Archive for April, 2006
According to my terminal shell, today it’s the 45th aniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin)! On the 12th of April 1961, he traveled into the space for the very first time in Human history, crossing the until then unbreakable barrier that the atmosphere posed until this day!
In this same exact day, I came across the work of Jan von Holleben, in particular this wonderfull photo, which reminds us that in matters of space, we’re more like little children:
this particular photo of Jan’s work, is part of a fantastic gallery called “Dreams of Flying“, check it out, besides employing a very original technique the results are simply great!
In Portugal, it’s very common to say that hope is the last thing to die, so I’m still dreaming of the day, in which we can all make that fantastic voyage to space! Oh well… back to earth, shall we?
April 12th, 2006
… are a funny thing to have on blogs! FilmLoops allow us to share photos without having to post them, or all the thumbnails in a post, which is a rather boring thing to do.
I’ve read about them on the Guy Kawasaki Blog, but only yesterday I’ve noticed the blog posting feature and I decided to give it a try! Started with some nice pictures I’ve taken yesterday on “Estufa Fria” (a beautifull garden in the heart of Lisbon) followed the simple steps, and here’s the result:
Nice, isn’t it?
A simple idea comming out of this, would be to have something similiar in effect, but that could harvest the pictures from a simple pictures feed, something like a new version of Fotos screensaver, hein? 
April 11th, 2006
NY Times just released yesterday a new version of their digital home, the new design includes some new features that probably justify why the NY Times is such a reference on the news paper market. It’s not my all time favorite, that prize still goes for “El Pais“, I don’t really like to much crowded homepages, with too much information, but I recognize that an online newspaper homepage must fits for a diverse range of individuals needs, so I can live with it.
The feature that got my biggest attention, was the fact that there’s now an explicit relation between the newspaper (traditional media) and the blogosphere, in the sense that on the homepage you’ll now find an area where you can read the most blogged articles from the newspaper, and this way get a sense of what people are actually talking about and seize the discussion. It’s an important step for the newspaper, but in particular is also the recognition of the growing importance of blogs as a media platform.
From the redesign point-of-view, it’s interesting to see that the new layout stands on top of a 5 column layout, very rich, but also very concise in terms of the information it provides at first glance. The new design is brilliantly made in terms of user interface adaptability, doesn’t break with the old website concepts, it’s just an improvement, allowing users to easily adapt to the new layout by making no so obvious changes to the navigation and typography.
A funny thing, which I actually don’t know if it’s entirely new, is that although their main market is the paper business, they just have a new area dedicated to multimedia content, in particular videos. It’s a sign of times, it’s hard to live only of words in this ever more image/video rich world. It’s also a good sign of adaptability from the NY Times an certainly an example for the rest of the world newspapers, in a sense that their future depend of this kind of market adaptability.
The responsible (correct me if I’m wrong) for the redesign was Axentric, who had some time ago brought us the redesign of the also famous The Onion.
April 5th, 2006