After a bit of research I’ve decided to go with www.weheartit.com for some visual bookmarking fun (getting an invite on fffound was too difficult!) it seems to be a pretty good service for finding and savings cool images and video, although it does seem to be going down a bit too often (though I’m hoping that’s just teething troubles). Anyway you can view my profile here, if you join up please add me as a contact so we can share the excitement! Here some of the goodies I’ve found recently:
So I finished working on iPlayer over the summer, but some of the last things I was working on have now been released which I think are really exciting, the first iPlayer Wii version released in October, in which the interface has been redesigned to work 10ft away with a Wiimote. If you don’t have a Wii you can see what it looks like here www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen
Then today the big news is that the new Adobe Air-based version of the download manager has been released, it’s not based on Windows Media or using Peer-2-Peer which means no uploading costs from your ISP + IT WORKS ON MAC AND LINUX!! This is really great as it was certainly one of the big criticisms in it’s initial launch … I think it’s still got a few teething problems but it will be really exciting to see how this develops.
Another big release (which I had no involvement in) but looks really great is the children’s version of iPlayer – particularly good if you don’t want your kids watching some of the more edgy BBC Three programmes!
I feel every time I check out the digg/design page every other post is based around the ‘list-top-10-funny-cool-design-resources’ type blog (and no doubt we’ll see more of these as 2008 comes to an end?). Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy them and I’ve noticed sites like Smashing Magazine seem to do these very well, generating an interesting/attractive title which gets people coming to your site for the first time? So here’s 10 list-based blog posts that I’ve enjoyed recently:
100 Top Horror Film posters
http://wellmedicated.com/inspiration/100-illustrated-horror-film-posters-part-1/
6 Menacing towers fit for a supervillain
http://deputy-dog.com/2008/09/6-menacing-towers-fit-for-supervillain.html
50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/16/beautiful-examples-of-tilt-shift-photography/
60 Beautiful music videos
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/16/60-beautiful-music-videos/
5 of the world’s best (drivable) wooden cars
http://deputy-dog.com/2008/08/5-of-worlds-best-drivable-wooden-cars.html
23 Signs you’re becoming a design geek
http://www.crestock.com/blog/design/another-23-signs-youre-becoming-a-design-geek–152.aspx
20 Artistic Architectural Optical Illusions
http://weburbanist.com/2008/11/29/architecture-optical-illusions/
11 of the lamest blogs
http://www.pcworld.com/article/153615/top_11_lamest_blogs.html
115 things that white people like
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/
150 worst album covers
http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/worst-album-covers
How cool is this? mapping the location of a video on YouTube to Google maps (you’ll notice the example below is of the Ross-Brand incident from Broadcasting House on Great Portland Street)
This week I’ve discovered and really enjoyed Fffound! - it’s kind of like a ‘del.icio.us’ for images - also has really good related links so you can get lost in a whole load of good pictures for a long time. One problem is that it’s invite only to join, so if you’re a member and could add me I would be SUPER grateful!
Here’s a couple of good ‘uns I discovered today …
.Net magazine has nominated the new iPlayer site under the ‘Best Redesign of the Year’ category, if you have a spare 30 seconds (there’s no form to fill in) please click here to vote!
wow, just been playing around with the last.fm iphone app, it really is very good - means you can forget saving up to buy that iphone with the biggest hard drive, just get the cheapest one and instead of transferring music from itunes you can just listen to it all online … very nice.
Here’s a sneak peak of the new iPlayer website that will be launching soon - the big difference from the last site is that radio is featured alongside tv making it a one-stop shop to access all of BBC’s on-demand content. There’s a big change in the audio playback which will now mostly be high quality stereo in flash (with the aim of gradually getting rid of all the crappola windows and real playback) and the TV playback size has increased to 640px wide.
Other features have been added such as the ‘Last Played’ function which remembers what you’ve watched or listened to and allows you to resume playing from where you’ve left off. Also a full schedule and list view to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
I’ll write more on this at the launch, in the meantime you can find out more on the BBC Internet Blog or view the promotional video on the Media Guardian website.
Really like the new video from Weezer for their track “Pork and Beans” which basically brings together some of the all-stars from YouTube such as the Diet Coke + Mentos Experiment, the Evolution of Dance and Miss South Carolina … this band sure do make some great videos!
Interesting interview with Tom Anderson the founder of Myspace in today’s Guardian:
“… even having 200 million friends and Rupert Murdoch as a boss won’t help when your website is no longer flavour of the month”
I really enjoyed the Future of Web Design conference today, most of the talks were really interesting. I particularly enjoyed Andy Budd (Clearleft) talking about the ‘user experience design curve’, Paul Farnell (Litmus) talking about unconventional ways of promoting sites, Daniel Burka (Digg) on iterative and adaptive design and a great presentation from Steve Pearce from Poke (pictured below) all about user experience vs brand experience.
Another thing that struck me about the day was virtually everyone there was a pasty, skinny, white guy with thick glasses! … Concerning!
Picture by jkleske
Interesting to hear that Flickr are now moving into video sharing territory, everything seems to work in that minimal Flickr-like way - though I found it interesting that they’re limiting video’s to being only 90-seconds long to promote the idea of the “long-photo”:
“Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new.
Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video”
View examples on the Flickr ‘Video! Video! Video!‘ group
This is a great little blog by a guy called Todd Hart who basically buys up old cassette tapes from the Oxfam shop in Dalston then digitizes them and shares them on his site. Having a quick flick through I’ve found some pretty cool tracks by Gill Scott-Heron, Groove Train and a nice James Brown mix by Matt Black (right-click and select “Save Target As” on the links). www.dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com
Thanks for the link Chris
Quick Response Codes – what what what? Well they act in a similar way to a barcode except when you take a picture of them with an internet-enabled camera phone, your phone will bring up information or take you to a link of a particular website.
It’s something we’ve trialed a bit at the BBC (we ran an experiment in London zoo a couple of years back with these images next to the animal cages so visitors could get more information), also I noticed when I was in Japan last year that they got used quite a lot on billboards and advertising to provide a link back to the product.
Anyway I thought this was quite an interesting use of the technology by Munich-based clothing label Emma Cott, basically you can generate a link to your own website, social networking site etc, they’ll then print it out on to a t-shirt. Here’s the code to my facebook profile (I’m sure there could be some interesting uses for this?):
There’s something I really love about this Muxtape site, it basically allows you to upload mp3’s and create online playlists or mixtapes. However I think it’s the interface which is almost over-the-top simple, but there’s something really beautiful and art-like about it?
Web design, good CSS practice and search engine optimisation - all to a pretty fly beat! Watch here
“design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into productionyour photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s alignedplease don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time”
Found this on Tonteau’s Threadless Blog which I thought was pretty funny, a classic British tabloid headline?
In other news related … news, check out the redesigned bbc news site, which is finally starting to drop those Real/WMV pop-up players and replacing them with the new embedded flash video player I was working on before Christmas.
Interesting to see the new ITV Catch Up site, there’s a couple of things that I like about it (though there are a LOT of bugs when using it on a mac) - My main gripe is that rather than using flash video (which everyone has) it uses Microsoft Silverlight (which no-one has?!)
Wow, this is amazing - like good ‘ol Quicktime VR but with video instead of still images … check out the demo here (be sure to move your mouse around over the video)
Found on the Protein blog