Valhalla Island

Things like this make me mad. Sharp has released a new mp3 player. It’s hideous. They have a little “Vol” printed above and below the + and -. What else could + and - mean on a music player? What else could they possibly represent? The “Vol” is unecessary, over instruction and just plain stupid.

iPod’s don’t even have a little “Vol” to tell you where the volume controls are, hell, they don’t even have + or - icons and believe it or not, people are still able to change the volume on their iPods.

I’m so sick of new mp3 players coming out, trying to compete with the iPod, going in a completly opposite direction and wondering why they’re failing. I understand that they aren’t allowed to completly copy the iPod but please start competing with simplicity, not with more features, not with more buttons.

More buttons is not better, more labels on buttons do not help with recognition, more buttons will not make an mp3 easier to use, more features with less attention to detail is the wrong way to be competing with the iPod.

Creative are getting there, slowly. Five colour options is still four too many but I don’t like the entire word “MENU” on the iPod, Creative has one up there.

I know you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (or a CD in this case (excuse the pun)) but it sure does help if something nice catches your eye in a sea of CDs on a music store shelf. Here’s some album or EP covers that I like:

Nightmare of You

Idiot Pilot

Idiot Pilot

I Can Make A Mess

Socratic

Underoath

Jimmy Eat World

Stellastarr*

It will be a shame when we stop selling music in a physical form. I will miss all the cool covers.

Everything I didn’t like in 10 has been fixed in 11. The slow and jumpy search, the only being able to edit field names one at a time, that stupid top bar in full screen mode, the useless now playing menu, it’s all gone! With a few nice new things added.

I love the new colour and I love that those main controls are sitting in the centre, where they should be. The new interface is brilliant. The default way it organises your library is a joke but it only took me a minute or two to get it back to my usual list that has been slightly improved by some nice grouping feature. Similiar to the way the explorer organises a directory of music if you ask it to.

It’s a shame that they’re competing against iTunes because it means they have to integrate some sort of music store, which just annoys me. I don’t like the “buy now” buttons all over the place. It’s one of the reasons I have never been an iTunes user, that and many, many others. It’d be nice if Media Player gave you the choice of a non-online store version.

I think the new interface is hot but those little niggling things that used to annoy me in 10 are what really did it for me. The hover effects on the buttons, with the fade in and fade out are subtle and very pleasant to watch. The option to turn off the sidebar is also welcome. Microsoft hasn’t been afraid to use a little whitespace in this release and it’s really paid off.

It’s kind of ridiculous how much has been stolen from iTunes. Their little magnifying glass search icon for one. Something else I noticed, it gives iPod icons to my mp3 player and PDA, accepting that it’s the way things are? Maybe. But then again, Apple and Microsoft aren’t real competitors there. iTunes and Media Player are direct rivals though, so it’s a shame iTunes has iPod influence because it takes some credit away from Media Player.

Oh yeah, you can get it from the Microsoft website. Where you can also download the beta of Office 2007 which I’m tempted to download. Speaking of the Microsoft website, I really like their front page. I’m excited about Vista.

Here’s fightingfriends arranged into a graph of HTML tags. Pretty cool. It’s a little Java application and looks very cool while it’s working. The guy that made the program made graphs for some popular sites, it’s a cool comparison.

It’s funny how I can be the busiest I have ever been in my life, trying to get 5 assignments done, trying to get jobs finished on time, looking after my broken legged mother and all I want to do is write a post about one of the hundreds of things I want to write about. And I do write, I squeeze them in somehow and end up writing three posts a day like I was for a week there.

Then I get the assignments finished, I hand them in and no longer do I have to be working non-stop to get everything done on time. I have time to spare. As my busyness (or is it business? haha) stops so does my motivation to write. In a time when I still have things to write about but have a whole lot more time to write them in, which means I should be able to write more, more often, but I don’t.

The same thing happens if I have two days to do an assignment, say, a Saturday and a Sunday. I’ll be lazy getting work done on Saturday and then Courtney might call and want to see me Sunday, I want to see her too so I can’t work on the assignment on Sunday, I have to work on it Saturday and I do. Suddenly I have motivation to get the work done and my assignment is finished a day early.

It just goes to show that deadlines motivate us like not much else can. Everyone’s always complaining about deadlines and having so much work to get done in a short amount of time, but you rarely hear someone complaining about deadlines not getting the work done on time.

If you can set self imposed deadlines and stick to them, you’ll probably get a lot of work done. But that’s a hard thing to do.

Hell, I don’t even like the writing much. Actually, the writing is probably the worst part of the new design. I’m not talking about the content, more about the writing embedded in the design, the static parts that stick with the design wherever you go.

I don’t want anyone to get me wrong, I’m a big fan of non-conventional copy when it comes to websites, “Move along” instead of just a “Next” button, is great for example. But things like “What would you like to see today?” displayed before a menu only three items long is annoying and is taking it over the top. It happens again with the search, “What are you looking for today?” Why say that instead of a simple “Search”? Why even include the word “today”? If you’re searching in the present (and not from the future or past via some sort of time travelling machine) it’s not possible to be doing it any other day apart from today.

The single article pages have a curious and large gap up the top. That’s also the article the design was released on. Filled with almost 100 comments telling him how great it all is. I seriously feel like I am missing something, I keep switching between browsers trying to find something I haven’t seen yet. A lot of the comments commend the new categories, so I poked around the categories.

From what I find, the site seems to be completely split into categories much the same way a newspaper is with sport, finance, lifestyle, etc. Except with Avalonstar everything’s modestly preceded by “Rockstar”. Each category page also has it’s own excessively big header. The category links on the homepage also have their own little cartoon large icon/picture next to them, the point of this? I’m not sure.

The major problem for me is the bits everywhere that aren’t actually anything. Little lines, double lines when a single would do, patterns sitting in almost random places. It looks like Bryan has used some sort of little notes to make sure everything is lined up properly and then has forgotten to take them out. They’re everywhere and they’re extremely distracting, maybe I have undiagnosed ADD but I find it really hard to concertrate on the content. The width of content with grey text on a navy background doesn’t make it any easier.

I know Bryan has a lot of friends and I don’t want to piss anyone off, I just really loved the old one.

This toothpaste’s tube just screams clean. It’s yelling so loud that I can barely hear myself think, all I want to do is brush my teeth. Of course, ‘EXTREME CLEAN’ being printed on the end plays a big part in our perception but it’s still very well designed.

The tube even feels clean. It’s covered in some sort of matte finish that makes it feel almost soft in your hand. I’d pick this any day over the glossy, green and red Colgate tube.

Today marks the 100th download of Day Dream. That’s downloads from my own Day Dream home and doesn’t include extra downloads from other theme sites like the Wordpress theme viewer.

I can’t believe it’s been so popular. I’d love to celebrate the 100th with a new version release and some new features but I’ve been too busy. Work on it will definately continue on it in the holidays.

Thanks everyone who’s downloaded and used it. When you sit down for dinner tonight raise your glasses to 100 Day Dream downloads and many more to come!

About a week ago I finished and released Black Sun, a Wordpress theme. While it was finished and I made it a little button on the right I never officially announced it here. So here is it, ta da! Black Sun!

To tell the truth I’m not that excited about it. It’s not my best work and maybe I’d be better off if I didn’t put it out there at all. It’s not exactly customisable, it’s more a dark version of the current Fightingfriends design, much of it is taken straight from this design, the sidebar especially.

Chances are it’s 0.1 release will be it’s last. I don’t see it going anywhere. If someone wants to pick it up and run with it, be my guest. Two parts I do like are the little date pads (which are a little bit of a craze I’ve jumped in late on) and the footer, the page doesn’t die at the end, it comes back to life, I like that.

At the same time Day Dream has been amazingly successful and development will definately continue on that. I have some big plans. As well as a few more ideas that’ll turn into themes on the holidays coming up.

I’d love to know what people think about Black Sun. Apart from telling me how shit the name is, I know, I know.

That’s right, Courtney has her own site! It’s called Courtney’s Music Site. It was inspired by fellow Random Shapes member, Meredith and her post on bagpipes. At the moment it’s on Wordpress.com which is very restricting in terms of design. Excluding Hemingway, I dislike all the Wordpress.com themes. But that’s where, in the holidays, I come to the rescue.

In three weeks, when I start my mid-year holidays, Courtney’s Music Site is going to get it’s own domain along with the second best site design on the internet! Can you feel the excitment in the air? I can.

Since I don’t want to tell you what to do I’m going to give you three choices, you can click here, here or here to visit Courtney’s site and leave a comment. If I don’t see 100% of visitors clicking on one of those links there’s going to be serious trouble. Dead serious trouble. You’ve been warned.

I have never been a fan of flash. Maybe because I’ve never been that big on games. Even when it’s used for websites, I don’t like it. Sure, sites like this are impressive and have the wow factor but it takes 15 seconds for the site to properly appear. It’s almost like going back to the days of dial-up when websites didn’t need Flash to take 15 seconds to load.

Then people will say, “it’s not the same, flash entertains you for 15 seconds before the site loads, dial-up didn’t.” How about the second or third time you go to that site? The tenth? Is it still going to be entertaining when you’ve seen the intro for the tenth time?

There’s other things like having to wait for elaborate mouse over effects to finish before you’re even able to press the button. Long transistions between pages are sometimes slower than it actually takes to load a new HTML page. Almost like a bad Powerpoint presentation.

I’ve been able to safely ignore the whole thing for years. Until university. I swear, everyone at university thinks Flash is the best thing in the world and it should be used for everything. That’s not an exageration either, even the agricultural students that barely know what a computer is, would die for Flash. This can be pretty frustrating. It got to the point where a little five page section with navigation, a blog, about page, contact etc. was made in Flash loading from flat files. All because he wanted a cool loading screen. But you know what’s cooler than a cool loading screen? Not having to wait for loading at all!

