Barcelona have agreed a one-year contract extension with defender Eric Abidal, the European champions announced.

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Jeff Croft has a nice rift on some of the responses he got when he tweeted about what Steven Witten has done with his site, acko.net. It’s an insanely cool piece of CSS and 3D work and Steven did an informative writeup

It’s fascinating to see some of the anti-Flash attitudes manifest themselves in the new world of a very rich HTML5. And I think it goes to show that a lot of the animosity towards Flash was rooted in a very strict interpretation of what is “good” when it comes to UX and UI. I don’t even think that’s entirely wrong, but I do think that some of it misses the point. As Jeff noted, you have to have experiments like this that show off the technology. This kind of thing inspires people to think beyond the gimmick and potentially implement some of these ideas in a more usable and meaningful way. It also does a disservice to the fact that things like this make the web a more beautiful place. This isn’t “design” in the traditional sense. But it’s still art, and art should be celebrated. Most of the things I’ve seen on Twitter were pretty positive about the site and appreciated it, but the opposite reaction from a lot of the web standardistas was, as Jeff said, disappointing.

My plea for the potential creators of things like this is to not heed the mindset that because you’re using open standards you need to adhere to the unwritten rules of UX/UI design and what’s “good”. The open web is at the beginning of what is going to be an amazingly creative period. With technologies like CSS3 and Canvas, the open web has the building blocks in place to harness a lot of creative energy. That is going to take many forms and some of it won’t seem as useful as other bits. But it’s all part of a process, one that we saw with Flash, that ultimately leads to better ideas, better implementations, and a better web.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

The Celox, Samsung’s 4G LTE version of its Galaxy S2, while superficially resembling the S2 differs in many ways, represents a serious beefing up of the spec for the Galaxy family. And this may be a problem for Apple, currently gestating the iPhone 5 and with existing models about a generation behind current Android super-phones, because it looks like the competition is about to get a lot tougher.

Screens

The Samsung Celox will sport a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 800 x 480.

It has been reported that in its latest incarnation Apple will slightly increase the screen size from 3.5 inches to 3.7 inches and will be an edge-to-edge display, occupying the entire face of the phone. It is unlikely that Apple will opt for a 4-inch plus display as the increase in size will result in a drop in pixels-per-inch. Anything over 300 ppi is considered retina display. A 3.7 inch display has a ppi of 312 — a drop of 13 ppi from the iPhone 4′s 326 ppi. So even though most Android phones feature 4.3 inch displays Apple is likely to remain conservative.

Cameras

The Celox is rumoured to come with an 8MP rear-facing camera and a 2MP front-facing camera.

Speculation suggests that the iPhone 5 will feature an 8MP camera with dual-LED flash.

Apple has already ordered 90% of its 8MP camera sensors from OmniVision. However, the Celox’s Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor has the capability to support a 16MP camera and the ability to capture and display 1080p stereoscopic 3D video or 8 megapixel stereoscopic still images. Thus, there is greater room for optimization in Samsung’s offering.

Processors

The Samsung Celox is expected to be powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor.

Rumors state that the iPhone 5 will be powered by the A5 dual-core processor, which currently powers its iPad 2.

While the A5 dual-core chipset can challenge the Galaxy S2 and other NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip-based Android phones, it cannot match the power of dual-core 1.5GHz chip-sets. If Apple wishes to take on the expected new swathe of 1.5MHz Androids they may have to delay the launch of the iPhone 5 until later in the year when the A6 chips may be available.

Networking

Celox offers 800MHz LTE support, and thus it will possibly be targeted at Europe (US carriers support 700MHz). However it’s likely that a different version of the Celox will be launched in the United States. The Samsung Celox’s features are similar to those rumoured for the Hercules which is expected to arrive soon on the T-Mobile network.

Most of all it is surmised that Apple will not launch a 4G LTE compatible iPhone and that will give a straight run to Celox if it winds its way to the U.S. Analysts have forecast that Apple will forego LTE functionality in the iPhone 5 due to the limitation of the Qualcomm LTE chip-set which failed to achieve sufficient yields.

Other info

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Barcelona striker Lionel Messi was awarded the FIFA Ballon d’Or for the third successive year.

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Wayne Rooney has defended himself after Roberto Mancini accused him of influencing the decision to send off Vincent Kompany in Sunday’s FA Cup third-round Manchester derby.

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