Category: design-and-ideas

Molly interviewed for bbc backstage



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I shot this video with Molly earlier in the week, which I shared with Backstage but I received a great comment which I thought was good enough to quote here.

Interesting interview, thanks.

It's interesting to hear Molly's views on how it can be technologists versus the business with regards to standards. I think this has been true of everywhere I have worked, and it's understandable. I think the points about businesses understanding the ROI from standards is also valid, they are waking up to this, however the biggest set back seems to be legacy issues and timescales. Often there are old systems that are difficult to replace, but also a great many of the contemporary tools that offer faster creation
do so at a cost to the code quality. Can we please get some good standards compliant .Net components?

Also the mention of uneducated educators. This is so true for a great many areas of IT still it is shocking, even university level courses are behind the times, especially where IT is not the primary focus. I remember how quickly as a class at uni we knew more than the lecturer about Photoshop. The problem is made worse when the teacher is too proud or arrogant to acknowledge their lack of ignorance. Which gets me onto a whole seperate rant about the quality of teaching staff and the under appreciated nature
of the job. It should be a desired occupation (like being a doctor) where the rewards are high, but you are held to account harshly for not being up to the task.

I haven't really seen the use of divs as table cell replacements, but it has been along time since I made the transistion from table based layout to CSS driven layout. I can easily believe it though, they are such different ways of working and require you to think so differently about you build a website. I've been made aware of this transistion again recently when learning Flex and WPF, where although some principles carry across, there are different rules and what you thought was the best way of doing it isn't
necessarily the case.

Thanks for the interview though, I hope Molly can engage the business guys at Microsoft

Elsa from Elsa

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Live and Direct at Volume

Volume at the V and A, London

I spent some time experiencing Volume today. I took 256meg of pictures and almost 2gig of video (which I'm uploading now). The video is in 720p but medium quality High Definition Mpeg4. If you really want to get a feel for Volume, do check out the non-flash versions which are as smooth as it really gets online. And of course do actually go and experience it yourself. Here's some of best shots with my new
Camera. Its great having a Digital SLR with 12x zoom!

Volume encorages you play

Volume in action

Walking across the grid of Volume

Somone looking up at a pole

People look on



More Camera shots

Look into the light

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Molly goes head to head with Bill Gates on Commitment to Webstandards

Molly is simply awesome. She recently asked Bill Gates about his Commitment to webstandards and didn't let him play it off.

Molly: On behalf of the constituents that I represent . . . standards-oriented developers and Web standards supporters around the world, I think they see a tremendous leap forward in IE7 and the work that has been done as well as the evangelism, the outreach. What would you say to the people that remain skeptical about Microsoft’s agenda in terms of committing to the implementation of standards for the browser and other development tools instead of this paranoia that seems to be out there that Microsoft
wants to own the Web. What would you tell the skeptics out there regarding your commitment to the implementation of open Web Standards in your products?

Bill: I don’t know what it would mean to own the Web. It sounds attractive! [group laughter]. We’re a software company, and we write software tools that let people do productivity, content, write applications. You know, we have our track record. I don’t know what date you want to start in. 1993, when we started IE 1.0, or 1995 when we shipped Windows 95, or when we shipped IE 4.0? We have our track record.

Molly: Well that’s the irony. You [Microsoft] were always ahead of the curve until the IE6 issue occurred, and this . . . five year gap really caused some issues for the development world, and that’s continued.

Bill: No, no. Come on! There’s stuff in IE 4.0 that people are starting to take advantage of. I mean . . . script has been there!

Molly: Scripting, yes.

Bill: Well? Now people are finally using it.

Molly: Well, how about CSS support specifically? It comes down to CSS implementation . . .

Bill: Well, okay. That is up to Dean . . .

Molly: [amidst laughter] Oh, I see, passing the buck, Bill?

Bill: No, no, there’s two things. There’s what we expect we’re trying to do; and the state of implementation of the things we’re trying to do. We’ve done the Mea Culpa . . . that yes, we should have kept the browser innovation curve to be a more continuous curve. Believe me, we wish that we’d done that differently. Dean’s group is getting more resources, and so you’ll actually see us not only going back to the state of what we were innovating before but actually innovating at faster speeds than we were before.
A lot of that has to do with implementing standards. It also has to do with doing user interface things that make our browser a cool browser and ultimately preferable for people to use.

