Granted

I’ve just been listening to Coldplay’s latest album “Viva la Vida” and reading some mixed reviews, most of which I can’t help but agree with. One of the funniest has to be from Mark Beaumont from NME:

Why is it that all major league UK rock bands end up turning into U2? Has Bono personally impregnated every arena dressing room with his juices so anyone within 20 feet catches Big Music like scabies?

Classic. Read the full review here.

“By removing the soot and grime from public spaces to create the outlines of nature, Moose makes a poignant statement about pollution in urban spaces and our reversal of the natural world.”

From threeminds. Thx to John for the link.

EcoZoo is a recent addition to an increasingly long line of impressive 3D interactives appearing online. Most of these have been made possible with performance and rendering advances in the Flash Player and 3D libraries such as PaperVision3D which have popped up to take advantage of them.

What interests me is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were scoffing at the thought of 3D interfaces and mocking them for their inherent usability issues and gimmickery. While the gimmick label is still fair, it may not be in the near future. With the barrier to entry dropping by the day, building a 3D interface is no longer the realm for the coding elite. Although we’re likely to see a large amount of experimentation at first, as thoughtful designers with a care for user experience pick up this technology, solid design and interaction patterns should emerge that will raise the bar over time – just as we’ve seen with normal 2D websites in the past 10 years. Although you could argue it’s not fully 3D, ‘coverflow‘ as seen in Apple’s iTunes and iPhone could be seen as an early 3D interface pattern that’s been picked up by the masses and can now be found on a plethora of sites, webapps and widgets.

Although 3D interfaces will only be appropriate for certain types of content, I’m excited about seeing how designers will start taking advantage of this technology in their everyday work.

Practical? no. Cool? hell yes!

I know it’s wrong, but I actually felt my body ache for this the first time I saw the video of it in action. Screw the iPhone, if I had the spare cash I’d order this puppy immediately. If anyone can think of a cooler geek gadget then you gotta let me know about it.

Bookmarks are great, but because sites are changing all the time they’re no good for capturing the design of a page or element. Over the years I’ve played with lots of different way to capture and keep screenshots. Flickr was working well for me for a while but it’s too slow and cumbersome. Last week I ran into a great new tool called ScrnShots. It’s an online image sharing site with community features (yeah so what I hear you say) but it has a great handy desktop tool that really does take the pain out of capturing, tagging and uploading your screenshots. Check out my collection so far then go grab yourself an account!

There’s something incredibly sad but awesome about this.

People getting punched in the face in slow-mo. What’s not to love?

Wow. It’s only available to home delivery subscribers at this stage but there’s some great previews available.

Read here. Well not the end really, but an interesting reminder about why ads don’t work that well for apps, and why the better (albeit harder) route is to connect buyers and sellers directly.