12th
February
2001
“Book sales are a useful indicator of interest in a particular technology. In Amazon’s listing of the 30 most popular computer books for 2000, Flash occupies four slots, with the first Flash title in the 10th spot. Carla Bayha, computer book buyer at Borders, told me that ‘Flash was THE hottest topic last year and still is this year.’ I wanted to talk over the apparent popularity of Flash with someone who’s been following Flash for a while, and who is familiar with the designers/developers that use Flash just as they’ve used Macromedia’s Director. I found Bruce Epstein, O’Reilly editor and author of Director in a Nutshell and Lingo in a Nutshell and more recently, the editor of an upcoming book on ActionScript, Flash’s scripting language.”
posted in Flash | Permalink |
12th
February
2001
Peter Merholz: “At the ASIS&T 2001 Summit on ‘Practicing Information Architecture,’ I had the pleasure of sitting on the Reflections and Projections Panel with Andrew Dillon, Andrea Gallagher, and Alison Head, where we were tasked to discuss ‘the past, present, and future of information architecture.’ …I wanted to share my notes with the community, in an effort to encourage discussion on the various issues facing information architects today.” See also Christina Wodtke’s thoughts.
posted in Information architecture | Permalink |
12th
February
2001
“Schiphol uses about 100 pictogram symbols to back up its written messages — for the benefit of travelers who know neither Dutch nor English. But the symbols themselves have their limitations. ‘The problem with pictograms,’ the Schiphol spokesman said, ‘is that they are not always standardized internationally. You have to learn them, as you have to learn any other language. …In comparison with the U.S., Europeans have always relied heavily on symbols to get messages across. One theory is that, while the Europeans have had to meet the different linguistic needs of a variety of nations living on a relatively small continent, the U.S. has sought to use the English language as a means of assimilating immigrants.”
posted in Logos/Symbols | Permalink |
12th
February
2001
“A design-sponge initiative… Design, lots of it. It’s all good for you.” This is a big list of design agency web sites. A nice, big list.
posted in Visual thinking | Permalink |
12th
February
2001
“This paper briefly discusses the relationship between XML and databases and describes some of the types of software available to process XML documents with databases. Although it is not intended to be exhaustive, I hope that it describes some of the major issues in using XML with databases. It is somewhat biased towards relational databases simply because that is where my experience is.”
posted in XML/XSLT | Permalink |
