SpottedWalrus

I’ve got quite a collection of web design and development books covering every topic from typography to color to XHTML/CSS and every development language imaginable. I’ve even got 3-4 books on the same topic for some things. But over the past year or so I’ve found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the books that have been coming on on various web topics lately.

It’s not so much that the contents of these books is irrelevant or badly written. What I’ve found myself thinking every time I crack open any of these books at Barnes & Noble is that I say to myself, “I could just find this online.”

So this got me thinking. Where will books, more specifically “web related” books, be in the next 5-10 years? The 37signals Getting Real book distributed as a PDF was a massive success and more authors seem to be going that route.

And even more than just “digital” books…will there really even be a direct need for entire books on topics? Practically ever bit of technical info you could possibly need is a simple search away.

Do you prefer books over searching online? Or the other way? And why?

With the announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 coming out within the next month, do you think you’ll be upgrading?

After getting a taste of the new Photoshop CS3 interface…I don’t see how I couldn’t. It’s just too nice.

As of now I’m planning on upgrading to CS3 Design Premium. You? Your thoughts?

Over the past week or so I’ve some how managed to become completely obsessed with Mac OS X icons. Seriously…it might be considered an illness.

My current favorites are pretty much anything and everything by David Lanham. The guy has created over a dozen unique icon sets that are just plain juicy.

Some other nice icon resources are Iconfactory and InterfaceLIFT. Both have countless sets for the taking.

And if you decide you really want to get hardcore with your icon collecting, I highly recommend snagging Panic’s Candybar for handling system icons and Iconfactory’s Pixadex for organizing your truckloads of icons.

Okay…branding shouldn’t die. But that still doesn’t change the fact that it showed up at the most inconvenient of times.

I, like millions of other loving husbands, purchased my wife fun goodies. And I did it all from the comfort of my leather office chair. The process took all of 10 minutes and I didn’t wait in a single line or have to awkwardly hand the check-out lady “female” attire. Great for me, right?

Well not really. 3 days after the easiest purchases of my life my wife walks in the door with 2 packages in her hand that she just picked up outside from the delivery man. Initially this isn’t so bad. The bad part comes in when the packages she hands me are completely covered in the logos of the 2 stores they came from.

To those companies, and any others shipping out items around Christmas, how about you not plaster your boxes with your logo for the entire month of December…seriously. It would keep you from being the evil grinch who spoils Christmas and I’d like a lot more and me liking you or not is extremely important.