I had to post this drawing my 7 yr old daughter made of me. The forehead and the hair is sadly quite realistic, but I love the that the speech balloon is me demanding “More Ideas!”.

The new Radio Times has a spectacular fold out cover previewing the upcoming Doctor Who Christmas Episode “The New Doctor”. Go see the larger version on Outpost Gallifrey for the detail (like the Cyberman with odd black tinted mask and visible brain).

Back in June, I talked about Helvetireader, a new approach I was taking to skinning Google Reader. Instead of making it look like an OS X app, this time I was going for minimal, inspired partly by Times, a newspaper style RSS reader, and the postcards that came with the (Deluxe!) Helvetica Film DVD.

As there’s always so many other things to do, it’s only now that I’m announcing it going live. First, here’s a small screenie:

I’ve removed a lot of stuff from the interface that I never use, so it’s not going to suit everyone. If it does suit you – great, if it ‘doesn’t quite’, you can take the CSS and fiddle and personalise to your hearts content!

I’m trying a different delivery system this time around. One of the things that made the previous theme feel like a burden were the different versions that needed to be upkept. Then I would feel guilty about clogging up my blog with news about any updates. Not this time.

Helvetireader is a hosted theme. To use it, you need a browser with user script functionality, which means Opera or Firefox out of the box, or a WebKit browser with the GreaseKit haxie applied. Camino doesn’t yet support user scripts, but you can download the CSS file and apply that manually if you like (see instructions below). This means that when there is an update to the theme, all you need to do is refresh, rather than download anything. It also means all I have to is update a single CSS file.

Before you install, you might want to set up Google Reader to be on expanded view, and check your view settings. After you install, these options will be hidden!

I’m not sure how it’s going to work out bandwidth wise, but I’m going to try it out as an experiment. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll maybe look into Git or SVN as a way of providing updates.

So how will you know when to refresh? By following the twitter feed. You can also use @replies for feedback. While requests to reinstate UI that I’ve hidden will be probably be answered by “take the CSS and change it to suit you”, I’m always interested to hear your thoughts.

That’s enough waffle for something that be used by 10 people at the most – head along to the Helvetireader site if you want to try it out.

If you do use Camino, then you’ll need to download the CSS file and add the following around it:

And put that in your Library > Application Support > Camino > Chrome > userContent.css file.

Thanks to Richard for pointing me toward these new covers for Penguin H.G Wells classics. Penguin have a habit re-issuing books with well-thought out covers (like the recent James Bond series). These are my favourites so far though.

The Gallery of Modern Art in Oxford has this fantastic installation, “The House of Books has no Windows”. A collaboration between Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, it’s constructed from 5000 books. Sadly, I only had my iPhone with me, so the pics aren’t great:

Truly a book sniffers delight. You can see more of the exhibition and the artists on the BBC Culture Show site.

There’s something warm and fuzzy about seeing The Rissington Podcast available via the iTunes store on iPhone and Touch. What’s more, the show isn’t dead either – we’ve had to re-record the last show 3 times before we got the sound quality right, but we now have an episode 18 in the bag, ready to edit. Give us another week and we should have a new show for you, answering questions from as far back as June! Gulp!

John and I were also interviewed by BBC Radio 5 last week, for ‘Pods and Blogs’, which goes out at the ‘Radio Quiet’ time of 2:30am. You can hear the slightly cringey, result here.

This post started off as a grumbly tweet, grew into a feedback email, and now it’s final state as a blog post. I’ll still email this feedback to the Evernote chappies as well, but I didn’t hear back after the last email (gentle nudge).

I’m still holding on to Evernote with the tips of my fingers, but there are areas where it still niggles at me:

