Google announced the 40 regional finalists in its annual Doodle 4 Google competition, which challenges school children to create their own version of the Google logo The winning logo will run on Google’s home page for a day. Over 33,000 students in grades K-12 submitted entries, competing for a $15,000 college scholarship, a $25,000 technology grant for their schools, and other prizes.
Article on Active Tut+ by Peter Eeckelaert
Google Analytics inside Flash – allows us to measure how well our sites are doing against our predefined goals: bounce rate, click paths and even custom measurements like how many people scrolled a certain page. Our specialists analyze all this information and use it to optimize the website. If you’re not measuring how people are using your site, you can only guess about its successes and failures.
“This is a guest post by Tiago Veloso from Visual Loop – a non-stop stream of Infographics, Maps, Charts and many other Visualization Goodies, with lots of new posts everyday. User submissions are always welcome, opened to artists and designers from all over the world..”
Thiago Lyra is a graphic designer and illustrator living in São Paulo. Since 2005 he has been developing infographics for the Saúde Magazine, and won a bronze medal in 17th Malofiej, as well as an indication to the Esso Journalism Award 2006. This is one of his infographics piece.
Icon set by Oliver Twardowski for free on Smashing Magazine. You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use.
The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and much more. It also supports, but does not require, the Metadata Plugin and the Easing Plugin.
This slide show plugin is really simple to use, embed the image in the body tag, link to the jQuery library file and use the custom function like the following example, different effects can apply to your image less than a minute.
$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘.slideshow’).cycle({
fx:’fade’,
timeout:2000
});
});
Article on Interactive Architecture
In January 2010 the Cologne based design agencies Grosse8 and Lichtfront presented their cross-media installation titled Augmented Sculpture. The core of the installation is a 2.5m tall wooden form that builds the screen for a 360° projection. In constant transformation over a score by Jon Hopkins, the 2:32 minute performance is described by Svenja Kubler of Lichtfront as a “mirror of changing realities… a kind of real virtuality arises to confront virtual reality.” I’m not sure what that all means but I really like it.
The Halbo is an electric bike concept that has been specially designed for BMW to be an ultimate and environmentally friendly next generation bike by featuring high end technologies and great aesthetics. The main idea was to create a transportation means that can run efficiently in the busy traffic of the future roads, while making it eco-friendly enough to contribute to the environment. This single-seater gets the energy from the electric power source and features an all-way rear axis with which the innovative sphere shaped wheel is attached. The front wheel is assisted by gyro and contains a space efficient baggage under the holo-screen panel. Design by Pierre Yohanes Lubis.
Article on design DOT fr
Tabletop displays or computers may allow a wide range of possibilities, but they too have their limitations, as they cannot extend more than an arm’s length due to the size limitations. Providing a solution, a team under human-computer interaction professor Patrick Baudisch has come up with a multi-touch floor display that ensures endless possibilities in both space and experience to the users and that too without sacrificing the direct touch. Incorporating the high-resolution multi-touch into back-projected floors, the floor display concept can sense pressure and recognize users based on the soles of their shoes, so it could ignore inactive users and focus only on known users capable of use their foot to interact with very high precision. In addition, the floor allows high-precision interaction to let users type with their foot on a QWERTY keyboard. Check out the video after the jump.
A-cero presents a single-family, two-story house on the Mediterranean coast that is designed to be used for the summer holiday. White is the main element in the house’s decoration to provide clarity and relaxation. The ground floor has all public rooms while the second floor has private dwellings.
“The Dome Cup concept has been designed as a great initiative to search talented football players from different province of the country. It features an urban street soccer tournament named NGOL cup campaign in a non-conventional way. The designer has utilized symbolic elements to craft the inflatable playfield that represents the sponsor Sonangol through their oil bottle goal posts. Capacity of the dome is around 1000 people which have been innovatively designed with a round fabric roof that glows from the center during daytime, creating a fabulous interior lightening to make the game more interesting.”
Creative Overflow showcase 30 Design Blogs that you may visit every day, being from informative articles, interviews, resources, tutorials and inspiration. It lists the links of the blog and also the RSS feed.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 will be released on April 12th.
In Photoshop, there’s some features that can save great amount of time on editing photograph. Contact Aware Fill is one of the new cool feature and you can check out the others on Smashing Share.
Article on Ntt.cc
As the response to new rules, it seems the US web company godaddy, the world’s largest domain name registration company and name.com, that sell Internet addresses to Web sites, joined Google China boycott, began to stop selling .cn domains in China.
Christine Jones, executive vice president and general counsel of Go Daddy mentioned that the new Chinese policies required every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms, as well as their physical address, email address and telephone numbers.
Article on Ntt.cc – Google recently demonstrated a version of its YouTube website delivering video using HTML 5’s native support for publishing H.264 video without Flash, it seems Google teamed with Apple and Mozilla, became a member of Adobe Flash boycott. Google plans to bundle its Chrome browser and/or operating system with Adobe Systems’ Flash in a deeper partnership. In fact, Chrome already works with Flash, only the announcement may include future versions of the Chrome browser or may focus on Google’s Chrome operating system.
On Adobe’s earnings conference call last week, CEO Shantanu Narayen indicated that Google was a partner, he said: I think we’ve been fairly transparent about that issue, which is we are committed to bringing Flash to any platform on which there is a screen, and it has nothing to do with technology. I think you’ve seen demonstrations of Flash running on smart phones from multiple vendors; at Mobile World Congress including Android where Eric (Schmidt) showed it as part of his keynote.
Interesting article on Smashing Magazine that talks about how Geo Location takes a big part in today’s web development. Simply using IP address and tracing down the location of user. This article shows different online tools and examples with code to help you have a better understanding on this topic, also comment the advantages and disadvantages of different online services.
Why Geo Matters
First of all, why is it important to consider physical location on this planet (at this moment) when we develop Web products? There are a few answers to this.
The first answer is mobility. The days of people sitting in front of desktop machines at home are over. Sales of mobile devices, laptops and netbooks have overtaken those of bulky stationary computers in the last few years. The power of processors now allows us to use smaller, more mobile hardware to perform the same tasks. So, if people use their hardware on the go, we should bring our systems to them. Which brings us to the second—very important—point: relevance.
Giving the user content that is relevant to the physical space they are in at the moment makes a lot of sense. We are creatures of habit. While we love the reach of the Internet, we also want to be able to find things in our local area easily: people to meet, cafes to frequent, interesting buildings and museums to learn about. The advertising industry—especially of the adult and dating variety—realized this years ago.
Google Analytics allows us to measure how well our sites are doing against our predefined goals: bounce rate, click paths and even custom measurements like how many people scrolled a certain page. Our specialists analyze all this information and use it to optimize the website. If you’re not measuring how people are using your site, you can only guess about its successes and failures. This tutorial on Active.tuts+ shows you how to setup a stripped-down version of an image gallery, that allowed the client to use Google Analytics to discover which images triggered the most interest.
