no experience).  Then we (in my head, I keep referring to this as the royal We, but it really isn’t; it is “we” meaning the Web design/dev community (whatever that really means)) decided that we should be nicer to everyone visiting the sites we build and moved to the idea of graceful degradation. More…

Montreal based indie rock band, Arcade Fire, have joined up with Google to created a site that uses the band’s new music to showcase the potential of HTML5 and the Google Chrome browser in some creative ways.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

For nearly a decade, Flash grew on the web to a point of near pervasiveness. It offered itself as a plug-in for every major browser and every major platform. It even came pre-installed in a lot of situations. Flash came as close to a “standard” as any proprietary technology on the web ever had. Then came the iPhone and the first hints that there was another (better?) way. More…