• I can’t export files in the way I would like. If I use the ‘Export’ command I get an Evernote style XML file, rather than, for example, the 3 PDFs I selected. Why XML? Just give me the PDFs! You can’t drag and drop items from the list into the Finder, but I can choose ‘email’ to get multiple items out in one go. Doing this for images frames them in it’s own branded Evernote border. Just give me the images! (does this frame go if you have a premium account?). The way around this is to drag and drop images from their notes individually, but that’s a tedious solution.
• I really wish it wouldn’t rename my files. If I put in a PDF file helpfully named “VAT Return Jan-Mar 08” I’d like it to still be called that when I export it, rather than the unhelpful “bb2cd873d62b7e9616a056a1aac12698.pdf”. It’s my stuff, give it to me in it’s original state.
• By default, an image is embedded into a note, which introduces whitespace into the thumbnail: Basically, portrait images fare better than landscape. I would like images to just be images – not embedded or renamed.
• In the iPhone app, you can mark items as favourites to store them on the phone for when you have no connection (yay!) but if that is a PDF, you have to click twice to see it. Click once in the list (which shows you it’s a PDF), after which you get a screen with another PDF icon. Click that, and finally your PDF starts loading. Compare that with a PDF in Air Sharing, and you can click straight from the list to view the PDF in one. What’s the point of the middle screen? It provides no further information and just delays the process.
• New notes created on the iPhone automatically go into ‘Pending’ where it can’t be read until it’s uploaded. This means when I’m abroad and have no data signal, creating notes is waste of time, as they can’t be read until I get (or pay extra for) a connection.

The effect of the first 3 issues is that I’m left feeling that my stuff isn’t mine anymore. Once in Evernote, I can do a lot with it, but once in, it becomes Evernote’s, not mine. I’m not liking that loss of control and ownership. Compare this to a desktop competitor like Together.app, which not only lets you import and export the unaltered file in a number of ways, the files themselves are in easily accessible, visible folders. Nothing is hidden, renamed or rebranded.

Why do I stick with it? Because aside from these issues, I like where Evernote is going so far. I like that development is regular and ongoing and that they’re tackling the issue of accessing notes anywhere. I’m also sticking with it in the hope the issues I’ve noted above are simply features that haven’t been implemented yet…

It was such a long time ago that I spoke at Geek in the Park on the subject of “Pixel Pushing”, and I’m finally getting around to posting the resources now! Tardy.

If anyone still wants it, the talk is available in the following formats:

• Slides in PDF format (8.5mb).
• The audio of the talk is available on the official site
• A HTML Transcript by CastingWords (sponsored by Opera ;o) ). Reading back the original transcript was quite painful, as it highlighted how many times I say “so…” and (laughs) amongst other waffle. It’s all good self-critical feedback for future talks though.
• All links mentioned are on delicious. Please note the delicious link on the PDF slides is wrong!

I’m currently working on a strategy on how to take the Opera UI forward, and I’m eager to get your opinions on a particular subject: Native look and feel.

How much does Opera feel like native application on your operating system? How much does it matter to you? Those using Opera on just one platform may want it look utterly native, whereas those using it on multiple platforms might appreciate a consistent ‘family’ look. This is one of the things I’ll be looking at, and striving to find the right balance and approach.

I’m predominantly a OS X user, so I’m particularly looking for (constructive!) feedback from users on other platforms. In the past, I’d always thought that the Mac was the only platform where where Opera looked like it didn’t quite ‘fit’, but I need to be sure!

Please let me your thoughts via this simple form. Thanks in advance for all your help!

I’m now full-time with Opera, and have just finished my first week, touring two of the (many!) Opera offices, meeting colleagues and getting up to speed on projects.

On Monday 3rd, I took my first trip to Sweden, to the office in Linköping. The train from Stockholm airport gave me lovely views of Swedish country architecture and time to play some Jens Lekman and Pelle Carlberg. As soon as I arrived I was briefed about the Big Secret Project™, and found out what I’d let myself in for.

As well as large wall of myriad mobile devices for testing, the Linköping office has a mesmerising interactive screen – showing a graph of the number of page requests through Opera Mini around the globe, represented by tiny dots (no private info of course – just the raw data of the number of requests through the Mini servers). The globe image is fed other live data such as night/day and terrain, and the dots emanate from their source (like the Genesis Project from The Wrath of Khan). It’s kind of hard to explain, but I could’ve watched it for hours. Someone at Linköping needs to do a video!

At the end of my first day there, there was some twitter baiting to get me to talk like the Swedish chef from The Muppet Show. Stupidly, I clicked on a link from Tim Van Damme, and soon the whole office got to hear an example on YouTube. I couldn’t get to the mute button quickly enough. Hopefully no one was offended…

After lunch on the Wednesday (Doner Kebab & French Fries Pizza was a revelation quite frankly) a group of us took the 7 hour train journey to Oslo. Thursday and Friday were spent at the Oslo headquarters, getting to know all the lovely people there.

