Just had to post a link to this fabulous web portfolio by Bryan Katzel. It has one of the most interesting and innovative uses of semi transparent PNGs I’ve ever seen. Simply scroll down to the bottom and keep an eye on the central area of the page with the rainbow. Gorgeous!

http://www.webleeddesign.com/

Note: Don’t even think about visiting if you use Internet Exploder 6 or lower.

Web 2.0 is not a design aesthetic. Yet that hasn’t stopped thousands of designers perpetuating a commonly understood “Web 2.0″ look: over used shiny reflections, rounded corners, subtle gradients, bold colours and the use of the word ‘Beta’ next to your logo (whether or not your service is actually in beta!)

However, I find the most annoying effect is the now ubiquitous ‘peeling sticker’. It’s everywhere, and not just on the web either. I confess I just don’t get it: what’s wrong with those stickers? Do they use cheap glue?

If you need to bring attention to something on your page, then be original about it. Don’t just follow the crowd. And think about your page structure — good information architecture should lead users to the pertinent areas of your page, and you can do this without having to resort to cheap tricks.

Still, if you really want to perpetuate this aesthetic, you don’t even need to do the work yourself. Just get an app to do it for you. *Sigh*.

How many badly PhotoShopped efforts do you see day to day? This site has some corkers:

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

So I’m trying to get away from having everything tied to software on my computer, such as email and web bookmarks. I haven’t decided how to handle email yet (Gmail seems an option), but I’d like to try social bookmarking to keep everything in one place, and accessible remotely.

I’m a die hard Folder Fiend and am entrenched in that way of working. I don’t really like the nature of tags as I can’t get an “at a glance” view of what I’ve stored. But I guess I’ll have to get used to them to use an online bookmarking tool.

I’ve signed up to ma.gnolia rather then del.icio.us (just to be different) and will start playing with it. But I’m looking for opinions on both magnolia and delicious. What are your experiences? Which is best? Out of all the other tools, are any better than both of these?

A short article on Wired comments on a poll run by What They Play, the US-based website aimed at educating parents about computer games. I couldn’t find the actual poll on the site — it must have been and gone — but the Wired article displays the results.

Apparently 37% of parents would be more offended by “a man and woman having sex” compared to 26% disturbed by “a graphically severed human head”. 27% would think the world had ended if a game contained “Two men kissing”.

Obviously this is not a scientific poll and is only indicative. However, it’s really rather silly too. Games have ratings. Sex and violence in games is rated, like movies. It’s right there on the box and the back always has a description of the themes of the content. Any game containing sex and/or violence is likely to be a 15 or 18 and is not suitable for a child anyway. I’m not naïve enough to assume that violent games won’t get into the hands of younger minors, but I’d suggest that if they are, there’s a problem with the parenting in the first place.

(As an aside, I was watching a Will It Blend of Halo 3 the other day and the presenter Tom Dickson discussed playing it with his 4 year old grandchildren. WTF? — it’s rated M for mature, 17 year olds and up. I know that’s probably too high — it’s not as bad as many games — but still…)

The most interesting analysis comes in the user comments, in particular this one caught my eye:

I have to admit, though, the fact that “two men kissing” even made the list just illustrates how fucked we are as a society.

Indeed. And I think it says more about the creators of the poll than anything else.

I’ve been using the new Wordpress 2.5 on a project which I upgraded from 2.3.3. It seemed very swish, with some great new features: Media Management, multi-file uploading, Gravatars, tidier menus and — the big one — an improved Write screen. When Wordpress was in RC phase, this was said about the Write screen:

.”..only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write.”

Wordpress’ Write screen is the core of the software. If this doesn’t work well, it doesn’t matter how many nice new features have been included, you’re gonna have a bad time blogging. So it was encouraging to read about its improvments. But rather than improving the experience, they made it worse. Why? In short: Bad use of screen real estate.

Read more…

I wasn’t expecting the final release to be so soon after the RCs, but it’s now available. It comes on the day I was intending to publish a new website — a personal project which uses WP 2.3 as it’s engine. Of course, it would be completely silly to do that, given that 2.5 address a lot of the problems I had and fixed using plugins, so I’ve decided to defer the site release for another week. It won’t make a lot of difference — I’ve been working on this site on and off for about 7 years but never actually put it on line!

