One Zombie in a Billion

Forgot about this one, I have 11 socialthing invites, so if anyone wants one, gimmie a shout in the comments.

Mine’s at http://jamesmcewan.socialthing.com. It’s a pretty neat service, I think I might get rid of the lifestream plugin I have here as this does a better job.

So the new iPhone 3G with GPS is out, camera’s still the same which is a bit disappointing. But the new model is only £99 which is a vast improvement on the old price and kudos to Apple/O2 for an actual currency conversion of the American price ($199), normally that never happens here!

On my tariff, £35 a month, it’s an extra £99 for the new phone, on the £45 tariff the upgrade is free. Still I think I’d prefer a one off £99 payment rather than an extra £120 a year.

I’ve spent the better part of today in the living room (I’ve pretty much abandoned my messy bedroom for the moment) working on a new Django version of this site.

So why the change? Well, as much as I like Wordpress, I feel like I don’t have enough control of the templates, which is probably due to being more of a front end developer than a PHP dude. So Django seems like a good alternative for me, as from what I’ve heard the template engine is well suited for designers, plus as a bonus, Python code is freaking beautiful and a joy to write.

Okay, I’m feeling exhausted, so I think I’ll elaborate on how I’m going to transfer my site from wordpress to django later on.

Once again, I’m pouring over my notes from another fantastic @media web design and development conference, this time the sessions with the world’s top designers and developers were hosted at the lovely South Bank Centre in London.

The folks at Vivabit put together a stellar line-up including some great talks like Jeffrey Veen’s “Designing Our Way Through Data“, Bronwyn Jones’ “The Book was Better : Writing as Source Material for the Web“, Dan Rubin’s “Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference” and Nate Koechley’s “Professional Front-End Engineering“.

Andy Clarke’s comic book themed session “Underpants Over My Trousers” was was of particular interest to me as it covered the idea of taking design and layout cues from comic books and applying them to the web. With both being great passions of mine, this is something I’ve been thinking about some time, but have always struggled with the execution.

Here, he details down some fantastic ideas to control the user experience through subtle but effective techniques rather than overt ones that have been employed in the past like animation.

These concepts like border breaking, in which a character or item bursts out of the confines of a comic panel to attract the reader’s attention seem simple but when you think about it, the typical reaction in web design has been to put the most important info into a box.

I think Andy Clarke will be doing similar sessions at a few other conferences this year, so I highly recommend web designers to check this one out, and I’d also like to add a note of interest in seeing a book on the topic too!

Traditionally this conference has really given me a boost during somewhat difficult periods in my work and this year was no different. So I want to say a huge thank you to all the speakers this year for sharing their considerable knowledge and to the organisers for putting on consistently great shows year upon year.