Farewell Jef

On February 26th, 2005 the world lost one of the greatest minds in computer science of our time. A passionate teacher, writer, model airplane enthusiast, but most of all a friendly spirit.

Jef Rasin invented the Click and Drag mechanism that we all take for granted now, I mean can you really image moving your data in any other way nowadays?

Jef is the best example that I can think of right now for the original Apple Manifesto for your really could not ignore this guy. His theories often sounded pretty radical, but when you saw them applied, it all came and fit together naturally.

I know he'll always be with us, in everything we use in our digital lifestyle. To me Jef always was like a virtual mentor when it came to really difficult design questions for interfaces, in his book or his website was always some hint that helped me to get the knack and deliver a fine product in the end.

Mr Raskin, I sure learned a lot from you and your work, wherever you are, thank you for the spirit.

The Documentary about Jef Raskin

Morony Alert!

How nice of Google to give use users a Google bar, one more search engine bar in my browser, one more pop-up blocker, one more news reader, how arse-ome!

What on Earth were you THINKING?

While the stuff mentioned above is quite superfluous but won't hurt anyone, here's the real treat… or threat?

Does Google violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

Oh great, how come? Their nice little gadget called AutoLink which will add stuff to YOUR websites, to any website. Sounds familiar? Yes, the crackpots at Microsoft had the same idea in 2001 with the MS Smart Tags, but the Internet fired back, what will happen to Google? Will users ban Google from indexing their servers? Will lawyers get rich and famous for the Google Crackdown that brought the biggest search engine down in a license lawsuit based upon an unlicensed content modification of gazillions of websites?

…the future?

Wild guesses, for sure, but it certainly will be the end of Google as we know it, it lost its virtue. People are already sharpening their knives to fight back or at least try to undo Google's modifications.

More on this at Zeldman's

But by all means TELL Google what they are doing wrong! Apparently they don't realize that these things along with automatic linking of ISBN numbers to the appropriate items at amazon.com will expose companies like Tower Records and Barnes & Noble to huge losses. Or how would you like an automatic map to your house from your whois.net entry that shows up when someone checks on your domain name?

What was the name of that Movie again? Ah yes, 1984! Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a company that tries to make the most out of their knowledge, but let me just insert a quote from Spiderman here to get my point across:

With great power comes great responsibility.

ATypI 2005 Logo ASCII Style!

This time it's all glyphs!

As a little update to my previous post about the Matrix-esque version of the ATypI logo, I decided to post a text only version of it now.

Yes indeed, it's all glyphs! not a single image in this one, just like the old days of BBS. Shit do I feel old now that I remember the pre web era when you dialed in to someone's computer to see some wicked ASCII art and discuss the daily news and other often quite naughty things. Aw, those were the days, I'm getting senti-mental now.

Update Mash-Up

Some Updates for Firefox worth checking out

The first one I got for you is quite neat for those of you that want to get started with their podcasting gig and don't want to fiddle with different engines that publish it on the web in an RSS Feed.

Link: Mozilla Update :: Extensions -- More Info: RSS Editor

Another one that's worth mentioning is called BlogThis, it's an extension that lets you create a Blogger entry by CTRL + Clicking on anything on a website and select BlogThis from the contextual menu.

Link: Mozilla Update :: Extensions -- More Info: BlogThis

One extension that I'm using now like crazy for my web research stuff is called QuickNote. It is a quite strightforward way to auto-generate Stickies-like notes that are organized in tabs. The cool thing about it: You select some text on a website and CTRL + Click to get the contextual menu and select Send to QuickNote and it generates a sticky note with the selected text and the URL where the text snipped came from, slick!

Link: Mozilla Update :: Extensions -- More Info: QuickNote

That's gonna be it for now, hope you liked today's mash-up and found some of the stuff useful.

Fancy Matrix-Esque ATypI 2005 logo

Ok, so I had a shitty weekend and wanted to do something different for a change, something really different.

If you are into typography, you will quite dig the result and if you into the Matrix trilogy you'll dig it even more.