So what’s different between the final 2.5 and the recent release candidate? At first glance, very little, although the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) does now seem to preserve HTML a lot better which was one of my big issues. So, have a look a quick at my overview of the good and bad stuff or head on over to the Wordpress site and grab a copy for yourself.

Wordpress have released RC1 of version 2.5 of the Wordpress software. It’s been a while in coming but finally we can play with a more streamlined backend that promises a slew of new features.

I’ve downloaded it and have a test install running on my local server. I’ve had a quick play around with it and here’s a few good and bad things that I wanted to comment on:

The good

• Importing from my blog worked flawlessly, picking up all attachments and images and arranging them in the correct upload folders. Sweet!
• Gravatars are now built in
• Uploads management has been completely replaced with a new Media Library section which is a thousand times better. You can now have permalinks for all media too. This is a massive improvement.
• The Blogroll is now named Links and has been moved into the Write section, which makes much more sense.
• You can add media directly to a post with a media-management popup allowing you to browse for files and send the links and/or embed code directly into the post you’re working on.
• Images placed into your posts are automatically given classes for CSS alignment. This is long overdue and very welcome!
• If you use the visual text editor, you can make it full screen, which helps block out distractions while writing. Shame that I still use the code view due to Wordpress’ horrible HTML code rewriting (which doesn’t seem to have improved, though I haven’t extensively tested that yet)
• Some ‘Reading’ settings that were previously hidden in Options have now been sensibly moved to the Reading section
• The admin area can have colour schemes applied using custom CSS which can be selected in the user profile (it took me a while to find that!)

The bad

• Some plugins are now broken, but that was to be expected really.
• The new colour scheme is ghastly and overall the back end still feels a bit clunky. It doesn’t feel like a polished product.
• The write page now has a reduced side bar with most options appearing in collapsible panels beneath the Write window. This is a real waste of space and will mean more scrolling up and down to set things like the page-slug, ping status, etc. This seems an odd decision to have made.
• Still no button for creating nextpage code in your post
• Backend CSS for the admin area is still very messy and there still are not enough CSS hooks for skinning it
• The Plugins page has a very bad default colour scheme that makes it tough to see at a glance which plugins are activated.

These are only few of my observations and I’m sure I’ll find others as I get to grips with it. Overall, this is a great improvement so a big “Well done!” to all involved. I’m currently re-designing my website, so I’m looking forward to using 2.5 to power it.

GIF and I have been through a lot together. Over the years, we’ve argued over dithering algorithms, we’ve cried over Photoshop’s lossy compression and we’ve drunk the night away comparing palette reduction techniques. Then one day about four years ago, I built a site that required alpha-channel (semi transparent) images. I called up GIF: “Can you do this?”. GIF shuffled about, looked at his feet and dithered his palettes. “Um… no. Sorry.”

I spurned GIF and turned to PNG. PNG was gorgeous. She smiled at me and her IDATs twinkled. “I can do everything GIF does–and MORE!” She laughed, and teased me with her data chunks. She’d got me. I gave her images with alpha channels. She took them in her stride and returned highly compressed, lossless files. I gave her images for dithering; she returned beautiful optimized 8 bit palettes that put GIF to shame. She gave me everything I wanted and I loved her for it.

Everything with PNG was great–for a while. Then one day I discovered the truth. On an idle afternoon I had decided to compare the filesizes of an 8-bit PNG and an 8-bit GIF, compressed with exactly the same settings. The GIF was smaller! What!? My love affair with PNG was being rocked to it’s foundations. PNG had lied! How could she do this to me?

Read more…

The default WYSIWYG editor that comes with Wordpress, TinyMCE, is perfectly adequate for writing simple text content. Given that’s what Wordpress is all about, that’s great. But what if you want to embed custom HTML into your posts? You might be lucky, it depends on what kind of day TinyMCE is having. Some code will be preserved, the rest gets flushed down the virtual swanny or converted to nonsense.

Read more…