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Branislav Kropilak Photography
Some of the most original and refreshing photography I’ve seen in a long time. Via Subtraction.
World Events - Impact on Web App Traffic
Quite telling how Flickr, Last.fm and Google all registered drops in traffic during the inauguration ceremony, but Twitter spiked.
The History of the Internet — an animated guide. A well produced infographic guide to the evolution of the grand network of networks. I’m not sure France was using the Euro in the days of CYCLADES, but details schmetails. Via Ryan Carson.
The Feltron 2008 Report
Nicholas Felton is back with another beautiful and meticulously designed report detailing his activities and habits in 2008. For more background info, check out Paul Boag’s interview with Nicholas on the process behind the reports. You can also buy printed copies of his reports from 2006-2008, as I’ve just done.
Tim Van Damme's Web Based Biz Card
So elegant it just directly seduced my brain before my eyes could figure out what was happening.
The Big Picture
Stunning photos gathered from the top news agencies on big stories and events. Hop on their RSS feed.
Twitter Follow Cost
A magnificent idea - look up how Twit-happy people are before you follow them, in average updates per day and the ingenious new unit of milliscobles (relative to Robert Scoble’s thoroughly ridiculous average of over 21 a day). I’m quite cheap at 0.18, or 8.64 milliscobles. Get following.
Liberty City (GTA4) vs New York City
Side by side comparisons of locations in New York, and their modelled representations in Grand Theft Auto 4’s Liberty City.
Procedural Art by Glenn Marshall
Application Interface Design Guidelines
An excellent set of rules from Matt Chisholm, many of which you will doubtless have noticed if you’re a Windows Mobile user.
Web Designer Cheat Sheets
Covering everything from Photoshop shortcuts to HTML entity references.
Modular Wine Glasses
A reinvention of the wine glass set by Sherwood Forlee. Metal stems for enhanced strength and interchangable glasses for easier storage.
More photos over at Yanko Design.
Good Night Firefox (Good Morning Chrome?)
Some exciting times may be just around the corner in web browser land, as news of Google’s rumoured foray into the browser market is “leaked” in the form a rather spectacular Scott McCloud drawn comic strip.
Here are some highlights:
- WebKit based: debatably the best performing rendering engine out there at the moment
- Tab process isolation: one process per browser tab, so one tab crashing will only lose you that tab, like having everything in Prism or Fluid (also delivering security and performance benefits)
- V8 javascript VM: a ground-up rethink of a modern javascript Virtual Machine — faster better stronger
- The might of the Google server farm being put to work on software testing, including tests of rendering bugs
The obvious question that remains unanswered by this lovely graphic medium for product introduction is; “can I get my Firefox extensions into it?”. The extensions I use on a daily basis are probably all that are keeping me from switching to Safari or Opera, and I put up with a lot of crashes for those extensions. Here’s hoping there will at least be a means for extension developers to port their code to Chrome, and that Firebug crosses the gap quickly.
I’m predicting that the Google effect will kick-start a strong take up rate, but it will be very interesting to see how things stand in terms of market share a couple of months after Chrome launches.
Olympic Medal Table Bias
Now that the spectacular events in Beijing have drawn to a close, I’ve been looking at the final medal tables and how different news sites are representing them.
There’s something suspicious about the sorting order. The official table ranks by gold medal count (but includes a rank by total medals), putting China in first place. This method is also used by the relatively neutral Reuters and the BBC.
Curious then, how the some US news sources are choosing to sort by the total medal count, which puts the USA out in front. How convenient:
