via History of the Internet on Vimeo.

Probably the most simplest and best way this boring history has been illustrated, and that too in a manner which makes it actually interesting to a lay man.

via parkour motion reel on Vimeo.

Another sunday morning discovery. The style is extremely nice, Flipbook style with a little bit of “Pen Story” happening in it as well.

via Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny on Vimeo.

This is definitely a very fresh and modern look at “Little Red Riding Hood”. Not to mention, thought blurbs like the “nutrition facts” what the Wolf gets is funny. Must Watch.

Sketch

Very true.

via The Sandpit on Vimeo.

Probably one of the best miniature style real like shooting I have seen. For all those around me who are trying to do the same.

I get these regular email from Youmint.com and I have no clue for why or what is their purpose. But today it was different, for once their mail looked a tad more inviting that the rest of them that piled up before this one.

I opened it and landed on a page. As expected it was some page with some advertisement about some holiday which I am never going to take. So I click on the Horoscope part on top left and get this. (I am reducing the amount of Junk that was written, just note the last line)

Libra (26 Feb, 2010)

“Good fences make good neighbours”, said Frost. It’s a good thing that you rubbish …   … brighter than usual for you, foresees Ganesha.

This Week

Heightened activity is on the cards, this week. All sorts of activities …   …move forward from your home and hearth mentality as you start focusing on the glow and glamor of both money and honey.

This Month

This will be a busy yet good month for you. …   … you will head for a foreign country. Your work will progress without any obstacles and you will find contentment in your line of action. And, this comfort may easily reverberate in your financial front too.

This Year

Sorry Due to Some internal error could not load the Data

Old mailer - Little boring and does not stand out

New mailer - Little bit more interesting than the old one, enough to make me click and check.

So Ahem.. What does that mean.. like there was so much data that could not be loaded. I like to be optimistic and think that all of it was good.

Anyway, for some sever error, my future is definitely unknown at the moment (also a 1/12th of human population)

Enjoy!

A few years back I got a couple of old photographs from home with the intention to restore them and get them printed. Somehow I never managed the time to get all of them done, but this was the first one. (More info is on the photograph itself and will try and upload a larger resolution version as well)

Parts of the photo were moth eaten. Out of the 14 legs of the brothers, about 9 were left when I started out. After touching and fixing most parts, the colors were done, mostly out of imagination and generalization.

A long long time ago

iPod dock built right into a table

Now that makes perfect sense. I have one that dangles around everywhere all the time. Not to mention the battalion of wires that march out from it and into the PC / Stereo etc.

Here’s what the manufacturers say.

What’s special about this iPod® Dock?

1. Provides a safe docking station for your iPod® while you charge or sync it
2. Eliminates the need for additional USB cord for your iPod
3. Saves valuable desk space
4. Mounting grommet ring allows space for your cables under your desk to pass through
5. Works with USB 1.1 and 2.0 for high and full speed data transfers

Fliqlo screenshot. From 9031.com

9031: Free Downloads: Screensavers.

Came across this today. It was a short search from Apartment Therapy and then over to finding a screenshot of the desired screensaver and then to 9031’s downloads page. Fliqlo is a lovely screensaver, simple and shows the time in a classic style flip clock.

And the downloads page is even better. Using an old style floppy casing to denote each downloadable item is brilliant, and does  justify the small apps that they give away free.

Fliqlo is available for Mac and Windows.

9031's downloads page

Somebody had to do this. And the fact that it’s this sporty and has a bright interface (and not a geeky droidy thing) is a plus. There are website talking about how viable is the solar option and when do I leave it out to dry.. errr.. charge. Well, the fact that this comes with a sports kit suggests that you get charged while your phone gets charged. Spend time.. outside.

Definitely not for the regular office fellow who basks in fluorescent glow.

Check that drool worthy UI

Also check out the review on Gizmodo and more images on their website.

]]> http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/puma-the-puma-phone/feed/ 3 http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/innovative-imagery-still-rules/ http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/innovative-imagery-still-rules/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:11:30 +0000 shubho http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/?p=503

Interesting comparison

Warning, Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous To Your Health: Gear + Gadgets: GQ.

The original post talks about the effects of cell phone radiation and how much research has been done and how harmful etc. What I was interested in was the image (attached) and originally posted on the GQ website. Follow either the image link or the Link on top to get to the article.

Innovative Imagery still Rules

Midday website has spanning ads that do not go away!!

Off late I am coming across pages of different news websites and others that have more advertising per page than actual content. Now we all know that everyone has to make a buck or two but at what cost? Attached is a screenshot from http://www.mid-day.com/. I understand the fact that ads need to be there to support their infrastructure, but things that span over actual content blocking it is a bog no no. Could not get a screenshot without the spanning advertisement in the center, as it wont go away.

But thats not all. Then there are ads that are purely unworked on. Specially through Google’s adsense. These are ads that look like no one has spent anytime on them. C’mon guys, you would not do that to television, then why the web? Probably because Google has little or no quality check in place to control that, after all they are making money and care very little.

This screen grab is from NDTV.com, a popular news portal. See the horizontal banner ad running in a box on the right side column.

It’s been a decade to full fledged internet advertising and banners, and I think it’s time that people actually spent time and money on them rather than copying and pasting a poor quality image and adding text from powerpoint.

Now some may argue that if you do put ads, things are bound to get cluttered. Not necessarily, just see Exhibit A: Wired.com

Wired.com homepage, smart balance and placement of ads work towards building the look of the page. Quality of ads matter as well.

But what if you want to play football and your Gym bag was big and already carried a Basketball, a Hockey Stick, a Baseball Bat, a Cricket Bat, a Tennis Racquet etc. Would you still carry all of them to the Football field? My guess is not, you would locate a smaller bag.

At this point, some may argue that softwares are like tools and not balls, but even then, I rarely see someone putting the Soldering Iron with their Wrench in the same box.

And that’s exactly the problem with too many internet based services getting clubbed and combined together. When I want to mail, I just want to mail. When I want to edit my documents, I just want to do that. When I want to speak to someone, I just would like to do that. These are options that should be separate, not because it’s easier to have them like that, but it’s human to have them like that.

However, there are many internet based services that are trying to combine all this on to a single webpage and calling it a dashboard. It’s good, but as long as that shows only the highlights and details are well segregated. What they need to list down are the services that Need to be separate and The services that are auxiliary like chat, tweet, global positioning etc. If it’s not done that way, your user may soon find his Football and Wall Street buddies on the same dining table. Sure there can be overlaps, but not a complete one, and it can be a disaster.

What would work?

1. Segregate the Work and Play software (Linkedin and Facebook)
2. Segregate Productive and Communication software (Google Docs and Gmail)
3. Segregate services like Photos and Videos (Like Youtube and Flickr)
4. Bind all these with Social and Professional Networking software (Google chat riding within Gmail)

It was supposed to get me updates from Picassa, Blogger, Flickr, and some more things. But initial experience soon became a pain of repeated comments and updates. Simple things are not sorted out. Things like sending me an update on my own comment. These kind of things just highlight the fact that the product or service has been thrown out in a hurry.

Then there are status messages. Which are pretty much like tweets and they appear in your inbox. Personally, I would like to keep status updates separate from emails, they are really not the same things. But it does not end here.

When you comment on a status message, the complete chain of messages as a single email update is mailed to you. It’s cute when there are 5 comments, and plain irritating if there are more than 30.

Have a few questions for Google

1. What’s the need of getting into social networking when there are quite a few of them that already work well. Why not collaborate and improve upon it.

2. Why not innovate and improve upon instead of barging in suddenly. Gmail is simply popular for its efficiency. Gmail is yet not perfect and still has a lot of scope for improvement.

3. Why so many products? We all thought Docs was a great idea. But it seems thats not getting any better any soon.

“We did not enter the search business, They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

- Steve Jobs, ipad Launch

And many of us completely agree with Jobs here. It’s almost like there are people in Google sitting and waiting for new products to come out which then they can “Improve” upon.

Make a product that’s needed, if it makes people go “Wow!” on day one, that’s a plus. Probably Buzz is a good product, but the premature launch of a buggy product just killed it.

Livestats

LiveStats by GoSquared – Real-Time Traffic Monitoring for your Site.

The software gets you live information on who is visiting your website at any given time. But what’s stunning is the User Interface that does the job. Even though I have no utility for this kind of a software, I am tempted.

The product gives detailed information about the visitors, their IPs, the country they are from including a small flag, what operating system and which browser they are using also in visual form, how much time they are spending on which page and much more. All this in a delicious visual format making the boring thing of Site Stats so much more interesting.

Credits Balance on Face/book

Was just going through the new new new Facebook User Interface and I noticed this. Seems like Facebook wants to get serious this time around in making money.

Clear monetization of existing services. Let's see how that goes.

And inside it has these options. (Shown in second image)

This post is for those who are not into CSS and HTML and normally get stuck trying to style their buttons

Every day on almost every website we come across these lovely buttons and on some we get the plain old boring default ones. We are not concerned with the boring ones, but here’s a small tip (which most web guys would know already) to style your ‘Buttons’ on your web page easily.

Lets say we want to create this.

This type of a Button is made of Two Components. The Text part, “Unsubscribe” and the image part.

