wheres rhys

Collider of large hadrons, or large collider of hadrons?

If you know the answer please leave a comment.

If, like me, you subscribe to a number of web-related blogs in an effort to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of websites and the internet, you’ll have heard all the chatter about Chrome, Google’s new web browser. I reckon it sounds good in boring, but important, ways - more stable, faster javascript, ability for certain components to crash without crashing the whole browser. They say they’ve re-thought the web browser from scratch, and it seems they have addressed some important issues that maybe no-one else, committed to extant browsers, would have been able to - but from the point of view of allowing people to use the web in new and exciting ways it’s a bit of a dud. Firefox’s add-ons, and even IE8’s anticipated new features are far more innovative, flexible and of use to users.

One immediately obvious attempt by Google to break new user interface ground is the positioning of their tabs. All existing tabbed browsers (Safari is the example in the picture) put the tabs below the address bar. Chrome, on the other hand, puts them above.

This makes sense, as the address bar is the address of the web page in the tab - the address of the whole browser doesn’t actually make sense when a browser supports multiple tabs.

But does it make the browser easier to use? I think not (although one has to assume the people at Google have tested it thoroughly and found the opposite, or at least inconclusive evidence either way).

Often I open up numerous tabs for the sole reason of wanting to hop between them. In this situation I can imagine the address bar getting in the way, both physically (you have to move the mouse further to get from hovering over the page and clicking on the tab), and conceptually (In these days of super-doopa search, and long, dynamically generated URL’s a website’s URL doesn’t take on the de facto role of “page title” it once did. It could be argued that putting the address bar physically within the tab adds semantic clutter rather than information of high priority to the user. Putting it outside the tab makes it less of a distraction).

So to sum up, I think it’s a good example of when the logical, ideal way to set up a user interface doesn’t necessarily equate to the most ergonomic way.

I’ll be leaving London again very soon (sooner than anticipated - A journalist back from Moscow (alive) will be taking my room on Sunday, booting me out in the process).

There is, as I expected, lots to take care of in order to ensure everything relating to my relocation runs smoothly. Already in the course of taking care of everything I have been appalled not once, not twice, but thrice!

1. At the Indian embassy they take your passport for visa processing, and tell you “you can track the application online by just typing in your passport number.” It’s only when you get home that you realise that they have your passport and they didn’t give you anything with your passport number on it. (Well they do, but it doesn’t say passport number next to it, and just looks liek a credit card receipt, and unless you already know your passport number you can’t very well recognise that that’s what it is).
2. Since the last time I had to put anything in storage both Big Yellow and Safestore, the market leaders, have prevented you from taking out insurance with somebody else. It’s bad enough that they make insurance compulsory, but to force people to take out their over-priced insurance, about five times the price of competitors, is naked profiteering. I’ve reported them to the office of fair trading, the first time I’ve ever done such a thing. In the meantime, I’ve used www.theselfstoragedirectory.co.uk to find an independent self-storage depot which is happy to not fleece you for every penny.
3. I’ve just taken out a card protection plan for the first time in a few years. Like many secure banking and related services in addition to a user name and password you have to choose some pass phrases: answers to set questions. What is odd and, dare I say, appalling about CPP is that it’s compulsory to use the question “What is the name of your favourite actor?”. I don’t have one and, put in a corner, just typed in the name of the first person whom I’d seen in a few things and generally liked, but I bet I forget it at a crucial juncture in the future.In hindsight I probably should have put Rob Brydon

Was just talking to my Mum on the phone and something I never noticed before occurred to me.

In welsh the word for “always” is the same as the word for “never” (it’s in how you inflect… which reminds me of the Pavement lyric in Blue Hawaiian). Despite being a welsh speaker all my life I’ve never noticed this before. Given that these are words in daily use this is pretty surprising. I wonder what other linguistic oddities have also evaded me. Also, I wonder if in the welsh assembly a transcription of a speech delivered by a stubbornly welsh speaking representative is mistranslated in to English meaning the opposite of what was intended.

Dicey thing, meaning.

When your Samsung mobile connects you to your Olympic spirit… imagination lives

This slogan fails to be any good on so many levels. Perhaps the only level on which it succeeds is as guffaw-fuel.

I can make a ball bounce up and down in flash, and that’s about it. And my javascript is rapidly improving, but still leaves a lot to be desired, but simple animation effects using flash or javascript can really enhance a design.

For example, one of my favourite site-designs, http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ (I love the classy, formal look, aimed at senior teachers, but also with splashes of colour and animation to suggest innovation and fun), uses flash to create a subtle bouncing navigation effect.

So what’s a boy to do?

A week or so ago Sitepoint published a cute little tutorial on how to make surprising animations react to browser resizing… and the magic of it was that it only used a gif and a jpeg to achieve this. Inspired by this, I decided to make the futurelab navigation using just animated gifs, and the results are pretty good I reckon. And it only needs a couple of 1 pixel wide gifs per navigation item - less than 1kb in total. (I also only learned how to make animated gifs in photoshop this afternoon, using this tutorial).

A note of caution: my navigation items are all the same colour, so you’d think I could use the same gifs for each item… but not so. Something to do with how firefox renders animated gifs means it doesn’t animate the hover-off image if it’s used on another navigation item too. The solution is simple: make a few copies of the hover-off gif with different names.

Hello

I’m back after a brief sojourn into not being on the internet.

A short post to start: It seems to have gone unnoticed by the blogosphere, and main stream media too for that matter, that a major event has happened on the internet recently.

I could be talking about the site I’ve been working on at work being launched… but I’m not. Far more significant than that is that Youtube now make it easy to subscribe to a person’s videos with an RSS reader. Previously subscribing to a video channel using anything other than youtube’s in-site subscription function meant a trawl through the faq’s to find the correct syntax for RSS feeds, and then typing the URL manually. Most annoying that they didn’t make it more publicly accessible.

Well, that has now changed. Visit any youtube person’s page and you will find a little orange RSS icon in the address bar. And for that I am grateful.

As for the blogosphere not noticing this major internet event, I meant that slightly tongue in cheek, as the end result of youtube’s RSS-ification is that it makes it easier to keep tabs on ephemera. But it does surprise me somewhat that no-one else picked up on it; I subscribe to a few blogs about the internet, and the trivia they publish, republish, pore over and comment on beggars belief sometimes e.g. The Twitter website was down for a couple of hours or so, and droves of technology writers went positively apopleptic!

Anyway… rant over. Now that you can subscribe to youtube at your leisure, i recommend you check these out:

• Mike L Mayfield - slightly surreal and nostalgic hand-drawn animation
• David Firth - disturbing, surreal and immensely funny animation. Think 2D Blue Jam
• Sheep films - mostly silent short films involving a man getting himself into unlikely recursive situations
• Me - I don’t make films, but will occasionally favourite ones I deem worthy