The Version History of a website

How great is that - tracking the changes made to a website not a sense of content, but in functionality. Since websites are not longer just containers of content it makes perfect sense. Is it interesting to the visitor? Sure, here are a couple of reasons:

Feature Discovery Just like you are interested what are the latest features your favorite app has, website visitors are interested what they can do on your website. Especially if you have a lot of functionality that is not immediately visible.

Help Documentation While you add more and more functionality a website might need help documentation - it becomes in the end more and more an application. The Version History keeps a log of what features might need to be added to the help section or which description might be out of date.

Showing that you listen to users By having a version history you can show that you listen to suggestions of your users. Not all new features might be inspired by visitors to your site, but many will be and giving credit is a transparent way of showing your commitment.

Reduces feature redundancy It also gives you a place where you can look up if a similar feature might be already in place. If you are part of a big website with multiple developers and units the chances are high that you don't know all the functionality of the whole website - and you might want to add something which is already there. Even if the site is small you might take over from another developer/designer you might want to know why the site works the way it does. The version history shows you when and where new things got added and might give a hint why the CSS file is messed up the way it is.

It doesn't have to be public You can also make the version history just for yourself - as a reference when you introduced a feature. This can than later be used for measuring how effectively that introduction has been - have you met the goals you have set for the new feature (you have set goals right?).

These are just a few of the benefits I can see for the version history on a website, what are yours?

#website #ux #idea

Reshared post from +The Verge

We've got a Version History!

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Version History | The Verge

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Space visualization inspires and can educate

I remember browsing through the library of my parents and since my dad is an engineer we had not only books about the "achievements of technology" but also books about space flight and the mission to the moon. The graphical language of this books and the illustrations have build my visual taste. I find it personally important to expose children and youngsters to a variety of visual languages and with the right guidance to art. While I despise most of the art circle the works of the masters can touch and inspire everyone.

The illustrations featured here from NASA are maybe not masterpieces but they are good examples of how you can make dull facts interesting while not dumbing down the message or falsifying it. This way they can inspire graphic designers to create better visualizations and readers to get excited about spaceflight.

Darrell Hudson originally shared this post:

You may find these Space Missions Infographics interesting to view. I combined them into this collection set. Some of the images are very wide so I split them in two images for improved aspect dimension. The larger photos are located at the end of the album. Most of the images are found at the NASA website. Don't forget to visit the +NASA Google+ page. Oh yea, one more mention +Ron Garan is a NASA Astronaut.

www.nasa.gov/missions/index.html

#infographic #space #nasa

Space Missions (11 photos)

Link your website to your brand new Google+ Page

Easy as usual and now that just a couple of hours after the announcement everyone can create pages you might also link your website to this page. The icon used for the badge is actually not the black Google+ Icon we are used to now, but a red one - black for people and red for pages?

Now this is more than just a badge to put on your homepage next to Facebook and Twitter, but the tool also provides a link to put in your HTML Header to identify the website as a publisher and link it to that page.

I assume this will be used for display in search results on Google like it is done now for selected authors. I also am curious to see if there will be conflicts between author tags and publisher tags ... maybe both will be shown.

But the opportunity to het immediate followers on search results is great and makes sense.

#googleplus #design #microformat #link #pages

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Link your Google+ page to your site - Google+ Platform — Google Developers Google+ Platform. Overview; Plugins. +1 Button. Configuration Tool. Badge. Configuration Tool. Hangouts. Writing Apps; Running Apps; API Reference; Release Notes. API. People. get; search; listByActiv...

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Google+ Pages - finally Brands can have their Google+ presence

You might think that this is just Facebook envy, but this move makes sense. At least (in contrary to Facebook) here businesses know that they have to create a page and not a profile - since you have the real name policy. The real strong point is the direct integration with Google Search, so in future if you use the + Operator (which was deprecated last week) with a name you get direct access to that Google+ Page.

These pages, as I already said, make sense as an additional tool for companies but should not be seen as a replacement to a website. We have to see how well integrated with the other services and how the use differs from Facebook Pages.

#goolgeplus #pages #business

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Official Google Blog: Google+ Pages: with all the things you care about Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about. 11/07/2011 10:01:00 AM. In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There's friends and family, of course, but there&...

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Amazing professional After Effects, Avid and Final Cut Ori importing/exporting tools...

