UX Magazine

UX Magazine running on Drupal

Constantinos Demetriadis — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:44:20 +0000

What a week! We have a bunch of new and exciting stuff to announce this week, but we'll start off the day by announcing our transition to Drupal. UX Magazine is now running on Drupal 6. The design has been left intact, although most of our frequent visitors will notice a dramatic upgrade regarding the sites' speed. We've also moved all out stuff over to the Rackspace cloud. We might still have some unresolved issues in the backend, and we might have to double up on some feeds but please bare bear with us, this is all part of the transition...

We have lot's of exciting announcements coming this week. Stay tuned by following us on twitter or by subscribing to one of our feeds

Google Wave Announced!

Alex Schleifer — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:49:57 +0000

Google I/O 2009’s big announcement could be the open-source – e-mail – chat – wiki – social network – file share – Twitter hybrid: Google Wave. While it won’t be out for another several months Mashable offers a pretty good recap of what to expect.

Badda Bing!

Constantinos Demetriadis — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:39:21 +0000

Today, Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing! It’s expected to go live in the next few days, so keep a close eye on it. We will…

Palm Pre Emulator Videos

Alex Schleifer — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:02:56 +0000

We’re pretty excited about the imminent launch of the Palm Pre. but until we officially get our hands on one we’ve been enjoying these screencasts taken via the WebOS emulator. While it’s hard to get a good feel of the phone without multitouch the videos go into quite a lot of detail on most features.

2010 Toyota Prius Microsite

Alex Schleifer — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:50:47 +0000

Nice little product page for the new 2010 Toyota Prius. Still not sure about the car’s stylings but I love the animated infographics. I hear it also made The FWA’s site of the day.

Hollywood goes open source, sort of

Constantinos Demetriadis — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:41:26 +0000

Is Hollywood reconsidering some of its’ strategies around film making?

I recently saw J.J. Abrams talk on TED, and was literally woken up to a reality “of the future” which, ironically enough, is happening now.

At some point he mentions that film making is now open for anyone who wants to do it. It no longer has to be done in studios and wrapped up in tremendous budgets. Anyone can grab a camera and start shooting.

I remember years ago – but not that many – anyone who wanted to create a short home movie, would literally be limited to creating something very “cheap” in every aspect. Either it be the quality of the end result or the “special” effects, it was always a “home” movie…

This has changed. Dramatically.

On May 3d, a new breed of movies was unleashed to the public. Not to say that this hasn’t been done before, it’s just the first time it has been done with Hollywoods’ consent.

I’m talking about The Hunt for Gollum which is self described as a “Independent film inspired by Lord of the Rings” and is based on the characters by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The film itself came to existence with a mere £3000 since it was created with the love – and funding – of it’s makers, and a whole bunch of “Lord of the Rings” fans, which took part in this venture without any pay.

Normally this would only go so far due to copyright laws and lawsuits. But in this case, Hollywood just said do it. Tolkien Enterprises, Peter Jackson and anyone else legally bound to the “Lord of the Rings” brand just said… “OK, do it, so long as you don’t profit from it”.

And they did.

To say the least, the end result is stunning, and nowhere near the cheap stuff we used to do back in the day. And although this might not be exactly considered a home movie, I still see a few people doing “their thing”, with off the shelf equipment.

Think about it.

If Hollywood can open up to the public like this, just imagine how many more stories will be told, how many more movies will be made, and how many more people will be inspired. It’s tremendous, and it’s happening now.

Google's New Product Logos

Alex Schleifer — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:24:45 +0000

Looks like Google is cleaning up its act and getting their product logos standardized. While I love the fact that Google has fun with its brand the previous format of having a small product name applied wherever it fit below the logo always felt a bit random. No big change but an important one.

Wireframing ahoy!

Constantinos Demetriadis — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:42:13 +0000

We take a quick look at some wireframe resources and tools

Wireframes are the foundation of a design before it even starts to formulate with colors, shapes and forms. And even if some of us find them ugly, or a waste of time – yeah, I’ve heard that too – there is always the greater part among us that find them extraordinarily useful, amazingly beautiful, and somewhat sexy.

Here’s a short list of my favorite wireframing resources, which apart from keeping me informed about how others do it, I am also inspired and lead to new directions.

Wireframes Magazine

Just as you’d expect form a site with a name like that, they serve great wireframing content

Visit Wireframes Magazine

I ♥ wireframes

This is more of a “Flickr pool meets twitter with a blog” kinda resource, but it still remains on my RSS Reader because it keeps serving top quality content.

Visit I ♥ wireframes

Flickr is also a great source for inspiration

Images always talk better than words, so here’s what a really quick Flickr search comes up with. Great inspiration minus all the jabber …

Check these Flickr groups for instant inspiration:

Everyday Information Architecture
IA Discuss
Information Architecture
Drupal Redesign

Software

If you’re looking for software to get started on wireframing, the following will probably suite your needs.

Axure for PC
OmniGraffle for Mac (+ templates)
Protoshare for online access

PicFog, Real-time Image Search

Alex Schleifer — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:40:19 +0000

Having fun trying out random queries on PicFog (such as this one) — as always, services built around Twitter’s real-time content are a great fun but can also be used for useful research or insight into what’s happening around you. But let’s face, most will probably use it for stuff like this.

Twitter Beating Google in Real-Time

Alex Schleifer — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:45:29 +0000

Interesting article and accompanying quotes from Google’s co-founders on how Twitter is winning the real-time game. Partnership vs buy-out might be in Google’s plans:

Eric Schmidt says, “We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the Web is people can talk to each other.” — especially when people don’t want to sell.