The browser wars: part 57 or so
Yet another opening has occurred in the long running war of the browsers… admittedly a war not many people are that interested in anymore – instead ‘web standards’ won. But back to the war.
The most interesting news is that Google have announced a new web browser called Chrome. My favourite feature is that it has been launched via a gorgeous and quirky comic by Scott McCloud (creator of the fantastic Understanding Comics). As for persuading a significant number of regular people to actually use it, I feel it will be a hard sell. There are features that developers and geeks will appreciate (we do!), but it has been hard enough to persuade people they should move from Internet Explorer 6, which is dangerous, let alone to think about moving to yet another browser after they may have made the effort to move to Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. It is also (arguably) quite ugly, which won’t help. That said, many of the ideas behind it are very interesting from a developers point-of-view and it may well become a very interesting browser in the future.
The other news, less interesting or fun, but news that will probably have more impact on the world in a practical way, is that Internet Explorer 8 has reached the next stage of development. When it actually comes out is anyone’s guess, but it will probably be much more important to web developers in an everyday sense than Chrome will be – at least for the foreseeable future.
2 September, 2008
The inevitable iPhone post
Everyone else is talking about it, so we will too. Here are our 12 initial small observations…
- It appears that it has a beautiful, flexible and refined UI.
- It makes all other phones look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
- It makes the iPod’s interface look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
- That said, in reality, making a call, starting a text message and entering my calendar on my Sony Ericsson k800 is efficient and fast. It will be interesting to see how fast the iPhone will be to do the same.
- The iPhone doesn’t offer any actual features that other phones don’t already offer. Will the interface and ease-of-use sway people to switch to the iPhone. It worked with the iPod, but lots of people bought Motorola’s RAZR despite its’ interface.
- Your fingers are going to be moving and tapping a lot, rather than sticking mainly to a small area like most phone’s joystick. Will this become annoying?
- The virtual QWERTY keyboard used for typing looks possibly awkward without real buttons.
- In the future I’d like a tiny Apple phone that does the basics well, and an iPhone without the phone element (i.e. a very slick iPod).
- Developers should be given a clear path for making applications for it. Apple is currently saying that this won’t happen, but a range of games, VOIP and Office-type applications immediately spring to mind as great features they may not deign to make, but would be a natural fit for the iPhone.
- While much of the functionality and interaction has been patented – it will be interesting to see how Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, etc. will react to this. Can they in time before the iPhone launch? This is much bigger, richer and arguably better competition than the iPod’s original competitors.
- The iPhone’s web browser illustrates how well mobile interfaces are beginning to deal with pages that are larger than their screen. Designing a website for all shapes and sizes is not necessarily something we will always need to do.
- We want one.
10 January, 2007
Blood Diamond Action, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and Amazon S3 (edited)
This article was edited, and moved to another post.
Spurt in Creative Review
The Spurt campaign, which we built the website for, is Pick of the Month in November’s Creative Review magazine, the world’s leading monthly magazine for visual communication. Working with Provokateur, the website backed up a press ad alerting readers to a spoof pro-aviation growth organisation, Spurt. Featuring bogus airline big-wig Sir Montgomery Cecil, the ad urged readers to ignore the tree hugging lobby with the motto “Sod them. Let’s fly”. Only when readers visit the site is it revealed that the ad was organised by a coalition of environmentalist groups including Enoughsenough.org, Airportwatch and Greenpeace.
8 November, 2006
Colour Blind Web Page Filter
A client emphasised an important design point during a meeting yesterday when he told us he was colour blind and couldn’t distinguish between the colours red and green. He said this can often lead to difficulties reading text on websites. And our client is not alone.
Colour blindness actually affects nearly 10% of the male population (but only about 0.4% of the female population). This means that 1 in 10 of the males who use the internet are seeing websites with a completely different colour scheme to that intended by the designer.
Colour blindness is a condition in which the individuals affected have a partial or total inability to detect certain wavelengths of the visual spectrum. It is typically genetic in nature but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals. The total inability to see colour is extremely rare and so the disorder should really be known as colour vision deficiency or colour defective vision.
Colour blindness varies between individuals in both the insensitivity and the wavelengths they are unable to see. The most common defect involves the green receptors and leaves people unable to distinguish red and green, but still sensitive to red light. The next most common failure is in the red receptors. These people also confuse red and green but are insensitive to red light.
The effects of red-green colour blindness can be described as follows:
- Protanopia (red deficiency) – blue-green appears grey, red-purple appears grey. This is a rare form of colour blindness.
- Protanomalia (partial red deficiency) – blue-green appears indistinctly greyish, red-purple appears indistinctly greyish. This is also rare, affecting about 1% of the male population.
