The latest from the good people at Google: catalogs.google.com
the social network explorer (or: browsing the web, sideways)
The wacky folks at the MIT Media Lab have created BlogDex, a system that maps and monitors the connections between web logs. Their latest creation is particularly fun to use. The Social Network Explorer lets you browse the web sideways, sort of, by showing you similar/related sites as you browse. Try it yourself.
words and phrases due for retirement
It is usually a good practice to have your house in order before start shitting on your neighbours, lest you be shit upon yourself (I know there are more appropriate analogies, but they all seem so cliché). Criticizing writing can be a dangerous thing to do. If you do so and make a typo (something I may well be doing right now) then you look like an idiot. As haste and sloth often trump good editing in my writings here on aov, I am in no position to criticize. However, if we all just stood around waiting for someone without sin, some much needed stones would go un-thrown.
What follows is a collection of words and phrases that, after noticing how dumb they make people sound, I am striving to avoid using myself:
- “First and foremost” – Often used by public speakers, primarily politicians, looking to create an artificial depth and emphasis. Although the alliteration is awfully alluring, this phrase has been robbed of any meaning it may have originally had.
- “At this time” – Often used by amateur public speakers, this phrase is oddly prevalent in Church settings (“I’d like to call on the choir at this time”). I suspect that there are people who use this term while speaking in church but never in any other setting. This has always confounded me. If you remove the phrase ‘at this time’ from your sentence, it is no less meaningful.
- “If you will” & “per se” – No, thank you. I will not.
- “Nothing but respect” – I have nothing but contempt for people who usually use this term to artificially sweeten their sour criticism.
- “Utilize” – See “use“.
For a more intelligent and less derivative position on clear writing see George Orwell’s article Politics and the English Language where he declares that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
Yeah, what he said.
I love it when people say plainly and clearly what has been ambiguously bouncing around in my head, slightly beyond my ability to structure and articulate. This is how I felt when I read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity (for those who only know Lewis from the Narnia series, I strongly recommend looking up some of his grown-up books – The Great Divorce is a good place to start).
The defensible and “damn-near-timeless” design of the British Rail logomark
I had this feeling again today, when I read an article by Adam Greenfield in this week’s double issue of web-design-weekly A List Apart. Adam explores and contrasts the art and science of design as problem solving against the art of style as expression. Without shitting on anyone, he draws a line between the designer and the stylist.
The article, The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes: and Other Notes on the Distinction Between Style and Design expresses, better than I could myself, how I feel about design. Design and style are not mutually exclusive, but they are different.
Also worth a look, dicovered via v-2.org (warning – this site breaks your Back button), a site by the author of the aforementioned article, Gasoline Signs: corporate identity in the real world.
Why does everyone hate you, Mr. Gates?
Great story at The Register about a 15 year old reporter for the BBC’s kids news show who asks some solid questions to Bill Gates.
She actually asked him: Does your computer ever crash? Gold! Bill’s total bullshit answers were actually a bit disappointing – she’s 15 Bill, not stupid.
You can see some of the interview in RealVideo.
War, War, & Hockey
This is what I found on the front page of the CBC website today.
Note the earth-shatteringly improtant three main headlines. Everything they say about Canadians is true.
Why buy local?
I was thinking today about getting new envelopes printed. In itself, it is a trivial matter. Since I bask in trivial matters, I was thinking about how we could have much cooler envelopes if the printing shop had more selection and options. Then in occurred to me that there are probably loads of good print shops that could produce our envelopes that would offer loads of options – they just aren’t on PEI. Not problem – I think I dealt with the local printer completely via email and phone anyhow.
Then the thought comes – as I’ve been programmed to think – I should probably keep my business local. Then – out of nowhere – another thought: why? Why is it any better for me to spend my money in the town or region where I live than in any other town or region? I’m sure there’s a printing company in Chicoutimi (randomly selected town that I don’t live in) who would love to have our business (and may offer a cooler selection of envelopes).
At my business we don’t expect people to go with us because we are ‘from here’. We are also glad that our clients don’t ‘shop local’ – since many of them are not from this fair Isle.
I know there’s an environmental cost of shipping goods unnecessarily. But doesn’t that only apply to things whose raw materials are produced locally? For example, if I buy my turnip from Uzbekistan (randomly selected county that I don’t live in and whose existence have only discovered recently) then I cause an unnecessary plane trip that pumps all kinds of bad stuff into the atmosphere when I could have just grown the turnips in my backyard or bought them from my neighbour. However, when it comes to goods where the raw materials come from elsewhere, does it even matter? I mean, the local print shop is probably getting the envelopes from Malaysia anyhow.
It seems that you only want people where you live to buy local. If our clients did it, we’d be out of business. I learned in philosophy 101 that a good way to test a concept is to see if it applies universally. This doesn’t.
I suppose it has a lot to do with which groups and regions you associate yourself with. I’m from Charlottetown, I’m from Prince Edward Island, and I’m from Canada. Trouble is, I don’t really identify myself with any of those groups in any strong way. I’m glad I live in a country where you don’t get shot at and you can think what you want – but it was just dumb luck (or a cruel and vengeful god, for the religious types) that I was born here and some poor chap was born in Somalia. I don’t feel any more connected to the guy at the local print shop than I would do the print shop in Chicoutimi (again, randomly selected).
So tell me, why should I buy local?
it’s a designer eat designer world
AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts has a site on User Experience called Gain. Ironically, it takes quite a bit of patience to navigate. If you do manage to find your way around, you might come across an interesting graphic illustrating the distilling of the many pioneering web-firms into the few struggling behemoths we have today.
