Posts from the 'Blog' Category

Search for a missing one

When I had a short visit near Lilienfeld in Austria, the news were all about a young guy, who went missing after a concert on a school holiday’s evening. Franz Kendler has not returned home to this day, but there are other things to the search that are the mention worth.


Fotos: BI Werner Planer, FF Wiesenfeld (from this article)

The villages in the area are those small ones with only a few hundred inhabitants, and since this case was the most important news around, I heard the gossips right after crossing the town sign. Therefore, most of the information I had were guesses – ranged from optimistic to pessimistic, and even some dark ones involving pedophiles, a stranger immigrant girl’s family, alcohol overload, new kinds of drugs, and my favorite: the Chinese mob.

Gossips is nothing new though. What I’ve found interesting is how small part modern technology was playing here. Even in a world with smart phones, all day data and network connection, the most peaces of information coming from these devices was, where the phone was last connected to the network – for me, this was rather scary.

A few years ago, as an ad creative, I was working with a worldwide security services group on a product for parents: it was a simple alert system for young children, with a permanent GPS connection and a 15-minute response unit. Since then, this technology got really cheap: nowadays you can follow your friends on Latitude, check your iPhone’s position via iCloud, and there are apps specially designed for parents.

Only one thing left unchanged: if you are alone with no one listening to those signals, even after a few hours, there is not a lot of chance to track you down. It seems to be therefore that to be on the safe side, you are better of to take some friends with you everywhere – all those apps and fancy devices are good for gaining false confidence only.

Without friends looking after us, we better don’t get lost – otherwise the only chance left may be a milk carton campaign.

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Train

I have the tendency to buy flights tickets only a few days before departing, which makes it all much, much more expensive as it should be. And it leaves me with the opportunity to travel a lot by train.

I wouldn’t say that train trips per se are a good thing, for one, because I love to work on airports (yes, it’s a fact: if you work on airports than you are important!) The last Berlin-Vienna trip on the other hand was something I would have again anytime, we had such a great time for those 9.5 hours on the train.

It was great thanks to the following:

  • I was traveling with Katrin; traveling in two is always more fun
  • Full charged laptop battery – I actually managed to be efficient for those 4 hours they lasted
  • Perfect weather: rain and cold outside makes the whole thing freaking romantic
  • Well chosen book: there is no single peace that suits train trips better than 80 days around the world
  • The new Japandroids album

What could have made it even better: good coffee and cleaner toilets, maybe.

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Redesigning Verzetteltes (on Blogspot)

If your girlfriend has an amazing blog, has more and more visitors every week, and you happen to be an UI guy, the least you can do is to make the blog look as pretty as its content – especially if you already promised to do so. Since our experiences might be useful to others running blogs on Blogspot, here are is a few words about the process.

A custom domain really is a must for all serious bloggers, so that was the first step. Since Blogspot (aka. Blogger) is a Google service, this was a rather easy part with a “next-next-finish” experience. That was actually the only thing we had to pay for, with the total cost of about ten bucks.

Before having any graphics done, we agreed on trying to keep the tools Blogspot provides to its users: widgets, social buttons for posts, tagging and so on. This introduces loads of constraints, but in the end, leads to a more flexible blog. Based on the current layouts I created a semi-template, and we started to design: with Katrin’s eyes and my hands we have put together some fine graphics in the end.

Because the already given structure and most of the markup generated by an unknown engine, for the sitebuild, the best approach seemed to be to use a template that is already available on Blogger. We have found one that was quite similar our layout, so I started the work based on that. With the help of Opera’s Dragonfly, the final CSS was done. Luckily I managed to avoid doing serious modifications on the DOM; keeping most of the original markup helped a lot in the integration process.

In the design we used a font that is not present on all platforms; to be able to use American Typewriter for the post headers without Flash, I used Cufon and some font support javascript that was already available for download somewhere.

As a final touch, I removed the Blogspot header as well. Now, I’m not sure if this was a legal move, but Verzetteltes looks much better without the blue strip, and there are a bunch of blogs on Blogger that are already doing that. In the worst case, I’ll be able to write about how to move a blog from Blogspot to WordPress as well.

For the image resources we added, we needed some online storage as well. For this purpose we used Google’s Picasa service – the few images we had easily fitted the free quota. All the JS and CSS content is wrapped in the HTML template, which is not the prettiest solution but seems to be a Blogger best practice.

Katrin’s blog is available at www.verzetteltes.com

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Flash support

I dislike Flash websites, but I prefer being able to open them when I decide so. Therefore, I really like Android’s approach, hate Apple’s ignorance, and – hey, what the hell is Microsoft doing?

The Windows 8 Release Preview is out since yesterday, and one new feature is the Flash support in Internet Explorer. Because this operating system is already the one that will be installed on both tablets and desktop computers, it’s a good opportunity to see Microsoft’s strategy on the topic. The desktop version is less interesting (the browser has the full plug-in), but on portable devices Microsoft seems to share Apple’s performance concerns, and tries to solve the problem.

More than a simple integration, they worked together with Adobe to create a power-optimized, touch-friendly Flash player based on Flash 11.3. This stripped-down version will also have a video player and some more added features, but will miss out those which typically cause battery life problems. The interesting part is that it won’t work on every website: Microsoft will maintain a list of sites that are authorized to use Flash on Windows 8.

This is indeed an interesting concept, but it seems like the question is only about the attitude: weather Apple’s arrogance or Microsoft’s compromises, it’s just the matter of time for those old Flash websites to disappear completely. And although I would be surprised if anyone would dare to create a new Flash-only website now, I want to access them somehow in the meantime – therefore, I’m glad to see Microsoft’s efforts.

