Design, yeah?

Flash annoyance

2006-05-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Flash reserves too many names, I'm making varibles yeah and all the sort of things you'd like to call them in an ideal world are reserved like:

name

icon

item

title

so my variable names end up being obscure like catName for a variable inside a class which may as well just be name.

project: The end

2006-05-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

Well the project is done basically and the first feature requests are in.

Next I want to take the iTunes music library XML file and create some beautiful visualisation of that data

IE bugs

2006-04-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

Ran into a moronic bug in IE where hovering over a link would remove the margins and padding from its containing div.
Turns out the culprit was changing the border colour on the a:hover...... how can changing a colour have anything to do with a container objects margins, just a sign of the incompetence at MS really.
The solution?
Telling IE to instead of changing the bottom border to a different colour to change it to the same as the original colour which manages to solve the problem, so IE must be asking each time "Is that the same colour which is already set? OK don't do anything then" luckily or I'd have to create a more awkward solution.

Microsoft admit IE is a pile of garbage

2006-04-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

So you need to put some different CSS rules in because IE is such a pathetic pile of junk that has been surpassed in the less than a year by a tiny team of developers so what can you do.
Well it seems microsoft realise how pathetic IE is at CSS and created the IE conditional comments

Using that special type of comment you can pass CSS to IE and hide it from less moronic browsers.
Which is good in some ways, but unfortunately you can't include them in CSS files they have to be in the HTML so thats pretty rubbish.

The fact microsoft put a feature like this in proves they realise they are not pulling their weight in the CSS world

Opera

2006-03-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

Downloaded Opera today and was pleastenly surprised to find that after two CSS changes my site functioned close to perfectly, the only thing missing is one fade effect which I might correct but all the AJAX and styling works great. I was worried it would totally butcher it but luckily the Opera team are on the ball, unlike Internet Explorer which rumour has it is getting pulled out of the OS in the next version of windows (currently its used to render some horrible information design around the edges of the file managers windows and do some other pointless stuff like draw the grid in add/remove programs) sounds like somebody is admitting its a big pile of garbage if I'm honest.

The PHP documentation again

2006-03-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

Its just so terrible, it reads like a child trying to show off to you rather than trying to teach you anything.
Preg_Replace
A pretty complicated topic as regular expressions are tricky to grasp for some people at first and are like a minute scripting language in themselves, so lets start with some easy text replacing.... or not in this case:
Example 1. Convert HTML to text
OH SOMETHING NICE AND SIMPLE TO GET US STARTED THEN?

gets much worse
Example 2. Using backreferences followed by numeric literals
Absolutely no idea what that means at all, something to do with dates judging by the code.

It should be
Example 1: Simple text replace
AS THATS WHAT 70% OF PEOPLE WILL BE USING IT FOR, you want something a bit smarter than standard replace but don't want to go the whole way and convert HTML just yet.

Macbook Pro

2006-03-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

Can't believe Apple moved away from the incredibly strong Powerbook brand, surely the only laptop name well known enough to rival it was the IBM Thinkpad and thats miles behind it. But instead of just sticking something on the end of it like they did with Powerbook G3 and G4 they went and changed it to the horrible "MacBook Pro" which sounds like the name a 14 year old would think up for a computer, absolutely pathetic Apple.

I really hope they switch it back to Powerbook when the G4 models die off.

Even the quite cringe worthy "Powerbook Core" would have been better.

Democracy

2006-03-03T06:38:00.000-08:00

Democracy Player is a nice idea of using RSS and Bittorrent together to provide internet TV channels, shame its so badly optimised at the minute that the interface is incredibly sluggish and it takes up 60% of my processor basically doing nothing while bittorrent normally takes up below 1% and VLC about 10%.
Hopefully it will get to a state where I can actually use it.

