The ultimate homage to Dick Tracy this year as two of its preeminent electronics manufacturers duke it out for supremacy in the oh-so-pricey world of watch phones. Due to land in France any day now, the Samsung S9110 is said to be the slimmest watch phone ever released, featuring a 1.76-inch touch screen and such niceties as Bluetooth, voice recognition, MP3 player capabilities, a speakerphone, and e-mail functionality. Sporting similar specs but a slightly thicker profile, and a higher MSRP, LG's GD910 will also pack 3G video call capabilities and 2GB of internal memory (versus just 40MB in the S9110) when it arrives in France at just about the same time.


LG GD910 Watch Ph Video

I have decided to make a playlist for all to enjoy. It was a little difficult to find a Playlist player that actually let me load the tracks from my computer instead of a search site. I used MixPod.com if you were interested in knowing which player I used. I would eventually like to create one myself through Flash. Well hope you like the Playlist and the artwork I made. Also don't forget to leave me a comment. Let me know what you think.

I was taking a look back at the technologies of computers the other day with a friend. It was astonishing how computer technologies have changed so rapidly. So I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to take a look at what website looked like in the later part of the 90's and what techniques were used.

1. Animated .GIF files.Yes, we really thought these made our sites look cool! I love these thing!
   
   Combine this with Times New Roman font and it’s 1995, all over again!
2. Cheesy clipart icons. Graphics programs have come a long way (can you say CS4?). Free and almost-free stock image sites are abundant. There is NO excuse for using crap like this today:
   
3. Layout tables with borders. We all know (or should know) that CSS is almighty and that you really shouldn’t be designing layouts using tables. There are always exceptions, but that’s for a different article. You want your readers to flash back quickly? Give your layout table a border. At least if you are using tables to create your site, the lack of a border doesn’t make it obvious.
4. Overbearing, non-seamless, repeating background tiles. Okay, admittedly, web design in the early 90s had major limitations and you were considered a progressive designer if you had a repeating background. Photoshop was still in its infancy, so seamless tiles were hard to come by. These days, there is nothing wrong with a repeating pattern but the rules have changed. Make them fade into the background, not stand out. And make them seamless and appropriate to your content. When it doubt, leave it out!
5. Blue and Purple links. If you can install a theme/template, use any HTML editor, or do a Google search for CSS, you can change the color of your hyperlinks.
6. Times New Roman and Comic Sans. Using either of these fonts for you body content tells the world you’re watching reruns of Beverly Hills, 90210.
7. Centered text. For everything.

   There were so few tricks of the trade in the 90s,
   web designers did anything they could
   to make their stuff stand out.
   Centering body text was one of those ‘tools’.
   Back then, I guess a lot of designers didn’t care that there text was not very readable.

8. Blinking text. Fun, isn’t it? For those of you who started coding after 1998, you can acheive this by simply using the blink tag. (update: for some reason the blink tag won’t work with this Today.com theme. Bummer. You don’t know what you’re missing.)
9. Psychedelic buttons. You know the ones. pretty, funky, rainbow gradients with beveled edges, that showed off your mad Photoshop skills. Buttons like this one:
   
10. Flash splash pages. Back in the 90s, all the cool kids toyed with Flash. Anyone who could make a logo rotate in an non-animated-gif way, and included a moving link to enter the page, well they are now the ones making kick-ass GUI interfaces. But back then, they made really annoying, no-use-whatsover splash pages.

Web Pages of the 90's

Google.com in 1998


Yahoo.com in 1999



Apple.com in 1999


Sony.com in 1997



Reference: How Popular Website Designs Looked Like In Late 90’s, Web design history, a look at the 90s

You love your phone, you don't want to be separated from your phone, trouble is you can't take your phone into the shower.
Now you can, one soap maker has taken their love affair with the new Palm Pre a little too far with the launch of a Bourbon and Coke scented soap in the shape of the new smartphone.What you see here is the first bar of soap modeled after the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre soap bar is about the same size and shape as the real-world Palm Pre.

What happens when you wear the soap down to the touchscreen is anyone’s guess.

The phone will weighs about 3 oz and rather randomly be scented with a Bourbon & Coke fragrance and made with Shea butter.

Luckily users can request the soap without fragrance.

But wait, if the Palm Pre isn't your gadget of choice, the seller is happy to make one that is, already stocking an iPhone, iPod, Blackberry and a range of Sony PlayStation gadgets too.

Price start from around $13 including worldwide shipping. If you want one, the Palm Pre Soap is available from Two Egg Plants shop over at Etsy.

