Author: Victor

Iris Rachel Rosenfeld has arrived. Yay!

I quickly assembled an Internationalization Gallery to see how folks are designing access to country and language sites.

I first heard about Blades – a chassis with ‘plug-in’ servers-on-a-card – a few years ago, and IBM is now at the point of heavily marketing them. I haven’t been a sys admin in several years, but these things still make me swoon.

The program for the IA Summit is rolling out.

The book TellMeWhy tells the story of the first 24 months of design firm karlssonwilker. Hjalti and Jan come from Iceland and Germany, respectively, borrow some money, rent an office in New York, and wait for clients to show up. The book also shows all their work, good and bad. It’s real and sobering and funny and fascinating and I stayed up til the wee hours to finish it in one day. So refreshing for a design book to tell a real story, not take itself too seriously, and still be beautiful.

Last month I wished recommendations would come from my favorite artists, and now Apple’s iTunes Music Store has ’em. At the moment I’m listening to twenty from the Counting Crows. Now if they only had permalinks…

The image displayed across the top of the site…is a 1600 pixel wide panoramic view from the top of my house, in Dorset. The scene was originally captured as a series of photographs, before being traced…to produce the cartoony version you see here… Thanks to an XML feed from weather.com, and some PHP jiggery pokery, the end result is a fairly accurate representation of what I currently see when I look out of my upstairs windows.

Pixelblocks

The Manhattan Skyline is one of the more beautiful drawings of Manhattan architecture I’ve seen. Produced on a Macintosh after photos taken from a ship circling the city, they’re a steal at $30.

Bill reports that the New York New Media Association has shut down. I’m not terribly suprised, as no one I know who has anything to do with new media was involved there. They seemed to want to create a new fashion industry, laying a superficial business+social scene over what actually succeeded here, which was people making good stuff. RIP.

Alex Wright’s article on Paul Otlet is a great read. The video excerpt from the documentary film is a must see.

Metropolis Magazine has a new website design, thankfully, as their old site was a prime example of great content suffering a lackluster design. It wasn’t that this architecture and design magazine ignored design, it was just quirky, in a bad way. Whereas a site like eBay is quirky in a novice designer kind of way. But this general idea of good content with sub-par design could be called the eBay effect. In eBay’s case, the experience can be downright frustrating, and with a site like New York Metro it’s merely annoying, but people keep returning for the abundance of great content.

Oh Great LazyWeb Hear My Prayer: An RSS aggregator that converts text to speech and saves the resulting audio in an MP3 file. The result: listen to your favorite blogs’ new postings on your MP3 player away from the computer.

Update! James points out this could be done with NetNewsWire and a little AppleScript, and Greg Hanek sends along a link to Read It To Me , a perfectly named piece of donationware that also works with NetNewsWire. For us Apple users this is quite a nice little solution.