Amazing professional After Effects, Avid and Final Cut Ori importing/exporting tools now freeSince Automatic Duck and Adobe has teamed up they are no longer developing their import filters, but at least you can get them now for free :D

#video #editing #avid #aftereffects #finalcut #download #free

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Automatic Duck, Inc.

As many of you know I used to be a professional Avid editor, often working between Media Composer and After Effects before the cool kids were doing it. By 1999 I had grown tired of the tedious timelin...

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Google Readers redesign is the right direction

I found it very interesting reading all the reactions to the redesign of Google Reader (http://brianshih.com/78073742). What an outcry. It remembered me the times when Digg launched their big redesign last year. Just like then we had the two camps The Superfans/Superusers: the one's who think they can't live without the "social" aspect the old features brought to them The journalist/blogger/designer/social media expert: who claimed that RSS and Google Reader is dead anyway and therefore deprecating features of Google Reader just confirms that.

They both agree that Google Reader is a niche product and "normal" users don't care anyway, because they discover content on Twitter, Facebook or Newsreaders like Flipboard, Feedly, Pulse. Well they are both wrong.

1) The superuser myth I'm honestly a little bit sick of hearing all the time that "we are the superuser" and "the rest" of the users are not tech savvy and don't care about technology. I can say that there have never been so many tech savvy people around like now - just they don't even address it, because it's second nature to them. I don't even want to start to talk about "young" people and the emerging countries where the population is generally younger and has a different approach to technology all-together. In short - people use technology a lot and they use it the way it makes sense to them.

2) The RSS Feed consumption is a niche myth RSS consumption is growing generally and the user base of Google Reader has grown almost exponentially in the last couple of years - and already last years discussion about the death of RSS where dismissed by the numbers (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/09/rss-dead.html).

While content discovery on social networks (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter) is great - it's also random. You have to take extra steps to see what are the big news you don't want to miss - you have to go to Techmeme etc. Google Reader is the source of "do not miss" news. I know that important tech news will be featured on more than one of the big outlets (GigaOm, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, TUAW, ...) so I just need to subscribe to a couple of them. On Twitter I will not see these posts - they fly by in the stream of yet another free icon Photoshop tutorial free download check-in.

One of the great drivers of the user growth are the mobile devices and the News-Reader Apps - they use mostly Google Reader to synchronize the subscriptions (http://alexking.org/2010/07/13/imap-for-feeds). Podcasting Clients use a similar approach. You can also see that this use case is prominent in the redesign - the subscribe button is clearly the most visible functionality on the site - which means that this is the most used function in Google Reader: Adding a feed source

3) Deprecating features is a evolution and good How many times do we complain about feature overload and bloated software. Trimming features is better than a complete redesign from ground up - it's like trimming branches of a Tree. The good thing about a web application is, that you (as a developer) can really see what features are used and by how many. The social features where messy, clunky and weren't easy to use. The actual number of users who used this specific feature must have been a relative tiny number (even if 10,000 people have signed a petition and where supposedly using the features).

Concluding I think I will continue to use Google Reader as before - as a gateway for news I don't want to miss. The new interface doesn't bring me back to reading content on it, but if I do now I can share it easily to Google+, and no I don't mind +1 something I want to share even if I don't have anything positive to say about it.

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Judging an Corporate Identity by the logo

I love identities - I've designed several big ones and love most the "system" aspect of it. A corporate identity is not only a logo, but the combination of typography, logo and graphical elements applied to many different media and form factors. Most of the time you don't even know all the applications of the identity when you start or deploy it. I find it ridiculous to judge an identity by only seeing the logo and maybe one more application - whatever application might be. But it's often done - like in this article on creative review where close to 200 "designers" mock an advertising agency and their work without knowing the background or the briefing for the redesign and by seeing only one tiny little piece of the work.

#CI #Identity #review #britishgas

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Creative Review - New British Gas logo: a sign of the future? The best in visual communication

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How to activate the new Gmail Look in Google Apps

Google likes to move things around :) While in Gmail you can find the new link in the bottom right, in Gmail for Google Apps you can find it in the right top corner.I made a screenshot, so you won't miss it.

