Janice Fraser at Adaptive Path neatly sums up the feeling of excitement in the web development community of late in her essay It’s a Whole New Internet. After the dot-com boom and bomb we are starting to see green shoots emerge, in the form of innovative and actually *useful* web site and web applications, many of them from the independent developer community - del.icio.us, flickr, wikipedia, basecamp, ta-da lists - but also from the unstoppable innovation machine that is google - gmail, google maps, google local, google suggest etc. And then we have the wonderful innovations which occur when independent developers are let loose on google’s API - combine google maps with craigslist property listings and you have this beautiful piece of genius from Paul Rademacher.
Those who stuck with this whole web lark after the bomb, because they truly loved the web and could see it’s real potential are starting to build the internet 2.0. They are doing this largely through building innovative applications to fulfil their own needs, rather than with a view to some mythical IPO. Which is nice. The recent emergence blinking into the spotlight of technologies such as xmlhttprequest (a.k.a. AJAX, which has actually been around for a couple of years) are allowing richer interactions on the client-side and will change the rulebook for us ‘interaction designers’ working the web. In many ways, design for web applications will come to more closely resemble traditional design for desktop application, with support for previously impossible tasks such as drag-and-drop, instant form validation, etc.
In fact, many übergeek web-folks (such as Evan Williams, CEO of ODEO) are more or less running their company on web apps. This, of course, rocks. You can pretty much work where you like (which if you have a wireless laptop is lots of places and more all the time), you have a web-based remote backup of all your project files (if you upload regularly, at least) and in a pinch you may not even need to use your own machine to get some work done. (Of course, some apps such as Photoshop and Flash will not be migrating to the web any time soon…)
Anyway, exciting times indeed to be a web designer - I’d better read a few books on XML. And maybe some Alan Cooper.
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Ourmedia.org will host your media, providing free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches. I am SO there, particularly when I start videoblogging in earnest.
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Jesse James Garrett over at Adaptive Path has written an great article describing how Asynchronous Javascript in combination with XMLHttpRequest (AJaX, geddit?) is revolutionising what we can do with web applications - making them faster, more responsive, and more like the desktop applications we know and love. And as we all now, web applications are where all the excitement is at, dig.
This technology is already being used extensively in gmail and flickr, and ushers in a new era of more responsive, smarter interfaces. Time to get our rethinking caps on!
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My most recent design project has now gone live at www.phlirtz.com, which is an online dating/flirting website. The client’s brief included the plea “make it orange”. So I did. Front-end design and coding (and logo) by moi, backend clever making-it-work stuff by the guys at igentics. A sizeable chunk of the project was completed while I was in Vancouver, collaborating remotely with the igentics guys in Cambridge, UK, via the magic of email, IM and the wonderful Basecamp.
It doesn’t validate, due to .NET chucking lots of weird .NET stuff in there, and yes, I used tables for layout of form elements (ooh, naughty), when I could possibly have used definition lists for this purpose, but despite these minor (fantastically geeky and uninteresting) niggles I’m pleased with it. Maybe a tad TOO orange, and a few more pictures and a bit less text on the homepage might not go amiss. What do you think?
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Toshiba are offering a Bone Conduction Pillow. I SO want one. All we need now is bone conduction stereos for our bikes, as in “Virtual Light” by the ever-prescient Mr Wm. Gibson.
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Speaking of web design, the other day I uploaded the freshly redesigned website for The Technical Glass Company, redesigned according to web standards, natch. Sorting out the last few buglets at the moment, but any comments would be very useful. For reference, here is the previous version, replete with nested tables, font tags galore and a dodgy colour scheme, designed by yours truly back in a previous life. In fact, it was my first professional website design project, not included some interface designs for Anglian Water’s intranet site which were never seen by the world at large, thank goodness (think bevelled buttons frenzy). Hopefully it shows some degree of improvement in my design skillz. heh.
I’ve not had much opportunity to work on freelance projects, what with being highly busy in my day job at Firebox.com (which I love, if I haven’t mentioned that before), but I am happy to see almost daily innovations in CSS-based design, such as robust ways of doing rounded corners which can get us away from the overly boxy look of early all-CSS sites. I look forward to trying out some of these new techniques on projects in the new year, including the massively exciting standards-based redesign of Firebox.com itself (currently an ugly mess of nested tables under the hood). That is, if I’m not already know as the “Steering Wheel Bongoes Billionaire” by then… Wish me luck!
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