These are the voyages of Rob Hawkes. His mission: to explore design's frontiers; to seek out new ways and new solutions; to proudly go where others just follow
I’m ill! Yes you heard right, the boy wonder web design extraordinaire has come down with something positively horrible (headaches and tiredness). It’s probably just a bout of the incredibly life altering man-flu, but I’m sure I’ll be back and bouncing soon!
My new iMac should be here by next Tuesday. I’m a bit worried about turning the new one on for the first time incase it doesn’t work or has even more dead pixels than this one – that would truly suck. The good news is that it’s a bank holiday weekend here in England so I don’t have any work before my new baby arrives. Hooray!
I haven’t mentioned this much previously, but I’ve been applying for University this year. I actually found out many months ago that I was accepted onto the course at Bournemouth Univeristy, but it was only yesterday that my student loan was confirmed and the reality of starting University life set in. This is the beginning of an amazing chapter in my life as I managed to slightly screw up Uni last time by going on a course that didn’t suit me. This time will be better I’m sure as I’ve picked Interactive Media Production; something which is right up my street!
So what does this mean for Rawkes? Well I’ll be covering this more as the time approaches, but the plan is to keep Rawkes running throughout my time at Uni, albeit in a slightly smaller state. The blog won’t be affected in any negative way, in fact I’m sure the things I learn at Uni will show up on here in one way or another! The freelance and work aspect of Rawkes will be cut down slightly, but only in the sense that I won’t be able to take on as many clients at one time. I will be updating the main Rawkes pages nearer to the time as I decide exactly how to approach the matter. All in all nothing negative is going to happen, although you might not see much of me during the first couple of weeks at Uni while I recover!
I’m feeling it’s going to be a rather long post this week, making up for the ’short’ one last week. Let’s assume the regular position, cuppa tea in one hand and mouse in the other as we enter the latest Rawkes Weekly. Enjoy!
This week’s news
On Monday I discovered the new Metropolitan Police mapping service which let’s inhabitants of London and the surrounding area to check crime levels on Google Maps. I’m not too sure on the accuracy of the statistics, but this is a really cool use of the Google Maps API and it’s been implemented really well.
iPhone GTD app Things hit version 1.1 early this week, with the addition of syncing to the desktop version. Things is one of my favourite GTD apps simply because it’s so simple and beautifuly designed - it makes getting things done fun!
I like the way that if you take your mouse off the slideshow for a period of time then the controls and Flickr branding disappears. I think this is a nice touch as it’s always an issue for larger companies to use services and tools like Flickr if there is branding and logos plastered everywhere – Vimeo does much the same with their video player.
On Thursday Mozilla announced the winners of the extend Firefox 3 contest. There are some amazing extensions on there, but my favourite out of them all is definitely Pencil: a GUI prototyping tool. The basic premise of Pencil is to let you quickly knock together GUI interfaces and website layouts without worrying too much about the finer details. I’m yet to use this in production, but that doesn’t stop it being an excellent example of what can be achieved with FireFox.
Towards the end of the week we found out that IE 8 is going to get a privacy mode. Cue thousands of teenagers screaming in joy all around the world! Apart from turning IE into a major pr0n browser, the new privacy mode will prove incredibly useful for public computers and for people who want to surf the web secure in the knowledge that anything they do won’t be found out by a someone using the computer after them. A prime example of this would be someone researching about an illness they might have that they don’t want to announce to their family. It may be a little extreme, but the option of privacy should be in all browsers without a question.
A shock announcement brought this working week to a close with the news that Ma.gnolia is going open-source! The social bookmarking web app has proven popular in recent years with it’s differences to the leader Delicious. The main draws of Magnolia are it’s groups which allow like-minded individuals come together to share bookmarks and discuss a particular topic. Magnolia also boasts a more visual approach on it’s service, rather than the utilitarianised (hooray for new words!) Delicious.
The open-source version is going to be called Magnolia 2, or M2 for short. The project website already has a variety of ways to follow the project and also hosts their project charter which outlines the plans of the project. I can’t wait to download the first public release in September!
An oldie, but I absolutely love the playfulness of this layout – it’s such a happy design.
Crowd Science
Simple, but the colours are so bright and refreshing. It has a nice gridded layout as well.
Lesson(s) of the week
Getting ill sucks
Putting off chasing things up only results in bad things
Track of the week
“Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Soulwax Remix)” - by The Chemical Brothers. I love both of these artists, but this remix could be bottled and sold as pure awesome!
This entry was posted
on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I swear we missed out a few days this week. No? Maybe it’s just me then. Either way, this week has flown by! Work is picking up again with more and more clients asking for work and deadlines piling on like nobody’s business. Time to crack out “Getting Things Done” again me thinks.
In other earth-shattering news: my iMac is being replaced after just a few days! I know, know, shocking isn’t it? Apple can’t do any wrong can they? Well, this time they did by shipping me an iMac equipped with a lovely bright green stuck pixel in the middle of the screen. It’s one of those things that don’t bother you until you notice it, but as soon as you notice it then you are always drawn to it. Luckily Apple was uber friendly on the phone and are going to send me a replacement unit and pick up the old one free of charge. Balance has now officially been restored in my love for the fruity company.
I must apologise before we start as this week’s post isn’t going to be as rich as normal. It’s been a rather hectic week sorting out University, iMac replacements, and that little thing on the side called work, so I didn’t have much time to compile content. I promise I’ll be back with a vengeance soon, bringing a whole variety of new funky stuff to the blog!
Let’s crack on with a roundup of events over the past 168 hours.
