Departing: London, UK

The relentless march of time has again caught me off guard, and these past three years have rocketed by like a, er, rocket. Alas, the time has come to move on, back to the homeland. Meg and I have a busy couple of weeks ahead of us, saying bye to friends and colleagues, getting our place packed up and tying up the loose ends.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow

An old Swedish saying. Some friendly advice for someone who’s been letting stress get the better of them…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

The design is strong in colour but super simple and aims to let the words and images do the talking. Diego’s a prolific guy, always taking great photos, painting crazy images and writing deep thoughts, so I’ll be visiting often to see what’s new.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

It would seem that it’s often a tall order to build sites in a way that will work without Javascript as the baseline, but instead going straight for the all-singing, all-dancing full-blown AJAX rich-media awesome experience. I tend to think you can have your cake and eat it too. That’s if you’re epically brilliant.

I love all the new bells and whistles we’re able to roll out on sites these days, just using native browser technologies. But bells and whistles shouldn’t come at the expense of a functional base

I do believe I just quoted myself there. Slightly weird… But anyway, if that’s your kind of thing, do have a read and feel free to share your thoughts.

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“‘Post-digital’ is a term coined by planner/blogger Russell Davies to describe the way in which smart digital and online behaviours have begun to make their presence felt in the real world, on real, tangible objects. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this concept after years of flash-heavy microsites, and of ‘traditional’ vs. ‘digital’ silos: a distinction rendered increasingly obsolete by the swelling ranks of a younger generation for whom such boundaries are meaningless.”

– Most Contagious 2009 – Contagious Magazine (PDF)

Gritty, grainy, rustling old newspaper.

Now to get some people and content together…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

“Good business is the best art.”
— Andy Warhol

Pop Life explores a newer generation of artists that have made use of the media to capitalise on their art and indeed their own names. There was a fairly large section devoted to Andy Warhol’s entrepreneurial leanings in the 80s, at a time where he continued to court celebrity, and made all sorts of unlikely appearances, like in Aaron Spelling’s The Love Boat, as well as randomly taking a stroll about in the back of a late 80s pop video.

There was a wall dedicated to the 80s cover art of Warhol’s magazine: Interview. This was compelling evidence of his part in unleashing that certain 80s style of commercial art on the world.

Also on show were episodes of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, which were a series of laid back chats with celebrities, made for MTV. I managed to catch a few minutes with Jerry Hall and John Oates (the follicly superior half of Hall & Oates).

Upon further exploration, I was pleased to find that there were works of artists other than Andy Warhol being exhibited. Damien Hirst had his False Idol on display – a preserved calf with gold feet. Funny thing about Damien Hirst, I’m yet to meet someone that likes his art. Personally, I take a morbid interest in dead things in formaldehyde. And if they’ve got bling, more power to them.

Jeff Koons had some of his particular flights of fancy included, notably Made in Heaven, discreetly tucked away in one of the “adults only” rooms. Here we get an intimate glimpse of Jeff and his wife, Italian blue movie star and politician “La Cicciolina”, celebrating their special kind of adult love in a highly colour-saturated, Garden of Eden themed series of photos, along with a somewhat generously proportioned sculpture.

The last room in the exhibition featured the very chirpy and only slightly twisted art of Takashi Murakami, where we were inundated in illustrations, sculptures and toys to perfectly compliment the well endowed lactating cartoon lady we saw in the first room. As a nice cheerio, we were treated to a big screen playing Turning Japanese, as sung by a nice blue-haired cosplay Kirsten Dunst.

All up, Pop Life was interesting and provocative, and a good excuse to get yourself over to the Tate Modern. Pop Life will be there until 17 January.

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E-commerce mavens (and benevolent employers) Snow Valley were lovely enough to send a couple of us along to dConstruct 09 down in Brighton last week. This was a good thing, as dConstruct was a quality conference with lots of food for thought.

Hopefully slides or videos of the talks will be put up soon. I’d particularly like to revisit the talks of Adam Greenfield, August De Los Reyes (from Microsoft’s Surface team) and Russell Davies (who I enjoy reading in Wired UK these days). Those presentations were especially entertaining and insightful.

The general theme was “designing for tomorrow”, and what really came through was the idea of taking what we have learned from building online experiences and applying those approaches and user behaviours to the physical world and the urban landscape. Or as Davies put it, going from representing the world on the web to representing the web in the world. I’m totally on that wavelength, and have been keen on the idea of doing creative projects of a more tangible, physical nature. It’s all about the “post-digital”.

Good to catch up with some web peeps and have a few drinkies too – good times. I’d put it up there with SxSW Interactive as far as interest and inspiraton goes, so definitely money well spent.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Now that the dust has settled on the launch of TurnTubelist a bit, not to mention Mr Speaker’s awesome continual improvements, I thought I’d share some thoughts about a few possible next steps, at least as far as user experience goes. If you haven’t had a play, go there now.

None of these are set in stone, it’s more of a rough to-do list for improving TurnTubelist’s user interface:

• Improve playlist and playlist management
  The playlist controls (loading, info, delete) that appear on hover are a bit weak. Going to rejig the interactions there, they’re just a bit finicky to use and not obvious enough at the moment.
• Simplify playlist publishing
  The new publishing functionality is pretty cool, but the positioning needs tweaking.
• Increase video size
  We want to do more stuff with video later, but at the moment, it’s not the focus. BUT that doesn’t mean we should necessarily limit the video players to such a small size. If at all possible, we want to make them larger so you can use TurnTubelist as a cool way to watch your favourite YouTube vids.

