The joys of UML

UML is a wonderful thing. It is possible to reduce highly complex processes and systems into very simple, elegant diagrams. For instance, iterative development can be represented using UML as follows...

Tommorow we will be working on the UML representation of how to make a good lunch decision

 

Firefox version 1.5 has been released

Mozilla has released the next version of their award-winning web browser (now version 1.5). Its free and you can download it from here; getfirefox.com.

There are versions for Windows, OSX and Linux. The most important updates are;
- Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
- Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
- Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
- Improvements to popup blocking.
- Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
- Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
- Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.
- Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
- Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
- Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
- New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
- Many security enhancements.

If you want to read the comprehensive list of the changes please go to this page/.

 

Ads of the world

Ads of the world is a collection of ads from all around the world. You can browse these by media, region or industry. It contains some rather good and creative markering solutions.

These are some of my favourites;
World Press Freedom Day
Excellent composition, a very strong visual communication.

Pattex glue: One
Clever idea, simple but good execution.

Wonderbra
Its magic!

The Economist
Interesting use of the surroundings, an eyecatcher indeed.

Gameboy Advance: Jail visit
Cant keep your hands away!

Careerbuilder.com bus
Yet another great idea, the placing together with the striking copy is ace

 

So many blogs, so little time

Ok here's a thought. Most blogs are busy recycling the contents of other blogs (and news...), this one included. They are the filter feeders of the internet. For those of us that like our information recycled. Blog etiquette teaches us to always link to our sources. But what if the source is (almost inconceivably) not something you can hyper-link to?

Or perhaps thats the point? In this era of information overload, having someone else whose opinion you trust pre-chew your content just makes it more digestible. So much information, so little time.

I've read one blog too many this evening.

 

AJAX vs Flash

I spotted the "AJAX or FLASH – is it just semantics?" post on the excellent Three Minds at Organic blog, and passed the link on to a few colleagues. What follows is a bullet point summary of the consequent conversation between Ollie Campbell (Flash), Reinoud Bosman (IA) and Olly Wright (IA).

• Getting preoccupied with technological specifics is a mistake


• Arguing about Flash v AJAX is a red herring - both have their place


• AJAX is not the same as DHTML - AJAX adds asynchronous server calls (downloading server data without reloading the page) which is now practical thanks to more widespread browser support


• Only crazy people animate in DHTML


• DHTML suffers from inconsistencies in implementing browser/ platform standards


• The real strength of Flash is its ubiquity and consistency - it’s slightly more future proof in this respect since it’s developed by one company only


• The development time for compatible, robust, commercial quality DHTML is always significantly longer than an equivalent in Flash


• Flash can dynamically load XML, connect directly to web services, load external images (in all the standard formats) and load other Flash movies. There are also indirect ways to communicate with almost any type of protocol you feel like.


• FLEX is yet another buzz word that doesn’t anything new (in terms of functionality) that hasn’t been available in Flash and its derivatives for years (Generator etc)

For the foolhardy/ intrepid only - read the full, unedited transcript (includes bonus "what's so cool about FLEX?" discussion)... (Read more...)

 

Free Sudoku for your mobile

Head to wap.cellufun.com with your mobile browser to get a free downloadable version of Sudoku. Your spare time will never be spare again.

Read more here

 

Sony Ericsson cruises into 4th place

Sony Ericsson has moved into 4th place in overall market share for global mobile phone sales, based on Q3 2005 sales. They overtook LG.

The current standings are:

Nokia: 32.6%
Motorola: 18.7%
Samsung: 12.5%
Sony Ericsson: 6.7%
LG: 6.5%

Overall mobile phone sales are up a sizable 22% in Q3 2005, compared to Q3 2004.

Sony Ericsson feel they could have gone even a little higher, but couldn't make as many K750's and W800's as consumers wanted to buy.

 

Paranoid chant

Teh internets are l33t! LOL! Or is it? Hmm...

This morning, one of my imaginary friends on the global interfunt exhorted me to read this article 'Saving The Net From The Pipeholders' by Doc Searls. It seemed to be a matter of life or death:

"We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before."

Netizens - to arms! But wait - let's have a nice cup of tea first. This isn't the first time I've read stuff like this - a while ago there was a scare article about how the internal workings of modems/ routers (something to do with NAT? Don't ask me) had completely destroyed the democratic principles at the heart of the internet... to me, this is more of the same paranoid chant. The reality, I suggest, will be a little less dramatic.

Kids nowadays are growing up and experiencing the internet as an integral part of their lives. They understand it in a completely different way from a) Old School self-important corporate shills who think in terms of control and cash, and b) New School net utopians who believe in sharing, democracy, global conversation and all that other lovely stuff (I include myself here). It won't be long before we are both displaced by this new generation - the True School - who will find both of these views pretty amusing, and quietly and syllogistically do their own thing.

Teh internets are dead! Long live teh interweb!