This week’s news
Gmail went down on Monday evening with only the following as an explanation of the problem:
We’re sorry, but your Google Mail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
It caused an uproar on Twitter and really shows how much we rely on Google for important, business critical services. Luckily the situation was sorted out within a few hours so a good job from Google for keeping the downtime short. On a slightly related note, has anyone noticed how stable Twitter has been of late?
PHP 4 bit the bullet recently with the release of 4.4.9 – farewell my ageing friend! This actually happened last Thursday, but I missed it and think it’s an important development in the programming world. We need to learn to let go of outdated technology and stop prolonging things by our insistence to carry on supporting them for no viable reason other than that people “don’t know how to upgrade” (IE6, I’m looking at you!).
Yahoo’s new location based platform, Fire Eagle opened up to the public on Tuesday. I applied to the beta of this a while back, but it’s great to see it out in the public’s hands. I have to admit I was a little dubious about how useful Fire Eagle would be as it doesn’t do much on it’s own, it’s basically an API that developers can use to store and retrieve location based information. After using it with a few of my iPhone applications I’m officially converted and I reckon this’ll really push the new wave of location based applications we’ll be seeing over the coming years.
Another one from the Yahoo camp this week was the preview release of the user interface library: YUI 3.0. I’m going to put my hand’s up right now and admit that I haven’t spent much time working with YUI, but from what I’ve seen and heard I’m really impressed. I’m even more impressed that Yahoo are happily giving this out for free! Maybe 3.0 will help tear myself away from jQuery and try something new.
Towards the end of this week the internet was victim to a manga revolution, most noticable on Twitter. Avatar creating software from Face Your Manga spread like wildfire across the social network, resulting in profile pictures all over the world being manga-ised.
As you can see, I joined in on the fun. I’d heartily recommend everyone creating a manga version of them-self – let’s take over the world!
Links of the week
Naming variables – Choosing the name for programming variables is always a tricky one. This post hopes outlines the case for more verbose naming of variables
Top 10 CSS table designs – Smashing Magazine are back with an article outlining a variety of ways to display tables with CSS
Use the best available ampersands – It’s no secret that Dan Cederholm loves ampersands. This post lists all the coolest ampersands that come installed as default on most systems
Sexy gradients and a lovely attention to detail. Plus he’s a Mac user so that’s instant kudos with me!
Lessons of the week
I was feeling greedy so learnt two things this week:
Don’t take people’s opinions so personally
Not allowing yourself to make mistakes is one of the worst things you can do if you want to become better at something
I think the second one is most important to me as I always find myself trying to make things perfect before I even start them. All this does is prolongs my realisation that “perfect” doesn’t exist and that I’ll have to go with what I’ve got. Doing something to a decent standard is much better than doing nothing to a perfect standard.
Track of the week
“Assassin” by Muse. I’ve always been a big fan of the Devon boys, but after neglecting them for so long I decided it was about time I hit my catalogue of Muse tracks with a vengeance. Roll on the new album!
This entry was posted
on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It only seems like yesterday when I was sitting here writing the last post, but here I am again and on schedule with this week’s installment of Rawkes Weekly.
Like I just mentioned, this week has simply flown by. I think a mixtue of work, rediscovering version control, stress over securing a student loan, and waiting for my iMac to be delivered certainly helped speed things along.
Did I just mention I got an iMac? Well, I just got an iMac! 24 inches of Apple goodness!. I have to admit, this thing is a beast and it’s definitely going to take some getting used to. The only sucky thing about it is that I’ve got a nice green dead pixel right smack in the middle of the screen! Here’s hoping there is something that can be done about it…
Yesterday was an especially busy one as I drove up to Northampton to celebrate Rachael’s birthday. There was a pig roast which was amazing, although I’ve never had one before. All in all I had a wicked time up in the country. Happy Birthday Rachael!
This week’s news
We began the week with (old?) news that Microsoft has kick-started research into the successor to Windows. They call it Midori and they claim it will be centred around the internet, throwing out the concept of a single PC operating system. It sounds fascinating and I can’t wait to see where this project goes in the future!
Mozilla Labs launched their concept series on Monday calling on the industry, educators, and generally everyone to share ideas on the future direction of the web. I think this is an excellent idea and some of the concepts that have already spawned from the process are looking mighty interesting. My favourite so far is the Aurora browser concept from Adaptive Path; definitely check it out.
Another interesting idea heading out of the Mozilla camp is the Snowl experiment with messaging within the browser. The concept is simple: integrate all the various messaging platforms (email, rss, IM, etc) into one interface. It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I’m not sure I’ll be reaching out for something like this just yet. I’m quite happy with multiple applications that do a single function and do that function well.
Flickr have upgraded their reverse geocoding functionality. The basic premise is that instead of guessing the name of a place someone took a photo from (by using the coordinates), Flickr will now provide you with a list of names that have been linked to that particular location – all you do is pick the right one! I think this is excellent because there have been many times where I’ve wanted to find a place on a map, but I only know the local “name” for it, not the address. I do a fair amount of development with Google Maps and they have similar features in their map maker app (http://www.google.com/mapmaker). It’ll be interesting to see how this all progresses.
Hand-drawn and laid out nicely using a basic grid. I’m love the colour scheme as well.
Lesson of the week
Being impatient only results in bad things.
Track of the week
“Gringo (Ragged & Ruthless)” by Stereo Mc’s. I’ve always been a fan of Stereo Mc’s and I’m really glad they’ve come back with a rocking album.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Towards the end of this week the internet was victim to a manga revolution, most noticable on Twitter. Avatar creating software from 
