Net Tech News

Space Invaders Rebirth... on the Socks

2007-03-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

Space Invaders was designed and programmed by Toshihiro Nishikado for Taito, Japan in 1978 and remains one of the most popular arcade games ever made. Years laters Space Invaders appear... on the socks.

Related sites:
Space Inviders Site
Space Invaders Pattern

The Best Mice And Keyboards You Ever Seen

2007-03-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

Introducing Russian Mouse company. The concept is simple, they take Logitech mice and keyboards and hand paint them.

Each painted item is exclusive. While putting a part of his soul in his work, the painter gives each item a feel of uniqueness and originality thus making it easily distinguishable from huge amount of ordinary mass-produced items. Besides, working with the painted mouse or keyboard feels much more aesthetic and pleasant, than with regular ones.

The craftsmanship is great, and they are reasonably priced, with many in the $30-50 range. Portraits can be as high as $100, and they will do custom jobs.

Russian Mouse

Russian Mouse

Shocking Alarm Clock

2007-03-17T02:59:00.000-07:00

For those people who having trouble getting up in the morning, here is the perfect solution, introducing the Shocking Alarm Clock (can you guess what it does?)

Yes that’s right, picture the morning with the light coming through the curtains the birds singing and the alarm clock ringing, you reach across to turn it off and SHOCK!!! it gives you a mild electric shock (it certainly got the boss out of bed this morning)

Perfect for playing a practical joke on a friend or loved one.

Warning: Not suitable for people with epilepsy or pacemakers.

Purchase Shocking Alarm Clock for £12.95

Apple wins 10 International Design Forum awards

2007-03-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

Apple walked away with no less than ten design plaudits at the International Design Forum awards in Germany this week.

No recent design event would be complete without the obligatory nod to Apple. The company scooped seven golds, mostly for its family of iPod gadgets. The jury unanimously praised the designs that make complex technology seem within everyone's reach. "Apple's product appeal transcends sex and age because it keeps things simple," says Frenkler.

It took Gold Awards for the

iPod
2G iPod Nano
MacBook Pro
MacBook
iPod Hi-Fi
iPod Radio Remote
iPod Leather Case

The company's Wireless Mighty Mouse, Apple Remote, and second-generation iPod Shuffle all took home Product Design Awards after Judges examined 487 products from 32 countries.

One judge at the event made a statement about Apple's portable player: "The iPod is simply fantastic," adding that the device is "a perfect product."

Related:
International Design Forum
CeBIT

Buddhist video game aims to teach morals

2007-03-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

Outbreak of kindness expected in Thailand

We hear a lot about violence in video games being to blame for all the ills besetting the youth of today. Now, a Thai games developer has decided it is time to right the balance and has developed a snappily titled Ethics Game to teach youngsters about being good, decent and teetotal.

The game is based around the five precepts of Buddhism: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not lie, and do not drink alcohol.

It follows three children on a pilgrimage with a wise old monk. The players have to deal with problems and obstacles along the way, but in a way which is consistent with the teachings of the Buddha. Normal game playing behaviour - shooting stuff, hurting animals, and so on - will cost the player points.

Pakorn Tancharoen, a senior officer in Thailand's Religious Affairs Department, explains that he became concerned about the moral impact of gaming when he heard about a boy who attacked his mum when she wouldn't pay for an online gaming session for him.

He told Thai paper The Nation: "It is impossible to stop kids from playing games or flocking to online-game arcades. So, let them play, but play good games."

Faced with a shortage of "good games", he set about developing his own. He worked in his spare time at first, hanging out at game arcades after work and watching what the kids were into.

Then he involved the kids in designing the characters who would go on the pilgrimage he devised.

When the project was approved, he found a gaming firm to develop and launch it. He said: "They said they had been hired to produce so many violent games, they saw this as a chance to make amends."

The game can be downloaded here. Being able to read the Thai language will be an advantage, and is not one we have, so we can't vouch for it actually being any fun.

Original Article: Buddhist video game aims to teach morals

Eyetracking: men tend to focus on private anatomy

2007-03-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

This image of George Brett was part of a larger page with his biographical information. All users tested looked the image, but there was a distinct difference in focus between men and women.

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

Full article: Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design

How to Embed FLV Flash Videos in your Blog ?

2007-03-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Video Sharing Sites like Youtube or Google video provide simple HTML code for embedding their video clips in your web pages. But sometimes we want to add raw Flash Video files like SWF animations or FLV [streaming or progressive] which are frequently used by News or media websites.

