David Emery OnlineRedesigning stories
Over at msnbc.com, where I spend most of my waking hours, we just launched a massive redesign of our story pages. For a news site, the story page is the most atomic and probably most important page of the site. The homepage (“cover” in our vernacular) and section fronts get a lot of attention and push our readers but the story page is where they’re trying to go and it’s where they spend the most time when they get there. This was a massive undertaking, the seeds of which were planted almost two years ago, and spanned the entire company, it’s amazing to finally see it live.
Amazing work – the layout is great, and I particularly like the ‘Upscroll’ navigation which you get to by scrolling up after the page has loaded.
Visit ➔Robyn launches 3D, interactive video
Swedish pop star Robyn has launched a 3D video, complete with Twitter integration, for her delightfully titled new track, Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do...
Pretty nifty, although it’s not the most amazing bit of computer animation I’ve ever seen.
It is though a good signifier of how the music video really has transitioned to being based primarily on the internet, and how it’s changing because of it.
Visit ➔Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures
Improved handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers using the text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; declaration.
Nice and simple, although presumably their must be a performance hit of some kind otherwise it would be on by default.
Visit ➔Levi’s Sales Page has individual like buttons
Levi’s Sales Page has individual like buttons for EVERY pair of jeans. I can instantly see what everyone else thinks is cool (sea foam skinny jeans) and what sucks (jorts).
Veeeeery interesting – great user experience.
Visit ➔Firefox 4: CSS3 calc()
Firefox will support the CSS calc() value, which lets you compute a length value using an arithmetic expression. This means you can use it to define the sizes of divs, the values of margins, the widths of borders, and so forth.
Oh god, it would be so awesome if all browsers would adopt this – most importantly WebKit, which on the sites I look after has a majority share (!).
Visit ➔Finally, a fluid Hicksdesign
I’ve been wanting a fluid layout on this site for about 5 years. I had a brief redesign back in 2005 where I flirted with it for a few months, but it was soon switched back to fixed as I couldn’t get it right.
Lovely stuff – I’ve been a long proponent of fluid width designs, and now with the rise in smaller-screen browsing and media queries now seems the time to really start getting stuck in.
A List Apart – as ever – is leading the charge, this is all you need to know on the subject.
Visit ➔Say Hello to My Little Friend
The other day, after spending my usual ten to twelve hours in front of this laptop I decided to restart my machine. I checked my email. I refreshed my Tweetie. I double-checked Facebook. I loaded Google Reader to make sure I was entirely up to date on all the news from Helen Thomas’ Middle East snafu to the number of gallons of crude still bubbling into the Gulf to the latest legal wrangling over Gary Coleman’s will to Sandra Bullock’s backstage reception at the MTV Movie Awards. Finally, after a quick check of my realtime blog stats, I took a deep breath and pressed the restart button.
Within five seconds, I picked up my iPhone and checked my email.
Suddenly self-aware, I paused. I looked at my sweat-beaded reflection in the still darkened laptop screen and I realized that yes, I am high on my own supply.
Well, this certainly rings a little too true.
I’m not sure it’s a problem, though, just a product of modern culture.
Visit ➔Safari 5 has implemented geolocation
Steve Jobs mentioned in his D8 interview that they take location privacy very seriously, and the ‘don’t ask for 24 hours’ checkbox is nice evidence of that; there’s no ‘Always Allow’ option.
Of course, I’d still like to see disclosure granularity at the source—ala Fire Eagle—but this is an improvement on the ‘OK/Cancel’ interface that the iPhone throws up.
I think the lack of an ‘Always Allow’ on this is a serious omission; yes privacy is important but there’s a bunch of sites – like check.in for example – that I go to solely for the purpose of using geolocation features. Having to say ‘yes’ every time you go there is fairly pointless, and breeds geolocation dialogue-box blindness (if you see it all the time, you’re quickly going to start clicking ‘yes’ all the time without thinking about it).
Visit ➔No cloud-based iTunes in Apple’s WWDC keynote
As you’ll know if you read our earlier liveblog, the rumours that Apple would have an iTunes announcement during CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote at its WWDC show today were inaccurate. No cloudstreaming iTunes, and no web-based iTunes.com store. Sorry folks.
I would have been very surprised if Apple had announced a cloud-based iTunes service yesterday - it was always going to be about the new iPhone, and it's worth remembering that this is a developer conference; new features for iTunes aren't very interesting to developers.
My bet is that we'll see iTunes 10, complete with some form of MobileMe-based over-the-air library functionality, in the traditional music/media focused September event they normally do. Same goes for a new version of the Apple TV, which will tie in to all that cloud malarky.
And the new iPhone? My only question is whether to get it in white or black…*
* Although it will be my second new Apple gadget in the space of a month, which makes me feel like a consumer whore. A happy consumer whore, though, with lots of nice shiny things.
Tools of a different trade
Photoshop and Fireworks are great tools …for tweaking photos and creating icons, gradients and textures. When it comes to laying out web pages however, they are worse than substandard. They are actively harmful. They reinforce the incorrect idea that there is a way of representing the browsing experience in anything other than a browser.
It’s always nice to see yourself quoted somewhere, and it’s also nice to see this issue gain a bit more relevance now we have devices like the iPad.
However, I do disagree with the idea that you should forego Photoshop and other such tools for the most part and design in the browser. Yes in the browser it’s much easier to see how a design will react to different window sizes and the like, but – certainly for me, at least – I think it can lead to unimaginative design.
It’s just too easy to make things simple when designing in a browser, and be lead by the code as opposed to being lead by the design. It is hard to visualise how a page will behave when designing it in Photoshop, but I find that’s better then trying to visualise design from within a text editor.
Visit ➔