Are Rojo reading my blog? In any case, they’ve fixed the issue I talked about earlier in this post. Huzzah!
Category: Articles
Crash
I finally got around to watching Crash on DVD yesterday evening and I must say it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in quite a while. The story revolves around a large group of seemingly unconnected characters whose lives get intertwined through a series of car crashes. Magnolia did this before expertly, this film does it even better perhaps – never giving you the feeling the run-ins between people are forced. The driving force and main subject of the film is racism, I’ve hardly ever seen the topic handled so thoughtfully. There’s a lot of ambiguity, no clear-cut good or bad guys and as a watcher you’re forced to constantly re-examine your preconceptions about the characters. In short – hugely enjoyable!
Remix en auteursrecht (open.info.nl)
“Onlangs verscheen een aardig artikel in het Tijdschrift voor Marketing van de hand van Ferry den Dopper, waarin een aantal web 2.0 aspecten worden uitgelegd aan marketeers. Eén van die aspecten is remix – het fenomeen waarbij één of meerdere websites worden gebruikt als basis voor een nieuwe dienst. Den Dopper staat daarbij heel kort stil bij de juridische implicaties van deze waardetoevoeging door derden. “Some rights reserved” schrijft hij en citeert daarbij het Creative Commons-initiatief.”
Opgehokte raven
Geweldig nieuws uit Groot-Brittannië – de koninklijke raven zijn opgehokt. Onlangs las ik een mooi artikel in mijn favoriete blad Fortean Times, waarin werd verteld hoe de zes raven van de Tower of London door de Yeoman raven master worden verzorgd en beschermd. Een oude voorspelling zegt dat als alle raven de Tower verlaten het Britse koninkrijk ten onder zal gaan. Nu staat de vogelgriep voor de deur, dus gaan Branwen, Hugine, Munin, Gwyllum, Thor and Baldrick op stok! Iets wat de raven master liever niet doet:
“Although we don’t like having to bring the Tower ravens inside, we believe it is the safest thing to do for their own protection, given the speed that the virus is moving across Europe.”
Plazes sidebar redesign
Plazes, my favourite underhyped European web application have updated their sidebar. I like the fact that they changed the ranges shown (here, 1 km, 3 km, 10 km, 50 km). Now I can see all the way to Utrecht from Amsterdam. I also like the new “friends somewhere else” section (see the screenshot). They’ve also clustered people at the same plaze, and (all the way at the bottom) have now included a tag cloud-esque city list. Very web 2.0!
Nerd wannabe
Damn. Nerdiger dan Tom, maar lang niet zo nerdig als Edgar. 32 punten: “Not nerdy, but definitely not hip.” Hoe durven ze?!
Rojo redesign
Rojo has redesigned. It all feels a lot cleaner and more compact (as well as slightly faster). Headline scanning’s improved quite a bit.
The one glaring mistake I’ve noticed is that headers no longer link to the original stories, but are some kind of permalink to the post inside Rojo. You have to click a link beside it, labelled “via [feed name]”. Silly choice!
Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour 15 feb 2006
A few shots taken at last night’s Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour are up at Flickr. We had a nice “Battle of the Interfaces” – Scopus and Aquabrowser facing off to see what’s best – search or browse? The results were… inconclusive. But good fun was had by all.
Far more better looking shots are over at Guido’s.
Thinking about IxD patterns
Having just posted about a new pattern library; my mind has been occupied a bit by the role of patterns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD problems, I tend to first try to tackle the issue myself. Then, I usually refer to some examples and / or patterns, to see if I’ve missed any obvious caveats. After that, I usually fine-tune the solution. What I like about patterns is that they give a clear outline of the most common way of handling a given problem. I do think that they’ll never be a replacement for some genuine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when interaction designers will be replaced by a huge pattern library…
Yahoo! opens up some more
Some great new resources are now available, courtesy of everyone’s favorite web 2.0 company: Yahoo!
The Design Pattern Library contains a whole bunch of patters for user interface designers to use and abuse. Martijn van Welie finally has some competition.
Of more interest to developers is the UI Library, containing “a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications”. These code examples are frequently linked to from the pattern library.
I must say, these look like some excellent additions to the current body of knowledge available to designers and developers. Thanks a bunch Yahoo!
However, my paranoid mind can’t help but think: what’s the catch?
Via Jeremy Zawodny.