The Oslo office has a great canteen where beers are served after work on a Friday, and it was here that I finally got to meet Ralf Demuth. Ralf isn’t an Opera employee as such, he’s an ‘Elektran’ – a kind of volunteer QA chappie, but he’s a legend in Mac Opera Skinning. Until recently, he was really the only person making Mac skins for Opera. Nice to meet you Ralf! Pretty soon after that I had to catch my flight home, leaving just in time to see some snow fall.

It’s a relief to be finally getting on with the work in hand, and my main priority will be the UI for the next version of Opera Mini, although I probably can’t say anymore than that. There’s plenty of other stuff in the pipeline too, which I’ll talk about when it’s time for them to go public.

Here’s a feature introduced in Coda 1.5 that might be new to you (after all the big focus of that release was SVN integration and global find/replace). The new books feature allows you to add new online reference and even reset the defaults if you wish.

Let’s take Sitepoint’s excellent CSS reference as the example:

1. First, Command-6 to go to the books view, and click the add icon bottom left. In the sheet that appears, enter the title and URL (e.g http://reference.sitepoint.com/css). You can also drag in an image to represent it (which looks rather sexy).
2. Next, in the ‘use for mode’, select the language it references if it’s available. In this example, ‘CSS’, which will override the default choice.
3. Finally, add the search URL. You can easily discover this by searching for * on the site in question and copying the resulting URL.

Now if there is a CSS property I want more information on, I can either search within the books view in Coda, or select the property in code view and choose ‘Look up in Reference Books’ from the context menu. This is something I do a lot, mainly to check the support for the property in other browsers.

I’m beside myself with pant-wetting excitement that Stars of the Lid are making their own feature film, it’s just a shame we have to wait until 2010 to see it all. In the meantime, they’ve posted a teaser:

<object width="420" height="236"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/> <param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1847116&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"/> <embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1847116&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="420" height="236"></embed></object>
Stars of the Lid . teaser 1 from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Finally, I can announce my big news, that I’ve keeping quiet about for what seems like ages.

From the end of this month, I will be Senior Designer at Opera Software! Like fellow UK members of the Opera team Chris Mills, Bruce Lawson and Henny Swann I’ll be working remotely.

Opera has been a browser vendor whose ideals and feature list I’ve applauded, but whose Mac interface design I’ve been, well, critical of to be honest. Now I’ve got a chance to ‘put my money where my mouth is’. I’ll primarily be responsible for Opera desktop, Widgets and Mobile/Mini browsers, but general design too. I’ll hopefully get to implement the ideas I have for the logo and branding too. I can’t wait to get my teeth into it!

My ego would love to say that I was ‘head-hunted’ for the job, but I have to confess that I saw the job advert and felt compelled to pursue it. I went up to Oslo in early August, and found them open, flexible, and jolly lovely fellows to talk to, with exciting projects. After all getting to work full-time on a browser? It’s a dream!

Finally, some folks might be wondering what’s happening to Hicksdesign as a company? Without going into too much detail, it’s still here. While I’m full-time with Opera, Leigh will continue to steer the ship – she tells me that she’ll be recruiting a replacement for me soon (as well as building up Hicksmade). I’ll be what is possibly called a sleeping partner. ;o)

(Saving for posterity, this has been covered on Ars Technica)

After the last about Exporting PNG files from Illustrator, the author of the script, Jack Westbrook, has come up new 3 scripts to cater for the requests that were left in the comments! Jack asked me to publish links to these, so how could I refuse? Enjoy!

• Save layers to PNG Default
• Save layers to PNG 200dpi

• Save layers to PNG 300dpi

Yipee! If there is one band that has been long lasting favourite of mine it’s Starflyer 59 – and they have a new album out on my birthday! Originally titled “Dial M for Murder”, Dial M is released 28th October:

For the past 2 years, I’ve been a staunch user of Yojimbo to collect all my bits and pieces, from PDF receipts to textpattern plugins and serial numbers. Having gone through a lot of notebook/organiser type apps, it was the one I really gelled with.

