The "copier" company.

For such a major brand, I am surprised the logo design is so short term, so "web 2.0".

It works today, but will I be saying that in 5 years?

Ever since Facebook began to dominate headlines, people have been criticising their "closed wall" approach to the web by not allowing developers to build apps on other sites that can use the network's data, and by not joining Google's OpenSocial project.

“… Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …”

Facebook recently disapproved of Plaxo's Pulse, an app that allows you to link your Plaxo and Facbook accounts and grab all of your friends' information including (the bit that Facebook really rejected to) email addresses. Facebook responded to Plaxo by banning people (mostly reporters trying out the new system) from Facebook entirely.

The biggest surprise of this announcement is clearly the unexpected (and sudden) willingness of Facebook to progressively become more open.

Will this change anything in the near future? Who knows, but it can only be a good thing if the major companies are (at least) appearing to work together on more open, flexible standards.

This move will surely help to make several more major players think about becoming open.

The open web is the future.

The search engine, set to "take on" Google, built by the same people as Wikipedia has finally been released as a public beta.

Much to the disappointment of the majority of the media, Wikia is in no way a finished product.

I have spent a while experimenting with the new "human powered" search project, but, mainly due to the limited search index, am bitterly disappointed with the quality of search results. For example, searching "GoSquared" on Wikia will, as the first result, give one of our previous most popular posts, while Google will present you with the GoSquared homepage. Which is more useful to our potential visitors: our home page, designed to provide easy access for first time viewers to anywhere else on the site, or a blog post we wrote several weeks ago?

Wikia's search index needs updating fast, and their social tools for promoting "good" pages, and demoting "bad" ones need to be developed greatly, and fast. Thankfully Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, has already responded to many criticisms by commenting on various blogs, including TechCrunch. He made the comment "It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine."

Whatever is said, I sincerely doubt many will be switching from Google just yet.

Since yesterday, we thought we had better get a move on with something iPhone related - to justify our purchase in some way.

We ain't no domain squatters!

So here is an early release of GoSquared for iPhone. Obviously, you need an iPhone or iPod Touch to experience this as it should be. Unfortunately, us poor UK residents are still anxiously awaiting November 9th for our iPhones [anyone else going to Regent Street, let us know!]

From what we could tell, using Safari 3, and iPhoney, we have at least managed to get GoSquared fit for viewing on an iPhone sized screen. I guess, proportionately, we spent most of the time on those icons. Squares is still very early in the development stage, but we do intend to develop /squares into a very cool little online application. We have also included an about page just to inform people of GoSquared if they really have no clue as to what we are all about.

We are pleased to have liquidicity entirely redesigned for iPhone, so check it out if you have time.

I will repeat, this is still in the very early development stages, so give us your feedback [especially those of you with iPhones!]

Thanks,

The GoSquared Team.

To signify the changes we're making to GoSquared, the new homepage has just gone live.

You will notice we have moved to a wider layout, after a good long debate between ourselves. We questioned the problems this could cause to some users if their screens were not large enough. So we carried out some research, and concluded that only 0.88% of visitors viewing GoSquared on their desktop had screens below 1024 pixels wide. The new homepage fits nicely on all screens including and above 1024 pixels wide.

We have also included a little personalization for our loyal members: when you sign in you are now greeted on the homepage. A lot of people were struggling to find the Control Panel to monitor their Squares, so you can now go directly to your Control Panel with one click [this only shows when you are logged in].

All in all, we hope you like the new home of GoSquared, and we look forward to bringing you more goodies soon!

Ok, so the word on the block is that the mighty Google are days away from completing their suite of online office apps with the launch of Presently, a stripped down Powerpoint style online app.

A lot of talk has gone on about when and how Google will do this, but all shall be revealed shortly, and, almost certainly to a great deal of fanfare amongst the blogging community.

I thought, hey, this could be cool, I will be able to make a presentation online, woohoo. But then I thought: do I actually want to?

If you have Keynote on the Mac, I think you will agree that there is not much on the market to match the slick and beautiful presentations that it can produce so easily. On the PC, Powerpoint just keeps getting better with every release, offering more and more cinematic quality effects to bring your presentations to near-professional grade attractiveness.

But when you start taking presentation software online you encounter a few problems, which I am going to be intrigued to see Google address:

Will we really see anything like the quality of animation in Presently as we already have offline?

