New Myspace Redesign is amazing!

Posted on September 25, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Remember MySpace? No? Well before Facebook (and yes there was a BEFORE Facebook) the most popular social network in the world was MySpace. It allowed people to customize their profiles with images and CSS, so each and every one was different. It was many things (music player, social media, bands promotion platform) but clean it wasn’t.

I still remember the horrible glitter backgrounds and green type on pink backgrounds. Yuck! Since Facebook came to life with it’s “clean&boring” design, MySpace was slowly dying, even with one of the biggest indie music collections in the world onboard. Well now they’re redesigning it (again) to be a mix of a music service, pinterest-que type photo viewer and in general a social network for the creatives – photographers, musicians, designers. And of course “fans”. Take a look at the screenshots after the break – it looks impressive and really clean + modern. Good job MySpace!

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Bing it on Microsoft!

Posted on September 6, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Bing it On microsoft
Microsoft’s Bing is a pretty good attempt to steal some search engine users from Google. It still however is pretty niche compared to the “don’t be evil big brother” from Mountain View. Aside from Bing being important in both Win8 and WinPhone8, MS is trying hard to convince people it’s as good, or better than Google. With this cute, retro styled comparison page they might win a few souls. After a couple of tests I can honestly say that with serious content the results are mostly exactly equal. Sure some sites are higher, some are lower, but both engines provide results that are “good enough”. Cool idea too, MS!

http://www.bingiton.com/

Why are designers afraid of big fonts? Web readability practices

Posted on September 5, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Back in the days when we had to design for 800×600 screen sizes, “The Fold” was somewhat as much feared as IE6’s ability to destroy layouts. Now it’s 2012 and we have 800×600 pixels and more in some mobile phones, and the web has settled for 960 pixel width layouts. But the Fold is still pretty strong in a lot of the designs.

On most websites a nice body copy font is considered to be somewhere close to 10-12 pixels, with the default leading. And usually to cover the fact that most web copy is just plain horrible, there’s a lot of graphics around the text, almost as if the main function (information) is loosing with the form (the graphics). It’s not readable. And I’m not talking about pink fonts on yellow backgrounds. I’m talking about most of the web.

It’s almost as if designers are afraid of making the content look legible. Maybe they’re thinking that if there’s more text than anything else in a design, they’re not really needed anymore? Who knows. The fact is that most of the web is terribly unreadable and actually painful to use.

And then came Flipboard with it’s pre formatting and changed some perspectives. Bigger fonts (between 16 and 24 pixels) came into play, and a leading of 1.4 em. Content consumption has become pleasant again. Apple added the “Reader” feature to Safari, and suddenly most websites are just a click away from being enjoyable!

Maybe it’s time to switch some perspectives and bring the web to it’s basic function (except porn) – reading stuff on the screen. And yes it can be a nice experience!

New Outlook.com email is stunning!

Posted on August 4, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Finally a worthy competitor to Gmail!

Microsoft is really pushing the ~~metro~~ interface (it’s not supposed to be called metro anymore – they’re thinking of a new name) with tiles, colors and beautiful typography. That purely digital, modern approach is finding it’s way in other places, and right now it came to the fully redesigned hotmail little brother – Outlook.com.

The site features skype video calling, facebook integration and a super-clean email experience with no ugly MS ribbons and cluttered menus. This looks so good, that it’s possibly the very best design in web email clients anywhere.

That clean, uncluttered interface IS the future and I seriously hope that Apple will tune down those skeumorphic designs at least a little bit. Since it’s all digital anyway, maybe it’d be best to accept it and become digital design-wise.

Besides it works well from the usability standpoint since it’s all clear, visible and easily accessible. The only thing I don’t quite like is the choice of colors. Maybe MS could tune down those hard colors a bit, or give the users a choice to just type in a hex color themselves. That’d be awesome. Well anyway – since it’s just launched maybe it’s a good time to go and “reserve” your name on there? www.outlook.com

Is IE 6 finally going to die?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by IdeaMonster

For years web developers have been begging and petitioning for this to happen. Now it's finally just around the corner.

Microsoft has launched a campaign of it’s own to free the world of it’s dreadful (to developers) browser from yesteryear. Go to http://www.ie6countdown.com/ to see for yourself the steady decline of usage which is now finally below 10%. That means that web developers no longer need to put time and effort to make an IE6 specific version of their websites. Ain’t that a nice new year’s gift? Microsoft thinks so too, even though the decline in IE6 doesn’t necessarily result in an incline for newer explorers. More and more people are turning to chrome and firefox. Which is fine, cause anything is better than IE6. And a year from now at this rate it will finally be extinct.