Now to embed flash video files, you can either download the flv or swf flash video to your hard drive, convert it to avi, wmv or mov format and then upload it to your Youtube account. Then you can use the Youtube supplied HTML code to embed that video in your webpage or blog. The video will play wrapped inside the Youtube or Google Video player skin.

The above approach works but is clearly not the best way to do things. What if the original video is updated - then you will have to revisit the whole encoding-decoding cycle again. Secondly, there will be considerable loss in video quality when it is converted from one format to another and Youtube is definitely not the best place to see high resolution video clips. They will degrade it to 320x240 size clip.

So here's a very easy way for embedding flash videos in your website without loosing any quality. Also you won't have to download the video to your own server - you can embed the flash video player in your site and it will stream the video [or play directly] from the source website [you might want to obtain permission from the content host since you will be consuming his bandwidth]

<object width="Width in Pixels" height="Height in Pixels" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0"> <param name="salign" value="lt"> <param name="quality" value="high"> <param name="scale" value="noscale"> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"> <param name="movie" value="http://geekfile.googlepages.com/flvplay.swf"> <param name="FlashVars" value="&streamName=FLV_Video_URL&skinName=http://geekfile.googlepages.com/flvskin&autoPlay=true&autoRewind=true"> <embed width="Width in Pixels" height="Height in Pixels" flashvars="&streamName=FLV_Video_URL&autoPlay=true&autoRewind=true&skinName=http://geekfile.googlepages.com/flvskin" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="LT" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://geekfile.googlepages.com/flvplay.swf" wmode="transparent"> </embed></object>

Incase you would like the video to start only when the site visitor hits the play button, replace autoPlay=true with autoPlay=false. Once the video track finishes playing, the cue marker would return to the original position. You can disable this by setting autorewind=false.

Here's a real world example - this flash video is hosted on an external news website in flv format but has been embedded in this site using just the above HTML code. See the video player skin is non-branded and looks more sleek and professional.

How to Embed FLV Flash Videos in your Blog ?

Google Image Ripper

2007-03-13T01:30:00.000-07:00

Google Image Ripper is a cool off-site Google Hack that that bypasses the Google Image search results and puts all the images on a single page at their full size -- no more postage sample results. You can refine the search by image size as well.
No more thumbnails, straight to the good stuff.
Image Ripper

Faux Column CSS Layouts

2007-03-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Why Functional Programming Matters

2007-03-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

This paper dates from 1984, and circulated as a Chalmers memo for many years.
Slightly revised versions appeared in 1989 and 1990 in the Computer Journal
and the Year of Programming. This version is based on the original Chalmers
memo nroff source, lightly edited for LaTeX and to bring it closer to
the published versions. Please excuse the slightly old-fashioned type-setting,
and the fact that the examples are not in Haskell!

As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be re-used to reduce future programming costs. Conventional languages place conceptual limits on the way problems can be modularised. Functional languages push those limits back. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute greatly to modularity. As examples, we manipulate lists and trees, program several numerical algorithms, and implement the alpha-beta heuristic (an algorithm from Artificial Intelligence used in game-playing programs). Since modularity is the key to successful programming, functional languages are vitally important to the real world.

The paper is available as postscript and pdf, and here is
a bibtex entry. There are even translations into japanese, by Nobuo Yamashita, and chinese, by ShiningRay.

JavaScript/CSS Font Detector

2007-03-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

JavaScript code to Detect available Fonts using JavaScript and CSS. I wrote a JavaScript code which can be used to guess if a particular font is present in a machine. This may be help of desktop-like web application developers when they want to provide different skins or fonts preferences to their users. This may also be help for blog skin designers which can provide different fonts for different users based on the list of fonts on their machine. Designers dont have to rely on the most common fonts like Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman. Since increasing number of users have modern PC with new operating system / applications, they may very well have a wide array of other common fonts in their machine.

This code works on the simple principle that each character appears differently in different fonts. So different fonts will take different width and height for the same string of characters of same font-size.

JavaScript/CSS Font Detector: Working Demo

10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

2007-03-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Summary:
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

I often write about the top mistakes in Web design, but what are the top things you can do to make more money? Following here are 10 Internet tactics with a particularly high return on investment (ROI).

1. Email Newsletters

Email newsletters let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. The newsletter is the perfect website companion because it answers a different user need: newsletters keep customers informed and in touch with the company; websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions.

Newsletters are fairly cheap. They require little technology and mustn't be published too frequently. If you don't have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence. If you do have a newsletter, then improving it according to research findings will likely make it several times more valuable to your organization. (Most of the newsletters we've tested failed to meet users' expressed desire for good communication.)

Newsletters have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines. In the long run, achieving this liberation is one of the most important strategic challenges facing Internet managers.

