Before I went to London I was working as a designer on a great new web-project Zomoto. Last month the site finally came in public beta, for all of us to play with. The site has some great features, personally I’m most fan, of the a-synchrone click search system. Although at first glance maybe a bit hard, but it’s so much more fun than the now most used drop-down boxes. An other industry shaker is the (yet to come) world famous Zomotex, thanks to some mighty math algabra mixed by the magicians at Pascolo it is now possible to get a pretty good indication of what each car might be worth. And last thing the complete transparent profile pages of each project member. And before I’ll be overflown with tons of fan-mail the last three months the design of the site came from the careful hands of Steven de Haer

Let me know what you think

Enormous media hype around the “jesusphopne” proved it once again, there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there is probably no other company that is more capable of selling a piece of the future than these Californian dream-weavers. Once bought, however, the great promise turns out to be quite a normal thing - certainly not as good as the futurists promised you. But it is already too late. So, why do we keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products than are just not quite there yet?

To get some answers on that question, I will talk you trough three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us.

• First, the future is used to force us to change our habits for own benefit. To be able to live in the future they say you’ll have to change the way of working and living.
• Second, future is used to keep us from complaining: although the current is not that good, it will better get once the future will have arrived. So - be strong, keep on going, on and everything will be all right.
• Third, the future is used as a shared dream of mankind: one day we’ll all be united, so if you want the best for the world stay with us.

As you can see all reasons have some overlapping and can be found in both business and governmental ways of explaining their choices for the future.

An example of changing our habits for the best is the different way the iPhone uses for text input. David Pogue of the New York Times writes: “Text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The Blackberry won’t be going away anytime soon”. Not only that iPhone is slower than the Blackberry, it’s also different. The multi-touch interface of the new iPhone is a good example of getting something new, and losing some good features from the past. On one hand, you get a larger screen and a more flexible interface to operate your phone. On the other hand, you lose a way of feeling with your fingers what you are doing. If asked, many 14 year olds are capable of typing text messages on their phone without even looking. This mastered skill is mainly based on the fact that they can actually feel the shape and location of the buttons they are pushing, and without any physical buttons to hit this skill will soon be one of the past.

Later on, Porgue even falls for the “In the future everything will be better” dogma. After writing about some errors and flaws he ends his article on the iPhone concluding that things may not be so good at the moment, but the will get better soon. “On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cell phones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.” Just beyond the horizon lies a land of milk and honey, where Internet is fast, photos are sharp and interfaces are workable.

Apple is not really selling you a product that is created for the current times. When you buy it, you merely get a beta version of the next model and pay Apple for their research and development. My point, however, is not that Apple makes bad products, but that we should judge them (just as almost any other product) on their value for money on this moment, and not how good they might become someday.

Than again, if you look at it from a more sociological perspective, the use of the future concept can also have a positive side. Historian Allan Nevis wrote in his research on American history that we are, although also bound by history, even more bound by our hope for the future. And despite the fact that Apple is not keeping up with their promises in present-day, it does succeed however in structurally promising us a better future.

What leads me to the following conclusion: if we would not believe in Apple’s branding strategy and judge their products like most other products, we would have to live without the shared hope for a brighter future for all. Quirks saw it already coming in the last century. Whenever the future failed, as it often did during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appeal was made to yet another new future patching up the miscarriage op previous predictions. (Quirks, 1989, p.178)

resources:

Nevins, A., 1971:398 in Quirks, J.J. The history of the future

Pogue, D. “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype”, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

Quirks, J. J. “The history of the future”. in Carey, J. W. “Communication as a culture”, 1989, Unwin Hyman

iPhone video: Lenart J. Kučić

Last Friday I was in Brighton for d.Construct a one dag conference about webdesign, development and project structures. Needles to say I was a great day to be (many thanks to MediaTemple and Yahoo/BBC for the free drinks on Thursday/Friday evening)

Since many people blogged this event already, I’ll just stick to points worth mentioning.

