A new, simpler, cleaner homepage is about to go online for deskhot. This is how it looks.
The aim of the new design is to give out “the message” quicker. Taking out the gradients allows the eye to focus more on the text. On top of that the picture with the kids is great. It gives a warm welcome to new visitors.
New mobile devices concepts emerge constantly.
My favorite is Project Rimino. It’s a concept based on a user interface inspired by print posters. It’s very good looking and user friendly. The people over at Umea Institute of Design have created a detailed page with their inspirations for the concept. Definitely worth looking at.
Another interesting concept is “A day made of glass” by Corning Glass. As you have guessed it’s about devices with glass interface.
It seems designers have understood that buttons on devices are no longer popular. Let’s hope that we’ll see elements of these concepts in production devices in the near future.
Well facebook is the very big thing on the internet right now. A huge number of users, a huge number of buzzwords. “Social engagement”, “Social interaction”, “Content curation” and so on. The big tech blogs always rush to inform us about the latest evolutions in the facebook platform. Even if those “evolutions” are something as silly as changing the text of the “like” button we *have* to be informed. We have to be alert, we have to keep up with whatever that is that facebook is up to. Well in case you got caught in that storm, let me clear up some things.
First and most important, not everyone is on facebook. From the total internet population only a part is on facebook. Less than a third. The other two thirds are only on “the rest of the internet”. Second: facebook doesn’t really have 600 million users. There are 600 million accounts registered but most of those people just log in a few times a month (or less). It’s true that for some people facebook is a daily need, but that doesn’t mean that all of it’s users are equally “addicted”. Third: even within the daily users, a huge part is just browsing holiday pictures and watching youtube videos. Nothing that would justify your attention.
Of course facebook and the tech blogs will always claim that something huge is going on. It’s the equivalent of news on TV. Big scary headlines, always something of huge importance, always something that justifies your time. But the world we live in is not like that. Things that justify our time happen rarely. At least not as often as the TV news claim they do. But if one day you open your TV and see the newscaster saying “another boring day in the news”, the first thing you would do is turn it off and carry on with what you were doing before. It’s the same with tech blogs. If one day you read on mashable that “the social web is not that important” what would you do? Carry on of course. And this is what mashable doesn’t want you to do.
The way I see it, facebook is the TV of our generation. Yes it’s popular, yes it’s important, and yes it’s a huge market. But while you should be aware of it, you should not obsess over it. I’m tired of listening to over-exaggerations like “Oh! now adwords is dead”. Have those people really considered that social networks could might as well be what ICQ and instant messengers were 10 years ago? They were popular, they were important but I’m glad I didn’t waste my time developing ICQ plugins.
Update:
A few days after writing this post I read on technorati that facebook sources are reporting traffic losses for the second month in a row. Read more on the original post.
Inspiration from:
When you’re about to start a new project it’s the right time to move to something new. Sometimes it’s a new CSS or Javascript framework, sometimes it’s a new version control system, in my case it was moving from PHP/CodeIgniter to Ruby/Ruby on Rails.
I started out in my windows 7 laptop and came across a myriad of problems. The first time there was encoding problems. Google came to the rescue. Then I had to configure the system PATH variable a few times since there was no documentation to tell me what to configure. It worked out fine. After a lot of hours I reached the point where I have a working Rails 3 installation but no virtual hosts and of course no sub domains. Unfortunately Passenger doesn’t work on windows and it’s developers don’t plan a release anytime soon. So since I can’t find documentation on virtual hosts with ruby and I’m quite tired of googling I gave up on the idea.
Next stop was Ubuntu. The Rails version in the latest Ubuntu is still 2.x. There are no official repositories to give you a Rails 3 installation out of the box so the most reasonable option is RVM. To make a long story short, after a few hours of trying, it didn’t work. I’m quite well aware that other people have had more success than me but unfortunately for me things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.
In PHP/apache world there are installers for windows that just work out of the box. In any Linux distribution things are even better. So since I don’t own a mac and I can’t spare any more time things are quite clear. The way I see it deployment for Rails is still lacking in options. Maybe Rails is a great way to build web applications and maybe it could save me time in the long run. But the way things are now, it just waists me time. So I’m sticking with CodeIgniter and I’ll revisit Rails next year when it will hopefully be more mature.