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http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
A demo of Photosynth, dazzling tech that may transform the way we look at digital images. Using photos scraped from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes with navigation.
Brands are changing, we no longer just partake, but also take part. Wolf Olins
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Mark Weiser
Modernista! is a design agency with a novel approach to having a presence on the web. They don't have one. Or at least they do, but rather than it being a website on it's own it kind of sits on the top of other web sites which host their content.
Want to see their latest video ads for some-brand-or-other? Here's a youtube page. Print work for the same client? It's on Flickr. Only the Modernista! navigation menu follows you there and holds you hand while you take a look.
You could say it's a bit new for new's sake, but I quite like it. In the continuing drive to find a way for people to collate and present all the content they've uploaded to different sites in one place it's kind of a neat solution.
(* a joke about distributed presence which I couldn't come up with)
All the cool kids seem to be getting into this thing. It's called the Flip and it's a very small camcorder and the point seems to be that instead of the usual "feature creep" design which effects most devices of this type, they've stripped away everything and made PC integration excellent. Mobile phone makers take note!
There's a good review on the New York Times site.
What is it with naming at the moment. Ug! What that in sky? It keep track of my location? Well my prehistoric friend it's probably a Fireeagle. Or Fire Eagle maybe.
Yes, Yahoo have released a new service which is "the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online". Which is great. I think. It certainly seems to have it's heart in the right place with a properly modern emphasis on data privacy and playing nicely with other services (naturally Facebook gets a mention).
Although it's out of Yahoo this seems to be a very mobile type of service. The options to use your phone to automatically track yourself seem to be far more interesting than the "type in your location" thing although having to visit a wap site just for this seems a little weak which leaves just the S60 brigade (however many of them there are).
The key though is really the privacy thing and the proof of that pudding will come when integration with Facebook etc come online. Sharing your location could be a pretty private thing especially to the postcode level granularity and beyond which seems to be the order of the day here (unlike Dopplr which sticks more vaguely to major towns and cities).
It'll be interesting to see the kind of use that this might be put to. It's certain to be something major telco's will be ripping off in around 4 or 5 years.
I have 4 invites for anyone who would like one.
A nice little genre mash up :)
Aviary seems to be a suit of design/creative tools which have all been built with flash and work in your browser. From the evidence it looks like they've done a pretty good job. So the question is will they be good enough to make a dent in the Adobe market for creative software?
Each tool is named after a different bird (how delightful!), so you've got: Pheonix for image editting (because that's likely to be the most popular and so needs the coolest name); Raven for vector graphics (obviously trying to lure Dean away from Illustrator there!); Toucan for swatch management and pallettes (ok...); Humming Bird for 3D, Owl, Penguin, Pigdeon, Tern, the list goes on and on.
My favourite is Horus for Font editor. Horus was the Egyptian god of the sky (or something), and the Egyptians only used hieroglyphics, so ... font editor? It's either very clever or very silly, either way I can't wait to give it a try.
Not all of them are ready or released yet. Oh yeah, and because they've built with Flash they're planning to have downloadable versions using Air which work on your desktop.
"Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.
Singularity is over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities.
Singularity is three days of talks over multiple tracks.
In 2008, Singularity will define Web ‘08."
More here...
This brought some mild amusement this morning, the Flickr communities reaction to the recent interest from Microsoft to acquire Yahoo
Also, a question that popped into my head, will Flickr lose its Flashyness and been done in Silverlight!?
Despite clearly being named by a neolithic tribesman it looks like this new wunder-browser might actually deliver some rather impressive goods in terms of web-on-yer-mobile. If the hype is to be believed this really will be like the web but on your mobile. No really it will. Exactly the same. You might even be forgiven for thinking for a second that your mobile is really a PC and you've magically grown to giant proportions.
If it does work and doesn't require only the hugest of processors to run it, it will be pretty impressive. Particularly for opening up the kind of Flash based content which has hitherto been ever so slightly out of reach.
Still as usual the question is begged: is this really the right approach? What about services tailored to small screens? Things that actually make more sense on the move then they do at your desk.
It's the web on your mobile, but also that's all it is.