The same couldn’t be said of Evernote, which I tried initially but didn’t give a second look. I’m not sure if there are new features in there, but recently I’ve been changing my mind. Part of the reason for this is the iPhone app: it becomes a way of collecting data when I’m out – voice notes, text notes and photos, which can then be synced and searched later.

I also discovered that you can publish a notebook publically, along with a wee widget for embedding this on your site. I love this idea, and my mind is reeling with possibilities:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" width="385" height="285" data="http://widget.evernote.com/widget/widget.swf"><param name="movie" value="http://widget.evernote.com/widget/widget.swf"/><param name="quality" value="high"/><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"/><param name="flashvars" value="feed_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs1%2Fpub%2F9613%2Fhicksdesign%2FScrapbook%2Frss.jsp"/><embed width="385" height="285" flashvars="feed_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs1%2Fpub%2F9613%2Fhicksdesign%2FScrapbook%2Frss.jsp" allowscriptaccess="never" wmode="window" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" src="http://widget.evernote.com/widget/widget.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/></object>

Then there is of course it’s main selling point – OCR technology, which means it will discover text in images. The uses for this are endless, but two great examples are scanning in business cards, or capturing notes made on a whiteboard.

Finally, from an aesthetic point of view, Evernote have the design licked. The desktop app looks good, and I can even get the widescreen view that I had to hack Yojimbo to get:

There are just a few niggles that stop me from leaving Yojimbo. My biggest bugbear though is that it’s not easy to get my stuff out again. Here’s an example: Every time I buy something, the receipt is printed as a PDF to Yojimbo and tag it with ‘accounts’, the same with any invoices I get in. When it comes to my quarterly send all paperwork to the bookkeeper time, I can easily see and select all the stuff for that quarter and drag and drop from the list in Yojimbo to a mail message – done. Evernote does all this, up until the ‘drag and drop’ point. It lets you drag, but no drop happens. You can’t even export individual items, other than dragging off textclippings or images.

Moving data to Evernote was easy, due to the way Yojimbo stores and exports stuff in it’s original format – .txt, .jpg, .pdf etc. Once in Evernote however, these become part of a note. If I ever wanted to move my data to another app, I can imagine this would cause a big problem.

One of the first things I did when started using the desktop app, was to remove the ‘monthly usage’ thermometer from the toolbar. Its screams ‘RESTRICTION’ at me all the time, but I can feel more relaxed now that it’s gone:

Some other features of Yojimbo that I would miss are encryption of notes, and the way it allows you to store serial numbers and passwords. So, it’s a close run now, but Evernote is definitely a contender, and if the export/format issue could be fixed, I’ll sign up for a premium account in a flash.

Update : Turns out Evernote can export after all, although not by dragging and dropping. Select the items and press the ‘Email’ icon. If you select PDFs. they’re added as attachments to an email in their original state. Images however have an ‘evernote’ branded frame around them.

(Something I made about 4 years ago, that I’ve just found again. If you can’t make out the text, see the full size image)

I’d used a variety of billing software in the past (including doing it manually InDesign!) and separate timing apps, but discovering Billings 2 was the first time it all clicked together. It quickly joined apps like Coda as one of my “how did I ever manage without?” essentials.

When I was offered a chance to preview Billings 3, I leapt at the chance. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and here are my thoughts.

The most obvious change is the revised interface. v2 looked good, but 3 brings it in line with Leopard and makes some key changes to improve workflow. For example, invoices and payments have now moved – you need to switch to ‘Account’ view to see these. It took me a a few days to get used to this, but now that I have, it makes much more sense.

(Sorry – couldn’t use a screenshot from my own copy for obvious reasons!)

My biggest gripe with v2 was having to go through a rigmarole just to see unpaid invoices, in my mind the most important bit of information! While there still isn’t an entry for this in the sidebar, I can just click on Reports and then Unpaid Invoices. It’s easier to see past invoices too.

Billings has been given a real polish and even minor details have been given attention, like the menubar timer.

• I can see all my slips, and filter by several options
• Client groups! I just set up two – Active and Inactive Clients. This is a real boon that reduces clutter in the sidebar
• Clients with overdue payments show up as red in the sidebar

In general though, the revised interface feels like the majority of the changes.

