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The HTML5 spec is 900 pages and hard to read. HTML5 for Web Designers is 85 pages and fun to read. Easy choice.

via http://books.alistapart.com/product/html5-for-web-designers

It’s quite hard to find mac-look like external hdd-case for the replacement of my old one. And I bought this MacPower Taurus Super-S Combo priced @ $920 in WanChai.

I bought 2 1TB Hitachi hard disks and run in Raid 0 ( no need to backup those entertainment stuff ) w/ the bundled IEEE1394B ( Firewire 800! Damn fast ).

Gallery after a break.

Toyed with almost a week and got some personal comments here.

Pros :

Finishing : Yup, it’s just more industrial. It’s very concrete but very thin & light.

User interface : Pretty eye-catching. Its navigation is very different to iPhone - There’re 2 main menus, a custom and a pre-defined. Custom menu include such as quick play ( Pin ), playlist, News & History while the preset one is a group of core features ( music / videos /pictures / radio / marketplace / social / internet / apps /settings ). All the sub menus are display as a cycle-tree-menu, so you can navigate to any list quickly. The home button is the same to the iPhone one - back to top / main screen.

Screen : A very clear, bright and high contrast 16:9 OLED screen. Can easily overtake any portable devices from market. At the same time, its capacitive multi-touch screen is superb responsive - rival or even sensitive than the iphone. It’s no joke, I tested both photo tilting and the pictures just rotate almost at the same time to my hand.

Sound Quality : It sounds deep, separate, full but not wide enough. Perhaps the EQ choices there are very few and not as customizable as some Korean PMP, but it’s quite easy to hear the difference of different settings. Maybe due to run-in time, I hope it could present a better sound later.

HD Radio : Unfortunately, this feature is not supported in Hong Kong; By the way, the Zune can still receive the common radio station.

Cons :

Audio Format : The Zune is just as wicked as those Apple mp3 player - which doesn’t support all open-sourced lossless audio format. For Zune, we have WMA lossless while Apple lossless for the iPod blessedly.

Apps : There’re currently 9 applications we can find in Marketplace - A horrible number even can’t compare with the WebOS or Android Market.

Internet : The web browser is just half of a junk. Another IE 6 based browser with unsatisfied loading speed and ridiculously not support .gif ?!

Conclusion : Personally I rate the Zune 6.5/10. Yes, it’s lack of many stuffs ( apps / more audio formats / a better browser ) and does have learning curve to use, but we should give more time to MS since the Tegra seems still being sealed, so it should have many rooms for improvements. I am not a Apple fanboy, but if you never own a iPod touch, it’s still a better choice for you at this moment; If you feel bored to Apple design ( just like me ), then this maybe a fresh gadget to you.

Video : 555 KUBIK | facade projection

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture - the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

According to wikipedia : Web design is similar ( in a very simplistic way ) to traditional print publishing ( neither print ad nor design ). For me, it’s not about graphic design - it’s all about usability, accessibility, readability.

If you only want fancy graphics - you just need a print advertisement, a beautiful EDM, or just simply place a big image in the hompage. You don’t need horrible netvigation, you don’t need a disordered sitemap, you don’t even need any links!

If you only want animations - it’s just easy that you can upload your introduction video to Youtube and share it to others. If that’s not enough, you can find a flash developer converting your powerpoint to flash with great animtaion or game.

Web design is *Not* with the same definition to graphic design. I pick some points from wiki and try to explain in my very own way.

Purpose - We need to define it very clearly before everything started. It means the uses of the website, it’s all about functions to the end users. What you suppose the users / customers obtaining from your website?  Brand image? Products specifications? Company information? We need to take exactly 1 or at most 2 of these and emphasize it. It’s definitely not a good practice if you take too much purposes just like you request Mcdonald to cook you a noodle. People who are newbies to website planning should remember that new visitors to your website is confused and should be guided.

Audience - Simply saying is the target marketing. Those visitors who are expected to view you web pages such as : age group / gender /occupations. You can imagine what content the group interested, what browsers they use, how much time they spend on internet as well as internet activities. This helps greatly defining the look ( font size, color, positioning etc ), complexity of the website.

Content - With the selected audience, we can set the  content with sequential priority and most important comes first ( for sure ). Content should be totally depends on the target group oftenly and avoid greedy for posting irrelevant content to the page’s topic - this action *Won’t* help you attracting more audience, but in contrast this will disturb end users reading and scare them away to visit again. People always messed with content, they always think graphic isn’t part of content, but how about the fact?

Layout - layout of website takes the job of displaying content clearly. Tableless design and W3C standardized is SEO-friendly and recommended but not a must; We should use tables for tabular content suitably - imagine what happen if we use all DIV to present an excel form in text browsers? We shouldn’t ignore browsers with big market share ( internet explorer 6 especially ) blindly because of meeting the w3C standard. Market first, standard second is my rule.

I hope this can help clarifying for those people who don’t know the reason they need a website ( most of the time they think they do ). We can use internet to advertise our products, our services but before that, it’s worth for us to understand its core functions and ways to make you success; Otherwise, I prefer spending my money on google adsense or get back to the old advertisement styles.

From the their demo in Google I/O, we can see they try to reinvent a new way of email - by combining new way of media sharing, multi-player live chatting & email, bringing version control concept to web application …etc. Thanks to the greatest ( maybe ) engineer they have, we can see how powerful HTML5 is; but more than that, what is the main point of wave besides changing our email habit? As they claimed, they bring some social networking feature into wave - so if you think facebook is awesome enough as a monster application, then Wave should be the warrior to kill the monster. Imagine that we may only have to addict into 1 application to play MSN, facebook, Flickr, youtube, Twitter instead of nowadays infintive tabs of app, then you can realize the possible answer of “Wave attack”.

Google wave official website :
http://wave.google.com/

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft unveiled the latest vision video from their Microsoft Office Labs called 2019″. The video shows an array examples of how current prototypes may evolve in the years ahead within the worlds of education, healthcare and beyond.