Archive for March, 2008
BBC News refresh: air’s in
March 31st, 2008 • Design, Internet
Tags: Design, Web
Open Firefox this morning, and an old friend shows a new face. The Beeb revamp sparked a fair flurry of debate among colleagues: one camp decided that it was too conservative, while the other concluded that Aunty had shown the maturity you’d expect.
I sit in the latter camp. The design has shifted to the centre of your browser, and also widened to a 1024 width from its long-established 800. But to my eyes, those apparently major moves are invisible. The real beauty is in the care shown around the text: while the old BBC News home was a masterpiece of efficiency, the newcomer is the work of someone who respects words.
Every line has exactly the right amount of space to put the emphasis on the story instead of the design. You simply absorb the news, without fussy artifacts throwing up noise. The only flaw I could find was below the fold: the centre column’s ‘Around the World’ group of links badly needs someone to put more definition to those crossheads. Other than that, she’s a beaut.
Woopra: the live stats addicition starts here
March 31st, 2008 • Business, Internet
Tags: Business, Web
GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.
Now this I want. I’ve long been a fan of Google Analytics - it’s simple enough to scan-read in seconds, yet clever enough to provide the kind of insights that change the way you work.
But Woopra takes the whole game to a strange new level by going… live. That’s right - unlike Google, Woopra presents a real-time dashboard, showing numbers of users, even incoming search terms from Google.
For a self-confessed stat addict such as myself, Woopra’s as good as handing a vampire an all-night pass to the blood bank. I’m putting the order in for the bank of screens tomorrow morning, one for each site in our portfolio.
The thing’s in private beta right now, but grab your camp bed and join the orderly queue.
Google paints it black for Earth Hour
March 29th, 2008 • Google
Blink in disbelief - Google’s home page has gone black as a sign of support for Earth Hour.
Spooky
March 29th, 2008 • Life
Flickr slideshow of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Silent Hill, anyone…?
LiveLeak withdraws Fitna
March 29th, 2008 • Life, Video
I’m a LiveLeak addict. So it’s no surprise that, along with three million other people, I ended up watching Fitna, the 17-minute film from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Today, the video has been removed after the LiveLeak team received ‘threats to our staff of a very serious nature’.
They go on to explain:
“This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net…. We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support… We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.”
I suppose we can safely assume that the threats will now arrive at the door of Google.
What’s at the end of the browser rainbow?
March 28th, 2008 • Internet
I spent half an hour yesterday getting lost in Adobe’s new PhotoShop Express, undoubtedly the nicest surprise the company has handed to us mortals in many years.
The thing’s more than polished - it’s telepathic. It knows. You go looking for a trick, and it’s already there under your cursor. Someone spent a long time refining the thing, until there was nothing left to refine. Flickr, Picasa, look and learn.
Even better, it’s the right product at the right time. Today, I came across a little crystal ball-gazing from the Mozilla team, describing what Firefox 4 may have in store (Firefox 3 comes out of beta in June, for the record).
The biggest leap will come when on- and offline no longer matter - when you can work using an application within your web browser, regardless of network availability. Go sign up for the Adobe Express beta, then imagine being able to use with no signal - it simply synced to a server when a pipe became available.
That’s no big news, I realise - Google Gears is already laying that road, and Mozilla is doing its part with Prism. But nothing is quite seamless as of yet: you either need to install an extension, or run a separate application, or discover that the site you want doesn’t support Gears. The concept of the ‘web app’ is still largely that: a concept.
Must Get Me One Of These…
March 27th, 2008 • Life, Strange, Technology
The web’s most valuable blogs
March 26th, 2008 • Internet
The big hitters, along with the cash you’d need to buy them out.
Four hours of sleep a night: thank God I’m normal
March 26th, 2008 • Life
So I’m listening to BBC Radio 4 on the way home tonight, and there’s an investigation into what counts as ‘normal’ sleep patterns.
Turns out there aren’t any. Some professor from a UK centre of learning argued that sleep patterns varied so widely than the notion of ‘average’ was a nonsense. As long as you feel ‘fit to face the day’ when you wake, you’ve slept enough.
From what I can recall from the piece, ‘insomnia’ is clinically diagnosed as the inability to sleep for more than three nights a week for a period of a month.
Well, thank God for that. I can happily put my head to the pillow tonight, knowing that I won’t actually drift for a further two hours, safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have insomnia: it’s not that I can’t get to sleep, more that I view 1am as good working time being wasted. Which would be dandy, were it not for the fact that I wake at 6.45am, desperate for my wife to tell me that it’s Saturday, and I’m all set to sleep in until 11am.
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