There aren’t many, but there are a few annoyances:

• The individual slip window still feels in need of attention. If you have more than 99 hours recorded, it only has room to show the first 2 digits. So 134:20 becomes 13:20. Also, the ‘log’ button placement feels like an afterthought, something that would’ve been better as a tab:
• There’s still no way to import individual projects – only restore a complete database.
• It’s still difficult to invoice in different currencies, which isn’t a problem for me, but maybe for you.
• The new icon lacks the detail and clarity of version 2. I’m not sure why they felt this needed to be changed, but this really is minor!
  

Gripes aside, it’s still a welcome and worthwhile update to an already great app.

So, I had an Illustrator file with 49 icons, each on a different layer. I put up a question on twitter, asking whether you can export each layer as a PNG, just like Fireworks would do. Within a hour this script was written and boom! All 49 icons output as PNG in one go, cropped to the artboard size!

If this is something you happen to need too, just download the script and pop it in your Adobe Illustrator>Presets>Scripts folder. Big thanks and multiple pints of Guinness must go to Jack Westbrook for helping me out with this one!

(The image above shows all 49 icon layers – visible and selected)

I was approached a while back by MailChimp to create an updated version of their logo, and here it finally is! I don’t need to go into much detail about it, as the MailChimp Blog has a really thorough write-up about the process, in particular the brief that started the job.

One thing I did want to show though, is how the sketch is traced. On the Silverback entry, I showed the process of it’s creation, but missed out this initial stage. This time I took some screenshots, and made another animated gif:

First the sketch is imported into Illustrator, and given 30-40% opacity, given it’s own locked layer, then the basic shapes are drawn on top. The paths are given some transparency so I can see where I’m tracing, but it isn’t always a straight trace, as this is the chance for some improvements. Finally, all the shapes are in place and the sketch layer can be deleted.

This is the last primate for a while – promise.

I don’t often get gifts from a client, especially one that I haven’t actually started working with yet, but when I met Dean Madden from Reading University that’s what he did. We met to discuss ‘DNA to Darwin’, an educational resource to coincide with Darwin’s centenary next year, and to get me in the mood, he gave me a copy of This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson.

It’s a novelisation of the lives of Robert Fitzroy (Captain of the HMS Beagle), and Charles Darwin, as they make their survey expedition to South America and the Galapagos Islands, as well as Fitzroy’s first journey and the years after their return to England. Based on real events, there’s very little embellishment, and where the author has changed events to improve the narrative, these are stated at the end of the book. The most interesting change is a meeting between Darwin and General Rosas, where the future dictator’s speech defending his actions is lifted verbatim from Tony Blair. While I was aware of Darwin’s contribution to the world, I knew little about Fitzroy, but it turns he has much to be lauded for – for example, he invented weather forecasting.

It’s gripping and tragic, with a cinematic feel throughout. A part of me wanted it to end just before their return to England, as from then on it’s a downward spiral for Fitzroy. Heart-breaking tragedy aside, I have to recommend it. I haven’t a enjoyed a book so much in years.

Bruce Lawson recently brought to our attention the UK government’s Browser Standards Draft 0.13. Basically, the draft recommends using browser popularity (2% or more usage), rather than capability, as the criteria for choosing which one to support. I really hope they rethink this for future drafts.

It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources, just by taking a different approach – one that isn’t based on statistics. Inclusivity is very important for the public sector, the draft itself says so!

To me, Yahoo got it spot on with their Graded Browser Support guidelines. The draft links to that article, but seems to ignore it for the most part.

If you only support certain browsers, then your website statistics will only enforce that, and not tell the true story of people trying to use the sites concerned. After all if a site only supports IE for example, then the ‘statistics’ are bound to show that to be the dominant browser.

If you feel the same way, please send polite feedback. After all, we are being consulted on this, and hopefully will be listened to.

When I wrote the last post, Google Chrome seemed like vaporware, but just as I hit publish, a release time was announced for later that day. Now that I’ve had a chance to have a play with the beta.

• It’s fast and nimble. In a Camino way.
• It looks like a Fisher Price browser. Simplicity is good, but the style is very child-like, and it makes me worry about the OS X version*. I thought the tab icons were nicely executed though:
  
• The location bar search is much better than I thought – giving solid URLs rather than just a ‘search Google for X’ option. For example, typing ‘Jeremy Ke’ brings up ‘Adactio.com’.
  