• Jared Spool warned once again for feature creep, in many occasions less features is more
• You can’t make a checklist for experience design, It needs to be learned by try and error
• Organise failure parties, this way people shouldn’t be afraid to fail, and feel more motivated to experiment with new ways of doing things

Have a 5 year vision of the future, that way you’ll be able to check each move if its the right way or not

• Johnatan Woo mentioned that products are people too, they are threatened with emotion, and should thereby be build with emotion too
• The most desing ideas of Google Calendar came by interviewing only eight people
• Create stars to sail your ship by (check the stars of flickr)
• Experience is the product, and cool is what is should be
• Cameron Moll mentioned the practile test if a site has been designed ok: make a print screen, grey scale it, blur it, check it; do you still understand how it works?
• Flickr stats: 11 million users, 1 billion photo’s and 2000 photos uploaded every minute
• Tom Coates had a talk as clean and clear as his blog, lucky for us he wrote down many insightful points of his talk

For the first time this year I’m going to d.construct in Brighton next week. I’m really looking forward to see this little town at the sea. And right after my first d.Construct also my first Barcamp. Flying next Thursday (first flight too) and expecting to return on Sunday evening. So if anyone is in the area drop me a mail for a Brighton meetup.

Programme (just for me to remember)
Thursday flying at 10 AM, arriving at 10.10 AM (hooray for time difference )
Take the train from Gatwick to Brighton
check in at the St. Christopher’s (location)
Check out Brighton
pre-party at Heist (location
)
friday: d.Construct (location)
friday night: After party (location)

Saterday Barcamp (location)

Sunday Barcamp (location)
Sunday fly back at 19.35 Gatwick

Looks like I never have to walk more than a few hundred meters

Queen- Brighton Rock

through the years you save a lot on the Internet, just because its so easy.. But what is the use of saving when it becomes so much that you can’t find it back anymore.

The solution is to spent each day a few minutes in trowing away stuff. Delete those saved posts on Bloglines that aren’t interesting or relevant anymore. Throw away all your old received newsletters. Cancel your subscriptions on Flickr streams of people who turned out to be more in to cats than great pics. Remove your read articles from toread in del.icio.us. Free yourself from the clutter… start working on it now! here is my howto guide!

twitter: check your twitter stream, the persons who you are following and you don’t know as a friend have they said anything useful the last ten post, if not, check them to shut up

Flickr Check your Flickr stream, the contacts you are following and don’t know from real live, have the post anything useful the last month, and why where you following them.. If not remove them (i would like to be friends with Flickr people without having their photos on my front page, please Flickr hear my call)

mail Check your mailbox daily, for the following weeks with every mail from a few days old ask yourself shall I ever search my mailbox for this mail, if not, probably remove it. Check your newsletters do you read them at all? if not, just remove them..

Feed reader Order yourself that you have to delete one post every time you save. And never more than 100 post from one feed, in the end you should end up with a list of 100 quality posts that reflect your interest perfectly.. (If there was an end)

Bookmarks check your bookmark site (like Del.icio.us) just check some links at a random page, follow them all and decide which to keep and which to trow away. With Del.icio.us you can visit the page, click right (if you have the plug-in installed) and delete the page from your bookmarks.

Digg Last time I checked my digged pages, I found out I had more that 15 pages! But deleting stuff in Digg goes slowly and painful, not sure how to fight this system yet..

more to reads
Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload
Coping With Information Overload & Keeping Up with Your Profession
The Cure for Information Overload
Information Overload

Anyone any more tips on fighting information overload?

I just read a comment by Peter on my European Silicon valley post, and he mentions once again one of the biggest reasons why Europe is having problems with keeping up with the Americans. There are just to many languages (that is more than one). The solution most European startups now use is just to make an English version and forget about the rest.. That might work to get the American and Uk market, and also the more tech savvy people from other countries, but the majority in French, Germany and Spain (thats South America and Mexico too) just won’t use it. And if you’re idea is good, you will see a translated copy of your idea sooner or later. And personally I really like those sites that make an effort to have a Dutch version (although many times I stick to English), just because they are showing that they understand that not the whole world is English.

Problem: Only a few sites are multilingual, and therefore most of them will miss the mass-market in Europe

Reason 1: It is harder to build a multilingual site
So why are there so few sites multilingual.. well first thing it’s harder to build, you can’t use “hard coded” text anymore, everything needs to be variable, that is a problem that is a bit harder to solve, so I leave that up to the tech guys.

Reason 2: It’s expensive to hire translators
To get a site multilingual you need people to translate it, and this is expensive stuff, and many not all, don’t understand much of the web stuff, so you have to let someone check all their translations too.

Solution: Build a site that enables everyone to make translations in their own language
Many of the words on websites are used over and over again everywhere, words and sentences as “click here”, “subscribe”, “search”, “login”, “add to cart” etc. All those words are also already translated by people a million times. So wouldn’t it be a great idea to save all these translations in one big database where everyone can add new translations, and ask for more translations. If that file is downloadable you can just check all the words you need, load them in your database and your site is multilingual from day one!