#Google #Gmail #design

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Stop searching your perfect developer / print shop / vendor

How many times have I heard a co-designer expess their desire to find a better [...] (insert external resource who delivers goods by specification of a designer - aka Developer, Printer or Print Shop, Media Buyer, ...). Not because the current service provider or vendor does a bad job, but the main reasoning goes like this: "They should get back to us with suggestions how we could make the [...] (brochure, website, catalog, mobile app) better, faster, smoother or more interactive by using the latest technologies - after all they are the experts of their fields." And in that reasoning lies already the answer - they are the experts in THEIR fields. An external service provider will always try to deliver your project with solutions they know well - therefore with the least amount of effort. They are not interested in making your project "more" anything - unless they have a ready solution to sell you at high margin for them - thus making it "more costly".

And this is rightly so - this is their business. It's not their business to find great solutions for the communication challenges of your client. So stop looking for this kind of vendor because you know them already - they are your competitors.

It's part of the job of a designer to research the latest technologies and materials to adapt them for the communication needs of their clients. It's important as a designer to know what is possible and what not - you don't have to know exactly how it is done, but at least now what there is. You have to push your vendor into new fields or find the right vendor for a specific job. You are the one who should know, because your client relies on you to get the best solution to his problem. Don't try to outsource your competence.

#design #workflow #outsourcing

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Free yourself from the 960 Pixel grid with Grid Calculator Basic Edition

Every serious web designers nows about the 960 Pixel Grid - it was the solution for designers who wanted to improve their design with a grid layout optimized for a standard screen resolution of 1024x768. It is still very popular, but with the advent of responsive/adaptive design and the need for designers to make designs on various screen sizes the 960 grid helps only with one size and the standard 12 pt web ssafe fonts. To calculate grids is a pain and is time consuming - making more than one for a project was not possible until now. Designers Bookshop has updated their Grid Calculator Basic Edition - which has now a focus on setting up Document Grids for Photoshop and Illustrator.

This means in short that you can make an optimized grid for your web project based on screen sizes, resolution and the font you are using in minutes - and even better, you can maintain gutter and leadings etc. through the whole project for different devices.

I'm a great fan of the Grid Calculator Tools (also have a look at the Pro Version for Indesign) and for only 29.99 it's a bargain and well worth a try.

#GridCalculator #grids #layout #webdesign #responsive

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Designers Bookshop – Grid Calculator Basic Edition The ultimate resource in grid systems.

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Pluto Italics for just $49 - and how MyFonts could improve their User Experience [updated]

The world on typography is on fire - new fresh and great fonts are released every day. Just like the new Pluto Italics. Even better when you can get the fonts at a bargain price - say $49 for 16 fonts. And yes it is worth paying, because it's full featured Opentype with alternatives etc.

The only thing I disliked is the buying process - because the website states on the cart that the font package costs $299 - even though it shows you the right price once you click on the button. I head to try it out because on first sight even though the slider image tells me it's $49 the button does not - confusing.

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Pluto Italics™ - Webfont & Desktop font « MyFonts Type designer Hannes von Döhren has created Pluto, a sweet type family consisting of 16 Uprights and 16 Italics; 32 fonts in all. The fonts are informal and friendly at first sight and lend themselves...

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[update]Myfonts has corrected the issue and the price is now shown correctly. Good for you.[/update]

When a cover pays tribute

Achtung baby is not my favorite U2 Album, but it might have inspired more musicians than the others. The free cover album released a couple of days ago is filled with great and popular artists. And as a preview some of the tracks are available to listen at Consequence of Sound. Nice

#nin #u2 #killers #cover #music

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Check Out: Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, The Killers cover U2 « Consequence of Sound Consequence of Sound is a New York- and Chicago-based, worldly influenced music blog that seeks to cover the music world as it has never has been covered before. Features news, reviews, mp3, and festi...

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Google Plus for Apps, Stunning Visualization and advanced Photo Editing

Nice Update for Google Plus of requested features (Google Apps Integration) and some other goodies. The Photo Editing has been seen a great improvement to before and has all the tools for basic photo retouching - so now you can pimp you smartphone pictures. But even nicer in my opinion is the Google Plus Ripples feature. How often have we looked at visualizations of Twitter and Facebook shares. Most of the times you couldn't really have the same tool for your own posts as none of the tools had access to all the users. The new tool from Google is build into the social network and therefore has full access.

