February 14, 2006

Open Sources UIs and Design Patterns

Filed under: design,Internet, eh? — sparkrobot @ 12:27 pm

If this headline doesn’t reach out and grab you, ignore this post. Yahoo has posted this to their developer network.  If you’re still reading this, you might find this interesting.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written
in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using
techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities
facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features by enhancing
and normalizing the developer’s interface to important elements of the browser
infrastructure (such as events, in-page HTTP requests and the DOM). The
Yahoo UI Library Controls produce visual, interactive user interface elements
on the page with just a few lines of code and an included CSS file. All
the components in the Yahoo! User Interface Library have been released as
open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

December 15, 2005

The Website Development Process

Filed under: design,photography — sparkrobot @ 12:09 pm

Ran across this on The Website Development Process. Clever stuff.

December 13, 2005

CHS Circus logos

Filed under: design — sparkrobot @ 2:38 pm

Stumbled across a cool collection of old Circus logos via veer.com. Veer’s recently redesigned and includes a new design blog. Good design inspiration and the new look at veer’s not too shabby neither. It’s not a major overhaul but the design seems to be more suggestive and inviting overall. A nice improvement on an already well designed site.

October 13, 2005

You are a solar power plant

Filed under: design — sparkrobot @ 9:44 pm

After all, this is the 21st century. I don’t know what happened along the way… where are all the flying cars?
(more…)

September 9, 2005

Sony’s new Walkman

Filed under: apple,design — sparkrobot @ 2:44 pm

Sony’s got something here. The recently announced Walkman is a well-designed product packing some of the features that seem to make the iPod such a phenomenal pop culture hit: a compact form factor, alluring industrial design, simple easy-to-use hui and enough storage space to carry around all your music… But am I missing something here, or besides the fact that it’s purple, doesn’t it looks almost exactly like the iPod?

Sony Walkman, image from news.com

Everyone’s looking for the next “iPod killer”. So far not even Sony – with the added cachet of being a modern superbrand (just like Apple) – has found a way to do it.

I think this might be a step in the right direction for competition. Instead of trying to kill the 800 pound gorilla, they’ll simply dress him up for dinner. However, in the wake of the annoucement that Apple’s got a new nano member in the iPod family, they’ll probably not get much ragtime for it. And although they’ll not make much history with it, they’re absolutely certain to make a few bucks.

There’s also something that’s fundamentally missing here: “It’s the software, stupid.“.