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Rawkes Weekly – 27 December 2008

December 27th, 2008 - 2 Comments

How are you all? Sorry I haven’t been around recently. My rather lame excuse is that I’ve been preoccupied with enjoying my first term at Uni. It’s the Christmas holidays now so things are calming down and I thought I’d change my ways and update Rawkes!

There is so much to tell you all about the last few months of my life like the things I’ve done, what the course is like, things I want to show you, but I’ll keep it brief and just give you the shortened version.

As some of you already know I’m now at Bournemouth University on the South coast of England. Bournemouth is a stunning area and I can’t deny that it’s bliss having the sea so close by. If anyone lives in or around Bournemouth it’d be great to meet up.

The actual University is amazing. I was a little dubious before I left home about how I’d settle in as a mature student, but the people there are so nice and diverse that it never became an issue.

I’m studying Interactive Media Production, which means I’m affectionately called an ‘IMP’. There are over 60 IMPs in total so I wouldn’t mess with us, we bite! The course is very good though, covering all sorts from media and technology theory to production skills like web design, Photoshop and video/sound production.

The first project we had was to create a set of 5 digital images in Photoshop using images we found around the internet or took ourselves. The images all had to relate in someway to the theme of Nature and Technology. It was a really fun project to get me back into the swing of education (and Photoshop!) – you can see what I came up with on my Flickr page or via the nifty little embedded slideshow below.

All in all, it’s been a great experience and it was definitely the right decision to go back to Uni and have another go at a degree. I’m sure I’ve missed something, but there is just so much to try and fit in!

With the inherent unpredictability of the Uni course I’m debating renaming Rawkes Weekly to something that has less of a time constraint, but we’ll see how the next few weeks pan out before I make a decision. Rawkes Roundup? So for now would you please grab a cuppa, assume the position and enjoy this belated episode of Rawkes Weekly.

This week’s news

In October Mozilla announced the availability of Geode, an experimental geolocation plugin for FireFox. The purpose of Geode is to provide early adopters and developers with a platform for playing around with geolocation, giving them a taste of the W3C Geolocation specification – planned to be supported by FireFox in the future.

The possibilities of a location aware browser are endless, but one Mozilla mentioned that interested me was the possibility of an RSS reader that knew when you were at home or work. The idea of a reader knowing your location automatically without input and then serving up only relevant feeds seems genius to me. A few other concepts worth mentioning were a news website only showing news truly local to your exact location, or website authentication that only lets you log in from certain locations in the world. With the rise of GPS enabled devices like the iPhone, geolocation is going to become more and more important. I’m excited to see what the future brings.

As an avid Safari user and fan the recent redesign of the WebKit Web Inspector was music to my ears. The Web Inspector (Safari/WebKit’s web development suite) is a feature that I absolutely love and is something I believe has been implemented extremely well, even better than other browser manufacturers. New aspects of the latest version include an updated UI, better use of the Console, a new Resources panel, and updates to the Elements panel – including automatic node updating. All in all I’m incredibly happy with the new features and would advise anyone who develops in Safari (everyone I hope!) to give Web Inspector a try.

You can enable Web Inspector in Safari (on OS X) by entering the following in the terminal and restarting Safari.

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

WordPress posted about the wireframe concepts and visual design processes they used while developing the latest version of their blogging-come-CMS software. I’m really impressed by the professional and methodical direction WordPress are taking with their release process, even more so with the level of community input and interaction that is going into the development.

In related news WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Beta 2 Beta 3 RC 1 (I knew I should’ve updated Rawkes earlier) has been released after what feels like a tiny, but highly successful development cycle. The major new features include a completely refreshed UI, a modular admin interface, better performance and tonnes of bug fixes. You can find out all about the latest version codename Coltrane on the WordPress blog. If two items of WordPress related news isn’t enough for you then how about the WordPress 2.8 features being finalised for a March 2009 release. They don’t hang about!

One of my favourite video hosting websites Vimeo announced their new Plus service recently. They are one of the most beautifully designed and high quality video hosts out there, especially with their incredible support and passion for High Definition. The new Plus package adds more space to upload your videos (2GB per week) and embeddable HD video for your own website – wicked! Unfortunately it’s only available to US citizens at the moment which isn’t so wicked, but it’s definitely something I’m happy to wait for.

In a move similar to hell freezing over MySpace updated their profiles system and moved it inline with W3C guidelines. Finally MySpace does something vaguely right!

It’s no secret that Coda is my favourite web development tool on OS X so I was over the moon when I heard that Coda 1.6 has been released. I won’t bore you with the finer details of this wonderful app (you can read my post about it for that), but I will say that the most important aspect of this version is plugin support. Currently there aren’t any substantial plugins available, however given some time I can see Coda being extended in many wonderful and unexpected ways.

In a pleasant but unsurprising move YouTube has expanded to 960 pixel width and adopted widescreen aspect ratio HD video. The update to larger HD video is long overdue and will definitely help pick up some new interest in a website that was using old and creaky video technology. After using some of the new HD video I have to admit there are some improvements YouTube can still make to the service, namely having HD video play by default or at least have the option to do that.

Google haven’t failed to impress with updates this year, and the recent update to the Google Maps UI is no let down. The new design is a subtle one, but an extremely well polished one. The focus of the page has been put firmly on the map area, quite rightly, and because of that you now have the option to hide areas of the directions and search system and expand the map view. Along with the sleek new control elements that now have Street View functionality built-in I have to admit this is an impressive update by the search giant. Google Map’s place at the top of my favourite online mapping software has been safely secured for a little while longer.

The W3C Validator now has experimental HTML 5 support. That’s right, you can now check your website against the draft HTML 5 specification and see how how well it performs. Admittedly there isn’t much use to a tool like this with the current state of HTML 5 support in browsers, but it’s a step in the right direction nonetheless. I can safely say that I’m itching for HTML 5 to be widely supported so I can start using the new features; I can say the same about CSS3 as well. The next few years in web development are going to be mighty exciting!

Taking a big role in that excitement is the browser software itself as this is where all the features and specifications are actually put to use. Two big browser manufacturers have been busily producing some of the next generation software and because of this we have Opera 10 Alpha being released and Google Chrome leaving beta. Both of these browsers are stunning in their own right, each has a tight set of proposed features and both look to shake up the browser world. Google Chrome interests me in particular as it’s such a new player that’s lighting a fire under IE from the things it’s promising (plugin support) and the general might of Google. The end of IE domination is nigh…

Any fans of PHP frameworks will be glad to hear CakePHP 1.2 hit it’s final version on Christmas Day. After 2 years of public development the long awaited version of the popular PHP framework has been finished and made available for all to download. With a stunning feature list, this really is a recommended update for all that use it.

Sites of the week

Tapbots

The iPhone-esque design to this website really stood out to me. The crisp attention to detail really compliments the quality of the application they are selling.

Tapbots

Product Planner

Something about this website really sticks out to me. I think it’s the child-like chalkboard effect that has been used, it brings back those happy carefree memories of childhood.

Product Planner

Tracks of the week

Rawkes Weekly – 28 September 2008

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.

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!

Rawkes Weekly – 14 September 2008

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!

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.

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