I was just trying to kill some time at work as I sometimes do and I stumbled upon a blog called Change The Thought. Change the Thought was founded in 2002. It was originally created to harbor the personal creative work of artist and designer Christopher Cox. Although the site does still harbor Christopher’s body of work it has since grown into a usable archive of creative inspiration for the online art and design community. I wanted to show some of the print work that was done by Christoper Cox because his style is one that I enjoy and his work is done very well.

The more intuitive layout structure is designed, the better users can understand the content. Whatever content you have to present, you can present them in a more interactive & more responsive ways.

I would like to focus on sliding effects and how i can change the structure of a page in a truly unique and creative way. There are many transition effects that can be used to slide different contents, such as fading, horizontal sliding, vertical sliding, the list goes on. Try to pick the transition that best captures the style of your website.

1.ImageSwitch
The main point of this plug-in is to make an easy-to-use, simple and fast plug-in to create effect when you switch between images. Minimize the arguments you need to input and still give some beautiful effects.

View Demo | Download File

2. Carousels & JCarousels
Over the last couple of years we have noticed a strong trend toward sliding horizontal panels or menus also known as Carousels. Creamy CSS uses a similar effect, once one of the navigation options at the left and right is clicked, a group of images in onetag slides Horizontally.

jCarousel (Riding carousels with jQuery) –

jCarousel is a jQuery plugin for controlling a list of items in horizontal or vertical order. The items, which can be static HTML content or loaded with (or without) AJAX, can be scrolled back and forth (with or without animation).

View Demo | Download File

3. Moving Boxes
The big difference in this slider is that there are buttons to change panels and the panels zoom in and out when user click on the buttons at the left and right.
View Demo | Download File

4. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery
All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through.

Set up the default starting point for the caption box. If you want it fully hidden initially, you will want the distance from the top or left to match the height or width of the window (.boxgrid), depending on which direction it will be sliding. You can also have it partially visible initially, as .caption .box caption illustrates.

View Demo | Download File

I have been hearing a lot about Google voice. So I was intrigued to find out what it is and what it does. What exactly is Google Voice? Is it a phone redirecting service? VoIP? Voicemail? All of the above? None of the above? So I did a little research and I am going to give you some insight to Google Voice.

Google Voice originated as GrandCentral, an independent company that hit the scene in 2005. GrandCentral allowed users to register a new phone number and direct it to ring multiple phones; it could also collect messages and act as your personal switchboard operator. This sounds boring on the surface, but it provided a number of cool features, such as the ability to listen in on voicemail messages as they were being left or to tell a specific number that your phone number is no longer connected (great for stalkers and crazed PR people, who are kind of like stalkers). Google acquired GrandCentral in 2007, and promptly sat on the project for nearly two years before it relaunched the service as Google Voice in March of 2009.

Currently the only way to get Google Voice is to get invited or either be a grandfathered GrandCentral user.

Features of Google Voice:

One number for all your calls and SMS

Owl City is the name of a project formed in early 2007 consisting of one member, Adam Young. Young started making his music in his parents basement, which he claims is a result of his insomnia. Among Young's influences are European electronic music. 1980s synthpop and New Wave music is also heard in Owl City's sound. Which seems to be a sound that I have been enjoying lately.

Owl City found early popularity through its own MySpace profile, which has received more than 5 million plays on tracks, such as "Hello Seattle". This is how I found out about Owl City. Young is joined by Breanne Duren on several tracks; the most noted of which being "The Saltwater Room."

Owl City currently just came out with a new CD "Ocean Eyes", which is also a great CD. It was release in late July. It has all the sounds of his previous records. He sings about unconventional topics such as urban design, the elements, travel, and also more conventional topics such as romance and love and the world around. Great music primarily synth based, dreamy and atmospheric. So check out his sound.

We have as a whole come along way in the technological world over the years. We went from a huge 1GB hard drive to something that is now even smaller and larger than 1GB that we can fit into our pockets. This drive looks like the Flux Capacitor.

You would never lose the 1980's version in a drawer in your kitchen and spend 2 hours searching for it before you gave up and went and bought another one then discover it in your pants pocket when you got home.

Techonology is forever changing at a rapid pace and we are all aware of that. The picture above is a comparison between “Head Disk Assembly” (HDA) from an IBM 3380 Model J storage device from the 80s and an SD card that we carry today.

Do you think that the engineers of the day would guess that today we would have more than a hundred times that storage in your pocket which also by the way has a color screen, battery and the smarts to make it play audio and video?