Apple’s Flashy iPod Touch Ad

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There’s a iPod Touch advert on Wired’s homepage that’s very smart.

Anyone not in the digital media industry, will likely look at the advert and not be overly impressed, but technically, this ad is very impressive, as it extends beyond what you assume is it’s frame, the iPod covers the menu bar above (which remains active), and that my friend is really neat, in a very geeky way.

I’m assuming it’s done with a combination of still graphics synced perfectly with the video below, but I could be wrong. Although the question to ask now, is whether this is all done in HTML5, or did Apple use Flash?

Facebook Timeline Photoshop Template

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Facebook timelines have now gone mainstream, as you can see from the screen grab of mine below, you can play around with the top image however you please.

This top graphic is 849 x 312 pixels, with the small square being 180×180 (although this gets scaled down to 125 x 125. But rather than you having to worry about setting that up, I thought I’d upload Photoshop & Illustrator templates so anyone could make their own with little effort.

The .zip file contains layered Photoshop & Illustrator files 849 x 312px with a positional graphic for the profile picture in the Photoshop file.

download .zip
UPDATE: Almost 2,500 downloads in 21 days! Wow, I wasn’t expecting that!

The Next Train Will Arrive in the Vegetable Aisle

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Hate grocery shopping? Hate waiting for public transport? Then why not combine them and make them twice as bad? ah, but elementary maths tells us that adding two negatives creates a positive!

This is a really simple, yet very effective way to get customers to try out Tesco’s online retail store. Perfect for South Korea, where 80% of the population have web enabled smart phones. Unfortunately Tesco would unlikely have the same success on their home turf, with no mobile reception and crowded rush hour platforms, the London Underground would be an impossible test bed.

The Web Icon

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A couple of years ago I needed a blog icon, realising there wasn’t a universally accepted one in existence, I created one to use for myself and threw it out into the world for anyone to use… it became far more popular than I ever expected, averaging 45,000 downloads a year!

A couple of months ago, I joked that I would look at creating an equivalent icon for websites, I actually sketched out a few ideas, but didn’t take it any further, until this weekend when I was realised I need one for my ID me at website, so I sat down to think about it a little more.

After numerous sketches and scribbled ideas based around “www”, “://” hyperlinks (even, dare I say it, a spider’s web), I eventually came back to a very simple solution and the first thing I’d drawn, a “w”

In keeping with the earliest web standards I used the web colour #0000FF (r=0 / g=0 / b=255) for the blue, plus added an underline to the “w”, both of these referring to the default way to identifying a hyperlink in standard HTML.

I’ve created a stylised “w” although I don’t see a reason why an underlined “w” in another font couldn’t work equally as well. As to colour, #0000FF makes perfect sense, but as with the blog icon, a colour more in keeping with it’s surroundings could be used.

As with the blog icon, I’m throwing this icon out there for anyone to use, tweak, do whatever they like with, totally gratis and without restriction. A mention or link back would be appreciated, but it’s not a prerequisite.

Let me know what you think and whether you’d use it, or know of anything else in use, I’ve included all original vector artwork and PNG’s with the blog icon .zip

 

 

 

 

There Can Be Only One!

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aha, I got a few responses/questions to my post last week about the death of email, so thought I’d explain it a little clearer.

Email may be being used less and less but we need email addresses, as they’re the most widely used open standard that we can use to uniquely identify ourselves on the internet. Of course Mr Zuckerberg would like to change that, and make having to have a Facebook ID the defacto ID and login for the web. That won’t happen as the web community naturally resists when a monopoly gets too big. Ironically you still need an email address to create a Facebook ID initially, although I’m sure it won’t be long before you can use just your mobile number to do it.

So why do I think needing an email address is likely to become a thing of the past, let’s look at phone numbers and domain names first.

When you purchase a mobile phone or have a landline installed, you get a unique number for your country or area, these numbers have in turn been allocated to the service provider you’ve chosen. If you choose to change service provider you can usually transfer the mobile number to the new one, thus retaining your number.

When you purchase a domain name, you choose a registrar that offers the services you need and pay them annually to retain it. If you decide to have a website you point the domain name at an IP address allocated to the service provider. The IP address is the unique ID number for the webserver that will host your website, 217.77.185.55 is an example. NB every device that connects to a network has a unique IP address.

So what? Well imagine this…

You go to a service provider that gives you a unique number, just like getting a mobile phone or a domain name, but unlike a mobile number, this number replaces your mobile, email, domain name, message service, voice calls, Twitter ID, Facebook ID, in fact any social network you choose to register it with.

If your number were +878101393436328

http://n.878101393436328 is your domain
@878101393436328 is you email, instant message ID
+878101393436328 is your phone number and entering the number is how you’re found on social networks (the same way someone finds you using your email address or mobile number)

You control how your messages are routed the same way you decide who hosts your website, or handles your email. So if someone calls +878101393436328 you decide if it gets routed to a mobile, landline, desktop, TV, tablet (or they could all ring at once, or in sequence), same when someone sends you an SMS, email, instant message, Tweet, Skype etc, it makes no difference how the message originated, as long as it’s routed correctly… the same way someone can call you on your mobile from the other side of the world using their phone / Skype, the audio gets routed to you instantly, no matter where you both are.

This will only be possible when the standards are open, there’s no monopoly and it’s available to everyone. That’s when email addresses or having to be on the same social network or instant message service or same VOIP service will become obsolete and a thing of the past.

Further reading: The ITU (International Telephone Union) introduced a universal personal telephone number (UPT) +878 in 2001 (wikipedia), controlled by VISIONng. ENUM is the process of converting a telephone number into an internet name space.