Archive for September, 2008
The dregs of e-commerce
Sep 26th
I’m currently carrying out some research into open-source e-commerce platforms. The research is at a pretty early stage and I’m still putting together the list of packages that we’ll then go on to assess in detail. While putting this short-list together I’m visiting quite a lot of ‘showcase’ sites for each package on my long-list. [...]
Skyfire – a browser for Windows Mobile
Sep 25th
Yep, I’m a Windows Mobile user—although I may not be one for too much longer. It looks like there’s going to be a long wait for Windows Mobile 7 (I’m on version 6) and the new HTC/Google Android device has piqued my interest. But for the time being I’m stuck in WinMo world. I was [...]
links for 2008-09-23
Sep 23rd
310 – The World, Justified « Strange Maps From Strange Maps, cartography meets typography as a pair of Brazilian designers explore what the world would look like left- or right-aligned. (tags: visualisation maps) Very Small Array This site collects infographics of a slightly unusual or quirky nature, or with a particularly pleasing aesthetic. Recent posts [...]
Love letters and live wires
Sep 23rd
On Sunday my girlfriend and I were attempting to make it to BFI in time to watch Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but as a result of some Boris Johnson/Sky Sports-related event we became ensnarled in traffic and arrived ten minutes too late. The BFI don’t show advertisements and don’t allow people in once a [...]
links for 2008-09-22
Sep 22nd
Star Polygon Slightly bizarre 3D shoot-em-up from Japan, quite similar to Space Harrier and so on. Built using Papervision, it runs in the browser and is pretty addictive (tags: games papervision)
Monday morning links
Sep 15th
This weekend everything here was moved from brelson.com/blog to brelson.com, and a couple of links summaries were missed as a result. So I’ve decided to post them manually instead… Planet of the Lemur: 10 Beautiful Little-Known Species Here are some excellent pictures of lemurs. My favourite is the crowned lemur. Thoughts for an eleventh September: [...]
Planet Organic
Sep 13th
They’ve opened up a Planet Organic on Essex Road. I went in there yesterday to see what was going on. There was some free food on offer, a dry crumbly bread-like substance, but I’m too suspicious to comfortably take free stuff (“there must be a catch…”) so I gave it a miss. While I was [...]
links for 2008-09-12
Sep 12th
Digital Nomads – Working Alone Sucks. Stop it! I only spend around 20-30% of my time working from home but can still sympathise with the sense of social alienation it would lead to if I did it much more. This article contains links to co-working initiatives for digital nomads who miss the social interactions of [...]
links for 2008-09-09
Sep 9th
"This Changes Everything" A diatribe against lazy use of the phrase "this changes everything". Makes the accurate observation that this utterance often comes from people who are talking about things that their under-paid, under-30 interns and trainees have probably known about for ages. And they're wrong anyway, nothing really changes everything just as hardly anything [...]
links for 2008-09-05
Sep 5th
Of bits and atoms in long time Interesting article about the Rosetta Project and the challenge of storing data over vastly long periods of time. I didn't know about the Rosetta Space Probe, which is a much more sophisticated artefact than the Voyager record. (tags: tools ia linguistics)
links for 2008-09-04
Sep 4th
FUMSI – Creating User Centred Taxonomies Part one of a two-part article on user-centred taxonomies. (tags: ia articles)
My Google Chrome experiment
Sep 4th
Late yesterday afternoon I joined the rest of the internet and downloaded Google’s new browser, Chrome. I’d initially thought that I’d play around with it for a while, eventually forming an opinion which I’d then broadcast to all and sundry. But while I was doing this it struck me that this was pretty futile. Internet [...]
links for 2008-09-02
Sep 2nd
Time lapse video of slime mold and mushrooms – Boing Boing Mushrooms and their allies are strange life forms with inconceivable but doubtless malicious intent, as these time lapse videos demonstrate. They're ripped off from Planet Earth, however, and have been overdubbed with music from Higher Intelligence Agency (tags: video fungi) IBM predicts the future, [...]
Image Source – redesigned website live
Sep 1st
Since October 2007 I’ve been working on a redesign project for Image Source, a stock photo provider not unlike Getty Images or Corbis. The site went live last night. My company was initially hired to help flesh out the information architecture and design concepts. The central aim of the project was to build something that [...]
Rawnet on web usability
Sep 9th
Posted by brelson in projects
2 comments
I don’t take issue with the broad thrust of Rawnet’s 2008 conversion report, which found that 78% of respondents had been put off companies or services by poor web usability. However, I do take issue with the quote from Adam Smith, their managing director: “companies are losing out on a massive amount of potential business [...]