Captain's Blog
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
Stardate August 10th, 2008 – 7 Comments
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.
Links of the week
Site of the week
ShiftSpace
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.
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on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under General.
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Stardate August 3rd, 2008 – 3 Comments
It’s been fairly quiet this week. Not to say that I haven’t been busy, but there haven’t been any surprises emergencies at work to deal with. The same could be said for the world of web design over the last seven days; there really hasn’t been much going on! Maybe everyone is too busy playing with their iPhone’s?
I can safely say that I officially know how to program basic applications in Objective-C now, hooray! It’s a lovely programming language to learn; I’m particularly fond of the rules that it imposes on the code. Before I get pulled up on that, I know C is a lot stricter. Anyway, I’m well on the way to my plan of releasing an iPhone application by Christmas – I just need to learn Cocoa now…
In unrelated and slightly random announcements; I finally reached pro level in Wii Sports tennis and bowling. However, there is a downside to this amazing feat, specifically being that my right arm feels like it’s about to die! Whoever said the Wii wasn’t a workout is lying through their teeth. Make sure to get in touch if you want to hook up on Mario Kart, or just add me as a friend on the Wii – my mii parade is looking more like a lonely stroll at the moment.
Back to the schedule; Here’s my take on this week’s events. Enjoy! (I’m off now to rest my injured arm and read about Cocoa)
This week’s news
Mozilla have released Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1. It brings a few major additions, such as a new interface for tabbing between windows, and updates to CSS3 and HTML5 support. You can find a whole list of changes on the Firefox 3.1 for developers post at Mozilla. I have to admit I haven’t tried out the alpha yet as I’m quite happy with FF3. I’ll be keeping an eye on development and will definitely try it out once they hit beta.
My favourite note-taking/capturing/do-everything service Evernote has been updated this week. Changes include rich text editing on the web based version, plus a few updates to the Windows application. I’m still waiting for them to put hyperlinks and lists in the OS X version, though. Come on Evernote, at least make your features cross-platform!
Delicious finally launched their redesign this week, and boy was it worth it – I’m a sucker for the utilitarian layouts and this one is no exception! I really like that they’ve moved over to the easier to type domain, Delicious.com – Del.icio.us was cool and very web2.0, but it was damn annoying to type in all the time. Along with the Delicious plugin for FireFox 3 and Pukka on the Mac I’m going to get my bum in gear and start bookmarking again.
This one isn’t necessarily new, but I checked out the Opera web standards curriculum for the first time this week and was really impressed. The idea of this place is to teach people proper web design practice, concentrating on the theory as more important than simply learning how to code HTML. I’ll definitely be pointing newbies in that direction instead of W3Schools from now on – I certainly wish this was around when I first started!
Links of the week
Site of the week
Delicious
The new design on Delicious is just that – om nom nom!
Lesson of the week
Being beaten at Wii tennis by your younger sister really does feel as bad as it sounds.
Track of the week
A cover of Coldplay’s “Violet Hill” by Pendulum on the Radio 1 Live Lounge. Absolutely fan-bloody-tastic!
Predictions for next week
I’ll become a hermit for a few days while I play around with my new iMac – which is currently somewhere between me and China right now. I hate being impatient! *twiddles thumbs*
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on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under General.
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Stardate July 28th, 2008 – 4 Comments
It looks like last week’s predictions were proven right with the “mini heat-wave” currently hitting the UK. Temperatures hit a rather toasty 30 degrees today, and with more planned for next week I can safely say that summer has finally arrived. No doubt it’ll only last a couple of weeks, but grab a nice cold one and let’s enjoy it while it lasts!
In other events this week; I’ve become an official developer for the iPhone. I was pleasantly surprised with the entire process taking less than 48 hours – although I’m not sure where all these reports of “huge queues” are coming from, but I certainly never had any major issues! In fact, a 2 minute call to Apple (including waiting) sorted out my only problem. Kudos to you Apple for proving you care about your customers.
Related to my decision of developing for the iPhone and OS X is the need to expand my programming skills into Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve always wanted to do this, but only this week have I really put these plans into action and grabbing a few books on the subject. I haven’t had much time to read them yet, but hopefully I’ll have an application in the wild by Christmas. Watch this space!
One of the coolest things things I saw recently was while I was at Fabric in London. I’d heard about their “sonic dance-floor” from friends in the past and I must say I was rather excited about checking it out for myself. The whole concept is that they’ve built-in some fairly serious sub-woofers under the floor which give you a “kinetic dance experience”. To cut a long story short, it was absolutely amazing. You really know you’re a geek when the technology under the floor excites you.
So let’s wrap up the week with the latest happenings on the interweb. Enjoy!
This week’s news
We started the week with the outage of Amazon’s S3 distributed file system, crippling a whole variety of web services that have come to rely on it. The outage completely disabled two web services that I’ve come to use often: SpanningSync for synchronising Goolgle Calendars with iCal, and the Twinkle localised twitter application. I remember this occurred earlier this year and I think it shows that you should never let your business rely 100% on another company’s service; you never know when it could go down!
Everyone’s favourite social network Facebook released their long awaited redesign to mixed opinion. The design has gone down fairly quietly, which is definitely better than an uproar. However, I feel that the more hardcore users (the addicts) of Facebook are a little frustrated over the redesign because so much has changed. Personally I think it’s a great design and Facebook are really heading in good directions with the clean, utilitarian look. I’ve spotted the odd table element being used for layout, but at least they aren’t basing their entire system on tables like some of the other networks… *cough* … MySpace! … *cough* … Excuse me, I seem to have caught a cold!
MySpace isn’t all bad, though. They announced that they’re going to be supporting OpenID, which is a great move on their part. Let’s just hope they can pull it off.
Clearleft’s user testing application Silverback was released on Thursday. I have to admit I haven’t had time to try it out yet, but I’m really impressed with the development and the video walkthroughs that are doing the rounds on Vimeo. With guys like Clearleft behind the wheel you can be fairly sure this app is going to be polished and really useful for web designers, I’m looking forward to being able to use it in my projects.
Google has announced that it’s now indexing around 1 trillion pages. These are some totally mind-blowing statistics, though. It makes Rawkes a massive 0.0000000017% of Google’s index!
Links of the week
Site of the week
Silverback
An awesome guerrilla holding a clipboard. What more do you want?
Onehub
Such a clean layout, with excellent attention to detail.
Design Disease
The illustrations and texture on this design really make it stand out for me.
Lesson of the week
Not everything can be thought through logically.
Track of the week
“Gobbledigook” by Sigur Ros. The new album by Sigur Ros is an absolute spanker, but I really like this one in particular, it’s surreal when you listen with headphones on!
Predictions for next week
I’m going to melt in the heat and start praying for the colder weather to come back!
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on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:07 am and is filed under General.
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