Is web 3.0 a mix of 2.0 and 1.0 ?

Posted on October 16, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Web 1.0 was all about creating content – articles, news topics, how to’s – you name it. Websites were hubs of information rather than a site with videos od a dog on a skateboard. Then the revolution came and the main focus on the web shifted from articles to people. Web 2.0 was all about being social online. And people loved it! Sure it’s counter-productive most of the time, but how convenient, right? You can now see updates and pictures of your “internet friends” from all over the world, and you don’t even need to meet with them for coffee to know what they’re up to.

Web 2.0 has generated an impressive amount of content and lured non-power-users into the internet. The amount of valuable content declined rapidly, and dogs on skateboards started to be the main focus online. Sure if you need information there’s wikipedia and wolfram alpha, which in fact is an answer to all the lazy people who can’t look up the answer themselves. So there’s more and more “social” content, more and more ads, but less quality content to browse through.

The answer? Well all those websites with funny pictures and subtitles encouraged people to at least write something under the pic. That’s creative sometimes, right? And then they share it with their average of 450 friends (who really has that many?) and it becomes another dog on a skateboard. Question sites are actually a true sign of change – people can ask about anything, and complete strangers may answer their question, which is then rated as the most valuable answer. That’s building a knowledge base right there. But when blogging shifted from serious articles towards “what I did last night with my facebook friends” I guess the last parts of web 1.0 died that evening. Facebook is trying to swallow some of that 1.0 juice by adding wikipedia answers to it’s searches, but seriously – who uses that?

Is internet eventually going to be about porn, shallow relationships with people and funny pictures only? What do you think?

when redesigns kill the project / how people get used to things

Posted on September 22, 2010 by IdeaMonster

We’ve seen it a couple of times already. Facebook made some changes and groups started popping up that were hoping to get the new design back. Some even issued threats that they’ll stop using the service if it’s not reverted tom the beloved original.

That clearly defines how people hate a change. Why blame them? It’s confusing when you come back to a familiar site to see it changed. As with music – you like what you already know- if you’ve used a site for a long time and see it many, many times you get used to the design of it as well. And it doesn’t really matter if the design was good or bad. It was “home sweet home” and people don’t like others redecorating their home. Now do they?

The whole subject came up because just recently some statistic were revealed about the popular site Digg. They had a steady 40mil uu daily and they drastically redesign the site. The result? a 26% decline in a few weeks in the US. That’s a lot of users.

So what’s the solution if you don’t want to stay behind with your design but you don’t want your viewers to go away? The simplest solution would be to keep changing small stuff constantly so people don’t have the time to get used. And if you keep the changes small the evolution will be easier to grasp than a revolution.

Examples? Think Google.

iPad brief review

Posted on September 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Since everything has already been said about how it’s beautiful, but no flash. How it has a long lasting battery, but doesn’t have a USB port. How it’s fast and portable but the operating system is a bit stripped.
Blah blah blah.

Since everybody knows all the tech specs already (and if not you can just look it up) I’m gonna focus on my impressions on using the device. Because in the end who cares if it does that or doesn’t do that if you hate every second spent with it. Allright then, let’s start from the basic.

It’s just a giant iPhone

No. This is like saying a soccer ball is just a bigger tennis ball, when both have different purposes and are used quite differently. What iPad is – is the revolution that the web was waiting for – not in the content and not in the delivery methods (that’s why flash doesn’t matter here) but in the form factor that’s easier and better for the web. It was the first big hit in the tablets but now, as I said before we’ll see a whole bunch of other ones, cheaper and more accessible. And in that respect it doesn’t matter if they run iOS, android or some crippled version of windows. Or linux. What matters is the way to interact with the internet is finally changing for the second time since internet was born. (this first one was text commands, then came the graphically intense websites and online videos).

So do I like it? Yes. In fact it’s become used more for everyday tasks than my laptop. I can carry it around me all the time since it’s pretty small and light, so I take my things with me everywhere. As simple as that, holding the internet in your hands is the way to go for the internet itself. And it doesn’t matter if you choose an apple device for that or something else. It has started and we’re sure even Nokia will make a similar device soon.

Facebook is the end of IE6 ?