 

Sony DRM - the low-tech fix

If you've been asleep the last few weeks you may have just missed out on the storm about Sony Music's new DRM solution. It auto-installed itself on your PC and rendered your PC vulnerable to a whole range of attacks as a consequence. And, to top it off, trying to remove it would result in you having to wipe your PC and install windows from scratch! Nice. They have since apologized (no doubt encouraged by the terrible press and the lawsuits), and are refunding people who bought the CD.

But it was all for nothing! Gartner, proving that they are actually useful, managed to defeat the DRM by sticking a small piece of gaffer tape to the CD. Smart eh?

You can read more about it here

 

$100 Laptop

At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday unveiled the first prototype of the $100 Laptop.

The $100 Laptop is a great initiative of MIT Media Lab:

"The $100 laptop, first announced by Negroponte at the World Economic Forum in January 2005, is an ultra-low-cost, full-featured computer designed to dramatically enhance children's primary and secondary education worldwide."

The prototype features a 500Mhz AMD CPU, runs on Linux and uses innovative power, including wind-up(!). Impressive.

Now, if only they would allow us to help them with their website...

 

Noise of magnetic

I used to love making mixtapes and decorating the cassettes and sleeves. So do these folks, apparently.

Burning MP3 CDs just doesn't have the same romance as spending hours with your finger on rec/ pause...

My Japanese is a long way off being able to make sense of what's at the top of the page, but it seems these dudes have been inspired by the tape/ fanboy clubhouse that is Project C-90.

Hey! They've got some gloriously garbled English on their homepage. Heh!

"In comparison with record there are various arrangement index of signals with the layers simultaneously c a magnetic the tape basic normalize frequency. A nominal level. Of residual magnetic tapes. Now was made by 1966 socalled noise of magnetic."

There's no arguing with scientific rigour like that.

 

Foolishness!

Our ex-collegue Merten Snijders that currently is working for PerfectFools in Stockholm, Sweden has just released this campaign site for the Norwegian Samsung. Its for the D600 (yes, the black one that swivels up and down).

Oh, by the way: click on "Engelsk versjon" to view the site in English.

 

Updates to Sony Ericsson global websites

If you know Media Catalyst you probably know that we do a lot of work with Sony Ericsson.

You may not know that we have in fact worked closely with their global Digital Marketing team as strategic Digital Marketing partner since 2001. During that time we have developed an extremely strong relationship with the lovely people who work there, and we're very excited about the future projects we're currently talking about.

And so we were all delighted at the launch of a suite of new releases earlier this week, enhancing the visual appeal, usability and effectiveness of Sony Ericsson's global online presence.

Updates this time round focussed on the Sony Ericsson M2M site:

As well as to the Global Portal:

While the customer Support zone was thoroughly revised, and a new Business section was also introduced.

As well as working on the digital strategy, information architecture, graphic design, and technical build of Sony Ericsson sites, Media Catalsyt also works with a number of partner organisations like Akamai, Teleca AU System, Human Factors International and CyberCom Consulting to ensure the sites stay attractive, fresh and functional.

...which is why www.sonyericsson.com continues to be independently recognised as one of the world's most usable, stable and high-performance websites online today.

 

Typography related

http://amaztype.tha.jp/
Amaztype is a book search for typographic related books on Amazon. Very welldone!


http://www.suitcasetype.com/
Suitcasetype launches a new font family called "Dederon". Its specially designed for books and contains both serifs and sans serifs.


Typotheque is a dutch type foundy with its base in Den Hague. They have some rather lovely work at their site.
And i especially like the fonts in development section!
With sketches of their ongoing work.


"mikesousa" over at typophile describes what method he used for setting the spacing in the typeface Calouste (PDF).

 

Ever wanted to make your own tshirts?

Found this interesting tutorial on how to screen-print on tshirts (and of course any other textials) at home!

Head over to the tutorial

If you do any tshirts using this tutorial, be sure to drop me an email with some images!
Im going to try it out, thats one thing for sure.

 

Creative Review presents... Creative futures!

The magazine Creative Review presents Creative Futures, a showcase of the best young talents in visual communication.
I must say there is are some really nice stuff in there, go and check out their portfolios!

They are categorized in these different sections;
Advertising
Graphic Design
Type and typography
Photography
Illustration
Animation
Commercials direction
Interactive/digital media
Special effects/post-production

http://creativefutures.atticmedia.com

 

Flux - Interactive panoramas

Flux is a festival wrap-up party for the Spark Conference in Amsterdam. Its beeing held Friday the 18th November and the venue is Club 11. At this party there will be 12 large screens showing projecting photos that we (=the online community) submit to them!


How do you submit?
Send a picture (JPG!) of your view that is in 720x420px to submit@flux.to


How can these "views" look like?

Visit the page to see some examples.


http://www.flux.to/panoramas/

 

May 1st Reboot 2006

May 1st Reboot 2006 just launched there website and is actually quite early this year (or is it just me?). For those of you who dont know what this is, i call tell you that it is an international relaunch of websites by people working with web design. After people have finished their sites, there is a competition and some judges get to pick out the best sites. Of course there are also prizes to win!