When comparing it to the statistics you get from Facebook you can clearly see the different approach of this social network. While Facebook claims to be people centric, the stats are mostly advertising driven. Since Advertising is not yet possible in Google Plus, the statistics are more people centric. I'm really interested to see how this will evolve in the future.

#GooglePlus #update #Apps #Visualization #data #photography

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Official Google Blog: Google+: Popular posts, eye-catching analytics, photo fun and... Google+: Popular posts, eye-catching analytics, photo fun and... 10/27/2011 10:07:00 AM. We think Google+ should get better every time you use it. It's not enough to obsess over community feedback...

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Donwload Section for Mobile Sites? - 5 Tips for a better User Experience

It's good practice to have a dedicated download section if a website is for a business that provides a lot of technical information for download. Especially B2B websites use the websites as a resource for providing access to brochures, drawings, etc. But in this mobile first times even B2B sites get accessed by mobile devices and downloading a file to that device is not always the best experience. Here are 5 tips for a better User Experience

1) Include a "Send Brochure to Email" Button I often find information I want to read later when I'm at my computer - the ability to send it to my email account is an easy way to remember me to read it and I know where i can find the brochure - in the email.

2) Provide links to PDF-readers Adobe has extended it's free Acrobat Reader series to mobile devices, but unlike the desktops not all smart phones users have installed them. It's much like a years ago where every website had a link to the download section of Adobe Acrobat - just now the links are for the app stores. Here are the links to the current versions: - Adobe Reader for Android - Access PDF files on the go: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.reader - Adobe Reader X for iOS - Access PDF files on the go: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=469337564&mt=8

3) Use a third party service like Isuuu I used Isuuu on many websites. Mostly where the business had a publication or catalog they wanted to make readable on the web without transferring all the content to the website. The causes might be workflow related or just because it was just cheaper.

Issue has redesigned it's online reading experience beyond their flash player to HTML5 and makes it accessible this way to mobile devices and tablets.

4) Give an alternative URL If the brochures just are other versions of the content already present on the website you might just publish a link and a note to direct them to that page.

5) Don't get rid of the download section If none of the above solutions work for you don't just get rid of the section. Visitors might know your site from the desktop version and expect to find the download section. Just have the section with some copy stating that you don't provide downloads in the mobile version with a link to the full website. I people really want to get to the downloads they can reach it.

This are just a couple of examples and it would be great to hear other ideas - what are your solutions? #UX #mobile #webdesign

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Do Camera Phones finally take photos that match the memory

Every time I change phone I hope I can forget about my point&shoot. I hoped it in 2005 when I've got the Sony Ericcson K750i (K is for Kamera = Camera) - and later with the first Nexus One. The improvements where there, but slow and I couldn't really see why the evolution was so slow and the quality so bad even compared to a $50 Point&Shoot from the electronic gadget store around the corner. My main problem is that the shots don't live up to the memories. If we take the pictures to keep on the memories, I want them to be on par with my memories - or even better. I want them to be the aid to remember more vividly how beautiful, fun or dull that moment was. I don't want them to distort my memory or change it.

Within the latest releases of smartphones I've seen (at least from the publicized shots) that the technology is going to be there - soon. This video is an example of the images you can shoot with the latest Google Galaxy Nexus Phone (with some technical help to make it more engaging). It really looks promising, just like the Samsung Galaxy SII and the new iPhone 4s. Maybe this time we can really forget about our Point and Shoots.

#photography #smartphone #memory

Reshared post from +Romain Guy

Rockaway Beach, by Galaxy Nexus #android #galaxynexus #timelapse

This is a slightly longer version of the video showed during the Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 launch event.

You can also watch the video on YouTube: Rockaway Beach by Galaxy Nexus

The video was shot on Rockaway Beach, near Pacifica, California. The final video is a compilation of video and time-lapse clips shot with a Galaxy Nexus phone. Everything was shot in 1080p and the final video was edited in Adobe After Effects CS5. The only processing done on the original footage was to speed it up in the first clip.

The video clips were shot without the help of a tripod and shake a little bit. The time-lapse clips were shot using a Stage Zero Dolly from Dynamic Perception (www.dynamicperception.com). If you haven't seen them before, check out the photos of the rig I used by opening the album linked below.