Posted on August 30, 2010 by IdeaMonster

facebookie6
At a point in time, when facebook is the internet inside the internet, and when many people think of it as THE internet, rarely using anything else, an interesting thing has happened. Many had pleaded, many had wished for it (especially web developers), and even Microsoft urged for it. No success. Nobody was able to kill Internet Explorer 6, mainly because it’s preinstalled with windows XP and this is still what the majority uses. So all of the office computers, and all the home computers of casual users remained the silent majority of web browsing.

ie6compat This of course led to websites being done ESPECIALLY for IE6 and for the rest of the world. Twice as much work. Or actually more, since IE6 had it’s humors and wasn’t really following standards, so it was all a hit or miss scenario constantly. And as years have gone by, the usage of IE6 was shrinking, but not fast enough so it’d be convincing for a client to skip IE6 version of the site. Even at 25% of the market (and it still has more than that, significantly more) nobody would decide to skip IE6 version while building a site.

Well until now. A while ago youtube stopped supporting IE6, but most of it worked just fine in IE6 anyway.
Now facebook comes into play, and since it has all those apps and all those quizes the casual user really loves, they’ll see a big difference. And that alone – a decision of a website they spend half their awake time on – can lead them to upgrade. Sure firefox, chrome, safari and opera are better than any IE iteration, but for god’s sake! Make them upgrade to at least IE7 and that, as terrible a browser as it is – is still a huge step for the web world.

IE6 Rest in peace.

Youtube is 5 years old!

Posted on May 17, 2010 by IdeaMonster

youtubetimeline

5 years. And yet it seems it had been there forever, right? Well apparently 5 years ago if you wanted to watch an online video you had to download a crappy MPG file or wait for those quicktimes to stream. And then along came two guys and their garage, and they changed the web forever. Without them we wouldn’t have the amazed lemur, the skateboarding dog, the laughing baby and many other classics of web 2.0 entertainment. Happy birthday Youtube! Too see (among other things) the Youtube timeline click on the number 5 next to their logo.

Internet Explorer web share is shrinking

Posted on May 10, 2010 by IdeaMonster

browsers
According to a recent survey by “Net Applications” this is the first time in 10 years when IE had less than 60% of market share. This is of course a good trend since this browser is obsolete, buggy and doesn’t follow the standards. Plus it’s hard to make cross-browser sites look the same and it’s usually IE’s fault. The fastest growing is actually Google Chrome which might in fact overpower firefox in a few years. That is all good news, even though microsoft is working on HTML5 supporting IE9, they’ll probably be at 50% in two years.

Facebook as the second internet

Posted on March 24, 2010 by IdeaMonster

The threat!

So here’s the deal. Right now A LOT (that’s an estimated number ;) of people are facebook users. And they share A LOT (also an estimate ;) of data daily. That is pretty impressive. But why? What’s so cool about farms, mafias and all those other stupid tests? Sure they work for a while but how to draw people in and keep them in ?

More than 200 million people?about one-fifth of all Internet users?have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day.
By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information?news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. All of that is carefully shielded from Google.

Well they got it all figured out with external links that are viewable inside the facebook web app. Basically you can listen to a soundcloud song file, view youtube (and other) videos and read some news stories without ever leaving the page. And how do you get that stuff? Well your friends post it, and your friends are pretty much the only type of advertisement you as an experienced web user trust anymore. Aren’t they?

So basically you get all your funny videos, and all your most recent news from one place and you can comment and “like” it all in that one place, allowing other your friends to see it and spread the word. So facebook is becoming slowly a way to discover the internet and not only the social network of friends. Because before that we used aggregating websites to find certain type of content (funny videos, marketing tips, games) and right now they can all be embedded to become a part of the facebook machine.

Who should be scared?

The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

Yes, it draws people away from google, and I think they’ve noticed (a little too late probably) and launched Orkut / or whatever it’s called now. Google Buzz? That’s it! It has potential of course (because it’s google) and it’s gonna be plenty useable combined with all the google cloud apps but it’s hard to break something that already works fine. And what’s more important it’s SUPER HARD to change the habits. Maybe they’ll succeed. Or maybe in a few years the internet will be facebook and content supplying “facebook apps” for it. Let’s all hope that won’t happen!

The problem with google is that it’s just a machine based on probability and algorithms to deliver you content. And social networks are based on the idea that no machine stands between you and the content. No. It’s chosen by the people you know and trust, and that’s why it’s actually better tailored to your tastes (well unless you’re spamming for thousands of friends you don’t know that is)