We got a super early copy of the new summer Howies catalogue through the door last week and I see that they’ve now re-designed their website.
The website is a nice subtle improvement on the old, mainly just navigation tweaks and even more fantastic photos from what I can remember. They’ve got some very nice looking t-shirts and tops but I should really resist spending more money this month 
.
Joe has a great post about Waterstones decision to break out of it’s (totally insane) e-commerce relationship with amazon.
“The new website will embrace employee blogging, a dramatic reversal for the company that emerged last year as the first British company to sack an employee for blogging.
Joe Gordon, 37, who worked for Waterstone’s in Edinburgh for 11 years, was dismissed for personal commentary regarding his day-to-day life at the bookstore on his blog.
However, Mr Giles said HMV’s new digital approach would not extend to rehiring Mr Gordon.”
Man, that is priceless.
Kerry and I had a Random Day Off on Wednesday this week. It was ace, we totally slept in and then went out into the gorgeous weather for lunch at Howies on Victoria street. I had brocolli and pea soup and then chilli chicken escalope on foccacia, or something. Whatever it was, it was damn tasty. Kerry had corn cakes to start and then some kind of squid thing, which I refused to try in my stuberness.
After lunch we went to see the Anatomy Acts exhibition at the City Art Centre. It was pretty cool, rather gruesome, but very interesting. Lots of models and paintings of the insides and outsides of bodies, medical instruments and very old, very elaborate anatomical texts. They even had some doctor chaps wooden operating trolley from eighteen-oh-something that must have seen a fair bit of blood spilt on it, as the wood was a good browny-red shade on top. It goes over three floors of the gallery and was a lot larger than I was expecting, especially for a free exhibition. They even have some modern medical imagery stuff from MIR and CAT scanners on a big screen which reminded me of the Visualisation course I did at uni.
A great day off, and it made the week seem really short!
So I notice that flickr have had an interface re-design away from using bits of flash and into the oh so fashionable realm of AJAX. The drop-down menus at the top remind me a little of the Office 97 menus which (back then) totally destroyed the idea that Microsoft have any kind of UI guidlines or consistency. But hey, its all good. Even more things happen instantly with out a page load, the new organizr is a work of art and the new user inspector popup thing is way cool.
Last week whilst on a Flickr uploading spree of my Beltane photos I hit the free account photo set limit and bought a Pro account, it was just too easy, and they took paypal. My grand scheme (aside from the volcano lair) is to make Edinburgh Urban Art (currently languishing in ‘forgotten’ land) a super-awesome front end onto flickr using the API. I’m not even sure what I want is possible with the API but any kind of easy user collaboration will be better than its current state. To start the ball rolling in this direction I’ve founded an Edinburgh Street Art group to collate all the fantastic stuff we see around the city. Get uploading!