As part of my generally rabid addiction to web feeds and blogs, I've stumbled on an entire underwold of photography blog sites. There is some really great talent out there. Some strut their stuff on an almost daily basis. Here are some of my favorites:
There are tons of others out there. Photoblogs.org is an excellent resource that makes it easy to list/find all sorts of photography blogs out there.
Remember, great photographs are not just for inspiration. They're also a great way to extract color schemes.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 19, 2004, 12:50PMOver the past three years I've consulted at a large financial institution, a well-recognized university and a major publisher. I've worn various hats but my roles have typically put me pretty close to the embedded technology groups within them. These groups are typically clearly segmented and are viewed as internal services arms of their respective companies.
Looking back, I can't help but notice some really bothersome patterns that the tech groups in the various organizations had in common.
For one, they perceived technology as an end in itself. Rather than taking approaches that could solve problems quickly and easily, they often made technical decisions that were simply wrong for the task at hand. The rest of the company couldn't say a word because, well, they don't know enough about technology. Unless you know cars, you aren't going to argue with your mechanic about the validity of his conclusions. You simply trust him (or find another mechanic).
And so, these companies trust their technology groups to make the right decisions to fit their needs. Instead, these groups often bake factors into their decision-making that are irrelevant and often unhealthy for the organization as a whole. They either take on technology because (a) they've already invested in it professionally (i.e. they’re well trained) or (b) they think a particular technology is "cool." It is exasperating to see heavy-lifting, costly technologies applied to some of the most basic corporate needs.
Far more telling than the strategic decisions these groups make is the absolutely chronic aversion to risk that technology groups suffer from. In these large organizations, you will commonly run into outlandish timeframes, endless disclaimers and an absence from any desire to "step up" and proactively seek out efficiencies and productivity gains for their users. The larger the company, the more ominous the perceived risk. Instead of appreciating the mandate handed to them, tech groups collapse into a territorial mindset. Their corporate survival – the battles for budget dollars and head counts – take precedent over the reason they exist in the first place. The result: your company is taken hostage.
In light of the outsourcing explosion that American tech workers need to contend with, I think this is cause for concern. There are some very bright and very hungry people out there that would love to replace the typically stagnant American technology group. The outsourcing of routine and mundane tasks should be embraced by American tech workers. It should be perceived as a "freeing up" for Americans to do what we're known for: innovate. Instead, there's a groundswell of anger towards companies that outsource. This anger comes from an unhealthy place in my opinion. Tech workers in the U.S. need to be less concerned about outsourcing and more concerned with reinventing themselves as indispensable players in technology.
I'm well aware that my experiences are far from a representative sample of what is happening in corporate America. Nevertheless, I can't help but notice the trend. Personally, there are few things that give more satisfaction than solving a pressing business need with a simple and elegant technical solution. In the end, it is about making the customer happy. Rather than being occupied about defending their territory – whether against internal encroachments or outsourcing – the American tech worker needs to stay focused on the customer. If the customer is happy, the territory will take care of itself.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 18, 2004, 11:13AMGoogle introduced another flavor of search today: Google Scholar. There's a big fat FAQ for the curious.
Are they days of purity for RSS winding down? I suppose it's an inevitable consequence of ever-increasing popularity. Overture has begun testing RSS ads. Google may soon follow.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 15, 2004, 03:31PMIf there's anything that can get a web developer excited, its the Firefox Web Developer Extension. It has a laundry list of very cool features that would anyone working in the web practically giddy (ok, maybe not giddy).
Give it a look. Very handy.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 12, 2004, 03:18PMThe computer that runs Times Square - yes, the one that lights it up into all sorts of colors and barrages all those Midwesetern and German tourists with all kinds of evil commercialism, crashed recently. Largest blue screen ever.
Hurry, somebody reboot Times Square.
A relatively commonplace feature in RSS aggregators is the ability to group your feeds under a common "Channel Group." This allows you to create topic areas of interest and just dump feeds into those groups. For example, I've got "News", "Design" and "Opinions" channel groups as well as others.
I currently use FeedDemon as my preferred RSS client and one of the features I like most is the ability to scan a "Group Newspaper." This allows me to get a nice birds-eye view of all the new entries in a particular group without jumping from feed to feed. Very cool.