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Frederique is back

Teenagers have dreams about drawing famous comics – or was it just me? Whichever it is, I was drawing like crazy with the age of 18.

Those first strips were of course boring, but the main character, Frederique was already there. A few years after, with a help of a friend some more characters were born: a talking chicken in the fridge, some guys always high on weed, and one who was similar to a goofy guy we both knew. Most of them never actually appeared in any of the strip – but the basement has been done. And now it’s time to build the house. (Evil laugh.)

For now, Frederique will appear on it’s Facebook page, and I’ll figure later how to make it part of the blog.

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The importance of being idle

Achievements for this weekend: walking the distance of marathon, sleeping next to a dog, and signing up for a sailing course.


People partying on the top of a working street sweeper in Berlin, after “Karneval der Kulturen”

I can quite agree with those who follow a perfect daily routine to achieve their goals; I tried Pomodoro and GTD myself, and I believe that all sorts of works can be done faster and more efficient if you set up some rules and follow those. On the other hand: the goals to choose from is almost infinite, and in my field, creativity is rated at least as high as the amount of ticks in your todo list.

So training for that with having some days playing football in the park actually makes sense – let’s try to get payed for that.

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The run of McAfee

The founder of McAfee Antivirus went on the run in Belize after his house was ransacked during the search for drugs and guns – and he kept posting from under cover. Regardless of how the story ends, there’s something important to take home here: the freedom of information is great.

“For those of you who follow the news in Central America, you will know that I am in hiding in an undisclosed location in Belize. Hiding out is no fun. I’ve always wondered why people on the run turn themselves in in many cases. I now know the answer – boredom.” – posted John McAfee. (Quoted from the article explaining what happened on Gizmodo.)

For our age, the Internet is an every day tool: we use it to share data, to connect with friends, to have some fun in the evenings. But it has a greater thing to it that can only be seen in times when someone is in trouble. Because weather it’s soldiers having fun killing civilians, a Cuban blogger who wants to share thoughts from behind the curtain; or, hackers want to prove that Sony is pretty careless with its users’ private data – the information will be out there. And this freedom of information, eventually, will make the world a better place.

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Bike repaired

Breaking news: new tires on my bike! (More in this post: procrastinating and laziness.)

As always, when it comes to tasks that seem to be rather inconvenient, we need a trigger to do those: we take down the garbage when the whole kitchen smells, we go to the dentist when the bad looking tooth starts to hurt – and we change the tires on our bikes when it’s not at all safe to ride anymore.

Or not even then. I should have bought the new tires a long, long time ago, but I kept using it for the last half a year, and did another few hundred kilometers on them – luckily, without any accidents. The trigger in my case was a friend with a flat tire near my apartment and the ever stronger feeling that I’m going to die the next corner.

So, at last, from today on I’m a happy urban cyclist again, riding on a safe – but still rather ugly – bike. And this all took 30 minutes tops (by the way: thanks Katrin for the help).

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The power of Facebook

There is a project, started a few years ago, where everything is about smiles: parents get professional photos of their kids, shopping malls get new visitors – and the website of the project gets lots of attention. After we integrated Facebook this year, it got five times more.


Image from MosolyOlimpia.hu

SmileOlympics is a one week event in shopping malls, where children and their families are photographed in the old-fashioned way. The picture taken is a gift for the parents, and there is a smile-wall set up in the venue where visitors can browse through the whole gallery.

After the event there’s an online competition, where users can vote and the photo with the most votes receives a prize. The website was designed in 2006, and not much happened since then: users could register, log in and vote for any pictures they liked. Of course, on an event like this, the customer support had loads of work – people registered with fake e-mail addresses faster than the moderators could delete them, and most of the mothers wanted to know how the other ones kid can have ten times more votes.

As this year the project will become a road show rather than a once-a-year event, we had the resources to improve some bits – and we integrated Facebook in order to prevent multiple registrations. Dumping all the user data we had (well, not quite… but you get the point), we decided to go with Facebook login, and we replaced the voting system with Like buttons. To make sure that users can’t vote before or after the one week competition, we created a database that is synced with Facebook only in that period.

At this point we were afraid of losing users: since it was possible to vote on Facebook without even seeing the website, some users had no reason to do so – to get around this, we had two things in mind. First, we created a Facebook page to reach more users, and provided information and the customer service there as well. Second, we made another competition running: whoever liked at least five photos on the website, could also win a prize.

The results were astonishing: on the first day of the competition, we registered five times more users than in the previous years, 90 precent of whom came from Facebook (compared to about 10 percent in 2011). From Monday to Friday evening Google Analytics registered 30K unique visitors, and after the first two weeks, at this moment there are 2450 likes on the Facebook page. All this without changing anything else on a 6 years old website.

That’s another smile here.

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Levitated interactions

The way we interact with the world is in constant change – for us, users, the best to do here is to adapt as fast as we can. No matter what the current technical development brings to our homes, we will push those buttons, twist the wheels and touch some screens.

Of course, sci-fi is always a step ahead: we have seen touch screens and something very similar to the iPad in futuristic movies from 30 years ago. But when it gets real and possible, it is a different thing. Or did you blink since you’ve seen the video above?

MIT created a very interesting user interface from levitating orbs. Placing balls in an empty place does indeed look amazing, and the rendered 3D video is crazy as hell – but the real power of this thing is in what user interaction designers think we could use it for.

I just can’t wait to see the first buttonless home stereos and washing machines – operated by levitating some orbs.

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