• 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)

• FUMSI – Creating User Centred Taxonomies
  Part one of a two-part article on user-centred taxonomies.
  (tags: ia articles)

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 browsers are applications that most of us use so heavily, they’re the software equivalent of a second skin. It’s not really possible to have an informed opinion on one unless you’ve used it fairly extensively (or gone through the hell of optimising a fairly complex website on one – but that’s another story!).

So, I’ve decided to put Firefox 3 to one side and use Google Chrome exclusively for a few days. Then I’ll write up my thoughts on how I feel it measures up.

But one thing I can say about it now is, what’s up with the browser crashing when you type “:%” into the address bar? I’m amazed they didn’t pick that up in QA…

Edit, January 2010: So, a while after writing this post, I went back to Firefox. I just missed add-ons too much. But without really noticing it, I gravitated back to Chrome to the point that it was my sole browser by around October 2009. It was mainly to do with speed; when feeling impatient I’d open Chrome while waiting for Firefox to load, and after a while I’d just open Chrome. When Google launched extensions for Chrome recently, I became even happier with it. I haven’t even installed Firefox on my new PC at home. It’s a shame though as I want Mozilla to succeed; I just think that Firefox has crossed the line into bloatware.

• 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, back in 1975
  I was born in 1975. At around the same time some people in IBM were producing this slideshow involving some vintage computer imagery and amazing typography. The presentation was about the transformative powers of databases.
  (tags: technology presentation vintage)
• How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
  Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, discusses the company's creative culture. The article covers the resolution of a creative crisis on Toy Story 2, the "brain trust" model and the importance of post-mortems. Catmull repeatedly comes back to the theme of open communication and how important it is for people to communicate passionately without it being taken as personal, something that creative teams often find difficult.
  (tags: creativity management)

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 functioned more like a software application than a straightforward website, but without using Flash or Java. We went on to produce detailed specifications, site maps, activity flows and the full visual design for the site.

One of the design principles was that “image is king” – the interface design needed to be clean and minimal so as not to stand between the user and the site’s images. The above homepage screenshot gives a sense of how we achieved this.

The new site also makes use of horizontal scrolling, which is quite a radical departure from convention.

We were engaged to carry out over forty user testing sessions in Cologne and London to validate this concept and ensure that users wouldn’t find it too baffling. I conducted these sessions myself and went on to produce the analysis document that led to a series of final refinements being made.

From a technical point of view the project has been really ambitious. If you work in web presentation technologies, I urge you to go and have a play – I think you’ll be impressed with the quality of the coding and the adaptibility of the interface. The company that built the site, Orange Logic, did an amazing job. When we were handing over the functional specification back in November 2007, I was worried that the site was just too complex to be delivered without resorting to Flash. I’m glad to have been proved wrong!