Hi,

Take a look at this web site that is extremely cool and uses traditional internet technology. Just shows you don't need to have a (browser) plug-in dependent built web-site and that CSS, javascript and html is well cool in the right hands :

http://www.vredestein.ru/

Note : make sure to click on one of the wheels to see what happens !



From the same company that designed the above web-site :

A further WOW for those who haven't seen any hype about this.

The optimus keyboard :

The optimus keyboard is a keyboard that will use OLED technology to provide mini-screens for each key on the keyboard so that the keyboard can be configured to display what you want.

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/


Take a look it is very impressive stuff !

John
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I'm afraid I didn't quite see what was so cool?

I like the keyboard though - I wanna buy one!

Yes I suppose that impressions differ depending on the eye but also I feel depending on how it was done.

I am coming across more and more web sites done in flash or some other commercial plug-in that IMHO goes agasint the initial spirit of the Web. This web site for example loads as fast as lightning because it uses two images per tyre to create an optical illusion of movement. Many creative agencies would have just done it in flash and it would have taken far much more bandwidth and time to load and not been viewable in all browsers.

It's impressive, again in my opinion, because it's simple and extremely well thought out for the obtained effect !

Thus the terms impressively designed like some examples from the CSS zengarden site (I'd posted an example in this forum I think)

But to further the discussion you may want to share some examples of what you feel is impressively designed :)

PS : by the look of it you'll have to wait until 2006 for the keyboard, I'm going to start saving my pennies (cents), they say it'll be about the price of a mobile telephone.

John
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I must say I am a fan of Flash. Perhaps in the days of dial-up it was a bad idea to embed a flash movie in a webpage but with broadband taking off in a big way it is much less of a problem. The audiovisual effects a flash movie provide cannot be reproduced by any other means. It's a complete all round experience.

As for my favorites - do you mean purely from a design standpoint or content as well?

Hi,
I think that Flash does keep on improving and Macromedia/Adobe have made it capable of doing wonders. I don't like the fact that it is a commercial product owned by a private company with regards to the Web.

One other reason Flash gets bad publicity from my point of view, is due to the way many web designers implement it. It is not that complicated to have replacement content or images when flash is not available in a browser to be displayed in place of the flash content.
You see so many web pages that just have nothing when you don't have the plug-in installed and so you get a big gaping hole in the page that says "you need to download the flash plug-in to see this page" !!!

I'm not for CSS purist approach either, I like tables for certain dynamically generated pages that can vary in length, width and height. Where it will be a complete headache with CSS to get it done. In the same way some developers just want to do everything in CSS and sometimes the "Oh, but your CSS doesn't validate" is enough to get some people turning to Flash instead.

Interesting read on how tables weren't so bad for certain layouts : http://www.sitepoint.com/...ng-limits-css-layout

However I don't want to force users to download a plug-in that some company owns and on top of that in order to create content for it I need to pay Macromedia a tax.

I get people complaining about me with CSS, remarks that are similar about developers that want to do everything in Flash. Some web agencies seem to do flash sites not web sites, you might as well have a flash reader instead of IE or FireFox, Opera, Safari or Konqueror...
It just gets stupid the way Flash is used on several sites for everything not even any html for the text.
This may be mean but I often feel that great designers are just so used to Adobe or Macromedia products that they just think "hey I'll use Flash to do my site, what did you say html was ?"... I'm not really interested any more in Flash sites, whereas sites that use the best of what is out there in technology, that is cool !

John
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I think Apple have a nicely designed website.

http://www.apple.com/

The moving ipods on the main page are done with javascript.

Hi,

Yeah I've got one of the second generation ipods and still find the design superb and it is till technically one impressive piece of equipment to have. I'll have to clean mine soon, when you take it around with you people love to play about with the "click wheel" on the front

Just the pictures of it are the real deal, but I couldn't see the example of them on apple.com I had the new i5 coming up on the home page and a static image of two ipods on the ipod home page...

John
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Hi,

I've got one too =) (20gb photo one). Its definatly one cool piece of kit <G> (my CD's were always getting scratched in the car/at home, but now I can have them all in one place, at the click of a button.. and no more scratching )

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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I bought the iPod nano a few weeks ago and I was able to get it engraved for free. It's very cool and I've found the sound quality to be much better than the previous iPods.

I guess we are seeing different versions of the website as we are in different countries. That's a pain!

Hi Andy,

From what you've told us about yourself and cars you'll most probably need to enquire about a shock proof Ipod, or at least get a little seat belt for it, LOL

John
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LOl.. I havn't had a "bad" crash since November last year (touch wood!) <G> The little ones I've had over the last 6 months wern't even enough to push bust the bumper

However, I do have a little holding arm for my iPod, to keep it that bit safer (although a bad crash, it wouldn't matter how its held in )

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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Hi Hargreaves,

I've just come across the page you talked about. It seems that it depends on the browser by the look of it. When I view apple.com with FireFox and IE, Opera, Safari and Konqueror etc. I get a different image. One has an image of the imac G5, one of the moving ipods and another with "Think Different" and a black and white image of Rosa Parks.

What is weird is that some browsers don't seem to be able to render the moving ipods correctly and only display three that don't move. I actually got this when viewing the page with Opera that couldn't render the page properly and then displayed the page with the imac G5 image instead...

John
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