Puzzle magazines are big business. 3/4 of the UK population regularly does puzzles, with 1/4 of the population doing a puzzle daily. Puzzler Media, the UK market leader, sells 1.3 million magazines every month and syndicates puzzles to additional titles in the UK and abroad.
With a 30 year trading history and 53% market share in the UK, Puzzler Media were looking to deepen their relationships with existing customers, reach new audiences and generate significant revenues by bringing their puzzles to mobile phones.
More info
Speechless...
http://www.veer.com/products/typedetail.aspx?image=UMT0000300
From Pen to Bezier
Between 1935 and 1955, many American calligraphers and letterers laid down their pens for new type technologies. But a few refused to give in. They saw those technologies not as progress but as an art-devaluing, salary-reducing threat.
Among those rebels was New Yorker Rand Holub, best known for his logo designs, brand signatures, and custom lettering for Macy’s. In 1958, his Gillot 291 – an upright script done in 1950 – became the basis of Intertype’s Monterey. Although Monterey included some reworkings of Holub’s lettering, technological constraints meant that the bulk of his calligraphic art had to be ignored.
Almost 50 years later, Holub’s original script has found new life in Feel Script. Designed by Alejandro Paul, Feel presents the lettering in its entirety, as well as letters redrawn from vintage American magazine ads (some by Holub himself). Thanks to OpenType, it also includes many alternates, ligatures, dreamy swashes, and other strangely beautiful combinations.
With over 1,200 characters, Feel Script is designed for maximum expression. A Veer Exclusive $99
See the slide show:
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/vectors_and_gradients_run_ramp.php
Swisscom are going through similar developments to Orange as a business expanding beyond their telecoms roots..
Interesting to see their identity develop away from the classical swiss typographic style.
Would the typographic heroes of Switzerland be happy I wonder.
Jan Tschicold what would you think?
The comments found on the link page are hilarious.
NOTE: Look out for the flash 'blender' clip.
http://www.madcomments.co.uk/text-celebrates-15-years-%e2%80%93-can-you-believe-it/
Everyone's wondering what's next.... :)
If I had one of them and one of them and one of them...
I'd want one of these....
http://www.kangaroomstorage.com/product/office/152/kangaroom-phone-pda-charging-station.html#
http://www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=281
A sensible look at how we all (everyone) can effectively take part in using words effectively and maintaining/building a verbal brand style.
Found this full Thermo product demo from Steven Heintz and Mark Anders on a list (Thanks FlashBrighton).
Also good to see Acrobat Connect in action with some good 'ol screen sharing going on.
Yes, it's about as dry as a dessert of parchment, but over on UXMatters Steve Psomas presents a dissection of User Experience Design and the roles and skills needed for various parts of it. I hate the word "competencies" and I'm sure that this shouldn't be regarded as the final word on the subject, but I do like an attempt to bring clarity to an area which has got so many overlapping terms and meanings.
There's also a handy downloadable pdf which is always nice I feel.
Graffiti artists in Berlin are replacing spray cans with torches, glow sticks and digital cameras. The results are stunning as proved by Flickr user, lichtfaktor. The technique loosely involves setting the cameras to over expose and painting with various lights in the shot. Essentially a form of stop motion animation, light writing employs a phenomenon known as persistence of vision which creates the optical illusion to the viewer.
Some companies are even employing the technique to form the part of their visual identity, Joost for example.
As the links says... Go read.
And for the lazy among you, here's the Top 10.
Jaiku have been bought by Google which somehow lead me to this fascinating presentation by Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström about social peripheral vision.
The idea is that your address book on your mobile should be acting more like a cross between your instant messenger buddy list and your twitter page, allowing you to have a kind of "peripheral vision" of all your contacts and what they're up to, and consequently you might choose to contact them at different times or in different ways.
This seems like a very interesting kind of ambient data.
Finally here's a quote:
To summarize. What I want to suggest is that unlike some handset manufacturers, mobile operators, and software companies want us to believe, Mobile 2.0 is not about streaming video, high-resolution displays, and music players that try to mimic the iPod. Instead, Mobile 2.0 is about enabling social peripheral vision. This is the next frontier for mobile developers, and it is where I believe the real advances in human mobile communication will happen in the next couple of years.