So I’ve had to take a class this semester called Multimedia Authoring. It could just as easily be called Flash Authoring since that’s all we do. It involves following tutorials doing little useless things that we can eventually put together to make a big useless thing. I’ll quickly find one of them.

It was my first time actually making things in and using Flash and I could speak for hours about how horrible the workspace is. You need three 30 inch monitors to be able to see everything at once. That’s not the worst part either. Flash is constantly on edge, one foot out of line and Flash won’t only crash, it’ll bring your entire computer to a stand still. Version support is non-existent, you can’t open anything between MX, MX 2004 and Flash 8. If you do manage to open something it’ll cause irreversible damage to everything you’ve done so far.

Everyone at uni just seems to ignore this though. Flash can do no wrong in their eyes. I hope this course is the last I have anything to do with such a horrible program.

About a week ago my old phone went through another one of it’s not working properly phases at a time when it was important for me to have a phone that works. That afternoon I did a little research and bought a Nokia 6101.

It’s by far that best phone I’ve owned, not that I’ve owned many phones or any good ones but that doesn’t stop it being the best. I’d never had a flip phone before or a phone that could take video. There’s a lot of reasons why I think flip phones are better. You get more value for size. They allow a nice big screen and an uncramped keypad while not actually increasing the phone size as a whole. But this means you have to open and close it all the time.

I don’t see opening and closing as a negative at all. Slightly pushing the screen closed, feeling it take, snapping closed with a satifying sound is a great experience. I could open and close it all day. Simply opening and closing the screen is enjoyable.

Nokia has nailed keypad design with the 6101. It couldn’t possible be any better. It’s huge, all buttons are a similar square size, butted up next to eachother. They have a slight convex curve on them making it easy to tell when you’re moving to another button without looking. The backlight is fluorescent blue and each key almost seems like it’s individually lit. The feedback from the keys is amazing. Pressing the keys is more enjoyable than I ever thought pushing a mobile key could be. I just love writing messages now.

There’s a small screen on the front that I find pretty useless, it can be used to take self potraits but it’s bad. Instead of going with a good non-colour screen on the front they’ve gone for the bad colour type. It’s difficult to read and I would have much preferred a screen with highly contrasting two tone just used to display the time, missed calls or messages.

The main display is nice and the still camera is suberb. Maximum resolution is 640 x 480 and it takes photos better than my piece of shit digital camera. The light adjustment is amazing. I wanted a photo of plain white for the front screen background so I pointed it at my extremely bright lamp that hurts my eyes to look directly into. I thought it’d just flood out and not be able to handle all the light but it handled it beautifully, much too well. You were able to see the spirals on the bulb, I was impressed by that. It also takes good night photos, something my digital camera can’t do.

On the whole, a very good phone. Nokia has done all the simple things right.

Back to reality.

This is what a link from a post on Binary Bonsai did to my pageviews and visits.

Wow, I was hovering around 40 or less and then the day Binary Bonsai linked to my article on Shuttle, page views shot to 228. I think that’s the biggest day I’ve ever had since I’ve started using Analytics. It would be really nice if I got some return visitors from that influx. My pie chart of new to returning visitors has been completely turned upside down aswell.

I feel like a little kid braging about getting a link from a cool website. I’m just excited that Michael Heilemann came to fightingfriends.

The winner of the Wordpress theme competition was Durable (you have to click the link to actually see a demo site, that’s annoying) by a guy named Andy Peatling. Out of the box it looks quite nice, it’s pretty, it’s wide, perhaps too wide, it’s organised into neat little boxes, very similar to the way Squible looks.

My first thoughts were, it’s ok. Something that really stuck out for me was the serif menu, comments and date with sans-serif everything else. If you’re really careful and use them in the right way sans-serif and serif can go well together. Large sans headings with a serif text body can sometimes look good. I think durable mixes the two too often. My first impression left me wondering why it had won.

I poked around for a little while and found why it had won. I didn’t find something amazing that blew me away, instantly making me release why it would beat the hundreds of others. I just found why it had won. At the top, in the menu bar is a link to an options panel that pops up over the page. In this options panel you can change just about any colour of anything on the page and it saves your preferences. Yeah, how cool.

A lot of words come to mind when I see features like this, practicality, usefullness, individuality. It’s a shame that things like this win people prizes. The tag line is “Let your users be in control of their own colors and settings.” Why? I’m interested to know if anyone has been to a website and thought “I really wish I could change all these colours to suit my own preference”? What if every website had this ability, would you change every website you visit to your favourite colours? Would spend any time changing any at all?

I’m a firm believer in the designer knowing what the users want better than the user does. There’s an absolutely perfect example of this. Myspace. The default template isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world but it’s 100 times better than the way nearly everyone completely destroys their pages with their own code. Rival Purevolume handles this brilliantly, they have designed a beautiful and functional default theme that users can’t change. I hear you ask, ‘what if they don’t like it and want to change it?’ Not being able to change them is for the greater good of all Purevolume users.

If the only thing a user can’t change on your website is the basic structure you’ve lost all sense of individual style expressed through your own page designs, colour decisions, etc. I think that the prize should have gone to the most well designed theme.