My guess is no. After all, the app can only be as fast as your internet, and Google's servers [which admitttedly are fast]. Sure, AJAX fades and all the other script.aculo.us effects are nice, and work with a standard web site, but they're nothing compared to a 3D cube rotation or a collapsing mosaic. I can only assume that, unless Google get in to some hard core Flash trickery, Presently presentations will be full of lackluster transitions.

Will anyone ever risk presenting to the board with an online app?

Not only are you increasing the number of things that could screw up during your presentation [Browser + Online App + Internet Connection], you are completely dependent on a fast internet connection that simply can't cut out for any period of time. Sure, you will be able to download your presentation and show it in Powerpoint to avoid this high dependence on telecommunications, but isn't that defeating the object of this online application's sole purpose?

Do you really want even more of your private information on Google's servers?

Considering the number of highly sensitive pieces of information individuals and organisations share via presentations; no matter what Google says, it still makes me feel a little uncomfortable to be keeping all of this data right under a 3rd party's gazing eyes. There is absolutely no proof to suggest that Google have or would ever look into our private documents, but there's this little curiosity that remains as to who can see and what can be done to our personal files when they're on someone else's servers. It is this curiosity and cautiousness that could well put a lot of people off of sharing their most important presentations on Presently.

On the other hand, I can see a few benefits of using Presently...

Sharing and collaborating with other members of the team would be a whole lot easier if Google Presently follows in the footsteps of Google Docs & Spreadsheets [which it almsost certainly will].

The interface will probably be cleaner and nicer to use in all major browsers than most of the competition already out there.

It could turn out for a lot of people to simply be a good way of uploading, sharing, and making minor edits to presentations, with a lot of users almost never using the editing features of the app itself, but more the storage and collaboration aspect.

All in all, for now, I think I'll keep my Keynote and web hosting to do the job myself.

What do you think on Google's imminent entry into the presentation space? And, more importantly, do you think you will be converted to online presenting?

A popular graphical style at the moment is to make your text look indented. I spent months and months trying to work out how to do this after seeing it perhaps for the first time in iTunes. I always looked for a filter or a tool to "emboss" or "bevel" the text, but these never looked quite as nice, and often made the text hard to read.

One day, it hit me: it's SO SIMPLE! And the method I came up with didn't involve filters, plug-ins, or any other jazz like that.

All you need to do to create the effect of indented text is to duplicate the line of text, with the duplicate behind, and slightly below the original.

Then, make the duplicated text slightly lighter than the original text. This will work perfectly when you have dark text, just like in the title of this post.

Also, not many people realise you can use this method with light coloured text aswell. However, instead of moving the duplicated line of text below the original, you move it above, and make it darker than the original text. This will look just as good and give the same effect.

This method can be used in almost any application, but I made these with Adobe Illustrator. It's great to know that something that looks so good can be done so easily.

Hope this helps

Get the Adobe Illustrator CS2 File [1.1MB]

Here it is: the completely redesigned liquidicity.

You may be thinking "hey this is great - a new liquidicity", but what did the old one look like? Well, here's a little comparison for you:

Above, you can see the fairly bland, pale looking design. Sure it was simple, but it didn't look that great, and some things were a little odd to use.

And here's the shiny new liquidicity:

Above is the lovely new theme. We went for a darker look to emphasize the difference between content and everything else. The sidebar has been cleaned up to the extreme with some sexy script.aculo.us effects to show our categories and archive lists without taking up tons of page space.

We also got rid of the dreaded of all dreaded design nightmares - Google Adsense. What more can we say other than Pheeeeeeeew.

It's also a lot easier to see and munch on our feed - bright orangey red - you can't miss it!

We didn't forget about the rest of the page, either - so we made a whole load of improvements to the bottom of the page, just look the difference:

Above, the old, boring, grey footer: nothing much really.

And our lovely new page footer:

All the links you could need to the rest of the site, and a lovely little divider line. Rounds of the page nicely.

We hope you enjoy the design as much as we enjoyed... celebrating its completion.

* There's still a few little loose ends to tie up - especially working with that browser a few people use, what was it called again... Internet Explorer, or something.

We said we were going to be bringing you a few things you might like.

We hope you're going to like this one.

All will be revealed in the next few hours...