2. Informative Product Pages
The product pages on e-commerce sites, marketing sites, and B2B sites all suffer from information deficit. It's rare to see product descriptions that tell prospects everything they need to know to make a purchasing decision.

In my recent book, I present data showing that poor product information accounted for 8% of the usability problems on the websites we tested. Even worse, poor product information accounted for 10% of the user failures (that is, cases where users gave up, as opposed to "just" being delayed or annoyed). Designing product pages according to user needs is a highly targeted way to encourage sales at a point where users have already indicated interest by virtue of visiting the page.

You need detailed product information, but it must be written in a way that makes sense to people who aren't experts in your field. For example, on the product page for a laptop, don't be like Dell and tell people that the screen is "WSXGA+." Tell them it's 1680 x 1050 pixels. (Be honest: did you know this? And you're probably five times as geeky as a normal person.) Or, better yet, be like Apple and show different screen resolutions next to each other so users can see how much data is visible with each.

3. High-Quality Photography

One of the simplest ways to improve product pages is to show better photographs. For the hero shot at the top of the page, show the most representative photo in a small size. Below that, offer several additional photos that show different angles and close-up details. Also, remember mistake #10 of the top-10 Web-design mistakes of 2005: linking from small pictures to pictures that are only slightly bigger. Instead, link to photos that are as close to full-screen enlargements as possible.

Using huge enlargements might seem to contradict the guideline about fast response times for downloading Web pages. But there's a big difference between bloating a navigational page with irrelevant graphics and showing a big photo after the user asked for it. In the first case, the slow download interrupts the user's flow. In the second case, the delay is expected, and while delays are never welcome, they are less of a problem when they're clearly necessary to fulfill a user request.

A great downside of the online medium is that people can't touch and feel your products. But close-ups and quality photographs can still give users a good approximation of a product's tactile qualities, and they are essential to making people feel good about buying online.

For software products or online services, show full-resolution screenshots instead of photos.

4. Product Differentiation and Comparisons
You must soothe user fears about buying the wrong product, or they'll postpone their purchases and probably never buy from your site. When you have multiple products in the same category, you must explain product differences so clearly that it's obvious to people without industry expertise why they should buy one particular product over the others.

Product differentiation is obviously easier for companies that simplify their product lines in the first place. Why offer many different products with virtually no true differences? For example, Dell has four different models of laptops: Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and XPS, several of which are available in six different trim lines. If there's a clear difference between the models, it's not explained well on the website.

Even if you have a small and clearly defined product line, you must make the differences blatantly obvious on your site.

Comparison tools can also help users choose and thus overcome decision paralysis and facilitate sales. But such tools work well only when they illustrate key differences in a concise and unambiguous manner. Too often, websites take the easy way out and simply throw up a huge table of specifications without highlighting the points where products differ.

5. Support for Reordering
I've already mentioned the best way to get repeat business: offer an email newsletter, which will keep customers thinking about you even when they're not ready to buy. Then, when they want to spend money, they'll remember you.

To make people spend more money, make it easy to reorder. People often need the same things again and again. Why require them to navigate five levels down your site each time? In B2B, customers often need to order supplies, spare parts, or accessories for equipment they've already bought, so you should also facilitate those types of supplementary orders.

In one of our studies last month, test participants especially appreciated it when FreshDirect, an online grocer, let them reorder from their previous shopping lists.

Reordering is a matter of total user experience, beyond the website's user interface. Compose your product line with a view toward reordering. Continue to carry classic products so that people can order new copies of things they like. If you need to launch new products, keep sizes and similar parameters the same. For example, a customer who bought a sweater last year should be able to buy this year's model in the same size and be guaranteed that it'll fit equally well. Keeping sizes identical is much more important for etailing than for the physical retail channel, where customers can try things on before buying.

6. Simplified Text
You can usually double website or intranet usability simply by rewriting the text to follow the guidelines for online content. Better writing is probably the single most important improvement you can make to your site, but it appears fairly far down the top-10 list because it's not a one-time fix. You must hire good writers for all your projects, train them in writing for the Web, and have all of their content edited by even better editors who are even more knowledgeable about content usability.

Expensive though they may be, editors are always worth the cost.

7. Catering to Seniors
Older people are the fastest-growing segment of Internet users. In fact, they are virtually the only remaining growth market in rich countries, where most of the younger people who want to get online already have accounts.

Many senior citizens are rich and have time on their hands. When it becomes difficult for them to get around, the Internet becomes a natural place for them to spend some of their vast piles of money. Seniors are also less into piracy and tend to be more loyal than fad-chasing young people.

