Yours truly will be in next month’s edition of Web Designer Magazine ( http://www.webdesignermag.co.uk/ ) availble in stands at the end of August. Here’s a couple photos from the shoot :
My thanks to Gareth Dutton for the great shot : http://garethduttonphotography.blogspot.com/2010/07/more-portraiture-or-moretraiture-look.html and Alex Suchet at unit9 http://www.unit9.com for the excellent organising.
I’ve now had my first look at the new London Public Bikes. Thought I’d share.
When logged into my Media Temple Word Press today, I was greeted with the following code sitting in my Admin :
Incase your curious, this indicates that the site has been hacked. The code in the image above loads malicious Javascript to redirect users from your site to somewhere else. This type of attack is pretty common place, with only the URL changing.
I very quickly learned from the WordPress forum that this is a wide spread issue for many Media Temple subscribers. Note that I didn’t refer to them as “users”, instead as a “subscriber” these people are paying money to Media Temple for the hosting facilities.
Further information from Media Temple confirms that several of their servers have been hacked, through no fault of the people who have their sites hosted on Media Temple’s Systems. People affected by this can find out information here : http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/1404-wordpress-redirect-exploit/
But that is not enough to solve things, Media Temple. If it’s your servers that got hacked and many accounts have been affected through no fault those customers, it shouldn’t be fall to those paying customers to clean up YOUR mess. If a car company sells a car contain a defect which allows someone to easily get into and drive away, would it make sense for the car manufacturer to tell it’s consumer to pay to get it fixed on their own dime? Or to grap a toolbox and work on their car’s electronics themselves? Of course not.
Add onto this the fact that there is no guarantee that the hackers haven’t altered other files in our websites, other than WordPress, and this becomes a very worrisome issue.
I’ve been with Media Temple for a lot time, and I’ve even met some of their staff at the OFFF festival – I like their service and their good attitude, especially toward design-centric sites. Unfortunately the exposure to security risks and lack of a proper solution on their part has really damaged their credibility to me as a customer. I’m hoping they are working on a better fix in the next day or two, otherwise you may be seeing this blog served from a new host.
It’s a bit old news that Dr. Cliff Kushler, inventor of T9 predictive texting, was creating a sucessor for touch devices, but I hadn’t seen the demos till today after reading an excellent article on Ars Technica : http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2010/07/hands-on-swype-keyboard-for-android-is-sweeptastic.ars
I’m pretty amazed by the speed, but what really enthuses me is the possibility that, like T9, Swype could create a standardised method of input across touch screen devices, which I believe is sorely needed.
Unfortunately due to Apple’s development constraints on the iPhone, I won’t be seeing it on my trust mobile anytime soon. I suppose this is just another reason why I should take some time and test out an Android OS device.
I have to give a big two thumbs up to the iPhone App, “The Leak in Your Home Town” created by Mark Skwarek and Joesph Hocking. In summary, after grabbing their iPhone App you can head off to any BP station, point your camera at the iconic British Petroleum logo and voila! You’ve got yourself an oil spill of your very own! It’s like socially aware, virtual, graffiti.
One thing that I love about this piece is that it’s much truer to what I feel is Augmented Reality than most applications just by using the BP logo. What I mean by this is that as a user of AR Apps I’m sick of being required to print out a logo that looks like some kind of half finished cubist painting and position it somewhere to get a virtual object to appear. At this point am I really augmenting reality? It feels more like I’m augmenting a piece of paper in an environment of my own choosing. I understand this proceedure is required to overcome huddles involved in the technology, however it seems that Ad Agencies and Developers of AR applications seem to forget that this typical process destroys much of the illusion that is so key to their idea.
I’ll give you an example brief that I’ve seen many times. To promote a product an agency wants to create an out of doors event where people will use a mobile device to present a virtual representation of a that product layered onto the real world. To do so the user must point their device at the stereotypical AR marker.
The intention is that viewer is Shocked! Amazed! that there is a crazy, unreal object right before their eyes! The problem is this : at the point which the user is required to point the camera at a symbol which is clearly not a part of their normal surroundings, that user already knows that something is out of the ordinary. And so why would they be surprised when something virtual appears above it? The user already has a big hint that “Hey! something out of the ordinary exists right here!”
“The Leak in Your Home Town” avoids all this by using something that is naturally present in the environment. That’s part of what makes this project so excellent to me, and I’m sure it’s been done before and will be done often after this.
What are some other alternatives? A simple one is to have the app respond to a logo in a billboard 50 feet away. Hand the phone to the user and give them alternative task – “Can you take a picture of me and my girlfriend?”. When a car leaps off the billboard and is chased by a giant T-Rex, I can gaurentee you the view will be suprised then!
Disclaimer : My friend Billy Burgoyne has reminded me that it is unsafe to use your cell/mobile phone in the vicinity of a gasoline pump. Be careful people! 
Recently I’d read an article by Richard Fink at A List Apart entitled “Web Fonts at the Crossing” which is an excellent summary of where browsers and standards are regarding embedding fonts in HTML pages. This is a technology that I haven’t read up on recently, mostly due to the fact that working in Flash over the last 9 years has basically spoiled me.
After a quick read and some investigation, it looks like this technology is finally at a stage where we can start adopting it without too many issues. During my lunch break I spirited away to the Google Font Directory, it’s a repository of free to use fonts with examples using Lorem Ipsum paragraphs of different sizes and styles – very handy to pick and choose what you’d like to use. I settled on Droid Serif, by Steve Matteson – it had nice readability and a good look to it, not to mention a good combination of weights and styles. After you choose the font you’d like to use it’s as simple as clicking on “Get the code” and adding it into your HTML. For those Word Pressers out there you can add these in via the admin tools of your blog under Appearance -> Editor. I found it easiest to add the “font-family” CSS into style.css and the Javascript “link” into header.php
And voila! The blog now has a fancy new font.
There are a couple things that I think Google could do to improve their font directory service further :
@astronomyblog Sites that use externally-hosted popular Javascript libraries should fall back to local copies if the remote one doesn’t load.
Altogether though this new ability to define fonts is exciting and long overdue on the net. For years we’ve been using jury rigged solutions such as sFIR to achieve what HTML should have been able to do on it’s own. I’d like to hear any feedback you have on the new font, and any experience you might have had with Embedding Web Fonts. I’m also considering putting together a “best of” list to showcase sites that use Embedded Web Fonts in creative and useful ways.
Special thanks to my friend Anders Andersson over at Helpful Strangers for once again designing an amazing poster to advertise my annual 4th of July BBQ!
Make sure to also check out the great one Anders did last year : http://blog.untitledfornow.com/2009/07/06/4th-of-july-bbq-in-london-2009/
From time to time I sign up for a Beta testing of a new game, it’s a free way to have some fun and can feel very rewarding, if you are actually participating and giving feedback! So when I got a mail from Ijji today about a new beta, I clicked through to the website to see what the new game was about.
The new game is called Genesis AD, it’s a new First Person Shooter which to be honest didn’t really grab my intrest. What did though was the marketing they are doing to spread word of the Closed Beta for which you need to register. Have a look at the following, screen grabbed from the page :
Basically, every time a person signs up for the Closed Beta Testing round 2 (CBT2) the start date that users can get into the game and begin playing. For people even mildly interested in the game this provides intensive to get out and do word of mouth advertising to promote the game, because it returns a reward to that player.
Quite a clever way to people to go out and spread the word. Even though I haven’t registered or intend to do so, in a way even I have now contributed to their marketing. Well done Ijji.