But that’s not all you need as a background image. What you need is a background image that has the image for all the button states, namely, hover, active, regular, and disabled (if needed). So you need to start with an image which looks like this.

Now we get to the CSS part. Select a “classname” for your button that you want to style. Lets say it’s “funkybutton”. For that our base CSS for the button would go like this.

<style>input.funkybutton {
background-image: url(css/submit.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
width: 115px;
height: 25px;
background-color: white;
border: none;
color: white;
padding-top: 1px; /* this is specifically for text alignment. adjust for your font-size and font*/ }
</style>


And an HTML part for this

<input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit-<?php the_ID(); ?>" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment"/>

And this together should give you this button:

But we are not done yet. Now we need the rest of the states for the same button to be covered, and that’s done line this in the stylesheet.

<style>
input.funkybutton {
background-image: url(css/submit.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
width: 115px;
height: 25px;
background-color: white;
border: none;
color: white;
padding-top: 1px; /* this is specifically for text alignment. adjust for your font-size and font*/ }

input.submit:hover {
background-position: 0 -25px;
}

input.submit:active {
background-position: 0 -50px;
}

</style>

Giving you a fully functional button like this:

Give it a try. (This same button is user everywhere in this theme as well)

Here’s another Tablet in the market, hitting it a wee bit before the ipad, sometime in December 2008.

Since it’s a prototype the Adam’s casing here is not what the final design will be; in fact this was hand-made especially for showing the tablet at CES. The eventual hardware will be 14mm thick (Rohan said they could even get it down to around 12mm) with a reasonably minimal bezel, packed with the 10.1-inch Pixel Qi transflective display, a capacitive touchscreen eventually capable of recognizing six simultaneous points of contact, integrated WiFi and 3G. Thanks to Tegra 2 the Adam is 1080p capable, with an HDMI port to output to an HDTV or projector, and while the OS they’re showing today is bare Android they’ve a new UI in the works complete with a replacement on-screen keyboard more ergonomically designed for large-touchscreen use.

- Slashgear

Read the rest here. Notion Ink Adam hands-on via Notion Ink Adam hands-on – SlashGear. Notion Ink is based out of Hyderabad and the product design is carried our by Ether Design very much in Bangalore.

Notion Ink, Adam. Image courtesy - Slashgear

Here’s how.

Step 1. Open you index.php file in the theme and locate the loop. That should look like this. It should start with the following:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And end with the following:

<?php endwhile; ?>
....
<?php endif; ?>

Between these two parts is where your posts pop up and the whole thing is repeated over and over again depending on the amount of posts you would want to load up on the homepage, which can be set right there in the settings. We don’t want to touch that.

Step 2: Now open your single.php file and find this small piece of code.

<?php comments_template(); ?>

Change that to:

<?php $withcomments = "1"; comments_template();?>

Copy that and paste it right above the end of the loop, just before this:

<?php endwhile; ?>
....
<?php endif; ?>

This should result in the comments form and the comments to pop up right under each post. But that would also pop up a bunch of errors as each form field ID would get repeated over and over again, and that can’t be cool.

Step 3: Now open the comments.php file in your theme directory. In that you will have to locate each ID identifying each field in the comments form. Either prefix or suffix them with the following code to make them unique. The code pulls out the post ID and adds a suffix to the already existing ID after a hyphen. Here’s how:

<input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="<?php echo esc_attr($comment_author); ?>" size="40" tabindex="1" <?php if ($req) echo "aria-required='true'"; ?> />

Becomes:

<input type="text" name="author" id="author-<?php the_ID(); ?>" value="<?php echo esc_attr($comment_author); ?>" size="40" tabindex="1" <?php if ($req) echo "aria-required='true'"; ?> />

Note the:

-<?php the_ID(); ?>

added right after the “author” in the ID of the Input Field. Do this for all the fields and submit buttons. Once you are done, you are error free for most of the part. But there still remains one problem, now when the page loads, you will see all the comments form and that cant be good, it would look cluttered and bad.

Step 4: Add or Change the “Reply” button under the post, in most themes this button is linked to the post page.

Instead put this Hyperlink to the “Reply” button:

<a href="javascript:toggleLayer('respond-<?php the_ID(); ?>');">Reply</a>

By any luck, you would have already added the “Post ID” identifier to the “respond” ID in the comments.php. That leaves us with the Javascript. Copy the following code and place it within the <head> section of your header.php file.