- Deuteranopia (green deficiency) – green appears grey, purple-red appears grey. This also affects about 1% of the male population.
- Deuteranomalia (partial green deficiency) – green appears indistinctly greyish, purple-red appears indistinctly greyish. This is the most common form of colour blindness and affects about 8% of the male population.
Luckily there is help at hand when designing websites to ensure they are “colour blind friendly”. The ColorBlind Webpage Filter helpfully shows how your webpage looks under the various forms of colour blindness as described above.
6 September, 2006
10 years of Flash: from Futuresplash to Flex
Another day, another big anniversary: 10 years of the Flash plugin. When we began working with the internet even images were a controversial addition to the web browser. It was before the dot.com boom, crash, Ajax and the Web 2.0 hype. Before stylesheets, large displays and millions of colours. Clients wanted to express their brand. Designers wanted to show-off. When Flash appeared print designers were revolutionised – they could suddenly be web designers and they didn’t have to use Times New Roman. An experience visually comparable to TV was suddenly possible – and clients and designers ‘got’ TV – and everyone wanted their logos to animate like CNN idents.
The web, though, is not a simple broadcast medium, but to many people trying to understand what to do with it, that’s what it reminded them of. This led to the splash screen, unnecessary loading times, confusing interfaces on mainstream sites, etc. – all now stereotypes of Flash content mistakes.
The tool now, originally just very simple animation called Futuresplash, is now a very different beast. It is a sophisticated visual tool. It can carry video. It can create rich online and offline applications. Flex, Flash’s most recent creation tool from Adobe, is a powerful standards compliant programming tool that is a million miles from Futuresplash’s simple timeline-based animation.
Ironically, the presentation that accompanies Adobe’s history of Flash suffers from many of the stereotypical problems of Flash: tricky navigation, slow loading (see screenshot, above), unnecessary animation that gets in the way of information. I found it so frustrating I had to reload the whole thing, just to be able to navigate on to the next section. The content seems genuinely interesting – but I wish they had a simpler way of accessing it.
This is the opposite of today’s best use of Flash. Examples such as YouTube will never win a graphic design award, but it gets the job done. It blends into the web, is easy-to-use and is enormously popular (although I believe the 60% of all web traffic rumours are probably overdoing it). People, of course, love YouTube, not because it is Flash, but because it delivers them interesting/fun content. In fact, I would guess that the majority of its’ users do not even know it is Flash.
Flash has also found it’s way onto mobile phones and other devices – with apparent great success, although it hasn’t appeared natively on any phones owned by anyone I know. The advantage for Flash on a phone is not only it’s portability and consistency, but it has an opportunity to ‘claim’ the entire user-interface. This gives it a better chance than on the PC as an all encompassing application platform. On the PC it will always jostle with all the other generally consistent widgets of the host operating system user interface (Windows/Linux/OSX).
We recommend Flash regularly, but there are almost no examples wherein we would recommend using only Flash for any website. NHS Alchemy is a case in point. We wanted an exciting opening page, and in the ‘NHS People’ area we utilise it for video and photo stories (with text alternatives).
People who build the web should never get hung up on the technology, people don’t care. People should never be asked to think about whether they have Flash installed. It should never take an age to download. It should blend into their experience and not break any web conventions (like making it impossible to bookmark content). This is equally true for Ajax, Java, Shockwave, Flash or even simple HTML content. The right technology needs to be used for the right situation – and this normally means: keep it simple.
30 August, 2006
Leopard, or: How the other 5% will live
Apple started their big WWDC jamboree today where they announced their next revision of their operating system: OS X 10.5 (Leopard). For us this is interesting as we are not only Mac users, but because Apple have a large influence on user interface design. Usually within a few months design decisions made in the Apple mothership will start to percolate around websites, TV graphics, games and other operating systems.
So what new things do we see in today’s presentation? Bearing in mind, this is only at a Preview stage, and they have another 7-9 months to work at it, we saw some interesting ideas, and maybe a couple of strange and ugly ones.
The first idea that raised my eyebrows was the design of Time Machine, a back-up utility built into the operating system. A very fine idea you might think, but the interface to access older versions of files looks like a bad Star Wars game, complete with a spinning galaxy (see above) and fat arcade buttons. While I think a visual way of browsing your past files is essential (as opposed to just having folders and lists), wrapping up such a powerful feature in what looks like an ugly toy seems like an very eccentric decision. I can only hope there are alternative methods of accessing your backups – and the world’s web designers don’t start peppering their designs with space metaphors.
More about Leopard, coming soon.
7 August, 2006