Two weeks ago I wrote a post on the problems of file versioning, in which I cried out to Adobe:
“Dear Adobe,
I’m kind of sitting here online with a couple million designers, and we think you should fix this.
Love,
Designers”
And little did I know, Adobe was sitting right there listening to me. I unexpectedly received a kind email from the Adobe Product manager, curious to more insight on the topic and how it could be implemented into Adobe CS4.
I couldn’t help but feeling how such a large corporation suddenly felt human and tactile. I’m glad to see a how Adobe takes their time to read users opinions and comments, despite of their dominance in the market.
I figured if I would ever have any influence on Adobe’s upcoming software, it would be now that I’ve engaged into a dialog with their product manager. I have willingly been using Adobe’s software for as long as I can remember, but I still can’t get over many of its shortcomings, and I made sure to be clear about this.
At times like these I want to urge people to voice their opinions about the way we use applications opposed to how we wish we could use them, because they are listening. Technology has made it relatively seamless for us to communicate our ideas to large audiences, and what could now be more important in this 2.0 industry than the co-creation of the very software we will be using?
Today I came across two very noteworthy examples of clever information design which make understanding sets of data both more visual and relative. The best way to grasp what data means is often to put it into perspective with other sets of data so you can easily make a comparison. This is when charts and illustrations quickly become a better data medium than numbers.
The first example takes a map of the world and distorts each region size, relevant to the category it is in. For example, while viewing the map on HIV presence, Africa will be bloated compared to the rest of the world.
See more maps or read more about the project at the UK Daily Mail.
(These maps were produced together by the universities of Michigan and Sheffield)
Universcale is a very interactive example of helping us putting into perspective the size of the universe. We quickly can understand how small we are compared to the billions of light years which span across the universe, whilst still being millions of times larger than the building blocks which make up the universe.
Subscribers to .mac will be pleased to try out Apple’s new web gallery. It looks great, and is a sure example of how well offline applications can be translated into online web apps. Instant image resizing, different viewing modes, and lots of reflections make you quickly forget you are viewing the photos online.
Great features like live image resizing make Apple Web Gallery really give Flickr and other foto services something to catch up to.
Although Apple did a great job thinning the line between offline and online photo viewing, it still needs some major work. All of the web2.0 goodness make just the home page clock in at more than 1.4MB, which even on my 6Mbit connection feels sluggish and irritating.
Sure waiting a minute on a T1 doesn’t seem too bad, but showing these images to your mom on her ISDN line will take her more than 2 minutes just to download the index page! Pure blasphemy
Curious, try out Apple’s Live Web Gallery for yourself.