All this euphoria triggered an idea: allow me to share and publish a single "mixed feed" that takes all of the contributing feeds and "mixes" them together. There are actually a couple of sites out there that do these along particular areas of interest. Full As A Goog comes to mind for Macromedia-centric blogs. There you'll find five or so feeds that are really just blends of various contributing feeds. Rather than adding 25 feeds on Flash technology, I simply add that one Full As A Goog feed and I'm done.
I think this could easily be described as part of a basic RSS module that extended the RSS spec. The contributing feeds could actually be listed in-line within the RSS payload. The current RSS 2.0 spec could pretty easily accomodate some of the other requirements of a mixed feed (e.g. specifying the source for a particular item).
When I have some time, I'm going to take a stab at drafting a module specification for RSS mixed feeds.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 11, 2004, 09:30AMA pretty neat resource for designers is hosted by the Big Mama of graphics software - Adobe. The Adobe Studio has free tutorials, downloads (symbols, brushes and the like) and other goodies for designers.
This is somewhat sad. Winamp, one of the best media players for the Win32 platform, is no more.
For me (and for many early on), Winamp was the MP3 player to use. It was lean and worked great. It's safe to say it was my stereo system for the last few years. Ah well, so long Winamp.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 10, 2004, 11:43PMMicrosoft has unveilved its new and improved search engine.
There are even headlines comparing the counter-attack to the Microsoft-Netscape drama of years ago. I don't know about all that. Google sure ain't no Netscape. Nevertheless, healthy (i.e. ruthless) competition is always fun to watch.
Turns out that Google Desktop isn't the only player in town. Tools to scour and index your hard drive for easy searching have been around for a while now.
Cnet recently did a roundup of the various desktop search tools out there. They selected Copernic as their Editor's choice.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 9, 2004, 10:24AMThe sexiest browser alive - Mozilla's Firefox - has been released.
The popular Firefox/Mozilla sites are going bonkers today. You can try hitting one of the mirrors. Here's a Google cache listing of mirrors. Be sure to navigate back up & out to the final release folders.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 5, 2004, 09:01AMI was trolling around for a decent list of the RSS apps that are floating around out there (there are literally hundreds). I stumbled on this neat little listing on the Google Directory.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 2, 2004, 01:39PMI've got an article I'm going to be posting in the next few weeks that touches on how the web is an abysmally poor platform for applications.
A few months back, there was some buzz in the community that web applications were now really starting to kick in and that better, richer experiences were to be had on the web. There's also been a decent amount of writing about the usability of web pages, home pages, and the like. Others critique the usability of sites like Amazon and Ebay.
I don't think such exercises are necessarily bad. Analysis is a good thing. However, I think the design community has really lowered the bar by simply accepting the web browser as an adequate means of application delivery without really scrutinizing its glaring flaws.
Now mind you, this doesn't necessarily apply to content-heavy sites like news magazines or blogs. These are less applications and more publications. I'm really talking about the more involved applications that are pumped through the web - like financial apps and the like.
I think the most fundamental flaw in web applications is subjecting users to the web page paradigm. If a user interacts with a web app in any sort of way, the entire application effectively goes white and the application is effectively “redrawn.” The user is then burdened with the task of surveying this new page and understanding the implications of what he or she just did. In other words, they lose context. This is not a good thing.
Yes, certain conventions have come into place that people have grown accustomed to (e.g. "Add to Cart"). But as soon you start to introduce more involved controls, the page paradigm starts to get in the way. People are constantly re-establishing context when using a web application. This is a big reason why the browser Back button is so heavily relied upon. Users don't feel like they're manipulating persistent objects (a timesheet, a project, etc.) but rather are traversing a series of snapshots in time. This effectively increases the overall cognitive load of the web application.
Various tricks have come about to overcome this. Page element loading without refreshing the entire page (through technologies like XMLHTTP) helps alleviate things, as do pop-up windows that intimate some semblance of modality, but these are just hacks.
As interaction designers, we shouldn't just accede these shortcomings and assume we have to work within them. Yes, the web browser is ubiquitous and we will inevitably have to work within its confines, but all the while, we should continue to press technology to take us beyond this platform.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 1, 2004, 10:41AMVeerle's Blog has posted a nice little tutorial on how to achieve that delicious, candy-like aqua effect. Let the aqua effect overkill begin.