BBC reports that recent technologies such as sms and email is slowly changing the way we use language, words such as hello and goodbye are being replaced with Hey, G’day, Hola, Yo and Laters, Ciao, Au revoir and Hasta la vista baby.
The article comments that in perhaps 50 years words such as hello and goodbye might no longer be needed in electronic communication.
I was watching Catch me if you can on DVD over the weekend with subtitles on and I noticed that at certain parts of the movie (about half way) titles were added when no dialogue was being spoken.
It made me think of some of the standards associated with subtitling in movies, television, etc. After a little search I found some standard guidelines for UK television.
The standard covered topics such as readability, for example, 1.5 line spacing, type of foreground & background of text, font styles to use, same punctuation printed english, as well as the colours to use such as combinations of colours for text and background.
For example, black background with either white, yellow, cyan and green text is allowed. Use of magenta, red and blue should be avoided. Of the combinations with coloured background, the most legible are blue on white, white on blue (preferred), red on white (preferred), white on red, cyan on blue (preferred) and blue on cyan.
Some other interesting standards include, timing, spacing, positioning on screen, leading and lagging (pauses), subtitling for emphasis and phrasing, tone of voices, music and sound effects.
The research to the standards of subtitling was co-funded for the UK by ITC and BBC as well as by the Centre for Deaf Studies at Bristol University. There is further research available which also looks at the subtitling for children’s programming as well as news and sign language.
Most of the research, reports and publications are available from ITC.
Other resources:
NCAM – The National Center for Accessible Media, International Captioning Project
RNDI – Subtitles for TV, DVD and Video Tapes
If you’re in Australia (or online) and you enjoy Breaks and other slammin’ beats, don’t miss Mix-Up tomorrow night (Sat) on Triple J 105.7FM, with UK guest dj Adam Freeland behind the wheels of steel for an 80 minute set.
He is by far one of the best Breaks dj’s around at the moment.
Even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both.
Reference: Eco U. (12, Nov. 1996) From Internet to Gutenberg – A lecture presented by Umberto Eco at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America [Online] Available: http://www.hf.ntnu.no/anv/Finnbo/tekster/Eco/Internet.htm
Whilst reading this blog post by Peter Merholz, which commented on the ACM Interactions article by Microsoft’s Dennis Wixon, Evaluating usability methods: Why the current literature fails the practitioner (which I’ve downloaded but haven’t read yet).
I came across a comment post by Beth Mazur from IDBlog on the useful paper by MAYA Design, Inc. and published for the 2001 UPA (Usability Professionals’ Association) Conference, in Lake Las Vegas.
The paper, An Integrated Method for Evaluating Interfaces (free to read) shows Maya’s process and methods when integrating user research, heuristic evaluation, affinity diagrams, cost-benefit charts, and recommendations for use in planning both short and long-term improvements to interfaces.
It is a useful and interesting read.
Eric Scheid, who runs the really cool WiKi site, AIWiKi sent me an email the other day of an upcoming local Sydney Information Architecture meet on Thursday, 14th August, 2003.
It is a non-formal chilled out affair where like minded people just chill and drink-up. :)
I’ll be heading out, so I might see you there – make sure you RSVP first, all details can be found here.
With possibly an indication that a new or updated version of Macromedia Flash might be around the corner, Macromedia have released a BETA version of their next Flash Player 7.
The Player is available for Windows, OS9 and OSX, but is still under development and might contain a number of software bugs and require fixes.
A copy of the Beta Plug-in, FAQ‘s and release notes can be downloaded and viewed from the Macromedia website.
Today, Friday August 1 is National Jeans for Genes Day in Australia, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
The event is a great cause to help find cures for leukaemia, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and other genetic disorders of young and infant children.
To show your support, simply wear your jeans to work, uni, school, wedding, etc. and buy a badge or make a small donation.
Jeans for Genes Day is celebrated globally with other nations celebrating it on other dates, the UK celebrates their Jeans for Genes Day on Friday October 3rd and Canada on October 2nd.
NBC reports that Teenagers & Young adults are online longer than on Television per week.
In addition:
The American Academy of Paediatrics has published a report of possible negative health effects of television viewing on children and adolescents.
possible negative health effects of television viewing … such as violent or aggressive behavior, substance use, sexual activity, obesity, poor body image, and decreased school performance.
Update: The Washington Post reports on Teens are spending more time consuming media, on mobile devices
Don Norman has posted a really interesting article in JND on a remote control developed by a small company in Canada called Harmony, which is Activity-Centred.
Their remote controls are designed not to control a Television, VCR or DVD player, but to do an activity such as watch a DVD, or watch Cable, or TV.
Remem (The Remembrance Agent) is a plug-in developed and maintained by Bradley Rhodes, for Emacs (a Unix-based text editor), which suggests information relevant to what you’re currently reading or writing.
It is a cursor based tool that helps with associative memory, unlike search tools that help with direct recollection. The plug-in is available as a TAR and GZIP file and requires GNU Make to compile.
The site also contains useful research documents on the tool and associated topics on intelligent user interfaces.
A closeup photo by Stefan Seip of a solar prominence (a cloud of solar gas held just above the surface by the Sun’s magnetic field).
The photo was taken on 1 June from Stuttgart, Germany with an amateur telescope and camera.
Gabe Zentall, a San Francisco-based user experience consultant has uploaded a library of User Interfaces in Adobe Illustrator format to be used when creating prototypes, user interface mockups and models for clients and testers.
The interface templates, which are free to download and use, includes useful buttons, menus, windows, and form fields as used in OS X, Windows and Palm OS screens.
Macromedia have launched their latest product called, FlashPaper. A currently windows based new tool that converts any printable document into a compact, web-friendly Macromedia Flash format with web page properties.
I couldn’t help but find a resemblance with Adobe’s direction with the PDF format, nevertheless the tool works with Macromedia Contribute 2.
Gene Expression, a weblog on Genetics and it’s connection to cultural & social issues, has posted a full copy of the interesting Technology Review article from last month titled, Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate by David Rotman.
The article and user comments discusses the current international project, The Haplotype Map (HapMap), which endevours to map genetic differences between population groups and cultures to allow researchers to find genes and genetic variations that affect human disease.
