David Emery OnlineInternet angered by website redesign
With radical features like black text typeset in Helvetica against a white background, a traditional blog river, bold headlines, faster load times and a fashionable 8-bit style logo, there are .. wait, there's nothing crazy at all! So what on Earth are its readers complaining about?
I like the focus on readability, the reduced clutter etc but – like most people, I hazard a guess – the problem I have with the new TechCrunch redesign is it doesn’t look very nice. It’s just not very aesthetically pleasing.
Just because the mob is up in arms about every redesign (or even slight tweak) doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it every once in a while.
Visit ➔Things that are blogs
Things that are blogs:
Frequently updated webpages with content arranged in reverse chronological order
Things that are not blogs:
The Hype Machine
Blog posts
Blog comments
See also: “I’ve just posted a blog”.
Visit ➔Secondary attention and the ghosts in the corner
I remember seeing a talk once from a guy who did sound for the ER (on TV, not in actual hospitals). He was telling stories with the sound - foreshadowing moments, enhancing themes, adding drama - all via secondary attention. And I've always wanted to try and use sound as a way of telling you what's going on in/on/with the web. We've been mucking about with a few varients of this - from the abstract and arty to the slightly less abstract and arty - and we're going to try them out via some boxes which Adrian's building for us.
There’s something really interesting in all of this. Not sure exactly what it is yet, though.
Visit ➔Lil B, SwagSec, and the Gay Hacking Parade
But some of this didn’t add up. ‘Gay hackers target Amy Winehouse’ still seemed too good a headline to be true.
Then I saw that Lil B was releasing his new album today. Apparantly his album ‘I’m Gay’ (named so in support of the LGBT community, though Lil B is himself a heterosexual) had been released without any notice.
Convenient? I later hear through the grapevine that Winehouse and Pritchard share the same PR guy. Would it be too cynical to imagine he has a new client in Lil B? Yes, it would. Until you see that Lil B had a ‘secret’ meeting with Universal staff back in March.
Does this smell even a tiny bit like a marketing campaign? Is it possible that the site owners and label did this purely for press coverage?
Pretty crazy if true. Pretty lousy marketing if it is.
Visit ➔Walking Around In Circles: As Google+ Opens Up Will People Start Using It Correctly?
Who knows, maybe I’m just a Silicon Valley guy who has lost touch with reality. It’s entirely possible. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite is true. Maybe “regular” people have been allergic to using groups in the past because they simply don’t want to use groups. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s a good idea on paper or in a brain-storming session, but doesn’t translate onto the web.
Maybe — gasp — the web isn’t meant to mimic the real world.
I go on holiday for a week and come back to yet another social network. I haven’t used it yet, but from what I’ve read Google+ doesn’t seem to offer anything significantly different – significant enough to make people switch away from Facebook, at least.
This article pretty much sums up my feelings – the key differentiator is the ‘Circles’ groups concept, but I’m just not that convinced people can be bothered to split their friends up into groups when social networking. Even with a nifty UI it still sounds a lot like work to me, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
It also surprises me just how similar to Facebook Google+ is – it’s pretty shameless, right down to the UI look and layout. One thing I haven’t seen though is events, which I know was a massive driver for Facebook in the early days and I’m sure could do the same if/when it’s added to Google+.
Otherwise, the only thing Google+ has over Facebook is that it isn’t Facebook. That might be good enough for the geeks (who in my experience have never been Facebook fans, although I’ve never really figured out why) but I’m not sure it will be for everyone else.
Visit ➔Soulwax's mashup marathon
Realising that getting clearance for all the samples would be a headache, they found a loophole and applied for radio licences, becoming an internet radio company instead. The upside was no tussles with lawyers. The downside was they couldn't charge a bean: the app will be completely free.
The whole thing is pretty nifty, but I particularly like the idea of being able to release mashups and mixtapes as ‘online radio stations’.
Visit ➔The Wheels Of Steel: An Ode To Turntables (in HTML)
I have been interested in the idea of building a turntable-based UI in HTML for years; however, the past presented a number of technical hurdles. Setting dreams of browser-based remixing aside, simply recreating the core design elements of a turntable was practically infeasible until the advent of CSS3. The features most notably missing from browsers involved drawing circles, rotation of elements and low-level control of audio. As of 2011, it's a pleasure to say that these features can be implemented almost entirely using HTML, CSS and JavaScript alone.
Seriously cool.
Visit ➔Apple Reverses Course On In-App Subscriptions
Apple has quietly changed its guidelines on the pricing of In-App Subscriptions on the App Store. There are no longer any requirements that a subscription be the "same price or less than it is offered outside the app". There are no longer any guidelines about price at all. Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.
This is a big deal, but doesn’t surprise me too much – Apple’s original terms (if you offer a subscription outside an app you have to offer it as an in-app purchase at the same price) were just untenable for most publishers.
Visit ➔New Mobile Safari stuff in iOS5: position:fixed, overflow:scroll, new input type support, web workers, ECMAScript 5
It looks like there’s finally some major improvements in mobile Safari, some of which I’ve found below on my “first glance” after downloading the SDK. Chime in if you find anything yourself!
Finally position:fixed works in iOS 5 – this should make more complicated designs a hell of a lot easier to implement.
Visit ➔So I wrote a book. It’s called Responsive Web Design.
“So what’s the book about and stuff I guess,” you ask. Well, Responsive Web Design expands on the ideas I articulated in the original article. It’s a crash course in how you can apply fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to your own work, but let’s face it: design is so much more than those three ingredients. As a result, I’ve tried to share a few stories I’ve picked up from working on real, live responsive projects: the lessons I’ve learned, the questions that have been raised, the hard choices made.
If you’re a web designer you totally need to buy this book.
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