This map of San Francisco’s “Walkability” by Lee Byron uses a similar blobby algorithm to The Neighborhood Project.
I want one of his Centerclocks for my wall. He’s also got a nifty Rivers of the World map, and he’s the guy behind the NY Times’ Olympic Medals Cartogram and Presidential Polling graphic (which thankfully shows Obama in the lead in a majority of the polls).
Punk rock heralded the decline. Then hipsters come along and Adbusters nails them for what they are: the dead end of western civilization.
Hank Williams busts out the brutal honesty: UI Guru Jakob Nielsen’s site is unreadable. And John Gruber concurs. Every time I end up there, I wonder idly why I’ve never gotten around to reading through what looks like great content. And after a few moments I close the window because the colors are so awful.
And why doesn’t his 10 Best Application UIs of 2008 awards announcement actually link to the winner’s sites? Seven of them are web applications, but if I want to know about any of them, I have to copy the product name, open a new tab, and look it up in Google. There’s a reason it was called “hypertext,” and the ability to have yellow and teal backgrounds isn’t it.
Edward Tufte’s books do a beautiful job of illustrating how to present huge amounts of information clearly and simply. Well presented information is critical to good interface design, but it’s not the whole story. Guidelines on how to present complex functionality clearly and simply are harder to find.
I’ve just spent two months carrying a terrible, ancient cellular phone and a mediocre non-Apple music player around the planet, and interacting almost exclusively with Windows XP terminals at internet cafes and hostels. As my frustration with these poor interfaces grew, I started a rough list of interface design guidelines. Here they are:
Adam Wulf, of the modestly named welcome.totheinter.net, has drunk the Browser-side MVC kool-aid! You too can drink this flavorful kool-aid here, here and here.
I’ve found two nifty “I drink your milkshake” t-shirts. This one is the best:
And this one deserves an honorable mention.
While you’re at it, buying this shirt will go towards saving the historic Hill Valley Clocktower.
Plus, this is a particularly nice execution of angels having the phone box.
Zed Shaw disses on every Linux feedreader you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t, and then finds his holy grail in Newsbeuter. I’ll have to try it.
Update 2008-08-12: I’ve tried it. It seems good, but it doesn’t seem to automatically update my feeds.
I just sent this to Google AdWords tech support. It’s self-explanatory. I’ll post the response from Officer Darth Google (if there is any).
Yesterday, I edited and changed only the URL in Google ads I was running for a t-shirt I made on RedBubble. The text of my ad remained unchanged. Yet suddenly Google has decided that my ads, whose text has not changed, are now in violation of a supposed trademark on the word “angels.” I fail to see how changing the URL in my ads suddenly makes the ad content infringing.
An “angel” is a Judeo-Christian mythological creature that predates U.S. trademark law, and in fact the entire nation, by at least two thousand years. It appears in a book called The Bible which you may have heard of.
The only corporation that I can think of which might have a trademark on anything having to do with angels is the Anaheim Angels baseball franchise. My ads are for t-shirts which say “The angels have the phone box” and are wholly and completely unrelated to Anaheim Angels, baseball, or in fact the entire continent of North America. If you follow the link and look at the shirts, you will see there is nothing related to the team or the sport on the t-shirts. Heck, they’re not even related to the great sport of cricket.
The phrase on my t-shirts is from, and targeted at, the fan community around a British television show called Doctor Who. I fail to see how the word “angel” could be infringing on anyone’s trademark.
I wonder, does Robbie Williams’ song “Angels,” or the book and movie “Angels in America” by Tony Kuchner infringe on this same supposed trademark? What about the lyric “I see angels in the architecture” from the song “You can call me Al” by Paul Simon? What about the street named “Angel Kanchev” in downtown Sofia, the capital of the great nation of Bulgaria?
I’m no expert in trademark law, but I’m reasonably sure that it would be my neck or other body part on the line, not Google’s, if the supposed holder of this trademark on “angel” (possibly it is The Vatican?) decided to sue. Thanks for looking out for me, Google, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take. I wonder if they also have a trademark on the word “phone,” “box,” or maybe on “have” or “the.”
I’m not changing the text of my ad. That would be like requiring a toilet paper company to remove the word “paper” from their ad because Paper, Inc. held a trademark. And my t-shirts are a lot cooler than toilet paper anyway. So you can either re-approve my perfectly reasonable ad, or I just won’t run Google ads for my t-shirt, and you won’t get any money from me. Your call. I suppose you’re not really hurting for money over there at Google anyway. Let me know what you decide, and thanks for listening.
This is a great, thoughtful article about Garrett Lisi, the reluctantly famous author of the ballyhooed An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.
