I caught one post in the sea of the drafts I have here. There are 10s of them. Anyway, I’ve chosen one and publish it today because this morning twitter is overfilled with messages like “I want to sleep”. I don’t have a problem waking up with a smile (I don’t use don’t use alarms, imagine that ;). Anyway I sometimes think it’s wrong to get up early. But let’s get back to the topic. Below is the remastered version of text comics I’ve sent to bo one morning.

This strip can also be considered a Friday tribute to Friday 4Koma which I like a lot.

Yes that’s the screenshot of the site described below

Know how to make ideal strawberry crème? Take fresh strawberry, little bit of blender, three smiles, cream, something listed in recipe, vanilla and make it to cooperate somehow. We don’t have any strawberries, and have bunch of smiles and photos taken while walking and made to look a little bit vintage. As in an old joke, we just had to add Helvetica texts and serve. So take your mental spoons, my dear intellectual foodies, because we are serving to the table of your imagination the Walkyrie = photo × helvetica.

Screenshot of Pepelsbey’s isgeolocationpartofhtml5.com with Geolocation turned off

I want new iPhone! I waaant it! But this post is not about iPhone 4. It’s about life and fear. Let me begin with classical joke I came up with to explain what I think about socialization of networks and networking of society:

So that guys enters the pub and barmen gives him Cosmo.
— Wtf?! I want pint of Guinness!
Barmen hands him HTC Legend with twitter on it where it’s twitted “I like to entar bars and drink Cosmo (@pub 4sq.com…)”. Guy greens:
— Bloody hell! Took my girlfriend’s iPhone.

Where is Waldo?

I read about something like that when I was ten in utopias and anti utopias. Big Brother was watching us and we hated that. Now it’s not fiction, it’s real. New Safari 5 supports Geolocation. Now sites can determine where you are with not bad precision. And it’s in HTML 5 features therefore it is in or will be in Chrome, Opera, Firefox and others. Sure browser asks if you would allow it to determine your location but who didn’t press Enter quickly to access the website needed?

I didn’t take a look at Geolocation API but I’m sure we’ll see headlines like this in nearest feature: “12 000 torrent users were jailed by RIAA for downloading new Daft Punk album. Know what? It’s brilliant!” By the way Safari couldn’t determine where I was neither with geolocation turned on, nor off ;)

On the other side I can forbid geolocation and get rid of the local Russian and Ukrainian versions of Google, Reddit, YouTube and other sites who are happy to stab their localization efforts right in my face. And that’s not the only advantage of geolocation. Let’s take Foursquare for example. It helped Ankl a lot when he couldn’t find parking lot in new city. But I’m nervous. It looks like we’re looking at the dragon hatching out and I’m not sure it’s up to us to train it.

Hey, phone producing companies, place screen and buttons on one side of the cell phone and dynamic on the other. Is that so hard? Every year when summer starts to heat the plastic or glass phone screen starts to stick to your ear or cheek. While it’s just uncomfortable with regular cell phones it makes touch screen phones (like iPhone and its brothers from other producers) unusable. You have to wipe the screen so it could feel you touch it again. Placing the dynamic on the other side of the phone solves that!

Today was the day to buy cider and meet bear in the grass. Real cider and toy bear. Couple of weeks was the time to draw a logo with “anime like fox” and company name. As to me my drawing suits Firefox loving mac-nazi t-shirt more, but logo consumer was happy. And I was and am happy. Leave you to taste cider.

Let’s make the top two of ways people love to organize information. First, for sure, is throwing all data in trash can and forgetting about it. The second is tables. People love tables! They love tables so much that Apple was nothing without spreadsheets software. Apple hired Bill Gates and his Microsoft to make that soft and he was happy to get inspired by Mac OS.

Anyway, let’s get back to the tables. I know a lot of office workers who even write texts in Excel — they find that way of information organization quite comfortable. So once again people love tables. It’s a pity that love doesn’t mean “can do good”. I met too much tables in my life but fell in love with only two of them. Other tables look like informational prison where data has to sit in it’s personal cell jailed.

Why so serious introduction?

When we started making Invest Gazeta design the one who was in charge told that the main goal is to make site feel like you’re reading magazine but not making it look like magazine. We had to use different infographics elements in articles to make them look more magazine-like. Besides histograms, graphs and that awful pie charts I had to decorate tables and make them look joli. We discussed several ways and stopped on the most simple yet elegant way. That’s how I met sparklines.

What’s sparklines?

To get the most exact definition head to Wikipedia (I read it writing the post for the first time). My definition is sparklines — little charts right in table or in-line text that expand information presented by data but they are not as informative, as detailed charts. E.g. if we decided to show unicorn meat price then we can put graph next to the numbers to show that it raised during last couple of month:

How can I make usable sparklines?

