New Google service: Streetview!

Well its not so much a new service altogether, but a huge addition to the existing Google Map service. On selected Cities throughout the US you can now navigate through cities and get a photographic view of what the area looks like, and you can even turn a full 360 degrees! You simply navigate around the maps with the little guy i have circled in red, and up pops a photo of the area.

I really think this is an amazing new feature that brings the maps to life and gives real entertainment, another notch on the belt for the the serial innovators up in Mountain View CA.

Hats off to you fine sirs!

The pic I have there is of the Apple shop I visited while in New York not too long ago, on the left of the photo is the entrance to Central Park.... oh the memories.

Its simple, Right?

I must admit am a bit of a stickler for simplicity and efficiency, I think its because I am generally quite a lazy creature, and when someone is getting paid handsomely to design something, be it a product or a service they owe it to the end user to make it as easy to use and as straight forward as possible.

If you read through some of my other articles you may well have gathered that I am somewhat of a fan of Apple computers and their operating system, mostly because they have perfected the art of making features much easier to use and more visually pleasing.

Palm were a company that were extremely popular in the 90s and produced handheld computers that could compute to, at the time, reasonably high levels, for each model in the design phase, the company had a designated "click counter”. The post came about when the CEO at the tine Geoff Hawkins had declared that any application or feature that was more than 3 clicks away from the main screen, was just not good enough and would have to be re designed.
I was watching a presentation on the TED (technology, education & design conference – great stuff here) website, given by David Pogue a Technology writer for the New York Times today, and he gave a perfect example of a company that definitely do not count the clicks and keep simplicity in mind. Microsoft

Rather than adopt the "dock" system seen on Macs, windows are determined that to access a program stored on your computer, you shall be forced to go through multiple menus and options. We start at “START” then to “All programs” - then search through the list of applications. In osX, you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen and click, that’s all.

When i want to turn my computer off, i need to go to an button on the screen called... wait for it...START, then I need to go to shut down, once I am there I am presented with a box of options which I then must scroll though, there are only 4 options in the box, wouldn’t it be so much better if they just made a window which had 4 buttons, rather than a pop down list?

I know that this stuff isn’t hugely important in the grand scheme of things, and it wont make many people lose sleep etc, but I think when you are making a product, that will be used by millions, and especially when you are in competition with similar products, it is you duty as a designer to make things the best they can be.

The Sega days

In the early 1990s Sega held a 65% hold of the home console market with their revolutionary “Genesis/ Megadrive”, the console had a huge array of games and with its (at the time) impressive 16bit technology it won gamers over in their droves. However in 1994 along came the SNES the Nintendo’s answer to the 16bit console, this entry quickly eroded Sega’s dominance and left them much closer to 35% of the market.

1998 saw the release of the Sega dreamcast, Segas last ditch attempt to catch up with Nintendo, and it quickly became the fastest selling console of all time, that was until Sony came in and ruined their party by releasing the “Sony Playstation” which brought gaming to a new level and would change the console landscape forever.

In 2001 Sega decided to depart from the console war and have since become a software development company, creating games for Nintendo’s gamecube, DS and Wii, Sony’s playstation series and also the xbox series.

Despite their fall from grace in the console market we should remember the great games that Sega brought us. My first experience of gaming was “Alex Kidd” which was really great fun, and acted as the companies flagship franchise until the conception of “Sonic the hedgehog”, whose franchise lives on to this day.
Other great Sega games on the consoles were

1. Virtua fighter series
2. Golden Axe
3. Shinobi
4. Crazy Taxi
5. Streets of Rage

Web 2.0

Not that long ago when i was a little whipper snapper, the Internet was very different from the way it is now. There was no way that i could have searched for a video like the way i can on youtube, and there is no way this blog would have existed. It may have been that somewhere on the unsearchable web these facilities did exist, but my point is that it is now supremely easier to create a video, a story and within minutes broadcast it to potential millions.
The web has come a loooong way in recent years and is now in a place nerds like to call web 2.0.
So next time you leave a comment on a bebo, upload a video to youtube, or write into your blog, give that a thought.
The above video is pretty great.