• It doesn’t look as if the ‘drawing layer’ in Chrome is quite up to scratch yet. It shows my naivety that I though such things were all part and parcel of Webkit, but it seems not. Text-shadow and border-radius in particular are broken.
• It does include the Webkit Web Inspector, so right-clicking reveals the familiar ‘Inspect Element’ command.
• I mentioned yesterday about the problem of multiple tabs, and lo, it was a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a beta, yadda, yadda.
• The ‘New Tab’ view is more useful than I thought it would be, with it’s inclusion of history and recently bookmarked and closed tabs.
• It does allow the use of other search engines, which is a good sign.

It’s a fairly promising start, but it feels more like a browser I would recommend to my parents than use myself.

*Just found out that Mike Pinkerton, the Camino lead is working on the OS X version as we speak. I feel more hopeful about the OS X UI now.

Google have just announced their new open-source browser Google Chrome, via the ingenious medium of a comic strip:

It’s good to see a new approach being used like this, particularly commissioned illustration.

First of all, the good news is they’re using Webkit. I remember John Allsopp joking about how great it would be if there was just one rendering engine, that was downloaded just like the Flash plugin. It’ll never happen, but the rapid adoption of Webkit outside Safari is getting to be the closest we’ll have to that. I had expected them to go with XUL and Gecko, in order to support other platforms with ease, so a voice at the back of head says this will be Windows only.

I can’t comment on all the talk about architecture/background processes, it all sounds very cool, but I have no idea if this really is a new approach or not. The main interface details are on page 19, where we see nothing new. Each of these features are currently available in other browsers:

• Tabs on top (or the ‘Omnibox’): Been in Opera for years, and more recently in Coda. While Safari doesn’t visually show tabs on top, if you have inquisitor installed it behaves in the same way as the Omnibox, in that each tab has it’s own URL bar and Search.
• Location bar that searches pages in the history: Another Opera innovation, recently added by Firefox. Also, for a few years now, Omniweb has enabled you to search the full text of pages in your browsing history
• New tabs show most used sites: Opera’s speed dial feature. Also, Camino has always had a dynamic ‘Top 10 most visited sites’ bookmark list, although I find that the 10 most visited sites, and the 10 sites I’d want to quickly access aren’t the same thing. I’d prefer to choose my sites manually.
• Privacy Browsing: Safari. Cough. Bless ‘em though, I like they way they use ‘buying a present in secret’ for the real world example.
• Pop Up Window Control: Most browsers have this, but in particular, the pop-up control sounds just like Omniweb.

They start by telling us how they’re rethinking the browser, and then go on to repeat what has happened before in others. I would’ve liked to see them approach another problem – namely ‘too many tabs open’. Beyond the performance issues, the more tabs you have open, the more difficult it becomes to know what you have open, and in which tab it is. Omniweb gets around this with it’s lovely visual tabs. Opera uses an alt-tab switch with thumbnail preview (which has also found it’s way into the latest Firefox nightlies).

The comic site itself highlights another web problem – loads of ‘next’ links, something Omniweb solves with a magical press of the enter key, and I’d love to see implemented in other browsers.

Knowing Google, ‘Chrome’ will most likely work really well, but not allow ads to be hidden, and of course, have the standard insipid google style. In fact just as I was writing this, a screenshot has appeared on news sites

I’m excited about the spread of Webkit, but at this stage Chrome doesn’t seem to offer me much. If they do make an OS X version, I’ll be duty-bound to try it of course!

Ye gads, Dell have shocked the pants off me with this tasty piece of industrial design! The diminutive Dell Hybrid PC comes with optional coloured sleeves, but in particular I rather love the bamboo sleeve version:

This kind of thing adds warmth and organic feel into something where normally only cold industrial aluminium or cheap black & grey plastic was before. Granted, there may well be cheap plastic in there, but this is a Dell that I would be proud to have on my desk. The specs also show it would make a good TV media centre – if only I could install OS X on it! More details on the Hybrid here

Maybe I’ll buy a bloody Dell after all.