To make sparklines usable and useful first decide if you need any and what data you want to decorate. Then decide what type of graph you want to use. Examples are shown in illustrations below. But first I want to discuss visualization of graphs as sparklines. A lot of useful advises are given by Edward Tufte (he is the author of the term sparkline) in his Sparklines: theory and practice. I like this article because I read it when I was finishing making sparklines for Invest Gazeta and found out that almost all solutions I came up with equal to Edward’s.

There are two columns with sparklines in this table: Last known temperature and How likely air smells. I used progress bar to illustrate how likely air smells because people are used to progress bar and percentage nowadays.

The temperature dynamics and adorable temperature range are shown in temperature column. Thanks to sparklines we not just present the last temperature but also show how it changed and how likely the season was for people. Marvelous! Units are show next to data because it’s easier to read not big tables that way.

I want to set your eyes on Term column. Instead of using two columns for first and last month in season I combined them into one thus improving readability of the table.

Sparklines in this table were used to show homeworks missed thanks to each of the games and to show overall result.

Homeworks missed are represented quite good thanks to sparklines. If we compare the shown sparkline with others we can conclude that it’s not intelligence boost but just switching to another games.

Overall results column represent fails and wins so viewer can see the progress. As we can see, player learned nothing — if he was unskilled in one game, he remained unskilled and won from time to time ;)

And once again I minimized the number of columns showing game publisher next to game title.

I had most fun with this table asking friends and trying to remember things you usually forget.

Let’s start with the last column Music volume after 21 average doses. Data is in decibels and each bar represents volume after certain average dose. It’s the same graph as in first example but it’s made more like equalizer bars and divided on 21 parts. If we could make roll over on that, that would give us even more information on volume on every dose.

The amount of bottles friends drank during 2005-2009 is represented in corresponding column. We use red dots to indicate and make more readable start and end of the sparkline and also color code numbers to see if the ending number is bigger, less or the same as starting. To make sparkline look more appealing I added background gradients that I couldn’t use in the first table because background there is used to represent range of temperatures.

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Sparklines are often can be replacement of big and detailed graphs and charts. Sometimes sparklines are even more informative then miserable pie charts. E.g. Google Analytics and Flickr use sparklines to represent visitors statistics and even as sign of statistics (on Flickr).

Sparklines on Flickr (on top) and Google Analytics

Yesterday Steve Jobs shared his “Thoughts on Flash” with the whole internet audience. Some think it’s disaster and mutation of Apple into Big Brother. I, the one who’s personal site is 100% Flash and the who wrote a lot about Flash, disagree. The explanation of situation by Jobs is clear and perfect. He says that iPad and iPhone are too “weak” to run Flash — batteries will drain out, processors should be as hot as the son and everything on the screen will be stuck anyway. The explanation why H.264 video is less resource intensive then Flash video is just masterpiece of easy to perceive information. H.264 is decoded by special chip and Flash video is decoded by soft that needs a lot of resources (different chips ;)

When it was first time that I found out that my genn.org won’t be available on iPhone because it’s flash I became a little bit sad. But then, after thinking on that, I realized that there is not tools for “mouse over” events in touch interfaces. Furthermore, there are no such events while stylish menu on my site is based right on that feature. Steve Jobs told about that too but he forgot to put link to my site ;)

Adobe replies

I expected Adobe to not arguing but cooperating with Apple. Adobe made a bunch of cool tools that help generate interactive content using CS5 applications. I understand why Apple restrictions made them sad but I don’t get why they consider it’s a war declaration. As to me, they should discuss things with Apple and come up with one easy to use, produce and decode format for interactive medias. I intend it to be PDF! That would be perfect for Adobe which will certainly become the number one for publishers, perfect for Apple which’ll get more and more content for it’s iPad users and will be able to make new subscription services. They will film the process of creating interactive media together with Wired and everyone will be happy, but no…

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen decided to argue on every statement of Jobs “thoughts” in a way “we’re always right and Apple’s always wrong”.

I think it’s redundant to explain how Apple CEO differs from any other CEO. Steve jobs knows how to convince, explain and sell. Other companies has evangelists and public relations managers for that. I hope that they will start doing their work for Adobe-Apple conflict soon. I communicated with some of them and find Adobe experts and evangelists professionals. Based on that and based on the fact that Adobe is large corporation with cool products they just must start communicating with Apple to come up with elegant and wonderful idea about interactive media.

By the way, every Adobe expert and/or evangelist on Adobe CS5 presentation used Apple computers or notebooks. Markus Bledowski started explaining post production application on desktop PC with Windows 7 but then had to switch to his white two years old macbook as the interface of Windows looked unfamiliar to him. After that he replied all the time: Look! Adobe optimized everything so perfect even my little one works wonderful without dropping frames!