Bonus features: Packages and Plugins
You can make packages too like “shop”, “forum”, “web2.0 site” etc. And you can check how many languages you want to download at first. And someone could build a Wordpress plug in (well there is one already) and a PHPBB plugin and a Vanilla forum plugin and so much more

Problems: Fuck ups
It has to be open so it’s easy to fuck up. It are the people that don’t speak nine languages that download those packages, so after a while there should be some “official” release by people who are to “trusted”

Questions
Q: Why is this different than a wiktionary
A: It isnt really, its just more focused on sites and not on everything, and for every “item” there can only be one translation, not many.

Q: Are you really the first to come up with this?
A: Don’t know, couldn’t find any other initiatives, it would be cool if it’s already been solved though.

Q: What will happen to the words specific to my site that are not on the translation site?
A: The original English (or native) text of your site will fill up that gap. My believe is that a half translated site is still better than not a translation at all

Comments and questions are all welcome in the comments section

Sometimes I come across people who use Photoshop in a different way than me. So I decided to tell a bit more about the way I use it. Although Photoshop puts almost any shortcut in the action-menu, you might not have made it a common habit to use them all. If you are serious about Photoshop, I would recommend learning the shortcuts for the actions you use on daily base (write the things you have to do down and practice it a few times, within minutes you’ll never forget it again). Not only it save time, it also reduces the time you use the mouse, and thereby the change you get RSI.

I hardly use Photoshop for photos though, it’s all webdesign. So if you are planning to do a lot with photos you might want to look at an other list of shortcuts. Here I focus mainly on the keys I use for webdesign. So lets assume you want to make prototypes and wire-frames of websites with Photoshop, In order to plan ahead, and make clients happy without actually having to code.

Trough the years I learned some shortcuts to handle Photoshop much quicker, many you probably already know, but some might come in hand.

first the single keys (just push the key to select the function)

V move tool, first push V, than keep the cntrl pushed down, and than click with the left mouse button on any object to select it, and move it around. Knowing this shortcut increased my Photoshop speed by 40% I think, you never need to look things up in the layer-pallet anymore.
A (arrow) Comes in hand to change vector objects, make sure it’s the white colored angle, so you can change vector objects)
M (marquee) make a selection
W (wizard) make a selection based on the colors
F push f and you switch to another view of Photoshop (push F four times and you are back where you begun)
Tab hides the pallets (push 3 times F and one time tab, and you have an empty screen)
T selects the text edit function, push T, click on a text field and you can edit it. Push cntrl+T to get yourself out of the text field again.
B brush (click anywhere in the document with the right mouse button to change the properties)
I eyedropper-tool - to select a color.
G fill bucket - most used by me in the combination of I (select a color) V + left click, G + left click, to fill a layer with the color of an other one.
Z - zoom use it in combination with ctrl + = or ctrl + - to zoom in and out quickly
Spacebar - keep the spacebar pushed down, click left, and move your mouse to move to the document.

Those where the key’s I used more often, you can check the whole alphabet if you want to know the secret behind every key. Now lets move on the the shortcuts

Shortcuts

shift + cntrl + alt + s save for the web, my most used combination saves your file for the web
alt + I + I changes image size
cntrl + A select all
cntrl + shift + C copy all layers
cntrl + V past image in new layer
cntrl + D deselects the selection again
cntrl + N and cntrl + v gives you an image in a new document
cntrl + R gives you rulers around the document (in properties you can set the distance in pixels instead of inch)
cntr + ; show the line guides, you can create and move them by pushing V and start dragging from the ruler to the document
in the view menu you can change if objects should snap to rulers
cntrl + T transform the object; standard on making it smaller or bigger, but if you click right on the object, you’ll get more options to change the object. Use cntrl+ Enter to do the transformation, or esc to escape it again.
cntrl + E merges to current layer with the one bellow
shift + cntrl + J cut out the current selection and put it into a new layer

This is about it, if you know more handy photoshop tricks, please fill me in on the comments. Thanks!

Some months ago I got an idea for a blog only about t-shirs. I took me some months to work it out (and weeks to find a .com name). But now it’s online and I’ve filling it with shirts for the last couple of weeks. Now I think there is the right amount of posts to test it a little. Go check it out: shirtlog.com - tee site for t-shirts

So what do you think, every comment about every tiny little detail is welcome

(And yes you can help me, save it to del.icio.us, add it to your favourites on technorati, write a blogpost about it, or a small post on hyves, everything to get the word out, thanks in advance)