Project Alphabet is a collection of photographs which documents “found letters” in objects.
Some of the pictures are great at spurring the imaginative possibilities of typography.
New Battlestar Galactica series for Dec 2003
All you Battlestar Galactica fans get ready… it’s time for a remake of the classic original television series.
The new 3GPP Multimedia standard for Mobiles
A first look at the new 3GPP Multimedia standard for Mobiles. Based on the MPEG4 standard and Quicktime architecture, mobile phones are now being turned into a multimedia paradise.
Here is a technical fact sheet (PDF) on the 3GPP standard and also the official 3GPP website.
The SARS Art Project
Whilst reading BoingBoing a few weeks ago I came across a little project Xeni Jardin started alongside some of the other folks at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and founder Mark Frauenfelder.
The SARS Art Project is a collection of reader-submitted contributions of Sars Art.
Designing with a backdoor in mind
Jeff Lash has written a useful and interesting article in Digital Web magazine titled, IAnything goes – an interesting article looking at the importance of designing for visitors who don?t necessarily visit or enter a website through the home page.
The Best of CHI-Web & SigIA-l discussions
I thought I posted this in March, but whilst searching the archives I couldn’t find it, so here it is… UIWeb have collated a useful list containing the best of CHI-Web & sigIA-l discussions.
It is a quite useful summary and the discussions are extremely interesting, particularly if you have an interest in the area of usability and HCI.
The CHI-Web and sig-IA mailing lists are two email based discussion groups on the topics of web usability, design and human computer interaction.
Beagle 2 takes off. Next stop… Mars
So we are off to Mars once again, this time with the British led Beagle2 effort to land on Mars as part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Mission which took off the other day.
Following the Mars Pathfinder mission of 1997 and the spectacular panoramic photos of the red planet it brought back, the Beagle2 is expected to reach Mars for Christmas.
Here are some movie clips from the live webcast of the Beagle2 mission which launched on June 2nd by a Soyuz launcher from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
Apple’s patented Piles user interface
The Register comments in more detail of Apple’s patented Piles User Interface.
Tagged as the next generation User Interface (UI) and designed to replace the windows/folders metaphor which apple designed back in 1981. Piles focuses more on the semantic meaning of how data is organised, stored and searched rather than the familar grouping by files and folders.
Piles was developed by Gitta Salomon and her colleagues at Apple’s Advanced Technology Human Interface Group and was announced to the world at the CHI conference in May 1992.
Piles is rumoured to be used for the first time in the forthcoming version of Apple OS X 10.3 operating system.
Google Limit
Ok, Google is big and Google is beautiful. That’s why we use it as our preferred search engine (don’t we?!?).
But Google doesn’t know everything and just because Google can’t find something, doesn’t mean it’s not out there.
Here is a test project for the Reloade-community:Out of pure curiosity I’m trying to find the shortest reasonable search string where Google returns a
Your search – “xyz” – did not match any documents.
I haven’t written any of these search words down yet, but with little competition, I could be challenged.
Ready, steady. go…
Printing URL’s of links using @Media Types
CSS properties are designed for a variety of media such as braille, handheld, projected presentations, including printers.
When printing a Web page can often not include the URL’s behind those links. A little bit of CSS can help by using the print @media type property.
[css] @media print {a[href]:after {
content: ‘ [‘ attr(href) ‘]’;
}
}
[/css]
The above code allows for displaying the URL behind a link on the printed page, while hiding it when shown on the screen.
With a little bit of CSS3, the future successor of CSS2, the printed page can be customised with a little bit in more added details:
The browser must be able to handle CSS2 to use this function. The most recent versions of Mozilla and Opera are capable of that.
[css] @media print {a[href^=”http://”]:after, a[href^=”ftp://”]:after {
content: ‘ [‘ attr(href) ‘]’;
}
}
[/css]
Other Media Types include:
- all (Used for all media type devices)
- aural (Used for speech and sound synthesizers)
- braille (Used for braille tactile feedback devices)
- embossed (Used for paged braille printers)
- handheld (Used for small or handheld devices)
- print (Used for printers)
- projection (Used for projected presentations, like slides)
- screen (Used for computer screens)
- tty (Used for media using a fixed-pitch character grid, like teletypes, terminals)
- tv (Used for television-type devices)
EU Domains
The EU-appointed registrar for .eu domains is EURid, an amalgamation of a Swedish, a Belgian and an Italian registrar.
The .eu TLD (top level domain) is seen as a counterpart to .com, and EURid estimates one million registrations within the first year, private individuals are welcome too.
Prices are not known yet. Interestingly the EURid web pages are completely un-European just in English. However, you have six months left to decide whether you really need a .eu domain. Registrations start then.
3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference
Who hasn’t got at least one of those e-mails once, asking for contact persons, allegedly to get millions of dollars (US) out of Nigeria (or South Africa)? Well, in Nigeria millions of dollars still await to be brought abroad safely.
Would-be reputable gentlemen untiringly point it out to us via e-mail. Good that there are seminars and conferences for enterprising Nigerians. “Write better emails. Make more moneys” is the motto of the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.
IETF – The Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website contains a listing of all protocols and standards created for the Internet.
The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and its the smooth operation. It is open to any interested individual.
They are slightly difference to IEEE and ITU who also deal with standard for hardware electronics and mobile or telecommunications.
Photos from the Annular Eclipse
The BBC posts some readers photos of the annular solar eclipse which was seen from the north-west of Scotland, a large area of Europe, the Middle East and some areas of Asia, including india. The photos are spectacular.
Annular eclipses occur when the Moon slips in front of the Sun’s disc creating a ring of fire.
The next total solar eclipse in November, but will only be viewable in Antarctica.
Screen captures of on-screen Help
Here is an interesting gallery comparing the different types of on-screen Help by software-applications on the Mac, both for Mac OS9 and OS X.