Adobe presented it’s new Creative Suite 5 in Kiev. I visited Adobe’s master classes for InDesign earlier, so I was eager to visit this one too. The presented material is fully covered by Creative Suites 5 descriptions on Adobe’s site so I’ll just say thanks to Markus Bledowski (Adobe evangelist) and Russell Viers and list youtube videos describing features I like most and post brief comments. Jokes and quotes are there at the bottom of the post!

Photoshop

Illustrator

InDesign

Post Production applications

I am not post production professional but thanks to Markus I was quite interested. First it was demonstrated to us how Adobe soft helped with Avatar. Then Markus has shown us how Adobe Premier Pro associates monologues from script with video using voice recognition (first useful use of technology, isn’t it?). After that he transcoded that video to DVD and Flash using Encore.

The final part was recreating a bit of famous Samsung 3D TV commercial using After Effects.

Markus made something rough but similar to the effects shown

All post production applications use the same cache on HDD so the data is updated automatically with every change if you work with the same file.

Interactive

Adobe goes on separating developers and coders in Flash more and more. Now there is Flash Catalyst so designers could design their interfaces without writing a line of code. And there is InDesign with new features for interactive medias that help to create interactive version of print magazine made in InDesign in just, dunno, and hour or two!

Now I see why Adobe was so angry with Apple’s deny to support flash and flash-generated applications on iPad. By the way, the generated swf is very intelligent — it stores all linked files in separate folder not in the swf file.

Wired uses Adobe Creative Suite to become more interactive. Though no way to use it on iPad

Dreamweaver was nothing interesting to me.

Interesting Facts

You can import 3d file to Photoshop, save it as psd and use it in other Adobe Applications as 3d model. It’s called Live Photoshop 3D.

Mini Bridge in all CS5 applications looks like enhanced open dialog. I think I’ll use it.

Adobe goes online more and more offering paid services. In InDesign CS5 you can publish your project right to acrobat.com and send link to it to everyone involved. They can leave comments viewing your work right there and you’ll get them right into InDesign GUI. Sounds like… fun?

Now you can name and change positions of art boards in Illustrator.

CS5 applications’ GUI and UX is more uniform now but there are flex-like GUI elements here or there especially in the “online” parts of interface.

Icons and splash screens have changed a lot and became more crazy (it’s not so hard to be more crazy then rectangle with a gradient, right?). Shawn Cheris told about the changes in two parts: one and two.

Jokes and Quotes

Russell Viers

— What’s your name?
— Volodymyr.
— Wha… Lah… Can I call you Bill?

I prompted adobe to place ad in dialogs with progress bars. That way they could earn money to make soft free for us.

Markus Bledowski

We don’t have problems — we have challenges!

Don’t ask if it’s possible. Ask how it’s possible.

Client comes and says he wants to recolor car in the video. Which color? He doesn’t know. Surprise me! Okay, that means pink. Then he asks the same color but different tone. That means green.

Roman Menyakin

While doing some complex task.
Roman: Adobe-kadabra!
Russel: Pow!

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I’m quite sure my post doesn’t cover everything told on the master classes and presentation but Adobe doesn’t film or record in anyway its events and there no wifi so I could spam twitter with my emotions. Anyway, everything was quite interesting! And pen with notebook with Adobe’s logos are now living in my bag and magnet with I ♥ Adobe on it is laying sad — I don’t actually like them. So if anyone wants to have such stylish magnet on his or her fridge — just tell me.

I couldn’t make my IXUS picture it right, sorry. Here it is — the blurred magnet ;)

At last and not connected to the post topic I want to greet my friend Yura (akella). He’s 14 or 35 or something like that today!

It was a 5-years-long waiting for MINI to hear my thoughts (as they did in c1rca) and make the Cooper I’d buy. Not just buy but also adore, love, respect, be proud of and drive like I’m riding a dream. Here it is — coming soon MINI Cooper Countryman. Besides it’s new design and perfect body it has normal amount of doors. MINI fans can blame me I don’t feel the spirit, banish Countryman out of Cooper family — I don’t care. I just want to ride this perfect six-speed manual gear box beauty!

Just because it’s MINI, the ads are wonderful. I’ll spoil the joy a bit offering you to watch Countryman ad prior to teaser of that car.

As MRNCH said: I’m happy to see car ad that doesn’t say ‘Your car — your road’

And here’s MINI Countryman teaser. Pay attention to the camouflage that is usually used to hide specific details of new models from papparazi. Now it’s a part of a new promotion:

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Those who consider Countryman is not MINI can enjoy my photo of old marvelous MINI taken in Rome: