It's here. The all new design for Liquidicity. We hope you didn't mind waiting, but we think it's paid off. We went back to the drawing board and decided to rework the blog from the ground up. Before we waffle on, let's get into the reasons why we decided to redesign Liquidicity.

A few things we noticed from the old Liquidicity

* People like our icons.
* People like our design reference posts - like Help Sheets.
* People want to be able to see what other posts we have produced without having to Google for them.
* We had a lot more people going to the site than reading our RSS feed.
* We never thoroughly looked at the Comments area before.
* We weren't making it clear that Liquidicity was just one part of the GoSquared site.
* People often find it easy to search for stuff.

So we went ahead, and tried to design a better Liquidicity.

As a side note, you may be interested to know we've been working on redesigning the rest of the GoSquared site, so many of the concepts we're playing with here on Liquidicity will soon be making their way across the whole site.

So what have we done? We've been very keen to clean up the many different areas of Liquidicity and form a more unified, easy to navigate interface, so we worked to a grid pattern (of 980px width) to structure the page. All navigation now falls strictly into the grid, from our subtly modified top navigation menu, to the Liquidicity navigation menu, to the sidebar, to the category and archive pages. We've tried to stick to the grid wherever possible.

Showing off the Feed

We broke the grid on purpose for the RSS badge in the Liquidicity navigation menu for obvious reasons - we wanted the element to stand out as much as possible. Trickier than it looks, but it makes sense. Along the same lines, with the aim of increasing awareness of our RSS feed, we are now showing the number of subscribers in at least two locations: the Liquidicity navigation menu and the sidebar. We didn't want to use the ugly Feedburner widget, though, so we dug a little deeper and found we could use the Awareness API to pull our feed count from Feedburner's servers without needing to show anything but pure text.

Comments that don't suck

We wanted to improve the appearance of comments so we added Gravatar support. Now your Global Avatar will show up along side your comments on every post. We also ensured the actual form that members use to submit comments looked a bit better. We worked hard to design some new buttons that have multiple states so your click is rewarded with a grateful "active" state.

Down Below the Fold

A lot of time went in to improving the footer area of Liquidicity. We now show the (new) global GoSquared footer, along with a breadcrumb trail to help you find your way in the navigational structure of the blog. Further helping navigation, we have made some new buttons (in the style of the comment submit button) for browsing back and forth in time through the list pages of posts. Again, we hope these will encourage people to further explore more content on Liquidicity.

All in all, we hope you like the new Liquidicity. Have a quick look through the images in the gallery below to see close ups on what we've done, and a few sketches we made when planning the new design.

As always, design gets better with feedback, so we would love to hear your thoughts on the redesign.

Thanks!

The GoSquared Team

It's Halloween time again, and we haven't made a new wallpaper in a few weeks, so we thought we'd treat you to some vectorised pumpkin scariness.

Available in a 320x480 iPhone friendly size, all the way up to a freakishly large 2560x1600 for you lucky ones with exceedingly wide displays.

Here's the large one (click it to go to the full size image):

Here's the iPhone sized one, click to go to the full size image:

Wow this post is long overdue but here goes anyway! A few weeks ago we attended the popular Future Of Web Apps Conference at London's ExCel, two busy days of mingling with like-minded tech enthusiasts and web entrepreneurs, drinking free beers sponsored by Google and Facebook, and attending various lectures on all that is important to web applications. Oh and of course, gathering free stuff. Lots of it!

The event was magnificently organised by the friendly people at Carsonified, who had brought in speakers from 280North, Digg, Google, Revision 3, Twitter, Yahoo... the list goes on. If you were unfortunate enough to miss the event, you can catch the lectures online at the FOWA video page. Between lectures we explored the floor, meeting countless numbers of people and introducing them to GoSquared, who we are and what we do, whilst giving them free special edition copies of our Help Sheets which by general consensus proved to be extremely popular.

Conference day two ended on a high note with a live Diggnation and afterparty sponsored by Facebook! We were fortunate enough to arrive just as they ran out of room in Diggnation... dayum! Luckily, Ryan Carson (head honcho at Carsonified and all round nice bloke) managed to sneak us in through the side door... but shhh - many people were turned away. To be fair, we did have conference passes.

OK, fine they weren't premium seats... or seats at all for that matter, but hey, it's still a live Diggnation.

The lively after party was held at the nearby bar, Fox's. Beers were on Facebook and we seized the opportunity to meet the Diggnation crew in person. We'd like to extend our thanks to all of the Carsonified team and a special thanks to all the cool people we met!

If you didn't get a chance to attend FOWA this year, you should seriously consider in the future. The event should return at roughly the same time next year to London, so look out for it! Carsonified hold conferences all around the world - in New York, Miami, Paris, and more, so there should be an event within 5,000 miles of you soon!

* Apologies for the less than professional quality photos. We have a number of excuses for that, including (but not limited to) our only camera being an iPhone, and the availability of free beer.

There has been a lot of talk lately that Apple will be releasing something code-named "the Brick".

There have been many rumours and suggestions as to what "the Brick" may be. 9 to 5 Mac is reporting that, according to their sources, the "brick" refers to a new manufacturing process that would involve using lasers and jet cutting instead of the traditional method of pressing to construct new Apple MacBooks from bricks of solid aluminium. If true, this process would truly revolutionise the manufacturing process of consumer electronics. It would, yet again, put Apple several years ahead of the competition, and would ensure Apple gained control over even more of the manufacturing process.

However, let's pretend for a minute that we haven't heard that rumour. Let's think of "the Brick" as an actual product, rather than a manufacturing technique. What could it be?

No more Power Brick?

Initially, when I heard the term, my mind thought power bricks - the bulky blocks that ensure your laptop (or Mac Mini) gets charged when you plug it into the wall. If Apple could innovate a way that would mean we didn't need a power brick for our laptops that would be truly astonishing. It would put Apple's laptops a major step out in front of all competition. However, as much as this would be groundbreakingly cool, I simply don't believe it is possible yet. Sure, power bricks are getting smaller and smaller, and Apple's are looking better and better (See iPhone 3G), but to eliminate the power brick entirely is, as far as I know, not currently feasible.

New Mac Mini?

So, what else could "the Brick" be? Perhaps the Mac Mini. The Mini hasn't been updated for a very long time. It has almost been forgotten about. This means either a) it's going to be eliminated from the product line, or b) it's going to have a massive overhaul very soon. Personally, I think it is much more likely to be b). With the current state of the global economy, and the increased growth Apple has seen in the higher end of the computer market, their low end, affordable Mac is overdue a massive sales increase.

On the one hand, Apple could attempt to make the Mini even thinner, even sexier, and perhaps re-brand it to Mac Nano. This would be great, but it could well confuse consumers with the similarly sized, and similarly priced AppleTV. Instead, I believe Apple will need to differentiate the Mini in another way other than to make it smaller...

No more Computer?

Let's take a look at Neil Curtis's idea for what could happen to the Mac Mini. He proposes that we dispose of "the Brick" entirely. Instead, we would have our entire computer inside the keyboard that sits on our desk. This would look simply breathtaking if you imagine that all that would be sitting on your desk would be a strikingly thin Apple Cinema Display (they're also long overdue a design refresh), a keyboard, and a mouse.

It is arguable that this concept would be possible, but I reckon, with Apple's knowledge, the Macbook Air's internals could be re distributed and altered to fit within the constraints of a keyboard shaped computer. Let's not forget that there would be no need for a battery, a trackpad, or even speakers, already saving a large amount of space. Neil even suggests that an optical drive could be crammed into this design, just like on the MacBook.

View the video above to see Neil explain his ideas in full.

It will be interesting to see what Apple releases in the next few weeks. So far, the rumour is that October 14th will be the day of announcements.

We can't wait!

Parallax is a really cool, powerful use of javascript from Stephen Band. Think of looking through a camera and having layers of objects at various distances moving around. Parallax achieves that effect using a combination static images, one for each layer.

"Parallax [is a jQuery library that] turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way."

Helvetica, you either love it or you hate it. We actually love it, in moderation, but still, here's a wallpaper for the vocal group that just can't stand the font.

Both developers and consumers on the iPhone App Store will be glad to hear some good news coming out of Cupertino today: you can't review an app until you've purchased it.

This is great, especially for apps that have a high price tag (or even any price tag) as the reviews section would often become filled with users complaining and giving low ratings for the app due to its price without ever having used the app whatsoever.

This is a small step, but it's good to see Apple adjusting to the way the app store is used.

Now, all you need to do now Apple is to help out those poor developers that spend months working on apps simply to be turned down at the last hurdle because it competes with your own plans.

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo is back in London for October 8th-10th at the London ExCel Center and boy, it's going to be one hell of a show!

Speakers include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), Blane Cook (Twitter) plus many more from the likes of Google, Salesforce, AOL, and Mahalo. Also attending (and speaking) are the guys from 280North, creators of 280Slides and Cappuccino that we wrote about a while ago.

We are very excited as we were unable to attend last year's FOWA and will be there on October 10th ready to chat, share, learn, and party!

Kevin and Alex are also going to be there shooting a live diggnation from the main stage at 7:30pm on October 10th where Google will be providing the (alcoholic) refreshments. After which, the wrap party will get started with Facebook and Digg kicking things off. (I've heard that Facebook are going to be sponsoring an open bar.)

The celebrations are going to be epic. We hope to see you all there and look forward to meeting a wealth of interesting people that are changing the web as we know it. There will ofcourse be free wifi for all (probably provided by the Cloud) so you can keep those posts coming even while you're having lunch.

Get your passes for all 3 days of the event over at Carsonified's FOWA site.

See you there!

So the financial markets are in an epic turmoil, and everyone's cutting back. Office equipment is an area where many firms could really make a saving. Here's a complete solution:

Credit: Unknown, if anyone knows the original source, please leave a comment below!

Being in London, this year we haven't been lucky enough to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. We'll be following Twitter along with the rest of the world's Apple fans, but just in case Twitter goes down (not that that's ever happened before... oh wait) we'll be keeping you posted on developments throughout the day.

Follow WWDC in style, updated every 30 seconds: http://wwdc.twistori.com/#apple

Updates

Apple homepage and iPhone pages updated.

Apple Store already back online

iPhone 3G Specs from online Apple Store:

Same camera 2MegaPixels - ouch.
Same screen.
GPS - wooooo.
3G - wooooo.
Price - woooooo from $199 for 8GB.

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