A while ago Alex pointed me to this site about how to make your own cute pixel objects. I messed around a bit and came up with this:
Hey, it’s a start! It also came to me that you could write code to do this for you. Some kind of php module with methods like:
pixelcube(dim_x,dim_y,colour);
You could have a pixel objects graphics library with all the basic primitives like cube, sphere etc. Hrm.
So, after my marathon post below about new search engine features, A9 have come out with a new Yellow Pages function. They went around some of the major cities in the US taking photos of all the shop fronts on either side of the streets. Then, when you search for a business you get an actual picture of the shop frontage. You can even ‘walk’ down the street by flicking along the pictures. All very cool.
Some has hacked it already (of course) so you can grab a view of an entire street. Nice.
And then a9 pay to get a shamelss plug into the OC, someone actually uses the phrase “a9.com-ed”. Doesn’t quite work aswell as “googled” 🙂
All the companies playing catchup to Google have recently brought out new interfaces to their engines. Google have been a staunch follower of the simplistic design approach with a minimalist front page and adverts that are incredibly unobtrusive when compared to their competitors. The competitors have obviously taken note that users maybe actually like looking at nice things and not some mess of animated red/black/purple blinking/scrolling/fading in 20 boxes all packed together on the page.
I’ve always been an admirer of design company 37signals. They have an incredible uncluttered and useable design style. The thing that made me notice them was their ’37better’ project where they redesigned some common websites themselves. They’ve also got a host of very cute projects like Ta-Da Lists, an online task list mananger and their fully-fledged project manager BaseCamp. Such good project names 🙂
In the past I’ve ranted about how clunky the Adwords interface is. Google have at last seen sense and are releasing an API: siliconvalleywatcher.com.
I was reading some rant of Cory’s on boingboing tonight and googled up one of his friends names and found his website. He’s a pretty interesting guy, who’s certainly been hanging out on the internet stoop for a while. I mean, he proposed the alt.* newsgroup category, that is some serious old skool. Anyway, his website has some interesting material, and I find that he is a found member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Clicking ahead I go, bracing myself for the horror that used to be the eff website to find that they’ve had a re-design and its actually not bad. Would be nice it it validated though…
I got the domain bug the other day and went a bit crazy.
I did mange to snag: http://ollyjackson.co.uk which I’m sure was registered to someone last year. I also picked up:
http://ollyjackson.org.uk and http://oliverjackson.org.uk
They are all just pointed here at the moment, but I’ll do something useful with them, sometime.
Every now and again I get the feeling I’ve seen all the cool (i.e. I think is cool) stuff on the net. When I find sites like this I realise how dumb thinking I’ve seen everything is, there’s always something else out there.
Another busy day at work…
I just got this with some of my christmas money. It is extremely shiny and nice:
Another brilliant t-shirt idea from skinnycorp (the people being threadless). Anyone can submit ‘slogans’ which they think would look good on a t-shirt. Then, other users can say whether they would wear them or not. The best ones will then get printed up and the user who submitted the slogan gets $100 and $100 to spend in their store.
Check it out: www.omgclothing.com
Really nice customisable hoodies, tees and lots, lots more:
They’re even more affordable for us Brits at the minute with the weak dollar 🙂
This is geting nuts, it’s made the Scotsman and the Guardian! Joe explains more here.
Also, I started a page collecting together all the publicity.
After talking to Jed (our local friendly lawyer) I figure I should make my position clearer on the whole Joe firing issue. I understand that what Joe did was most likely in breach of his contract and can easily be called Gross Misconduct. It’s just I expected a company such as Waterstones, that sells books, to have a slightly more open-minded approach to this whole thing. A minor reprimand would have been a more apropriate response in my opinion.
Also, stop the presses, Joe has made the front page of boingboing. They’ve quoted a bit of his post where he talks about me, I wish I’d gotten on to boingboing under better circumstances.
I left Waterstones over 6 months ago now and it was basically going downhill when I started about two years ago. Higher levels of management were imposing more HMV-like directives down through the structure and it was all getting very ‘un-bookshoppy’ in my opinion. But hey! I’m glad I don’t work there now because my fellow mate/blogging/geek Joe Gordon has been fired for blogging about working there. OK, he made some small criticisms about the management style but nothing that would warrant a full dismissal. Apparently it was ‘gross misconduct’ and ‘brought the company into disrepute’.
I really do feel for Joe, he certainly brightened the place up when I was there. But he was so frustrated with some aspects of the business that were being imposed. He had to vent somewhere and his blog turned out to be an ideal outlet. His venting was not a frequent thing, after all his blog is based around his satirical magazine, it’s not just a personal blog.
After I stopped working in waterstones I realised how crap it is. I only ever go in there now to talk to people I worked with and get the latest goss. Shops like Blackwells or Ottakars just have more soul. Waterstones is just like a shell that has books and I till in it. OK, this may be a little all-encompassing. There are some renegade branches out there, or ones that have enough clought to get away with stuff (like Manchester Deansgate) but Edinburgh – East End just seems cold. Anyway, I buy most of my books online now from amazon or second stuff from the nice wee shops in Edinburgh.
Joe also seems to have lots of other support on the internet: here, here, here and here.
Threadless, amazing t-shirt suppliers and one of my many money-spending weaknesses have had a re-design. Must resist…
No, I haven’t been honoured. But, Peter Molyneux has been. Molyneux seems to have been around for ever and constantly has amazingly original game ideas. I never really got into Populous back in the day but I did love the Syndicate series and many other Bullfrog games like Theme Park and Theme Hospital. It’s good to see the UK gaming industry getting some recognition at last.
So, they did indeed buy LiveJournal as everyone was speculating. Reading around the Six Apart website I began to think I was a little harsh on them with my hatred towards the mess they made of the Moveable Type licensing. They do seem to be a jolly nice company with nice people working there. I’ve no intention of moving back to MT or going side-ways to Type Pad though, WordPress does everything quickly, cleanly and oh so smoothly for me.
Six Apart, the company behind MoveableType and TypePad are rumoured to be be buying the teen-angst ‘blogging’ emoticon filled pit of despair that is LiveJournal. I gave up on MoveableType when they started the whole world-domination thing and were so obviously neglecting MT in order to work on their pay for use blogging tools. I can almost hear all the livejournals screaming with drama…
I’ve ordered myself one of these babies with my christmas money 🙂 mmmmmm, shiny.
Interesting update about the Quake 3 engine and general game engine talk over at John Carmack’s blog. Including this snippet:
That’s crazy considering how old the original quake engine is, and a testament to how ground-breaking it still is.
So, someone has stolen another of my ideas that I hadn’t implemented yet (well, only in my head). Preshrunk is a blog purely about cool t-shirts to buy off the web. Nice design too 🙂
Happy New Year World!
(Annual change of footer copyright text 🙂 )