What I did was taking the ATypi logo that they use for their 2005 conference in Helsinki and run it through a Perl script (beta) that mimics the shape of the logo by replacing it with Kanji and Latin glyphs to make it a little more Matrix-like.

The original logo was done by Underware and you should check out their website, they might not be too aware of web standards, but the definitely nail it when it comes to type design!

Wicked Cool iPhoto Gallery Thing!

Some while ago I found this pretty slick accessoire that lets you get custom HTML from your iPhoto output instead of that rather horrible thing that iPhoto spits out by default.

Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign was pissed-off by this too but went another way that is more centric to his blogging environment, which is Movable Type and might be the shiznit for you as well. Douglas describes his findings on his site stopdesign.com.

If you are like me and just have some little php that helps you around or don't use any engine at all to stuff your website together, my finding will be pretty helpful to you as well as it is for me. Hint: click on the posting title to get there

What I did so far on this is basically just a very slim XHTML framework that just has placeholders for the meta-data of each image, like the iPhoto comment that I wrote or my iPhoto ratings, pretty simple stuff. To avoid lengthy passages of text I went for the <title="comment..."> way that will give you the comment when moving the mouse over the image thumbnail. The large image that it links to, has it a box of text underneath it, since my comments tend to be of a lengthy nature. I just need to find a way to inset just a portion of the comment in to the <title> tag, otherwise it will look pretty awkward, image having a Post-It like thing hanging from your mouse pointer, yuck I don't fuckin' work at the Microsoft user interface team.

The design of this baby is of-course all done in CSS 2.1 and the XHTML I'm using is 1.1 and only used to mark-up the content. Tables are for 3 things only here, tabular data, food, lovemaking. You wouldn't design a book or a brochure with MS Excel, would you? Thanks, but some so called web-designers think that way, so I thought I should mention it. Since the sites of those people are also not valid XHTML in most cases, let's just call 'em the invalids here, ha!

When I'm done with the whole thing, I'll make sure to post a link to the galleries here for you to check them out. The next few weeks are gonna be pretty busy, got lots of cool stuff and hard work to do, so the galleries have to wait, since I was mostly using the RAW format of my SIGMA SG9 which is supported by… NO ONE it'll take me some time to get all the gazillions of images over to iPhoto, I'll use batch processing though, ah well, just watch this space and stay tuned to the rantoblogcious feed.

Enchantment at the Gates

No Bill here, this installation is actually interesting.

I have to admit being a teeny tiny bit disappointed when I saw the first pictures of the latest Christo and Jeanne-Claude installment in New York City's Central Park. The main reason for this little disappointment were the wonderful drawings that Christo published last year. Drawings that were so vibrant in color and so lively that I couldn't wait to see the real thing.

The press coverage here in Europe was rather poor on the whole thing, so when I saw some gray-ish images of washed out linen, it was an awkward feeling. Browsing over to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's site I could see some better pictures, like this one and somehow this magical moment comes across, the moment that I felt when seeing Christo's sketches and drawings in 2004.

My name is Frank and I do believe this is art!

Writing an e-Book

Just started on my first self-published e-Book about web standards and how to use it to stop wasting money.

It is targeted towards designers and decision makers along the way. And yes, I promise to piss-off designers that are too full of themselves and see their values as the only ones valid. Quite funny to use the word valid here, though.

So far I'm done with the outline and can safely say that it is going to change while I'm writing the thing together… as usual. Well, OK… I CAN say that it is bound to have some historical notes to it, how the web started and so on, since these notes will make it totally clear how to make a great website. Oh yes, and it won't be too technical.

First Blogged, First Served?

Stardate whatever, captain's log: … Remember these lines?

The first bloggers apparently were Starfleet officers that had to blog as a part of their job description: Explore space, discover new civilizations and don't forget to blog about it every night. Today this behavior might even get you fired! Blogging about your work I mean, don't even think about exploring space!

Anyway… welcome to my blog. My very first posting here, so please don't mind if it is totally incoherent. I'm using Apple's Mail app btw to post this blog entry, isn't that just cool from Google, to let us blog by e-mail? I certainly think so!