Final Year Project

2006-02-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

This is my final year project, hopefully in a state I'd like to test soon.

vennt

PHP stupidity

2006-02-18T05:14:00.000-08:00

You'd think getting a mysql result of entries from a DB with the largest numbers would be easy then reordering them by their names with some averages performed from the max and min of the numerical field would be a pretty easy thing that you could program in 10 minutes.

Oh wait sorry PHP was developed by morons so that 10 minutes will become hours of questioning why everything in PHP is so ill equipped for dealing with the plastic bag of dogshit that it throws at you from its shoddy sql result phrasing commands.

MYSQL, bit of sillyness

2006-02-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

If your developing a system that hooks into programming languages, you'd think it would occur to you that many programming languages have a fondness of single and double quotes. Obviously not for the MYSQL developers, tomorrow I have to put a bit of code in to escape all quotes so it doesn't destroy my SQL query. Also there doesn't seem to be much justification for it when the language consists of case sensitive statements such as SELECT, so you know when the WHERE query has ended because either the entire query ends or ORDER BY(etc) is called.

PHP Sillyness

2006-02-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

The PHP developers really don't do you any favours do they? The documentation reads like some programmer showing off and expects users to provide most of the quirks and documentation in comments. Its near impossible to find information relating to custom function problems and the multiple search systems are irritating.
They could learn a lot from the style the processing documentation is written in. If I have a problem with that it only ever takes me minutes to sort out, php its more of a look around the internet for the correct way to do something.

For example "require" if you call a function which is in a different directory and uses require, then it will take the page you called the function from as the reference point for relative paths.
WHEN WOULD ANYONE EVER WANT SOMETHING THAT DOES THAT? compared to the number of times someone would want to do it the expected way.
So why does the PHP documentation teach you to do "require dirname(__FILE__)."/path to include.inc")"? or why doesn't require automatically add the dirname information in its own code?
and I love how awkward it is to do mysql queries, only takes about 8 lines of code to get some data outputted, it should be about 3.

Next up, website status pages, in particular the MSN Messenger Service status page and the Blogger service page.
This is a great lesson in how to really annoy your users, when an error occurs in your service point them to a page which tells them everything is ok!

Safari Web Inspector

2006-01-29T13:10:00.000-08:00

Safari has a new web inspector
Done in the lovely new Apple UI concept the introduced in Motion and Aperture

Advanced Communications Technologies

2006-01-23T17:03:00.000-08:00

Got shown the brief for this, got annoyed at the School Of Computing's inability to give us proper multimedia modules,wrote about it on the forum.
Come on SOC, I know for a fact your not staffed by idiots and plenty of you know your multimedia stuff so there is no excuse for these.

How much did you pay for that new logo Intel?

2006-01-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

So intel has a new logo
Did the management not get the memo saying "its a bit shit and predictable isn't it?" well done intel, remove the stupid "inside" bit, font change is alright, BUT FOR GOD SAKE A SWOOSH? talk about faceless and cliché.
"oh we're getting a new logo, great time to reposition ourselves in the market from embarrassment to coolness, OH I KNOW THE OLD STANDBY OF THE BAD LOGO DESIGNER! YEAH THAT'LL SELL MICROCHIPS!"
I dread to think how much Intel paid for this, I mean the papers shouted when BBC changed from their slanty logo with colour to the square 1 colour logo but at least the new one was much nicer and more modern, this intel logo is what it should have been in 1993 not in 2006.

Just lose the swoosh intel, the new font is unique enough to stand on its own feet.

looks like they lost the horrible beveltastic badge logo though, god that was bad too couldnt do with buying a computer with that monstrosity staring back at me (Spoke too soon, its still tacky and bevelled). One of the nicest things about Macs is they're so free of clutter like that, you buy a pc laptop it has about two A1 sheets of stickers plastered on every inch of free space, you have expect to look down and see "scratch here and win a free iPod" why wont the higher end of that market give people a product that doesn't look a total design and branding embarrassment, maybe then I might even start to consider one next time I get a computer haha or not.

CEEFAX!

