We are pleased to announce the launch of the site for COPE - the Committee on Publication Ethics. COPE are the “the kitemark of medical journals” - working towards high ethical standards and safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record.  In other words, they “help scientific journals to get their houses in order”.

We developed the brand for COPE and designed and built the site from the ground up. COPE wanted the site to be a forum where publishers and editors of peer-reviewed journals could discuss issues related to the integrity of work submitted to or published in their journals. Also required were different levels of membership to the site, each with varying degrees of access and functionality.  To cope with this (excuse the pun) we built the site using the modular content management system Drupal.

The site launched successfully and has received great feedback from COPE members - of which there are 3022 to date. A big thank you to the COPE team and, in particular, to COPE’s Jeremy Theobald and Linda Gough for their hard work and dedication on what has been both a challenging and enjoyable project.

At FoxLand we’ve been talking about the Blackberry Storm a lot recently. We like our iPhones here, but it’s not perfect, and with it now being the no.1 phone in the US, we’re looking for competition and new ideas. We have also recently been working with a client on an iPhone application and other mobile-focussed websites, so we have a great deal of interest in what is happening in this area.

RIM are a strong, respected and much-loved company with fanatical users (much like the other fruit-seller), and they have released a string of highly regarded phones over the years while also breaking out of their corporate niche with phones like the Pearl. Therefore, RIM’s first foray into the touchscreen market, the Blackberry Storm, promised much. The feature that had us particularly intrigued was the unique take on the touchscreen, that included a ‘clickable’ screen. This creates a multitude of ways of interacting with buttons and text, and also has the potential to avoid ‘accidents’ (it is often far too easy to accidently click on items you didn’t mean to on the iPhone). 

Sadly though it looks like RIM have failed in their revolution, and while it is early days and there may be a software fix coming, it looks like they have a major problem on their hands. From reviewers to developers to bloggers, the reviews vary from lukewarm to scathing. The highly regarded and usually pretty mellow David Pogue at the New York Times has put the boot in with his review:

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up activating something else in the list.

I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.

So, what to do? As with the iPod before the perception is that companies seem to want to copy Apple without trying to create their own concepts and ideas. RIM are known for their fantastic phones that work brilliantly with email and use real keyboards. They could concentrate on that and push and innovate that whole experience. Many people will always prefer this to the touchscreen, even if it is ‘clickable’. What they shouldn’t do is even look like they’re trying to play ‘catch-up’. For example, earlier today as I walked past the Vodafone shop, they had a giant version of the Storm in the window showing the user experience (see image above). This is exactly the same as Apple who show giant iPhones in theirs and O2’s shop windows. Unfortunately for the giant Storm, the quality of the video looked terrible, the user interface poor - and worst of all, the screen had not been set up correctly - the image was squashed.

Update: See Stephen Fry’s mini take on the Storm (via Twitter)

After a couple of years of being heavily addicted to the US presidential campaign, I’m already beginning to feel a little nostalgic for the time spent endlessly flicking through the websites that helped feed my habit. While none of these will be particularly new to many people/addicts, here is a little list of some of my favourite websites I’ve been heavily using:

• Memeorandum has been the main supplier of my needs - a constant river of the most read news and opinion from the makers of Techmeme, from the rabid right all the way through to the paranoid left.
• 538 has been a fantastic new site that parsed the various polls, and made projections of its own. Created by baseball statistic geeks, it has been widely quoted and used everywhere in the media and even had its creator on the Colbert Report.
• Andrew Sullivan, a US-based British conservative who supported John Kerry and now Barack Obama has long been an invigorating thinker on issues of what it means to be of the Right.
• Twitter’s US Election page has been an amusing, if not actually very useful insight into the endless gibberish that spouts from the minds of the Twitterverse.
• The Corner is a great insight into the primarily hardcore neo-conservative mind.
• The Huffington Post has been a great resource of mainly Democratic points-of-view.

There have been endless others, but these have been my main sources. And to think… just another couple of years and I’ll be interminably flicking through these yet again.

A nice viral video to encourage your friends to get out and vote (if they were American, that is). Who knew it was all Christian’s fault?

We’re a bit late, after all she joined us a couple of months ago, but we’d like to welcome our newest recruit, the wonderful web designer Inayaili (thankfully she’s happy being called simply Lili). Inayaili came all the way from Faro, Portugal to join us and she is still getting used to the “freezing” English weather and London’s public transport. She loves making beautiful, clean, hand coded websites, and, as she says, it is done “always with a bit of love”. 

One of the main reasons that appealed to us about her was that she is thoroughly engaged with the web, its citizens and where it might be going next. Inevitably then you can find her all over the internet - on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Friendfeed, Dopplr… everywhere!

She has also just been nominated as one of the web’s 25 hottest female web designers - a slightly dubious concept - but we’re proud anyway!

We’ve been busy recently - we’ve also just launched the website for Jane Wentworth Associates. JWA are a consultancy that helps cultural organisations, like Somerset House, the V&A and the Natural History Museum, understand and clarify their brands. The website will be evolving over the next few months as more case studies are included.

We’ve been helping out our friends at HoweMello with their website. HoweMello are a brand new company focussed on using copywriting and graphic design to “bring brands to life”. They have worked with a wide variety of clients, including Colors Magazine, the Tate and Donna Karan.

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.