September 28th, 2008 - 4 Comments
So there goes another 2 weeks flying by. I do have to apologise for not posting last week, although I do have a good reason – I was moving into University! Unfortunately because of this I have been slightly out of the loop with regards to the latest happenings on the web, but I’ll try my best to make this week’s post worthwhile.
As for University, It’s been 7 days today since I moved in and I’m absolutely loving every moment of it. The course starts in a week and I think that will be the moment when everything finally sinks in and I realise this is the next 3 years of my life. Bournemouth city is amazing and I’ve already walked down to the beach (500 metres away) a few times – even venturing out in the early morning.
I wouldn’t be a true geek if I didn’t mention some of the awesome technical features of Bournemouth, namely the University’s stupidly quick internet connection – 52 Mbps download and 200 Mbps upload! Let’s just say I’m going to enjoy spending the next 3 years of my life with connections like this.
In slightly more relevant developments, Rawkes was featured on the Web Designer Wall’s post on large background websites – I’ve been a regular on Nick La’s sites for a long time so it’s even more awesome to see my site up there.
Grab yourself a cuppa and let’s get on with what you’ve all been patiently waiting 2 weeks for…
This week’s news
The creator of the internet, Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation: created to study the web, seek out solutions for capability and robustness, and to extend it to everyone on the planet. It’s a slightly bizarre claim which I’m concerned is going to tread on the toes of the W3C. I’m not the only one to feel this way; Read Write Web wrote a post on the announcement and covered the views of some industry leaders, including Eran Hammer-Lahav from Yahoo!, and blogger Moly Holzschlag. With the new foundation already receiving $5 Million from the Knight Foundation (am I the only one to think of Knight Rider?) it looks like we’ll be seeing a fair amount of the W3F over the coming years. Watch this space!
Google Maps mobile was updated last week, bringing with it features such as walking directions and mobile street view. There is a great video that showcases all of the new features, definitely check it out. The only thing that irks me about the new update is that it isn’t for the iPhone, although I’m hoping this will be rectified in future updates.
Firefox 3.1 beta has been delayed by a month. It sucks, but if it’s necessary for Mozilla to make it a better product, then I’m all for it. We can’t have Chrome taking over just yet now can we?
The time sucking web app Twitter has updated the design of their homepage. It’s mainly just cosmetic tweaks and a clean up of the whole design, but nonetheless it’s definitely welcome – at least the website is nicer to use now! I’m hoping that this update is a sign of things to come with Twitter as there are some fairly chunky hints going on like being able to track @replies that have nothing to do with your name, but we’ll see how it pans out.
Links of the week
Site of the week
Tomáš Pojeta
Some stunning illustrations on this website with themes right up my alley – space, rockets, and sea!
Grooveshark
Crisp, polished, awesome! The only words I can use to describe this sexish layout. They have obviously spent hundreds of hours tweaking and adding detail to every single page.
Realmac Software
The colours on this website are gorgeous. Coupled with the top notch icon designs and fine details to the layout, this website is another testament to the quality of Mac software developers.
Track of the week
“The Twitter Song” by Ben Walker – Bloody awesome and will be stuck in your head for many days to come!
September 14th, 2008 - 5 Comments
I would like to apologise for the lack of a blog post last week. With dConstruct, a wedding, and my birthday, that weekend turned out to be slightly busier than I expected and I simply ran out of time and energy. I’ve so much to talk about (I’m off to University next Sunday!), but I’m going to keep this short. To make up for last week I’m going to be covering 2 weeks worth of news, so be prepared for an action-packed Rawkes Weekly!
This week’s news
It’s official! Google is making it’s own browser, affectionately named Chrome. They announced it earlier last week with an awesome comic strip and you can download it from the official area for Chrome (You need to be on a Windows machine). Apart from being a revolutionary browser, they are going that extra step and releasing it in an open-source format which is called Chromium – It can be found on the Google Code page for Chromium. There is even a dedicated section for web developers to get a better idea of what’s in Chrome and why they should be excited about it.
In the grand scheme of things I think this is an excellent move by Google, in particular the decision to use WebKit over building their own rendering engine from scratch. The instant browser share of between 1-4% for Chrome will, I hope, give Microsoft a kick up the bum and make the next few years of browser development extremely interesting. I could talk about Google Chrome and the state of the browser market all day, so I’ll stop here and maybe save it for another post.