I totally agree. I'm far more interested in innovation around communication than I am in innovation around content.
Blog Nation has an interesting round up of stuff going on in the world of internet TV.
I've tried Joost and similarly found that although the interface was lovely the content was well below par and considering my opinion of most of the "quality" content on normal TV that's really saying something.
If you're after real quality programming from the web you need look no further than shashing telly ;-)
Adobe have a pre-release of their Adobe Media Player software available for download.
Here's the official word on the product from Adobe Labs:
Adobe is driving the next generation of internet video delivery with the Adobe Media Player (AMP), Flash® Media Server software, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization. AMP brings the best of both the broadcast television and web video worlds to your desktop—providing high-quality content both online and offline, with a wide range of business model possibilities.
Also, its built using Adobe AIR, Adobe's cross OS runtime for building and deploying RIAs to the desktop.
After downloading I took it for a spin and noted a couple of thoughts on the UI and functionality from a customer experience point of view:
Good times :)
Bad times :(
Obviously this is a way early release with debugging and tweaks to make along the way. Looking forward to the next version.
Is this a dream product???
You will lead a highly motivated team developing an innovative new tool, codenamed Thermo, that will enable designers and creatively inclined developers to easily build rich internet applications and interactive content. “Thermo” will streamline the process of adding interactivity, behavior and motion to creative assets and will work seamlessly with both Adobe’s Creative Suite tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and Flash, and with developer oriented tools such as Flex Builder.
Thermo is a strategic project for Adobe. It will enable designers to more efficiently build the richer experiences that are reshaping the internet and give developers greater control over creative assets without leaving the development paradigm that fits the way they work.
Found while having a nosey here.
And it looks like the cats out the bag... Thermo will be forming a big part of the keynote at Adobe Max (Europe) in a couple of weeks.
Comedian,
polymath, friend of Hugh Laurie, and all round national treasure Stephen Fry, has a blog and his first post is oddly relevant to the mobile industry. So much so in fact you start to wonder whether it's the "real" Stephen Fry at all. But then this is an offshoot of his official site so I guess it is. Excellent.
All you designers sing along! A simple message with a powerful delivery.
Make the logo bigger .
This video shows a new technique developed to resize images automatically by scanning an image for the least important parts and then removing those first. It sounds a bit weird but the results are amazing, and considering the potential for dealing with images on multiple screen sizes, quite important to us potentially.
There's something about it though. I can't quite put my finger on it but somehow it seems a bit wrong. The idea that some "empty space" in a picture should be less important and therefore more removable doesn't seem to fit with my ideas about composition and layout. Surely the condensed versions of the images won't be as good or work as well?
I suppose it doesn't matter for some kinds of image. The results are certainly impressive. Maybe it's just that removing people from pictures like this reminds me too much of Stalinist Russia. :-)
This might be the Mac-geekiest thing I've ever seen. Sharp-eyed reader Morgan W has a flickr pool of signs around the Apple campus in Cupertino, and notes that three of their newest building signs (at Bandley Five, Six, and Eight) have an updated logo with no 3D effect, and use Myriad for the font instead of Garamond, which the old signs used.
mrdoob has been playing with Papervision 3D in his lab and the results are very nice indeed. Stunning in fact.
Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform, written and maintained by a small core team, and contributed to by a growing community.
A real world example of the engine in action is Paper Critters, an online application for creating and sharing 3D paper toys. Its a polished piece of work that uses Papervision 3D to display content created in 3DS Max.
Coincidently the guy behind mrdoob, Ricardo Cabello has just been hired by the agency Hi-ReS! A longtime fan of their work I see they recently did the movie site to Darren Aronofsky's time traveling tale, The Fountain. Which kind of makes sencse as they did the movie site for his earlier film, Requiem for a Dream. Quality Flash work.
I've been reading up on Second Life and Linden Lab recently to see what all the fuss is about and wondering whether I should get me an avatar and enter the "Metaverse".
Nah! I prefer my RL thanks.
