Where's Mama?
I was just reading a post and someone mentioned offhand a browser that I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d share. Shiira is a new open-source product for the Mac based on the Safari rendering engine – details here.
I can only assume that Jon Hicks was involved in the design – look at the logo below, then think about Firefox. I’m not complaining at all – love the fishy logo.
I woke up last night at 2:30 in the morning thinking about work. I have to admit at the moment I’m finding it a little hard to shut off at the end of the workday. Generally even if I succeed in slapping work out of my conscious mind, I just end up with lots buzzing around at the back of my head, which can make it a little tricky pretending to be human in my free time.
I think this comes down to a slightly painful truth – if a job is worth doing, then it has to be more than just a job. If it’s more than just a job, then you naturally end up quite absorbed, in which case it’s very hard to shut off.
The solution is probably to throw myself with equal energy into something unrelated outside work, but that almost requires energy, concentration and dedication outside of work that I’m having trouble with right now. Right then, Guitar Hero it is.
I just looked through a slide deck from Khoi Vinh from a recent SXSW presentation, and found it really interesting reading even without the verbal commentary. It walks through the approach to a complex portal design, and how to use a grid to achieve balance and order when presenting so much information in a single interface.
I freely admit my own background and personal preference is totally based around complete simplicity, with each interface helping you with a single task. I find it fascinating how to approach putting together a coherent design for a much more multi-task interface. I suspect my own bias is partly based in the fact that I haven’t been educated in grid-based design, so should have a go at something similar to the site that is used for illustration.
My job is very happily near where I live, which for the most part is a very enjoyable thing. One slight downside though is a lack of any kind of gap between work and home. Generally I spend half of the evening with my head buzzing around before I can focus on more useful things like relaxation and personality. I’m trying to make a dedicated effort to stop at a cafe and read for 20 minutes or so on the way home, as a way to fight back.
I also realised that I’ve only really read technical books for some time now, and not really been taking in any fiction. I’m back to reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which is my favourite book. I was chatting to a friend recently who doesn’t quite see the point of reading books that you’ve already read. Personally, I think it’s more like chatting to an old friend.
OK, my new favourite thing is this cool little flash game. It’s a flight simulator based on the google maps API that lets you fly around london. Such a cool idea…
Go and have a look at mister president. I think that even a clever dog would have trouble using twitter (without an oversized, big, dumb keyboard), but he seems to manage ok.
There’s also the Daily Oliver from my webhost Textdrive if you’re in that kind of mood.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the best way to bring an idea to life, in such a way that it can be pitched or easily communicated to a cold audience. Previously I think I’ve worked with the assumption that you either provide a static visual design, or an interactive demo.
A static visual mockup can communicate a lot about the brand, tone, exactly what is important about the service, and generally provide an intuitive reaction about whether you are hitting the right spot.
An interactive demo can generally go much further in demonstrating how a user might go about a typical scenario that your product would be used for. This can really help to communicate the concept behind the product, and how easy or difficult the important processes are.
A data driven interactive demo can be put together quite fast, but you’re still really talking about 2 – 3 days work. In addition, making rapid last minute changes and redeploying to a demo laptop can be a little more involved than is ideal, and it’s quite easy to end up unduly stressed and flapping around.
I’ve had a little revelation about how to make this whole process much more efficient. It’s really much faster to work on a design in photoshop. If you have a scripted demo, then there is a linear path about what you click on, and where you end up. In terms of what you see during a demo, there is very little difference between a real interactive demo, and presenting a linear sequence of images in a browser, set up with anchor elements to allow click through to the next snapshot. This approach is much less work, and allows quicker turnaround and less stress.
The end result looks very similar to a typical person. They see a user clicking elements of a page, and progressing through a scenario. Generally it means that clicking anywhere on the interface will progress to the next page. If you require a little more control, you can add anchor elements, style them to have dimensions and absolute positioning to overlay the main image and provide hotspots. This can provide conditional branching in your demo – for example, clicking the logo to return to the start of the demo from any page.
It feels a little like cheating, but is actually much easier and allows you to focus more on the design, and the aspects of the service that you want to capture and present.
I’ve just been nosing around quite an interesting site based around technology to extrapolate a 3D model from a flat photo. They work out which elements of an image are vertical, which relate to floor or ceiling, construct a simple 3D model, then texture map from the original image. It’s worth watching the intro video to get a feel for how it works.
I went to watch Sunshine last night, which I had been looking forward to but hadn’t actually spent much time thinking about what kind of film it would be. I was thinking along the lines of friendly, slightly strange sci-fi.
It’s a stunning, powerful but above all scary film, which hadn’t really occured to me. Not so much scary in the way that most horror films are, but simply by providing a sense of scale and perspective totally based in reality.
I prefer not to attempt to be an amateur reviewer, suffice to say that this film left me dazed and racked with emotion and I think you should watch it.
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