A place for our creative musings on web-design, technology, and life.
Looks like the warm weather front that has largely prevailed during my business trip down to Boston has decided to change today, and I awoke to some fresh snow! Having missed the last 2-3 snowfalls in Victoria this year as I've been away, it has been nice to finally throw a snowball. But where oh where is the skiing? The Charles River has also frozen over, and looks rather picturesque. Here's to wishing I had a camera with me.
There will be some routine maintenance performed on our server on January 23rd (today) at 10:00PM that will result in all client sites being down for 20-45 minutes.
The recent announcement of Apple's iPhone has caused a massive amount of buzz on the net. After watching the keynote last week all I could say was "I want one" with one of those jaw dropping expressions that I'm sure the majority of the global geekisphere was performing. It is very clear that the phone will be revolutionary and I can only imagine what the CEO's of Blackberry and Palm stated after watching Steve's keynote. I believe it would go like this:
Well there goes that... what the [insert old-English curse word here] do we have that can compete? How long is it going to take us to get something similar out there?
Luckily it doesn't look like Apple will be targeting enterprise users with this initial glimpse at the iPhone (so Blackberry and Palm may be able to hang onto that market for a little while longer), but it sure will blow away the competition in the personal pda phone arena. The combination of Mac OS X + Movies + iTunes + Camera + WiFi + Bluetooth + GSM + Multitouch screen will definitely put Apple substantially above the competition on a number of levels. This phone will also be a web designer's dream, since it will run Safari, and with any luck it will spark a revolution of devices that utilize modern browsers (I'd love to see Firefox run on an iPhone competitor). Wouldn't it be great if you never had to design a separate CSS stylesheet for cell phones?
There are a lot of positives about the iPhone, but I think there's been so much buzz about how awesome it is that there has been very little coverage of some of the potential down-sides (and Apple's potential solutions). The first thing I thought of while watching the keynote was: What if you are driving? (more...)
I have recently been involved in a large amount of web design research for an international client, and made some keen observations about how bad advertising can ruin sites with good design principles.
Let's take a look at the very popular faith site called beliefnet (1 million plus views per day) and look at a page on the site with advertising. Beliefnet was not chosen for any other reason than it's the first one that came to mind when I thought of bad advertising on a site with some good design. (more...)
Well I'll have to be designing on the road for the next 2 weeks. I'll be out of the office and away in Boston on a business trip. Everything should continue to operate smoothly as I can collect both phone and email messages.
There is actually one very good skill that has developed out of all this constant travel over the last few months and that has been my growing affinity with the trackpad on my Powerbook.
Well I sat down this weekend and thought I'd highlight a few of my favorite websites, and 2 of my favorite designers I've discovered this year. With all the buzz and hype of "Web 2.0" everything, I've narrowed down 8 websites from 2006 that I've actually found useful.
Simple project management with to-do lists, milestones, time tracking, file sharing, calendars, and more. We use Basecamp to take charge of communication, collaboration, and organization for projects big and small. The design is simple, yet effective. The book they have written titled "Getting Real" has been an eye opener in it's approach to developing web-based applications.
Visit site: basecamphq.com
The easiest way to send invoices to your clients via email. If you are entrepreneurial you'll really appreciate the simplicity of the design behind this tool. We use Blinksale for all our invoicing and we love it. Some of our favorite features of Blinksale include:
Visit site: blinksale.com
We use Feedburner to provide statistics, and formatting for our RSS feed that is generated by our blog. Over the past year Feedburner has really taken off, and we've been really impressed with the simple tools they provide to manage RSS feeds.
Visit site: feedburner.com
Having read a few of Cameron's books and after taking a glance through his portfolio I've been really impressed by his sense of style and simplicity. His site (in particular his portfolio page) has a lot of design touches, which I find classy.
Visit site: cameronmoll.com/portfolio
From the first t-shirt I've bought I've been hooked. This site sets the standard for e-commerce in my opinion. The checkout process is simple, professional, and fast. In addition the mission of the company is really neat. People around the world design and submit t-shirt designs, and then the community rates them to decide what gets printed. Tshirts by the people, for the people.
Visit site: threadless.com
The 'who's who' for college students, Facebook is a university networking tool (you need a uni affiliated email to sign up) that allows you to keep track of your college friends using relationship tracking, degrees of separation, photo albums, specialty groups, and more.
Visit site: facebook.com
Cork'd is making life easier for wine lovers. You can catalog, rate, and review wines in your Wine journal, find out what your buddies are tasting, and discover new wines to try and buy. A one stop shop for finding a good wine, be it for a dinner party with friends, or trek on New Year's.
Visit site: corkd.com
Although this is a bit of old news - I really got into CSS based design this year, and the Zen Garden has been a prime place to find some neat design ideas, and see the code behind it.
Visit site: mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/ or csszengarden.com
Yet another designer I've grown to admire over the past year. Jon Hicks is the owner, and has some really top-notch portfolio work. He's done icons for some of my favorite programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and skEdit.
Visit site: hicksdesign.co.uk
claimID lets you track, verify, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you online. We use it to display what work is about us, and what is not.
Visit site: claimid.com
We use the Magpie RSS reader to display the list of 'Recent Journal Entries' on the front page. It does its job well, but it sometimes fails to display HTML entities like apostrophes and quotes correctly. Instead, they appear as a '?'. This problem comes up with some frequency on the Magpie mailing list, but I wasn't able to find a working solution there. (more...)
For those of you who haven't already heard, a new version of Firefox (the best web browser on the planet) is out. The award-winning Web browser from Mozilla is now faster, even more secure, and totally customizable to your online life.