2006-01-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

Today James answers the biggest question of all!

What is the most popular colour on CEEFAX!

Happy new year! Hope you all enjoy this adventure as much as I am and that it ends many sleepless nights.

Whats next?
CEEFAX 2002 vs. CEEFAX 2006
Whats changed? What stayed the same?
and what does this all mean to me and you?

Really Shit Standardisation

2005-12-30T18:56:00.000-08:00

So yeah recently Microsoft and Mozilla have got together and "standardized" the RSS feed icon because Yahoo! did some survey and found only 4% of users use this feature, I wonder why? Could it be one of the following:

Its not actually that useful for anyone outside of the 30 sites+ a day market

Its been developed entirely by geeks locked away somewhere so follows geek branding logic thus has a really stupid name thats been turned into a joke. "Really Simple Syndication" god where to start on whats wrong with that! Firstly sounds patronising, secondly why the hell does syndication mean to the common internet user, thirdly since when did joke names like that work? We didn't all run over to "the GIMP" from photoshop, and even if it did have an interface that wasn't designed by a monkey it would still be a failure that you can't even give away down to the fact how can anyone do remotely professional work on a product with such a ridiculous excuse for a name, oh ha ha GNU Image Manipulation Program makes a funny acronym lets call it that BRAVO LINUX this is why Mac OS X was the first desktop ready *nix system because it takes things seriously and your just the bright kid at the back of the class who pisses about and ends up locked in the back office thinking up stupid names for technology like RSS.

Most of the internet still uses Internet Explorer garbage which RSS isn't built into (This is most likely a real reason why it hasn't taken off)

No one to really explain what it is sensibly

However Microsoft and Mozilla have decided that the real reason is it doesn't have a standard icon. Well it had that ugly bevelled orange button didn't it, always seemed to sit there ugly and proud of its ugliness. Anyway so they decided to share the same icon, Apple because they were ahead of the game had already made theirs which is similar to the original RSS icon only blue (as it appears in the address bar a massive in your face orange mess would have been bad for usability) but Microsoft and Mozilla have decided upon this monstrosity.

God where to start with this mess:

Central point and waves moving away from it is far too specific to broadcasting, which isn't entirely what RSS is about also its too radio centric.

Too predictable and thus has actually made itself way too similar to volume meters, wifi meters, and many logos. I can see many users in the future thinking that the logo means their connecting to a site via their computers wifi especially if its used in the address bar as the Microsoft method of mashing the browser into the file system has caused them to use a globe up there for online, a CD up there for browsing your cd, folder for browsing your hard drive and so on so a globe and a radio broadcast logo similar to many wifi logos just says this will be mistaken for "I'm browsing this site over wifi" logo in user logic

Too similar to Apples old airport logo Too similar to RNID I'm sure with 30 minutes searching I could find many many more point/waves in orange, seems as common as the blue swoosh for "dynamic e-business"

Does a feature that so few people are interested about really need to SHOUT IN MY FACE WITH BRIGHT ORANGE

This post is mostly sparked off by the creator of this site basically some guy read about the new icon and created a lovely little template for everyone thats completely illegible at 16x16 just to grab some cheap hits. Unfortunately he seems to have missed the point entirely.

Not a fan of orange? Download the package and customize the icon to your liking. We believe that as a symbol, the feed icon is recognizable enough that it doesn't need to be restricted to one colour.

Why make it colour at all then? Making it several colours just breaks the standard.

Coming in January '06 - upload your customized icons and share with others! This will help non-designers get their hands on custom colours without having to learn complicated software. And to make things easy to find, we're adding a gallery that will allow you to sort and rate the icons. Internationalization is also on the top of our priority list.

Ok we have here perhaps the worst and most boring idea for an e-community I have ever been unfortunate enough to read, I really can't wait to see this and I bet £10 its just "here is the feed icon in brushed metal" "here is the feed icon glowing blue" wow really pushing those standards Matt!