Molly: But the question wasn’t answered, which is: What is the commitment?

Bill: Who has done more implementation of Web standards than Microsoft? I mean . . .

Molly: I’m not arguing you. I’m asking a question . . .

Bill: No, no but eventually a question has to be answerable. What did we do in 1995? What did we do in 1996? What did we do in 1997 . . . you can skip like three years and say we did nothing. We didn’t do anything proprietary, either! That’s criticizing not our intent, our strategy, that’s criticizing our execution and we fully accept that. But every year for 13, 14 years now we’ve not just followed and implemented standards, we’ve contributed. This WS stuff, . . . we contributed more Web standards than anyone!
We have our smartest people who go and work on that stuff . . . we just did the OpenOffice . . . our office XML formats we contributed to them . . . we’ve got XML at the core of all our products. Back in 1996 it was us and a few small companies that proposed XML in the first place. At some point you just have to say hey, look at our track record and if somebody’s track record doesn’t prove something you, then I’ll probably never convince you of something. What is it that we’re not doing? You know if you name
some obscure thing and say hey, Microsoft ought to do more on that I’ll probably just send Dean mail and say hey, she said that such and such a thing we should go and do and we’ll go and do it . . .

Molly: That’s absolutely what’s happened, and I’m acknowledging you for that and Microsoft for that. I’m just saying there are a lot of skeptics still out there.

Bill: How can they be skeptical? I guess if your job is to be skeptical, you’d hate to be out of a job!

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Volume at the V&A

Volume in action

Volume looks like something I dreamed about when I was clubbing in the early 90's. A club with bar graphs through-out the dance floor which react the music in real time. I know it didn't make sense practially but nor did a 6 walls of lasers completely covering the dance floor. I'm going to have to check this out to see what its like in person. Its on at the V&A till Jan 28th 2007. So make sure you don't miss it. I hope to do some recordings in HD and hey get some good snaps with my new camera. The website for UVA is
very heavy on javascript but the pictures are worth looking at. So who's up for going?

Found via We make money not art

Right click here and select ‘Save Target As’ to download video directly.

V&A and Playstation® present ‘Volume’, created by United Visual Artists and onepointsix as part of the Playstation®season. Photographs by John Adrian.

A luminous interactive installation has transformed the V&A’s John Madejski Garden this winter. Volume is a sculpture of light and sound, an array of light columns positioned dramatically in the centre of the garden.

Volume responds spectacularly to human movement, creating a series of audio-visual experiences. Step inside and see your actions at play with the energy fields throughout the space, triggering a brilliant display of light and sound.

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Self-destruction candles

Destructo candles

I love the sound of these candles, shame there about 20 pounds a pop. And I don't understand what happens when you burn it down to nothing one end. Is the battery protected or have to be removed first?

With The Design Can’s clever new Self-Destructo Candle, you can literally burn your candle at both ends. The Self-Destructo is a traditional paraffin pillar candle with an embedded LED light. If you replace the battery occasionally, the LED “candle” will last forever. However, if you ever get tired of it – you don’t need to worry about sending yet another gadget
to landfill. Instead, just flip the candle over, cut the wick, light it, and watch it slowly melt away.

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Yum Yum – Sheer Kitchen and Gravity Chair

Sheer kitchen

If I was building a new house, this would be in it.

The most gorgeous use of design and space for a kitchen I've ever seen. It seems as people get older, they want bigger rooms for everything – the kitchen is no exception. I see beautiful kitchen showrooms all the time but in reality, the space in my home and many others is limited. The Sheer Kitchen addresses those issues by becoming the centerpiece, the light source and the utilitarian work top all in one.

And the Stokke Gravity Balans Chair

Stokke gravity chair

The Stokke Gravity balans chair is the first chair of its kind to simulate zero gravity in multiple seating positions. Although technically, gravity is still there, the design uses your own weight as a counter balance making it feel as if your're floating in the chair – whether upright to get some work done or reclined for a quick nap.

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Alternative Reality Gaming Whitepaper

Jane McGonigal on ARGs

The ARG SIG has written a whitepaper for Alternative Reality Games – ARGs.

