St Stephen's Church, Edinburgh, 1961.
Trafalgar Square, London, 1961.
One-horse dray in Dame St., Dublin, 1961.
I’ve really enjoyed browsing the archives of amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman, who from 1938 until the ’60s toured his native USA and the cities of the world. Cushman worked in business finance and law, but always took his Contax II A camera with him on his travels, documenting the architecture and people he encountered. Indiana University has scanned Cushman’s entire collection and put it online.
Thanks to Include Digital for this one.
From what I’ve read lately, I expected itv.com’s online video service to be a bit rubbish. I wasn’t prepared for it to be spectacularly bad.
I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the Tour de France since it started on July 5th. Considering it’s the world’s biggest (and best - bike bias acknowledged) annual sporting event, TV coverage is woeful: a 1-hour slot on ITV 4 every evening. But - wait a second - how convenient! You can catch up online on itv.com!
Here are a couple of screen grabs that sum up my experience of watching the Tour on itv.com:
Great!
Just great.
Over the past week of viewing on a Mac (which is supported) in 2 different locations (thus ruling out bandwidth or bad internet connection as possible faults) I’ve encountered a grim catalogue of errors:
- player hangs or freezes during playback
- selected video doesn’t play on request (this is not about buffering, I know what buffering is)
- videos are ‘not available’ for some unexplained reason
- the selection of Tour videos goes from e.g. 7 (we’re currently on Stage 9) to 2, and now at time of writing, 3 - again with no explanation
Not to mention incomprehensible error messages, bad player controls and navigation, and having to watch the same advertisement up to 8 times in an hour of playback. And what’s with Silverlight by the way? Having to download and install it before viewing is like some nightmare flashback to Real Player days.
The Tour de France videos must be among the most popular programmes on ITV Catch Up at present. If it was any good, this would be an effective way to promote this service to viewers who perhaps wouldn’t normally use it (from the looks of it most visitors are catching up on Corrie). But it isn’t any good, it’s awful.
Hey ITV! Spend some money and sort it out!
For anyone hunting for a decent way to watch Le Tour online, try www.letour.fr. Here’s a decent video service with daily short clips summarising the day’s action, albeit without Phil Liggett. This content is re-purposed by a number of other news sites (like this one, which plays back using Jeroen Wijering’s very excellent and now ubiquitous FLV Player).
By now you ought to know that I love cycling and bikes. I’m also pretty keen on web design. So when a bike manufacturer I really like gets a new website, I’m excited.
Condor Cycles, the iconic London bike builder, race team and brand name, had a ‘coming soon’ holding page on its site for most of 2007 - for so long, in fact, that I almost got in touch to offer my services. But I just checked back, and they’ve relaunched!
Here are some of the things wrong with the site:
- Sloppy code: the visual elements of the site rely on Flash, and there’s no text content, or keyword or description metadata, so it’s no surprise the site doesn’t show up on the first page of Google for a search for ‘london bike shop’.
- Dodgy user interface: I know what they were trying to do with the ‘virtual catalogue’, but the Flash page turner tool is fiddly to use and doesn’t encourage browsing, even if there are additional buttons for ‘next page’ and ‘previous page’ on certain screens. What happens if I want to download an image of one of the bikes or email to a friend? I can’t.
- The ’store opening hours’ page opens in a new window. A minor point, arguably, but the issue that prompted this post. Here’s why you shouldn’t do this on a single domain - or indeed ever.
So why use Flash, really? Can it be easy for Condor staff to update details in their catalogue? No - there’s no product database feeding into the site. In 2009 when their new bikes are launched, they’ll have to start over.
What Condor needs, to do justice to their excellent store, solid reputation and superb bikes, is:
- A clear, accessible site designed in standards-compliant HTML and CSS, to boost its search engine rankings and improve navigability.
- A better catalogue system that displays pages to the browser transparently, with unique URLs per product, and which the store staff can update easily.
Next time I’m in to pick up new inner tubes, it may be time for a quiet word with the manager…
I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.
These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.
Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ’soft zone’.
For the past month or so I have been working on a big project for Castle Gibson, the restored furniture retailer. Castle Gibson have decided to close their bricks-and-mortar treasure trove on Upper St in Islington and move their business online.
In collaboration with Sheridan at Wall Creative, who designed the visual layout, Simon and I built a catalogue and shopping cart system. The user interface is clean and simple: browsers can click on an image from the thumbnail grid to view larger images in the main window, or use the catalogue menu. If they’re interested in an item, they can add it to their enquiry, then click submit.
The user-friendly admin area is arguably the pièce de résistance though. It makes the business of uploading images to the catalogue and choosing how to display them a breeze.
Full project profile.
Probably when we should have been working, we were tumbling.
A tumblelog is essentially a blog without the baggage. You set it up for free in seconds, then publish your links, images, movies, quotes, whatever. For me it comes into its own by serving as an RSS feed aggregator: you can publish your del.icio.us links into it, as well as your Flickr photostream and loads of other bits - then feed it all back out again.
Projectionist is reliably offered as the daddy of the tumblr, while Max Wheeler’s Penguin Classics tumblr had many of us wishing we’d tried it first. For the record, here are mine (which switches between colour-riot and ultra-minimalist about every 5 days) and Si’s.
A few months back I pulled off another against-the-clock website build. Last-minute seems to be a trend among fashion designers. MA student Fiona Campbell needed a site in advance of her forthcoming exhibition at London College of Fashion. Fiona specialises is sustainable footwear, and wanted to use a website to promote her expertise online and offer consulting services.
Thankfully we had some great photos to work with, and after a bit of to-and-fro we settled on a calm, muted visual feel with a mix of blues and slate grey. While I put the structure together, Si came into play with an easy-to-use blogging tool so Fiona could publish news snippets and keep the site fresh.
I’ve decided to move my albums to Flickr and upgrade to a Pro account. Zenphoto may be free and better than ever, but for exposure, community and inspiration, it’s got to be Flickr. Since I made the switch I’ve been practically addicted.
The other reason for the switch is that I’m re-designing this website. It’s been over a year, and it needs a freshen up. More of which very soon.
At the end of December ‘07 we launched a new website for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. More →
My preoccupation with mannequins is ongoing. Could be time to devote an entire album to my plastic friends.
This one from the backstreets of Copenhagen.