Anyway on his blog he quotes someone at mozilla who says

I’m encouraged that we’re further distancing browsers from the awful “RSS” as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don’t call web pages “HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages” and we don’t identify them in the browser using little icons containing “HTML” and “CSS” acronyms; We shouldn’t do it for feeds either.

Well Mr Mozilla do you know why we don't call them that? Maybe its because when they're in the browser they just work, if a user put an RSS file in the browsers on most computers in the world today then nothing would happen at all, at most you'd get a confusing looking pile of XML unless it was a really recent RSS enabled browser. Thats why we have to tell people what they are, a little dot and some waves doesn't do this as they will just link to confusing RSS.

So here we go average IE 5.5 user "oh whats this bright orange wavey thing *clicks and gets pile of XML* oh thats a bit scary, *clicks back* best remember not to click that again" Bravo Mozilla/Microsoft and Matt nice to see you looked outside your RSS obsessed bubble on this one.

YEAH JAMES YOUR REALLY FAST TO CRITICISE! But you haven't thrown together an RSS icon in 5 minutes in Illustrator and spouted a load of nonsense about standardisation just to get some easy hits off the "blogsphere"

Exactly, if that was the solution to the RSS problem then yes I'd be the first to do it, but its not ok! got that Moz/MS? branding isn't the problem with RSS and no matter how many lovely colours of gradient noise icons Matt Brent churns out and writes condensed text above is going to solve this.

The real solution
Tackle it at the end, not at the beginning, blogsphere types love ranting on about standards and new technologies but its not going to get them anywhere if they browser can't pull its weight. So for RSS to take off it needs to be a seamless integration with the browser that doesn't require any intellectual investment from the user at all.

If I were Microsoft
I'd make it so the default homepage on the browser wasn't some scampit trying to get me to use MSN Search like everything else they've released in the past twelve months is and no doubt IE7 will be. Instead I'd make the home page of the browser a locally generated RSS feed centre. Scan the users bookmarks for RSS feeds and then show them the news as soon as they open the browser, they won't even know its RSS it'll just be there for them all the latest stuff of sites that support it, if something like this is there at the start then more sites will add RSS and you won't need to be a subscriber to slashdot.org to understand what the hell RSS is all about.

If I were Apple
The above solution is excellent for the hand holding Microsoft approach to computing, however I think apple are already on the right track, if a site has RSS just add a little indicator somewhere that links to Safaris ability to display RSS. Apple are pretty much the masters of easing users into a product by good interface design, I know my shortcut key use is about 1000% higher since moving over.

If I were Mozilla
See which works best between those two, rip off the best bits because thats what you do usually ;) but we love you for it.

Flow update

2005-12-28T17:10:00.000-08:00

Found out that compiling my old Flow program from early 2005 in Processing Alpha makes it run even faster and at normal speed on macs so thats great. The really slowed down the pixel operations in Processing Beta
Updated Flow

Also I'm working on a complete rewrite into Processing 3D which is even faster and will have many different types of particles, ignore the messy drawn lines in this shot thats due to a processing quirk so I can only draw with ellipse outlines, but anyway lovely water and also lovely snow which piles up and also floats to the top of water and melts.

Foam!

2005-12-23T17:57:00.000-08:00

Alright 3rd project this week, a return to Processing with Foam which takes an image and creates a foamy bubbly version of it which it exports to Adobe Illustrator format.

Tesla update

2005-12-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

Updated Tesla today, now it can add a background marker to the data which can either be a script generated average of the data of a user specified value. See more of Tesla

Tesla, PHP sparkline script

2005-12-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

Getting to grips with PHP again very quickly, been a few years since I last used it really and all that procrastinating in Processing over the last year has paid off. Anyway spent a few hours messing with what I've wanted to do for a while which is dynamic PHP graphics, was worried when I found out Imagemagick was not included on trentamd, however then I found PHP has a library installed by default known as GD and thats perfect for what I want to do. So here is what I made thats a dynamically created diagram of the wordcount in the past few blog posts (data isn't dynamic but it could be easily) with this one highlighted in red.