The whole "competition" has kinda been dying lately and last year there wherent that many sites that where actually really good. But its still intereting to see what people are up to.

If you want more info about it, please go the may1reboot.com

 

Revenge will be mine

--- I am very patient ---

Pre-empting the blog which is being composed nowish.... Bad Mal.

Here is my message to u all......

[UPDATE] I'm totally abusing my admin privileges, but this makes no sense unless you can see why Mark wants revenge - click the cartoon to find out... (Ben)

 

Hard times choosing the right color/colorpalette?

There are many tools on the net that can help you out when you are stuck. They can also be quite fun to just fiddle around with. The process of choosing the right palette can be a tricky one, but these tools can make things easier for you as you get instant visual representation.

A list of color picking tools can be found at mambofrog.

 

Some handy OSX applications.

I changed to using Mac and OSX quite recently (hmm, 3 months maybe now?) and I've discovered some applications that can be really handy to use. Read more to see what i'm talking about.
(Read more...)

 

Wellvetted's November "issue" is out.

Wellvetted is a site that every month releases an index of sites that where submitted from leading international web design portals and communitys. All these get to pick their favorite site from the previous month. There arent any direct criterias for this, so it can actually be anything. Each months also some guests get invited to submit a site.

The November "issue" has just been released, so head over there and see if there is something worth seeing!

Wellvetted.com

 

Google Locale.... on your mobile phone!

Right next to Wayfinder and TomTom Google launches its Mobile routeplanner application. It's totally free and combines the forces of maps and satellite images. As it still is a beta, its only available in the US for these operators;
Cingular
Sprint
T-mobile
And other (?)

I wonder how Wayfinder and TomTom (and also other companies in this segment) will place themselves in the market and towards Google.

Read more

 

Clothes Swap!

Last week the ladies at MC cleared out their closets for a clothes swap at the office. The girls could bring in their old clothes and trade them in for "new" ones. Response was amazing! The terrace room became a regular clothes store and many were made happy with their finds. (See guys, it's never a bad buy - everything will come to good use... in time :P) Even though this wasn't initially planned as a charity event, surplus clothes were packed and sent over to a nearby store which was collecting clothes for Pakistani earthquake victims.

Lots of fun and for a good cause :)

 

California Coastal Commission Site

Here's an interesting site that shows the evolution of the California Coastline from 1972 to the present.  Pretty cool you can  find the most obscure places ...like my home town.  Now you all can see that when I say, "I come from a small town" it's not an exaggeration.

 

Firefox reaches a global average of 11.5%!

BBC wrote this friday that the browser Firefox has reached its global high with 11.5%. The region where Firefox is the most popular is the USA,
where Firefox is beeing used by 14.9% (!). But only 4.9% in the UK.
Although the rather big success for Firefox, IE (Internet Explorer) is still in the lead with 85.5% (93.37 in the UK!).
These figures where gathered from two million web users.

This data has been gathered by Onestat.
The article at BBC News can be found here: BBC News.

 

Creativity support tools

Latest newsletter from Doors of Perception dude, John Thackara. I have a real fondness for Thackara, not only because he talks a lot of sense about design and innovation, but also because his name always makes me think of one of my favourite musicians, Jake Thackray.

Anyway, amongst the usual Doors roundup of interesting things, this bit caught my eye:

CREATIVITY SUPPORT TOOLS
My in-tray is groaning under the weight of books, pamhlets and reports on all things Creative. Creativity is one of those Good Things (like Community) that is being rendered tedious by too much analysis by economists and policy makers. A welcome exception is this online report of a workshop on design principles for tools to support creative thinking. It's by some wise US researchers - among them, Ben Shneiderman, Mitch Resnick and Ted Selker.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CST/report.html

It's good! Go read it! Then when you're done, go and sign up for the Doors of Perception newsletter.

 

The Greatest Invention?

Forget the steam engine, antibiotics or space flight. The wheel? That's just a square gone wrong.

As of now, The Greatest Invention Of All Time is... *drum roll*... Beer-coffee!

New Scientist reports:

"Nestec, part of the Nestlé empire in Switzerland, has filed patents in every major market round the world on a "fermented coffee beverage" that pours and foams like beer, but smells of strong coffee and packs a concentrated caffeine kick."

In a company like ours, with a healthy mix of designers and techies, this news should go down very well. Eureka!

 

New (online!) music store

There online music store is just about to explode with different operators/companies just pumping out their own products. Lets see if anyone can take down iTunes from the crown?I wonder how long it takes until iTunes Mobile store comes out? Maybe together with a "real" iTunes phone? (The Rokr didnt really rock my world).

Here are some stuff that are happening right now;

Nokia and EMI trial bFree music download service…over Bluetooth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4392534.stm

Spring Music Store – The first US carrier to offer a full-scale music store with downloads available at one price to both your phone and your PC.
http://laptopmag.com/Review/Sprint-Music-Store.htm