Tailored programming & graphics from Glasgow, Scotland
Recent Entries
The idea that somebody would want to sift through your entire life is pretty daunting. It almost feels like facebook is aiming themselves towards the stalker in every one, with the addition of the ticker feed that displays everything that your friends are up to (even if they are not talking to people you know).
I'm not knocking their timeline idea entirely as I can see some of their reasons for the change. However, there are some problems with it both on a retrospective and personal level. What if theres something you posted 4 years ago that you don't want people to see now? Everytime you delete an older post it grabs a new one in its place (nobody wants that now do they?). I think this part needs further looking into. Unless you live your life like Mother Teresa you are going to find yourself spending the next few months tidying your profile up.
You can find facebook's introduction to the timeline here at more →
Here is a segment taken from the Initial project overview document -
"The lack of a student community within the school of computing at Edinburgh Napier University is undoubtedly apparent with very few effective online resources for student support. However, the actual idea of having an online community at Napier is not a new concept, yet to this day, it seems no applications are currently thriving or having any real impact on the student community at the university. The growing availability of social computing platforms, with APIs which enable the programmer to customise these, has led to an increase in time spent socialising online. Answers will aim to harness the current online technologies and use them to develop an application that, until now, has failed to generate any real peer-peer community environment."
You can view a selection of screenshots and snippets here and here.
... more →If you're a veteran designer you will have already realised just how busy and messy html files can be, even if you've spent hours indenting your code and making it beautiful. The question I have been asking myself recently is "What can I do to make this better?" and it's that same question that has helped me in the making of my new site design.
I recently read some books on CSS and HTML that really struck a chord with me. One of these books, 'HandCrafted CSS', goes on to describe a few things that are now invaluable to my design processes.
I'll start off with "Progressive Enrichment", a new way of looking at designing for multiple browsers. Dan Cederholm describes in his book 'HandCrafted CSS' that we don't need to mirror our websites perfectly from browser to browser, rather, we should reward users, visually, for using a modern browser (I know, refreshing isn't it?). Dan goes on to describe his use of 'border-radius' as an example of this progressive enrichment. I've already started using this method in my design processes and it's a breath of fresh air in comparrison to the browser headaches of the past. But, of course, sometimes we will have to design for IE6 (God help us) and in those cases progessive enrichment just isn't feasible.
Another method described in the book is "Self-Clearing" floats. We all have, at some point, had ... more →