See more Tesla

New little projects

2005-12-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

Updated my university site with two little projects:
Videotime
Simple infographic made in Processing to deconstruct Quicktime sources.
The Vote
Spent today getting back in the swing of PHP so made a lovely little pictograph application that stores its data in a plain text file.

Ruby

2005-12-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

Interesting Ruby tutorial up-and-coming web development language which I think Flickr was made in, from the tutorial it has some very nice little features. Think it derives from a command line scripting language which has also been included in OS X since 10.2 ("ruby" in terminal to invoke it funnily enough, not sure how to activate it in the web server) so might be having a bit of a go with this over the next few weeks.

AMS and general awfulness of this term

2005-12-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

What this term really needed was a more easy going subject designed to get everyone back into working, after work placement its incredibly hard to transfer back to the university way of life as for a year you have had the schema that at home you can relax and you tend to block out work especially if you had a ridiculously long day as I had for 6 months (6:00am with about 3 hours commuting then getting back about 8-9pm) everyone who was on placement that I spoke to agree with me on this that they found it hard to get back into the flexible working style.

So what the term really needed was a smallish project, nothing too taxing just like design this, or research that given out week 1 due in week 4 instead of all this due in at the end because only now do I realise how completely ridiculous the workload for AMS has been. For a module that has lectures on subjects as inconsequential as SMIL and no less than THREE lectures going in to way more detail than necessary about multimedia databases which could have been summed up as "yeah you can describe the multimedia but its not that good yet and nothing really important uses it yet" it certainly piles the work on. Its stupid near pointless exam questions have disrupted the work flow of more important modules for me and on top of that we have this 3000 word essay due in Tuesday and the handout is as vague as it could possibly be I mean its all of 3 paragraphs if that and then a side explaining plagiarism and Nick made a massive deal about how it has to be "about multimedia not MULTIPLE MEDIA" and then we have an exam on top of that.
If I had to describe AMS as a person it would be someone who thinks they are much more important than they really are, if your going to flood me with exam questions, large essays and an exam then don't squander your lectures talking about technology that is dead at the minute like SMIL or things that are near useless at the minute like MMDBs I mean 3 LECTURES ON MMDBs!!! thats probably more than we've had on typography all together and god would it have done people good to have had the same amount of time spent on that. Can we please learn to use padding this year kids.

Then we get told on Wednesday that we have presentations this Monday, brilliant

anyway mostly behind because I did a hell of a lot of research into my project basically spent like 2 weeks on grid theory and stuff because I'm determined to make it pretty much the most amazing thing ever, I mean I don't want to oversell it but it should be absolutely brilliant. Although I did forget to include my proposal for the 20%, think that will be the database system

anyway used to working under pressure now

IM Project

2005-12-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

Well my report had the finishing touches today, very pleased with it.

Design Futures and Project

2005-11-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

Ok my new portfolio is up ish, just gotta add screenshots for one item and remove another till i have something to show for it. Needs flash 8 at the minute so should be a Flash 7 version and a detector soon. And finally a load failsafe incase the server is being naughty.
Made a little university site to direct between work for different stuff pink for uni work, blue for programming experiments and various other colours for various other things.
James' various university things

my new portfolio is mostly a chaos vs order piece, firstly I developed a generative composition maker and sequencer which is created by the pseudo-random seed from the computer but this has the narrative opposition of the golden ratio defined grid system and Fibonacci sequence typography, which mostly becomes apparent when the chaotic background flows behind it.

IM Project

2005-11-12T07:02:00.000-08:00

Been researching on project stuff recently, one issue I've found is there is a lack of screen design books mostly grid layout books focus on print grids which is a whole different ball game to on the screen although some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff on usability is a good guide for positioning your menus and such and some comments on whats considered standard that shouldn't be used really.