Best of all, you can take advantage of the fact that most websites discriminate horribly against older users. Even government websites that supposedly target retirees are designed according to guidelines for thirty-somethings. Because so many sites are hard for them to use, seniors will shower you with business if you're the honorable exception who acknowledges their special needs. (And, those needs aren't even that special -- it's much easier to make sites usable for seniors than for users with disabilities, plus there are many more seniors and they tend to be richer.)

8. Gift-Giving Support

Wishlists and gift certificates are low-cost features that give you incremental sales and introduce your site to new customers.

9. Search
Maybe search shouldn't be on this list; even though the benefits from improving it are immense, the required investment is fairly high -- certainly higher than for the other redesign initiatives listed here. Thus, the cost/benefit ratio is not as stunningly favorable for search as it is for my other recommendations. It's still favorable, though, so you should work on it.

Users increasingly depend on search as a primary interface to the Web. While search is getting fairly good for the Internet at large, it remains miserable on most websites and intranets.

Fixing your site's search requires that you buy and install better search software, and then tune it for your content and user queries (by adapting the spell-checking suggestions, for example). Worse, you must fix your content so that it's searchable. For example, you have to write meaningful page titles that actually explain the page's content so that people will know what they'll get when they click on a search hit. You also have to write using your users' vocabulary.

While it's expensive to rewrite your content for findability, doing so also improves your standing in external search engines, and SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the highest-ROI Internet marketing tactics. This is a much better investment than running ads that most users won't see due to banner blindness.

10. User Testing
User testing should really be #1 on this list because of its ability to set your project right with almost no investment. But I know that most readers tune out when I harp too much on the need for testing: people prefer to be told what to do rather than run their own studies.

However unpopular, I still recommend that you do your own user testing. There are always issues that are unique to your own industry that can't be resolved by reading general research insights. And remember: usability studies can be cheap, especially when you use low-cost paper prototypes that let you test an interface while it's still in the early design phase.

Bonus Tactic: Loyalty Program

For 10 years, I've recommended loyal-user programs, such as frequent-browser points modeled after airlines' frequent-flyer miles. Virtually no websites have taken me up on this idea, so I can't claim that it's a proven high-ROI tactic like those on the official top-10 list. But, take loyalty programs as a bonus idea: it's likely to be one of the main ways the Internet can fight back against search engine overlords and return more of the value to the websites that create it.

We've recently been observing people shopping online and are seeing some user loyalty emerge: more users are now starting out at a preferred site rather than a search engine. Perhaps we're finally seeing some websites that are good enough to be worthy of a bit of loyalty.

To encourage more loyalty, reward your repeat users. Discount offers and free shipping are the obvious ideas, but a website is a computer and we can go beyond these old-world approaches. For example, there are products in limited supply that sell out every holiday shopping season; give your loyal users first dibs on your allocation -- or let them register for future allocations before you make them available to the general public.

Serving Customers, Not Chasing Hype
The high-ROI ideas I have highlighted here have one thing in common: they add value to your site by enhancing its value for customers. That is, they give users what they want and need. These ideas are not the latest over-hyped stories the trade press loves to cover. Users want you to get back to basics and invest in the simple things that really matter to them.

Interface design is about making money for the company. Execution and workmanship are what you need, not fashion and advanced features. Do the basics, and do them well.

Learn More
More pragmatic design advice is covered in my full-day seminar on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability at the Usability Week 2007 conference in Washington DC, London, and San Francisco.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox

A fast way to install ATI and NVIDIA drivers in Ubuntu

2007-03-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

One of the first questions Linux users often ask, after installing their distro of choice, is “How do I install Nvidia drivers?” Although the process has been hit and miss in the past, one of the best solutions that I have come across is Envy for the Ubuntu distribution. The process is breathtakingly easy and works like a charm everytime. Since version 0.8.1 Envy now installs Ati drivers as well as Nvidia. The process is as easy as :

wget http://albertomilone.com/ubuntu/nvidia/scripts/envy_0.8.1-0ubuntu6_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i envy_0.8.1-0ubuntu6_all.deb

then press Alt+Cntrl+F1 to kill X-Windows and type

envy

at the terminal. From there press a few “Yes” and you have the latest stable Nvidia drivers installed on your computer. The program even brings you back into X-Windows. Envy is one very sweet script. The author of the program is Alberto Milone, better known as tseliot in the Ubuntu Forums. He was nice enough to answer to some questions on Envy, as well Ubuntu.

*Note for users of previous Envy versions you should first do these two steps before the installation of version 0.8.1

sudo aptitude purge envy

sudo rm -R /usr/share/envy

Discover (nithin)