Anyway, I found Orange.fr using an avatar called Diane. She's there to provide a bit of help with your internet woes. A nicely executed guide I thought.
How about a "scary chocolate event" anyone?
This game looks very cool indeed. It's based around that kind of impossible-object drawing that you'd see on the front of maths books in school but requires you to rotate & move the objects to allow a little man to reach his goal.
I love the way it completely messes with your sense of space and yet it has a very definite internal logic of it's own. I'd imagine it's one of those games which if played too much would cause you to see objects slightly weirdly for a while afterwards.
A nice story from Design Observer about the emblem of the United Nations being designed, at first, as a lapel pin.
Talking with McLaughlin, I found myself thinking of that little pin. At the time, it must have seemed like a little job, almost the kind of thing an ambitious designer would consider a nuisance. We've all done projects like that, often with teeth gritted. There's a lesson here: you never know what might happen to those little jobs.
Someone has created a variant of all our favourite font called ... wait for it ... comic serif.
NB: alternative titles for this post included:
- The Sans Of Time
- Live At The Sans
- I Shot The Serif
I've been a fan of the Opacity website for a couple of years. It started as a portfolio site for an american photographer who visited old, abandoned buildings. It has since grown to be more about the exploration of the buildings themselves, and often includes the building's history, and any plans for the site in the future.
Most of the sites are american, but there are a few from a recent visit to Britain, and some recently uploaded Belgian ones.
The photographer has a great eye for capturing the eerie atmosphere of these places, and finds humour and beauty in a lot of the little details.
I'm generally jealous of what he gets away with, but I'm too much of a scaredy cat to try this kind of stuff myself. There are many more abandoned buildings of this nature in America, due to the fact that land isn't at a premium over there. In Leeds at least, anything vacant for more than five minutes is converted into 'luxury apartments'. Hmph.
T-shirt design. Always something you'd consider being restricted to the 2D printed format. Not necessarily any more. Those bods over at Sony have developed a paper thin display that bends like paper while showing full colour video.
At 0.3millmetre (0.01 inch)! the display combines Sony's organic thin film transistor, or TFT, technology, which is required to make flexible displays, with another kind of technology called organic electroluminescent display.
This potentially allows it to be worn as clothing as well as other applications where a display needs to wrapped around an object.
However:
Sony said plans for a commercial product using the technology were still undecided.
Tatsuo Mori, professor at Nagoya University's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said some hurdles remained, including making the display bigger, ensuring durability and cutting costs.
"To come up with a flexible screen at that image quality is ground breaking," Mori said.
"You can drop it, and it won't break because it's as thin as paper."
So maybe its not time to give up Illustrator for After Effects just yet!
Watch a video of the display here.
Very interesting article about iPhone, Nokia, Google, Adobe and web/desktop apps.
In short, there is a strong possibility that applications built for the iPhone will run on Nokia Series 60 devices with relatively little re-coding. [...] The applications will also run on Windows and Mac desktops with the Safari browser.
The final pieces of this jigsaw are supplied by Google and Adobe, who are working together on an open source project - Google Gears - to enable browser-based applications to function off-line. Adobe is planning to incorporate this capability into Apollo [...] which runs across desktop and mobile devices.
[This is] more than just interesting in a mobile context - it is a way of solving one of the key issues which has constrained web-style application development for phones, i.e. what happens when the device loses the network connection.
Maybe you're not as anal as me and don't have any need for crazy rock'n'roll things like todo lists. However, if by any chance you are then Todoist is what you need. Not only is it a very nice neat design, the interaction (via judicious use of ajax) is nigh on perfect. No click is left unacknowledged; no page leaves you wondering what you should click next; the help screen is always a single instant click away (as is most of it really). You can add new lists, create sub-lists (via indenting), colour code, and even give every item a date (via a cunning little command based interface) which is all just lovely. There some screen casts to help you get started and a host of shortcuts, an api, gmail integration, mobile access etc etc etc.
Bye bye tadalists I have a new master now!
To me, the title of this post is misleading, because even we have had a music download service running on WAP and also handset applications, but according to this report from the Beeb, Sweden will be the first country to try a proper Mobile Music Download service.
