• Temporize
• Web log
  2009
• 05/01/09

Following on from the last post, I’ve just finished reading and interesting piece by Brad Neuberg about how flash can integrate with the open web. One of the comments of the comments I found interesting was:

“Over time Adobe has been become more and more open source friendly, contributing to open source projects and opening up their own products. However, these decisions have always been good business decisions and open sourcing Flash right now is a really bad business decision.”

A good point, though I really think open source is going to be one of, if not The, major business models of the future, and I believe most companies are going to have to go this way at some stage in order to compete in the market place. Microsoft will at some point (if they haven’t already) start eating into Adobes market and user base with their Silverlight product, so opening up Flash to the open web and significantly increasing the developers and the community involved in the product would, in my option, be a very good business decision.

Although flash is slowly making its way onto some mobile devices, Flash on the iPhone is still looking as far off as a manned mission to Mars. But with HTML 5 starting to be implemented in webkit and most other browsers, and the advancements in SVGs of late, I’ve been thinking about what roll flash will play on the iPhone, and if it is really needed at all …

At the moment, I find the fact that I can’t jump on youtube and watch my friends latest video a little annoying, but with the <video> and <audio> tag already working in safari 3, how long will it be before these are carried through to the iPhone? And with the wider adoption of such tags, will sites such as youtube continue to use flash as their default media player?

I’m a big fan of Flash, and seeing what Joshua Davis and Hi-Res were doing with the platform back in the late 90’s is what really go me into web design and playing with code in the first place, but now that I’ve had to live without flash on the iPhone for the last few month and counted the amount of times I’ve actually missed it, I’m not so sure it’s the iPhone enhancer I’ve been hoping it would be.

Waaaaaaay back in the early 21st century, when I had just finished studying and had landed myself a job with London based Hoop Associates, surfstation.lu was THE design portal. Sure DiK was pretty cool, and INfront was my home grown portal, but with its ‘Pick One’ user submitied photo gallery, free grunge fonts and ever updating design news, to me surfstation was the bee’s knees.

Unfortunately, as the web progressed and sites became more advanced, surfstation stayed as it was. The news became less frequent, the fonts out of date and then flickr came along … and I did what any other designer hungry for news would do. I moved on.

But – as they say – better late than never. After 6 years I’m happy to see that rather than being pulled down, Surfstation is back with a clean new look. And while there aren’t as many sections as there used to be, the guys are looking to expand the site ‘as time goes by’.

Just don’t make it aother 6 years …

Smashing Magazine, primarily a web design blog,  have put together a great post on award winning Newspaper designs from around the world in order to highlight how some design principles, such as use of white space and grid based design, are used over both print and web based media.

Luis from BladBlog emailed to let me know that he has just updated his blog, which is looking great, and that he has also updated the url, which is now http://bladblog.nl If you’re not already subscribed to this site, I suggest doing so.

I’ve been waiting for this for some time now, so when I saw a post over at Computerlove that Hi-Res! had finally updated, I was quite excited that at long last I would get to see so great new flash mastery … Not quite. While the guys have a good new showcase of work online, apparently the ‘proper’ Hi-Res! site is, um, coming soon … At least there is a new Hi-Res! book to tide me over in the meantime.

If, like me (or Boicozine), you’re constantly battling Wordpress in order to bend it to your will, you might want to head over to the Web Designer Wall. Nick La, who also runs N.Design Studio and Best Web Gallery, has written a great post on hacking Wordpress in order to maximise it’s CMS capabilities. Even if you’re not to keen on the ‘coding’ side of things, there are some great little tips there that may just keep you from screaming at your computer the next time you go to update your theme …

After 10 days away in New Zealand enjoying the snow, I’m back in Melbourne and in the studio once more. I’ll have a few pix up later on in the week (I’m still using film) but for mean time, here is a little something that came up this morning … As I’ve just seen, Fairfax digital has redesigned the template for the sites for their two main newspapers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which I couldn’t help noticing looked very similar to The Guardian’s new(ish) look … Unfortunately I find the new template still leaves the page looking quite loose, and lacks the order and containment of information that The Guardian website has achieved.

Earlier this year I had the please of meeting Paul Darragh while lending a hand at Furst Media. Paul has just updated his new portfolio with an amazing array of illustration and design work.

My talented friend Laith McGregor now has an online presence with his newly launched website. (designed and built by the handsome Lucas Golding). Laith is currently undertaking his Master in Fine Art at VCA, and his work has adorned the walls of many Melbourne galleries. Laith’s work has also been featured in Is Not and Litmus magazines.