• Improve messaging
  We want to improve the way message dialogues are presented when the app needs to tell the user something, such as an alert or error. There are still the odd Javascript alerts appearing too (…eek!)
• Make forms better (and bigger!)
  Tiny forms aren’t generally a lot of fun, so we want to find a place to put forms in such a way that lets us make them bigger.

In general, we want to use the available viewport space more effectively. I’m planning to use funky overlays that use the whole viewport, rather than being constrained to small containers and such.

User feedback has been really helpful, and the ease of which users can submit feedback is also something I want to improve. Always interested to hear people’s thoughts, so feel free to leave us comments using the feedback form on TurnTubelist, or of course here.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Twitter is:

• Pithy, straight to the point.
  140 Characters. That’s it.
• A good networking tool
  Yes, yet another one, but probably one of the better ones
• There are better ways to Tweet other than the website
  Its API means you can use Twitter lots of ways other than the website. I don’t like to use the Twitter website very often, I much prefer to use Tweetdeck (an Air desktop app) on my lappy and Tweetie on my iPhone. There are lots of other apps for using Twitter on your PC or phone. That plus support for good ol’ SMS make Twitter super convenient. You usually get better features on the other platforms too (like re-tweeting, URL shortening, and linking to images via Twitpic.

Why Twitter and not Facebook?

Twitter is:

• Open and public, like a blog (unless you lock your updates);
• Able to reach and network with people you don’t already know.

Twitter and Facebook do different things. Facebook is brilliant for keeping up with my friends and family all over the world, seeing their photos, videos and updates. I don’t use Twitter for that.

Why Twitter instead of blogging?

Twitter is:

• More conversational, not so much one person writing long passages of text followed by comments;
• It requires less time than blogging. 140 characters does not allow for lengthy research and background information.

However Twitter doesn’t replace blogging, it’s the more frequent little brother of blogging. They go quite well together. If you’re marketing yourself or your business, it’s another useful channel and quite helpful in driving further traffic to your site.

In general, I find Twitter a great source of information (as well as entertainment). I get as much or possibly more news and information via Twitter as I do via my RSS feeds. Twitter is a great tool, as useful and enjoyable as the people you follow.

As an aside, I plan to shuffle a lot of things around this site in the upcoming redesign. Seeing I’m on Twitter more I’m going to try to simplify this site a bit. A bit less emphasis on the blogging (seeing as I’m not doing it regularly anyway) and just more of a landing page aggregating feeds from Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, etc. The blogroll (“Elsewhere”) column will be deactivated and replaced with Delicious for ease of RSS subscription (and ease of updating for me).

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

UPDATE 2: TurnTubelist is now LIVE. Go now and play with it and let us know what you think. We are still tweaking it but we decided to get it up and out there. More details to come soon…

So Webjam 8 was the biggest and best so far by all accounts. There were brilliant presentations and competition was as tough as ever, but it was to Mr Speaker’s and my absolute delight to win first prize for TurnTubelist, a little pet project we’ve been mucking around with in our spare time. Props where due, Mr Speaker (aka Earle Castledine) presented brilliantly as always in his own inimitable style, not to mention his JavaScript prowess in turning a beer-idea into something well cool. When it’s available, I’ll also put up the vid of the presentation hereThe vid is now at the end of this post.

Mr Speaker at Webjam. Photo by Halans

TurnTubelist demo. Photo by Halans

Sneak-peek at TurnTubelist

TurnTubelist is a web application that lets you crossfade YouTube videos and build your own playlists for continual YouTube fun. It currently works entirely on the client-side using HTML, CSS and lots of JavaScript (mainly jQuery). It’s not up yet but we aim to put a beta up on the web really soon.

Earle has come up with some neat wizardry that hooks up to YouTube via their API, does some nice AJAX to search for YouTube vids without interrupting playback and stores your playlists in a cookie. Not to mention, the sliders, keyboard shortcuts and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I worked on the graphics, the user interaction design and got my hands dirty with some jQuery for a lot of the user interface bells and whistles. There’s still a lot of work and testing to be done, but I think it’s just about time to put it out there to get some feedback.

Stay tuned for when we launch the beta, this thing is a hell of a lot of fun to use if I do say so myself.

In the meantime here’s the presentation video:

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

• Finally got a new UK Work permit visa! An incredible amount of preparation and bureaucratic delays, after which I had to travel to Australia. In the end it took a couple of months to finalise! I can now live and work in the UK for a couple more years. It was great to catch up with everyone while I was back home, thanks to all who generously shared their time with me.
• Work is going crazy, have been working feverishly on T.M Lewin and Lipsy’s sites at full steam…
• Mr Speaker and I have been spending every spare hour on a side-project. I’m very glad to say that Mr Speaker will be giving our prototype a test run at Webjam 8 later this week! More news on that very soon…

Subsequently, my site redesign has taken a back seat, and now I’m thinking I want to redesign my redesign.

More news soon!

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things