Because their site is based in flash and pop-up windows, I can’t link to it. How’s that for #$!@ing user experience. They do have a PDF version of the chart, but it obscures the interesting data in its own totally X-treme way (note to graphic designers, most of you suck).
Since I can’t link to it and even if I could, you’d be annoyed by the flash interface, I’ll sum up the most interesting info with words (they can be so handy sometimes).
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Razorfish Avalance CHBi Spray Network Sunbather I-Cube TSDesign Lee Hunt Assoc. Medialab AG |
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Studio Archetype Sapient Adjacency E-Lab |
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Rare Medium i/o 360 Circumstance |
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| = | Razorfish | = | Sapient | = | Rare Medium |
Oddly, Sapient also designed the website for AIGA. Hmmm… They should read some Edward Tufte.
Windows Messenger tells you off, politely
I got this message from Windows Messenger this evening. It’s a clear and simple message that asks me to finish up any conversations as the service will be shutting down for maintenance in 5 minutes.
While the obvious ideal would be for the service to never shut down, this is a smart and simple way to handle any downtime. It would also be nice if they told me how long they would be down (although I sympathize with their tech people). This message would go a long way to preventing a zillion confused, lonely, and disgruntled users.
Good call MicroShaft.
Windows XP: rough around the edges
I resisted my well known irrational urge to upgrade as long as I could, but this weekend I gave in and installed Windows XP. A good rule of thumb: never upgrade your operating system simply because you are bored.
My initial reaction is that the fancy UI effects make things feel a little sluggish, but there are some very interesting improvements as well (and the visual effects can all be turned off). What struck me most about the new visual style in XP is that it is full of little glitches and holes. None are particularly significant, and this may seem nitpicky, but as Blink 182 puts it so well, it’s All the Small Things.
Behold some stupid little things that I couldn’t help but notice and criticize.
Icons Old and New
First, the icons – most are new and beautiful. However, this makes the new that are neither new nor beautiful all the more jarring.
You’ll see ugly old icons like this all over the place, but most are from old, non-microsoft programs. That’s understandable. This left over icon for Offline Web Pages is just weird. I don’t understand – did they forget it?
Even within the icons that were clearly designed for XP, there are odd inconsistencies. As you can see here, there are both icons with an angled perspective, and traditional rectangular icons. Not sure why.
In addition to that, notice how the two rectangular icons (vmmred32.dll and Soab Bubble.bmp) don’t even line up.
The end result of all this is a really wacky looking screen full of waggling icons.
The worst offender in terms of icons is in the administrator components of XP. Did they think the pretty new icons would frighten techies? (not a totally unreasonable fear, mind you). These are some of the icons from the admin section of the otherwise beautiful Control Panel.
Rough Around the Edges – Literally
This next point may seem to cross the line into obsessive, but I with all the other eye candy going on (alpha blending fading menu shadows, etc.) it’s a fair point. If they can smooth the edges of your fonts, why can’t they smooth out the corners of the windows? Perhaps there are good reasons for this – and I concede that this is getting to be a little too nitpicky – but I still noticed it.
Give Your Pretty Widgets Room to Breathe
I also noticed several places throughout the UI that looked like they needed a little room to breath. Spacing and padding are critical to a comfortable looking layout. Notice the areas pointed out by the green arrows.
Innie or an Outie?
While the subtle gradients and shadows used throughout the UI are generally well implemented, there are a few areas that confuse the eye. Note the shadows in the top and bottom of this small window pointed out by the right green arrows. When the eye has trouble discerning depth (is that a rise or a depression?) it can be visually disruptive.
Also, notice what appears to be two versions of the same icon in the image above (by left green arrows).
Oh, I see, Office XP
The next two images are not specific to Windows XP, but to inconsistencies between Microsoft’s Office XP and the rest Windows XP. Notice the two different menu styles: the Windows XP default on the left, and Office XP on the right.
Another odd discrepancy between Office XP and Windows XP – the scroll bars. For some reason, Office XP doesn’t use the new XP scroll bars. Holy 1995.
Having trouble following the rules in-house can make it all the more difficult to police other developers.
Buying Music Isn’t Hard to Do
My final criticism is not visual. In fact, it looks great. Trouble is, it smacks of the overwhelming advertising tactics of RealPlayer. While browsing folders, there are panes with common commands on the left of the window. For the most part, they are quite handy and intuitive. However, when you are browsing a music folder, the following ‘helpful’ option shows up.
Final Thoughts and Compliments
You’ll also occasionally catch a glimpse of the scaffolding behind this pretty OS. When opening a new window, or expanding a new tree in the start menu, if your computer is working at something else you’ll often see the old Win2k grey before the pretty new colors load in. This only happens for a split second, but it undermines the feeling of stability (which can be just as important as actually stability in terms of customer satisfaction).
Despite all of this criticism, I am generally pleased with XP so far. The ‘Thumbnail’ view for images is more refined and much faster than in Win2k. Also, the sorting and grouping options for files and folders are simple, but quite handy. For example, you can group a folder of images by file size or actual image dimensions.
If you have a folder with 3000 images, a third of which are thumbnail, another third large images, and the rest icons, sorting by dimensions is fantastic. See an example grouping by date. For someone who deals with a lot of images, these features are a nice touch.
These points are mostly quite trivial on their own. Together, though, they can undermine with feeling of stability and consistency of the system.
More thoughts as they come to me.