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.

If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed

Bloomberg takes a look at newspapers and magazines that considered the iPad their savior.

Storyboarding iPad Transitions

Greg Nudelman walks through the amazing detail of iPad (and iPhone) animations and shares his thoughts on how to document their design for developers.

How To Build A Mobile Website

This deep dive from Smashing Magazine includes a lot of often-overlooked details of implementing a mobile website.

Progressive Signup: A Better User Signup Process

QuietWrite segments their users by step of the sign-up process to provide a low-effort account creation flow.

This Shell by the Gamits

Similar to what the Arcade Fire did a while back with incorporating video and HTML5, this hit the webs recently. It was created by some very cool folks at Legwork Studios as well as the Denver band, The Gamits.

Controlling text size in Safari for iOS without disabling user zoom

456 Berea Street takes a look at the intricacies of text scaling and orientation changes on iOS.

iOS Icons Made in Pure CSS

A stunning collection of iOS icon replications made purely with CSS. Be sure to use a webkit browser to check these out.

Learn HTML5, JavaScript and CSS With Mozilla’s Free “School of Webcraft”

Mashable runs down Mozilla’s expansion of their School of Webcraft to 30 classes.

Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration areas

Harry Brignull uses real-world examples to remind us what NOT to do when designing log-in and registration flows.

Apple engineer re-creates ancient computer with Legos

I remember using a computer to control Lego models back in school. Now the computer itself is made of Legos!

Mies van der Rohe Society

An appropriately stunning website for one of history’s greatest designers.

Telescopic Text

A new take on “progressive reveal”.

Today Google launched a new feature: Instant Previews (this hasn’t rolled out for all users, so you may not see this functionality yet). It is now possible to get a snapshot of each site in your search results before you actually visit the site (just click the little magnifying glass). This could be a useful feature. And Google has executed it in such a way that the previews show up remarkably fast. They also feature the sections of the page matching your search. Well done! More…

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…

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…