This is the first paper from the ARG SIG, and provides a full introduction to the genre as well as a wealth of practical and analytical information on design methodologies, business models, and current and recent games.

The ARG industry is consistently producing multi-million-dollar games for tens of thousands of players at a time, and generating interest across the entertainment, broadcast, and advertising industries. In the last few years, successful games have received widespread recognition, winning awards from the gaming, media and broadcasting industries. As well as these critical success, there are already several businesses with long-term sustainable revenue streams.

Although new to many people, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are still far short of achieving their full potential, each new wave of games bringing major new innovations and increased understanding of what works and what doesn't. We hope you find both inspiration and real practical help in this paper, and look forwards to playing the next wave of ARGs you come up with.

The word in the communities around ARGs is that it royally sucks. As Christy points out in a note BBCi did Jamie Kane not Crossmedia entertainment and there's meant to be lots more errors and mistakes. For the full low down listen to the ARGN podcast 25mins from the end.

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The end of screensavers?

Widgets everywhere

Something I picked up somewhere today. The concept of a screensaver is quite simple.

A screensaver is a computer program originally designed to conserve the image quality of computer displays by blanking the screen or filling them with moving images or patterns when the computers are not in use. Today, screensavers are primarily used for entertainment or security purposes.

So with all the best screensavers now being RSS or internet connected and widget engines being common on desktops now. Doesn't it make sense to do away with screensavers and go for a special widget mode. For example it would be really cool if instead of going to a screensaver, the computer simply moved all the windows and applications back and showed the desktop and an array of widgets. Like most widget engines, it could dull the background so you avoid the burn-in effect. I'm also thinking the widgets in that mode would be either be locked or ones which are informational only. So you can't bypass security through a widget. Anyway it was just a thought….

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Digital Wellbeing, into the woods…

Into the woods range

Digital Well being have changed there range to match the change of the season. They had a instore bash recently to celebrate the change. It was a good night and I managed to grab a chat with the guy behind USB cell and a guy whos created a maginify table. All good stuff and a great evening had by all. I've added a load of pictures here on flickr.

I went back to the Digital well being shop on Sunday. I have got even more pictures and caught a few more videos. This time Sheila playing with the maginfy table, Alex trying out the wood sound remixer and Alex also explains how the Nabaztag works and why its more that just a toy.

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Enterprising Britian : the debate?

Raising the currency of ideas

Well first up, it wasn't a debate, it was a very long series of lectures. And to be fair lectures which were pretty much saying the same thing but not offering any real ways forward. There were some highlights to the day. Talking to Doug Richard was interesting and he had some thoughts about what backstage could be doing with Library House. Kevin Steele chief executive of Enterprise Insight, also put out a call to all community groups around London to get in touch with them, as they have money to fund your community. This event kicks off Enterprise week which has been running for about 4 years now, and there are many events happening around the country this week.

Anyway like the mashup day, I pretty much filmed every I could and have uploaded the results on to Blip.tv.

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End of the road for the Gillmor Gang?

Tom Morris writes

There are rumours flying around about the Gillmor Gang – the whole thing may be wrapping up, or that the show might leave PodShow. Who knows? In Steveland, nothing is constant. Truth is dead! The Gang is dead! Links are dead! Ding dong!

I loved the Gillmor Gang when the likes of Jon Udell were on it. But in the last year its been a mess of ego busting natter. Steve Gillmor seems to be trolling people, while Jason Calacanis seems to suck it all in and blow it back again. Dan Farber and Dana Gardner tend to be very monotone while Mike Arrington and specially Doc Searls sometimes say something of interest. But generally its not enough and its gotten worst recently.

The last straw for me is the crazyness which is going on with the RSS feed. I looked this morning and it had downloaded 600 meg of old Gillmor gang podcasts. I gave up on Gillmor daily ages ago. When I get online again, I'm removing them both from my subscriptions.

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UK Geospatial Mash up event

Uk Geospatial Mashup

I should have blogged this much earlier but I attended and spoke at the UK Geospatial Mash up event at the Ordnance Survey centre in Southampton. I don't remember much now but there's some really good posts about the whole day here and here. I did however record a few of the sessions and put them on Blip.tv for everyone to enjoy.

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