The Blog
Join me as I share my experiences from across cyber space and talk about my passion of web design
September 28th, 2008 - 3 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.
August 31st, 2008 - 8 Comments
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that I’m feeling a lot better than I was this time last week. No thanks to that damned nemesis of the male race, the man-flu!
The iMac replacement came on Tuesday, much to my excitement. I was briefly the owner of two 24″ iMacs while I waited for the old one to be picked up, but unfortunately that didn’t last too long. I’m happy to announce that the new one doesn’t have any dead pixels! I can finally proceed to melt my eyes trying to take in the giant-ness of this screen. YAY!
I’m going to end the introduction there as we have had a rather large amount of news this week and the post is already turning into an essay. Assume the position everyone as we jump into the events of the past seven days…
This week’s news
FaceBook hit 100 million users this week. That is an astonishing amount of people, considering much of FaceBook’s early days were tied up in the educational area rather than being fully open like MySpace. With the new design and solid plans for the future, I’m really excited about what FaceBook has to offer over the coming years. MySpace just doesn’t excite me in any way what-so-ever, probably because of it’s tarnished reputation with unsavoury characters and the appalling code!
Google Gears Beta has finally been released for the Safari web browser. At last! I’ve been waiting on this for a very long time and it’s been the only thing keeping me from using Gears on a regular basis. It has been strongly advised in the Google Groups post about the beta that it’s in an unstable state and should be used with extreme caution – it could break Safari basically! That being said, it’s a massive step in the right direction. Rock on Google.
Mozilla are on a roll with new releases, this time coming out with Ubiquity: An experiment into connecting the web with language. If you’ve ever used Quicksilver on the Mac (or Launchy on Windows) then you’ll be used to the idea of using words (language) to achieve tasks quickly and from wherever you currently are, be it your desktop, inside your email program, whatever. Ubiquity is looking to use a similar concept, but in the browser and using web services instead. One example given with the prototype is the ability to quickly add a map of a location to an email by selecting some text (eg. Starbucks, Acme Town), invoking the dashboard, and typing the word “map”. Once you do this it enters what they call “interactive mode”, basically where your location is shown on a Google Map and you can zoom in or move the map as you see fit. When you are happy with the map you click a simple link that then embeds an image of your map directly into the email. Simple as that! I think this is an amazing development at Mozilla and I can’t wait to see how they progress with it.
My favourite code editor-slash-do-everything application Coda received a significant update this week. The new version is 1.5 and it brings with it features such as built-in Subversion version control (hooray!) amongst other great additions such as the ability to add custom reference books. Overall this update brings everything I’ve been wanting Coda to do, more than justifying it’s place at the top of my favourite web development apps on OS X.
Is supporting IE 6 sucking up precious time and getting on your nerves? Then you might want to take part in the IE Death March. With the likes of Carsonified supporting the movement amongst other big name studios and designers, it finally looks like the web industry is making a stand on the OAP of the browser world. Good-bye Mr. Internet Explorer 6!
In related news, IE 8 Beta 2’s new features finally bring it up to scratch with the other newer browsers. This is all well and good, but it’s been uncovered that IE 8 has ‘broken it’s promise’ of loading websites in ’standards’ mode by default. I’m not holding much hope for the latest incarnation of the Microsoft browser suite as they always seem to screw it up one way or the other. One step forward, two steps backwards.
Steve Jobs ‘died’ earlier this week! Ok, so he didn’t really die, but Bloomberg certainly put a cat amongst the pigeons by accidently publishing his 17-page obituary this week. Whoops!
Amazon just purchased the online bookshelf web app Shelfari. There isn’t too much to say about this although I’m definitely interested in the direction Amazon are going to take it, and what sort of integration they’ll inevitably come up with.
It might be called Really Simple Syndication, but you’ve always needed a fair amount of computer literacy to use RSS properly. Google has noticed this problem and is implementing some new features in Blogger aimed at making RSS mainstream. By integrating a slimmed down version of Google Reader into the user’s Blogger dashboard and naming the feed links “Follow This Blog”, RSS for the average user will become trivial. It’s such a simple solution, but half the problem is that using the official name for something isn’t always the best option if you want to appeal to the masses, like RSS or RFID (ArrEff-what-now?!).
Last.fm and Flickr sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee! Flickr has released some new functionality that let’s it read the machine tags from last.fm that users have been adding to photos for the past year. What this means is that by using a special tag (eg. lastfm:event=34640) you can link your photos to a music event that is on last.fm. You’ll even get a funky icon underneath your photo with the name of the event and a link to other photos from this event. Cool!
On Friday we saw the new design for the jQuery site, sporting a rather retro rockstar on the banner. The new website looked great, very polished, but the rockstar illustration really didn’t go down well and the community certainly let their feelings be known in the blog comments. By Friday evening the rock star was gone, he didn’t even last 24 hours! I can’t say I was too bothered, but I’m liking the layout in it’s current state – it’s really bringing jQuery up into the serious and grown-up framework territory.
To round the week off, the super-cool open-source eCommerce engine Magento turned 1 on Saturday. I absolutely love what the guys over there are doing with the bland and ageing area of eCommerce software. Magento is a breath of fresh air and the possibilities are endless with it. Keep up the good work!
Links of the week
Site of the week
TokyoCube
An urban store selling loads of funky products. I really like the way they’ve tied the striking Flash banners into the rest of the site. Overall a detailed and pretty damn awesome layout.
Lesson of the week
Installing PHP extensions on IIS is pretty annoying
Track of the week
“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. This is a killer tune if you need to unwind. Take a deep breath in and slap this on!