Delia Derbyshire has long been considered ahead of her time. One of the earliest creators of electronic music, she is most famous for her work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale, at which she created the haunting original Dr Who theme, in an age without synthesizers:

<object width="420" height="351"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bKg9tuSbXmk&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bKg9tuSbXmk&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="420" height="351"></embed></object>

A lot of modern musicians like Orbital, Stereolab and Spacemen 3 cite her work as an influence, and it’s easy to to see why.

What sparked this blog post was the news that more of her work has been discovered, some 267 tapes to be exact! All of this is going to be digitized and made available, but in particular was this experimental dance track that she created in the 60’s. Made decades before ‘electronic dance music’ really happened, and yet it sounds like something created today.

This clip from a BBC Four documentary gives some insight into how she created music with reel to reel tapes:

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Sadly she died in 2001 at 64, just after rediscovering her love of electronic music, working with Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom), of which she said:

“Working with people like Sonic Boom on pure electronic music has re-invigorated me. He is from a later generation but has always had an affinity with the music of the 60s. Now without the constraints of doing ‘applied music’, my mind can fly free and pick-up where I left off.”

Discover more about her life at delia-derbyshire.org

I’m big fan of the French artist/illustrator Geneviève Gauckler, having discovered her work via the Guardian Angel Room project.

Now, I’m not sure why, but I was really surprised to see her work (or at least her style) in the backgrounds of CBBC, the site for BBC’s youth output.

I’ve tried to do a bit of searching, but no information is forthcoming, and I can’t see a credit anywhere. I’m surprised, can anyone tell me if these really are her work?

There’s also wallpapers available too:

Gawd Bless™ Chris MIlls and Gawd Bless™ Opera, for together with authors like Norm they have begat the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

I linked to this in my sidenotes a couple of days ago, but really felt it deserved a bit more attention, considering the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into it.

Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum, released in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network, is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.

Finally, there is non-reference resource to point people to, where they can actually learn in stages what web standards mean, and how to adopt and use them to build a better web. Heartily slapped backs to all of the contributors!

This is for those who watched (and care about!) Dr Who episode 12 The Stolen Earth, so be warned – there are spoilers!

This email landed this morning:

“I’m surprised to not see a Dr Who post on your blog. Are we going to get one? Will David Tennant be staying? Did you feel a pang of sadness at the thought of losing our current doctor?”

Ah, go on then.

I don’t think this is when David Tennant leaves, and I base that solely on the fact that he’s been seen filming the Christmas Episode! However, some points against that though:

• It’s possible that the production team kept his leaving secret – after all they had planned that Rose would be coming back, and managed to keep it secret for a couple of years.
• Catherine Tate did put her foot in it by saying this was his last season, after which there was an air of ‘she let the cat out of the bag’
• The scenes for the Christmas episode may be flashbacks, or some other ‘Time-Crash’ style plot device. Or even a complete Red Herring.
• Ood Sigma telling him that his “song may soon end” (although I take this to refer to Professor River Song – too literal?)

Still, my feeling is that next year’s special episodes will be his last. 3-4 years is the usual reign for a Doctor, and I’m sure that he would want to move on soon. He’s a great actor after all, and wouldn’t want to be typecast no matter how much of a fan he is. I hope he doesn’t go though – he makes even a bad script magic to watch.

So if this isn’t his last story, as I’m reckoning, then that leaves some issues. Will they back out and do some cringey plot device about how he regenerated but ‘came back the same’? Hopefully not, but here’s my theory: There was a brief mention to Donna that she ‘had something on her back’ – referencing the previous episode (Apparently Dextrus says this to Donna in ‘Fires of Pompeii’, but I missed that reference). There is still a Time Beetle™ on her back, and once some other choice is reversed, it will undo all these events. Anyway, we’ll see come Saturday!

On Saturday 9th August, I’m going home! Leamington Spa is where I was born and spent 22 (in total) years of my life, and I’m going back to talk at this years Geek in the Park organised by the Multipack. There’ll be a picnic in the picturesque Jephson Gardens, followed by an evening at KoKos.

I’ll be talking on “Pixel Pushing: An introduction to Icon Design”, which will go over the theory and practice of creating icons for desktop applications and websites.

Drew will be tapping in to the nostalgia vein again, with ‘What Brian Cant Never Taught You About Metadata’. I hereby give him the challenge of working Jamie and the Magic Torch into his next talk.

I’m praying for good weather, and looking forward to meeting other geeky picnicers!