There was even more to celebrate for the Mountain View giant(?) with Google turning 10 last week. It’s amazing to think that 10 years ago this major part of the internet didn’t even exist, yet you wouldn’t be able to comprehend the web without them now. With innovations in web applications, open-source projects and now browsers, I’m excited as hell to see what the future brings. Happy Birthday Google!
It’s 9am on the 5th of September, and hundreds of geeks are descending on the sunny seaside city of Brighton. Why are so many web developers and designers all in one place? No, it’s not the release of a new Apple product, it’s dConstruct: an amazing yearly conference for the UK web industry! dConstruct is organised by the lovely guys and gals at Clearleft and has been running for 4 years now. I’m lucky enough to have attended it for the past 2 years with my friends from Insiteability and I have to say that the conference last week was absolutely top notch. To be honest the conference couldn’t have failed to impress with high profile speakers such as Digg designer Daniel Burka, Tantek Çelik of IE5 for Mac and Technorati fame, and none other than Jeremy Keith himself. All in all I highly recommend anyone who works or has an interest in the web industry to attend dConstruct, you won’t regret it. For anyone who went, you can find a list of all the URLs mentioned throughout the day on Jim Muttram’s blogger page.
Two of the speakers at dConstruct were Matt and Matt from Dopplr. They did an amazing and funny talk on the possibility of building a successful website that nobody ever has to visit. It was a mighty interesting concept and they covered it well, but I think the most news-worthy part of the talk was the announcement that Dopplr is going to be releasing some new features in the near-future – specifically groups. I personally don’t use Doppr incredibly much, but that doesn’t stop me seeing the importance of such a feature. I can see it being especially useful to companies and groups of people (duh) that need to track their travelling and even their carbon footprint!
Visualising data in new an exciting ways has become incredibly popular over recent years. Vimeo Toys is no exception; with it’s interactive landscape and animated grid system, Vimeo has made a really fun, but inherently pointless method of accessing videos and viewing activity on their website. Overall, it’s fun to use and that’s all that matters – sometimes things can get a little too serious and boring regarding data.
This week Flickr open the doors to a new user homepage (The surprise when it changes is a nice touch). They haven’t made any drastic changes, but they’ve focussed a lot more on statistics and the social aspect of Flickr. You’ll find more information from groups you’re in as well as a small graph of visitor statistics for your own photos. I’ve covered Flickr a few times over the last few weeks and it’s evident that they are really pushing things forward. I know everyone was dubious about how the service was going to be run when Yahoo! took over, but I certainly have high hopes for them after these recent developments.
Stop the press everyone, we officially have a new web app on the scene! Actually I’m quite excited about this one; it’s called Stack Overflow and it’s basically social Q&A for programmers. I’ve had a brief look at it and I really like the concept, although I’m slightly dubious over how they are going to deal with spam and nastiness on the website. If they can tackle that then I can certainly see this becoming a big resource with programmers all over the place.
Nearer the end of the week Dropbox launched out of beta. Dropbox is a web service that allows you to share and sync files across as many computers as you want – you can even access them through a web interface. The beauty of Dropbox comes when you share only a particular folder with a client or a friend, making sending and sharing files with that person a breeze. I’ve been using this service for months now and I have to admit I can’t think of anything that comes close to it’s shear usefulness and ease of use. Definitely give it a shot!
We had a controversial end to the week with Facebook announcing that the new design is staying, like it or not!. Personally, I absolutely love the new design, I don’t have a problem with it whatsoever. For some people there is a different story. Around 1 million people signed up a petition on Facebook against the new design, but I’m glad Facebook stood up to their decisions as I believe it’s better for the long run. I feel that some people, especially when they don’t understand the thinking behind website design can sometimes be afraid of change – “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” sort of thing. The problem with Facebook was that they recently hit 100 million users and any change they did was going to cause a problem with someone. Give it a few months and this will blow over and we’ll move onto the next big thing like MySpace closing down… I wish!
Links of the week
Site of the week
Acko
Some amazing use of angles and perspective have been brought together to achieve this layout.
SMS Parking
A simple layout, but one that I feel really works to achieve the desired outcome – making a technical service look as easy as possible to use.
Lesson(s) of the week
Don’t skip a week of Rawkes Weekly, it means the next one takes absolutely ages to do!
Track of the week
“An Ode To The Spaceman” by The Mandrake Project. This is a very relaxed and ethereal track. It’s quite long as well, so definitely one for when you’ve got 10 minutes spare and want to kick back and zone-out.