This video was my very first try at shooting video (including time-lapses) with a phone. It is also not what I had planned on doing when I went to Rockaway Beach that night! My Canon 5D Mk II remained untouched as soon as I got the idea of using the Galaxy Nexus. This first experiment was very interesting and I already have many ideas of other videos and time-lapses I would like to shoot with this phone.

You can watch the video in full 1080p resolution and I highly recommend you do so on... a Galaxy Nexus! The gorgeous 720p screen at 315 dpi is amazing.

Enjoy!

In album Photo Gear (5 photos)

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Mapmaker now available in Canada

Mapmaker is the the tool from Google Maps where you can add information - much like you can in Open Streetmaps. By looking at the list of countires and regions where this tool is available I can see a pattern - regions with low density of population or available data. But to be honest - there are areas even in high population density countries like Italy and Germany where Google Maps still lacks. While I hope they will release this tools for those areas as well I will try to make the map of Canada better :)

Reshared post from +Daniel Mabasa

Woohoo! The magic of Google Map Maker is now available in Canada!

Read about it here: http://goo.gl/RG7Gl

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Animate your Website Elements the easy way

CSS3 has introduced easy animations to webdesign ... but what if you are new to animating and don't know what looks good or want to see a couple of examples? Here is a cross-browser CSS Animations that look really good and will help you make you website look more animated. I can already see them in use on forms and sliders.

#CSS3 #Animation #Free #Resource

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Animate.css - a bunch of plug-and-play CSS animations

Animate.css. animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness. Create ...

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Custom Report for Google Analytics to see impact of encrypted searches

Looking at the Keywords of your site statistics are one of the first things web designers/owners do to see, what people are looking for on the site. The latest changes in Google's Policy to encrypt searches will impact this key measure - but how much?

Check out this cool tutorial on how to see the impact or just click directly on the link of the custom report and add it to your Google Analytics Account.

http://goo.gl/UuKY0

#Analytics #Encryption #Google #SEO

Reshared post from +Avinash Kaushik

Estimate the impact of recent Google http > https change for logged in users on your search keywords.

Step 1. Open Google Analytics (or any tool you have access to).

Step 2: Go to Traffic Source > Sources > Search > Organic

Step 3: Change the Date Range (top right) to Oct 19th - Oct 20th (yes real time! :).

Step 4: Look for a keyword called: (not provided)

Step 5: Compare the total Visits (in the scorecard under the word Explorer on top) with the Visits you see in the row called (not provided).

Step 6: Use your own data, rather than FUD to: A. Worry a lot. B. Not worry at all. C. Wonder if you are suddenly hungry.

Screenshot for my blog attached.

#datadrivenfreakingout :)

PS: You should be able to do this with every web analytics tools including the main ones like Omniture, WebTrends, Yahoo! Web Analytics, CoreMetrics, Baidu Analytics et al.

PPS: Inspired by Thomas's comment below I've created a special custom report in Google Analytics that you can use to keep track of the impact of this change over time. Log into Google Analytics first, then click on this link to download the report: http://goo.gl/UuKY0 .

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Why do startups Succeed of Fail

Great insight to the Startup Genome Project - which tries to discover what makes a startup successful. With all the startup hype going on it's really interesting to see the light a data driven approach can bring into this complex topic. While many startups struggle to even get their first customers, it seems that scaling to fast is the neck breaker...

Enjoy this interview brought to you through Dormroom Tycoon Podcast.

#podcast #startup #data #analysis #audio

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Max Marmer: Startup Genome Project – Reasons why Startups Succeed or Fail – Business Interview In this interview, Max Marmer founder of Startup Genome Project gives reasons why some startups succeed whilst others fail.

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Google Rail/Street View - or the never ending Deja-Vue

I love that the Swiss rail is embracing the new technology instead of demonizing it (like it was in Germany). I love StreetView to check out a neighbourhood before renting a place and get an idea how a certain area looks like before I book a vacation, but sometimes then when I get there I have a feeling of Deja-Vue. Have I've been here? Yes - virtually. There is still a difference in experiencing the real thing - especially nature, but still sometimes I wonder if I should scale down on my peaking before travelling.

On the other side I'm deeply related to the Swiss Alps, because I grew up exactly next to them in the italian Alps and the Dolomites. Seeing them in Google Streetview makes me feel a little bit closer to home whenever I want.

#StreetView #Switzerland

Reshared post from +Vanessa Schneider

Too, too cool.

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