It's called Musicstation and is developed by a British company called Omnifone - who seem a bit mixed up and look like a cross between Vodafone (if you look at there logo) and Apple (if you look at there website)...I digress.
Musicstation allows customers to download tracks from a library of one million songs while they are out and about. The service costs £1.99 or 2.99 euros per week and the fee is added to a customer's phone bill. This fee actually includes data charges, to encourage use of the service. It is expected to launch in in other European countries including the UK in the near future.
There are a couple of features which differentiate from existing mobile music services and they are centered around community, namely the ability to share tracks and playlists with other MusicStation subscribers via the mobile network.
Take a look at the two demo videos.
Java Client - quicktime | wmv
Touch Screen - quicktime | wmv
You'll notice the familar looking interface on the Java App and the touchscreen version looks quite similar to something else. The ability to download tracks straight to your phone is a good thing, but there are still issues with speed of downloads and network stability - in and out of signals, the pressure on networks due to potentially many people sharing and downloading tracks.
Another Apple post. Yawn....sorry, couldn't resist...
Apple.com (US version) has gone all Web 2.0 and has been redesigned for the first time since 2000. The old Aqua look (which is still used on the current UK version of the site) has been replaced with this new future look, no doubt to coincide with the Lepoard release.
The top navigation has changed from the Aqua look to the new style. Everything is a lot darker - black background is now preferred. Navigating within the site you'll notice new menus such as the sideway scrollbar to flick through products, ala Cover Flow and the funky rollover/dropdown menus quite similar to what our Tom did on the old DU Studio. Best of all is the Live Web Search which works in the same way as Spotlight does on OS X Tiger, although a hell of a lot quick than Spotlight.
All very neat and goes to show how little there is to differentiate between web and desktops these days.
And yes, I do have an unhealthy obsession with Apple.
Apple has spoken out about the new features (300+ apparently) in the forthcoming new operating system OS X Leopard, at this weeks WWDC. There are some cool features worth looking at, if not only for the "jazzy" UI. It all looks just so smooth. Of course, if you're not an Apple user you may not be too impressed, but you have to hand it to their UI designers for creating such a simple, yet attractive UI that their jealous Microsoft cousins can only attempt to recreate.
Take a look at the videos and new features here.
How to turn your TV into a work of art. What an excellent idea. This could even make Big Brother watchable!
All has been relatively quiet on this for a while, or maybe that's just me not obsessing about it, but the US launch is imminent - June 29th to be exact. Apple has started airing the adverts for this and just viewing these reminds me how sleek this interface really is. The way everything is integrated and looks so seamless e.g. open the map application type in a place, then make the phone call. I think when I get my hands on one of these beauties (and I will you know) I'll probably react in a similar way to this chap.
I've been using Tumblr recently and I really love it. It's a small blogging service which concentrates on making it very quick and easy to add lots of bits and pieces of different content and not on writing long wordy posts.
A couple of things which are particularly good are: the grabbable bookmark (allowing you to very easily grab almost any content from the website you're looking at and re-post it to tumblr); and the RSS integration tool (which can pull in any content you add to any of your favourite web2.0 sites or any RSS feeed). It also formats different content in a pleasantly different way meaning the resulting weblog look really quite nice.
A very good example of a service which adds value simply by making something which is fairly easy and fun to do even more easy and more fun and just.... better. If Orange wanted to provide some kind of blogging tool to it's customers which integrated easily with the all services their techy customers already use, but was easy enough for even the grannies to start playing with this would be just about perfect.
Oh yeah and here's a link to mine ;-)
Rossignol quotes an article called Shaping The Future which talks about the possibility of flash memory being cheap enough in a few years to have enough to easily record a video stream of everything you see for a whole year on a single card!
I was talking to Tero the other day about memory becoming cheaper and how mp3's or photos at fairly high quality aren't getting getting any bigger, but we still agreed that people would find ways of filling even enormous capacity memory.
Perhaps recording every second of every day of our lives as video is what that will be. Makes that old grainy cine film of my parents wedding kind of seem like some priceless ancient artefact.
Deary me... so the current vogue for all things 80s has finally permeated through to the new logo for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.
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