Wish I'd found the design section in the library in the first year it has a ton of books I've wanted to read for a while

project

2005-11-01T04:38:00.000-08:00

Data visualisation

Dot based clock

Project and event

2005-10-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

Experiemental audio visual event in Huddersfield next month, some interesting projects on show it seems: Ultrasound.

Created a prototype for my 2nd project proposal which I would upload if I had some working uni server space. Been playing with Flickr and such for my 1st proposal.

IM Project - Pen based interfaces

2005-10-25T17:10:00.000-07:00

Don't want to discuss my first idea here yet however for my second:

I/O Brush - Amazing work from MIT

Teddy - This should so be included in a future version of Maya, absolutely amazing to use

Considering a pen based illustrative interface for collaborative music composition, a user will draw to a time line and the play head will move along looping so you could start with a gently synth in the background and add further strokes to build up the soundscape on top of that. Hopefully network several users canvases together to a central server to perform the actual music. Perhaps an interface which is so simple and natural a child could use it but simple and expressive so it provides a more free flow method of digital real time music performance.

Possibly created in Processing (if I can get the canvas system working due to its lack of vector abilities) or Director if it can generate the sounds.

Flow

2005-10-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

I upgraded Processing and that made my wonderful simulation finally export and work outside of the development environment. They'd accidentally left some Java 1.3 libraries in which must have caused the problem once exported.

So once my uni space is working again I'll upload this masterpiece.

Project and Design Futures

2005-10-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

Been looking at pen based interfaces and may have a better potential second project now, just need to discuss it with the target audience a bit then I'll go in to more detail.

Got my prototype for the background composition engine for my portfolio working over the weekend, I accidentally compensated for less than by using subtraction when the same formula for more than worked just fine. Now just need to see if I can stop my cached bitmaps in flash changing back to vectors to keep things nice and speedy or if optimised vectors will be the way forward.

Tactile feedback interface

2005-10-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Tactile feedback demonstration movie
There was talk of tactile feedback in AMS this week so here is something more on it.

Chameleon

2005-10-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Some web developer has created an icon set where the client can type in a colour and the icons are automatically changed to that colour for purchase.
Very interesting idea and well implemented.
Chameleon
However they dropped the ball a bit its way too easy for someone to steal because of the aliased nature of the icons, I would suggest some sort of noise pattern instead of just lines so its more effort to remove.

Flock

2005-10-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

New browser project out soon, described as a web 2.0 social browser it integrates with flickr, Delicious and blogs really well so they say. It runs off gecko which is a good start, but osx users will miss the niceties of safari such as inline spellchecking.

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

As usual the developers being such a blog obsessed bunch of individuals its impossible to find a list of what it really does that is different because they just keep linking to each others posts which link to more posts.
But the hype is there at least

Flash 8

2005-10-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

Had a bit of a go at Flash 8, although some elements feel better programmed others have slipped a bit.

The new feature I'm really excited about is the bitmap access so you can generate and manipulate bitmap elements in real time. unfortunately in true macromedia fashion they messed this up and didn't include a method simply to draw on the canvas, so it seems you have to draw with vectors then convert the vectors to bitmaps then add them to your canvas which is really intensive and stupid for something so simple.

Usability thought about ALT+F4

2005-10-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Why does ALT+F4 close a window in windows, ALT isn't the usual modifier key for shortcuts and F keys are hardly used for commands and mostly just for palette toggles.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Colour Picker Perfection

2005-10-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

As most of you hopefully know the colour picker in Mac OS X is absolute interface perfection as far as colour pickers go, it makes the default Microsoft and Adobe pickers look like pathetic child's toys. The only part missing is the ability to choose colours using hex however thanks to this free plugin you now can hexcolorpicker.

Design, etc?

2005-09-27T03:36:00.000-07:00

Welcome to this Internet this blog is about Design and its many crevices.
Ready?, Lets go.