<script type="text/javascript">function toggleLayer( whichLayer ) { var elem, vis; if( document.getElementById ) // this is the way the standards work elem = document.getElementById( whichLayer ); else if( document.all ) // this is the way old msie versions work elem = document.all[whichLayer]; else if( document.layers ) // this is the way nn4 works elem = document.layers[whichLayer]; vis = elem.style; // if the style.display value is blank we try to figure it out here if(vis.display=='' && elem.offsetWidth!=undefined&&elem.offsetHeight!=undefined) vis.display = (elem.offsetWidth!=0&&elem.offsetHeight!=0)?'block':'none'; vis.display = (vis.display==''||vis.display=='block')?'none':'block'; }</script>

Thats it. you are done. This Javascript will simply “Show/hide” your comments form identified by “respond-(postID)”. Now I am no PHP guru, but this seems to work just fine returning zero errors.

[Edit] If you are copying the codes from above in green. Make sure you copy them into Notepad / Textedit and remove all formatting (convert to plain text) before pasting them in.

Just came across this post while browsing for 3D Topic Browsers in Jquery. It’s a simple Jquery funcltion to flip a container within a web page. I think, it’s a great idea to have spot reply forms created with these. They will give a blog very ‘Dashboard – Widget – Settings’ kind of feel. Will give it a test drive soon.

Jquery Flip Content

This is a video of an anamorphic, time traveling DeLorean (Mr. Fusion and all) I made in my basement. The image was made using only painter’s tape and elbow grease.
And, it makes me happy every time I look at it.

- Wablamo (on youtube)

I think it’s pure fun. Even more fun if you are a DeLorean fan.

But can’t the manufacturer rig the doors correctly?

Metro in Calcutta started 2 decades back and the doors would open if something or someone got caught in them and they did not shut properly. Its alarming that such stuff is not in place on buses even today.

The tech part should be fairly simple.

1. Detect an open door
2. Disengage the already electronic / hydraulic clutch (yep, they are no longer wires pulling each other)
3. Bus does not move.

Technology is there, it’s a matter of using it.

Auto Closing double jackknife bus door

This is just a broad overview.

Social networking sites as we see today consider the later to be their primary user. Sites like Google, amazon etc consider the former to be their primary user.

The idea has to slowly shift to combine the both, to invite the “accessing” user to “provide” more often, and this can be done only when the “process of providing” becomes a lot easier.

Apart from that, now we have to keep in mind the 3rd kind of user. “The Bots”, or crawlers from various search engines. Yes, a site has to be easier to crawl for information as well, and easier it is to do that, the better chances of it’s visibility on various search rankings.

What’s next?

The move should be to design for the 2 types of users and try and merge them. This would lead to a steady flow of updated information (not just about status messages and tweets but relevant information). The move has already started, and personal computing devices and slowly changing sizes and shape to aid in the process. And designs have to mirror the same sentiments.

We all know that iPod is probably one of the most used devices in the car in conjunction with other devices that already exist. But why doesn’t Apple get into the market directly and give us front row right from the driver’s seat either as a Software (with 3rd part hardware) or Hardware + Software combo. Many die hard fans have already put their Mac Minis in the their cars.

Car audio running front row!

“I don’t know if i totally agree with that. But nevertheless, you make a good point. What if I can come up with a response in opposition to your arguments”

Yep. That’s a spam caught in Akismet. On a regular blog that may sound like a legit comment, but when its posted on a tweet that criticizes .aspx pages and from a Light Bulb company. It’s a Spam. Good try.

The character is Architecture Professor Ted Mosby’s student. Popular for all the jokes that can be played on the name. Character is played by Hong Chau.

Believe it or not, but Cook Pu is a more searched for keyword than Apple’s ipad. Wow!

[posted: Most Searched Keyword Analysis]

Example: http://bit.ly/b2NoCF becomes http://bit.ly/b2NoCF (with tooltip, hover to view) or http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/i-would-have-loved-if-my-mobile-and-tv-did-this/ (complete URL)

Wordpress Plugin Anyone?

A/pple Tablet TImeline

A very interesting way of representing that data. Apart from that, a very interesting data in itself.

]]> http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/infographic-of-the-day-eight-years-of-tablet-talk-updated-fast-company/feed/ 0 http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/an-eco-friendly-washing-machine/ http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/2010/02/an-eco-friendly-washing-machine/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:37:04 +0000 shubho http://timeline-studios.com/blogs/?p=220 For a long time I have had this thought in mind. Why can’t washing machines have 2 water inlets, separate for Hot and Cold since so many users now have Solar Heaters at home.

How it would help:

1. Reduction in energy costs when heated wash is used.
2. Most washing soaps are designed to work in room temperature, and this would allow the machine to manipulate and chose a water temperature.
3. Definitely green.

For the sake of redundancy, the heater part should remain. After all, we do not really get the sun shining all the time.

Dual input for a washing machine to save energy.

Top Sites is a feature in safari where it gives you a thumbnail display of all frequently visited websites. Although the function is very simple, the display however is fantastic like all things Apple.

Safari Top Sites