Category: Web, Tech & Design

The Wall Street Journal have published a list of the top seven items of techno-lust.
Here they are with my comments on each one:

7) Cool new do-everything cellphone
A few years back, I was against cellphones, now I can’t deny a cool feature-packed cellphone is a hot item in my wish list.
People change, and I’m only human 😉

6) DVR (Digital Video Recorder)
Hmmm, not a must, but it would be rather cool.

5) The iPod Mini
Certainly want a digital music player. Not necessarily an iPod though.
I actually have a digital cam/mp3 player that my dear wife bought me. Only problem I have now is space. I need a bigger flash card for it.

4) Flash Memory Drive
Have had one from back when people didn’t know what the hell they were. I got it with my laptop. I’m outdated now though, mine has only 16MB, and people are going around with 256MB and 512MB drives these days.

3) A Really Big, Really Flat TV
Now this would be beautiful, especially for DVDs and movies.
I’m already a movie addict, and with a TV like that, God knows what would happen to me, lol…

2) The Apple Airport Express
Well this seems to be very interesting and cool. The idea of connecting a PC’s music library to the stereo and extending a wireless network is something I’ve been wanting to do for ages.

1) A Gmail Address
Already have one, and I love it.

[Via eclecticism]

So Yahoo! has started offering 100MB Email space for it’s free email accounts.
A nice surprise I got this morning as I logged in to check my Yahoo! account.

I stopped using my yahoo account much mostly because of the size limitation. I mainly used it as a spam filter for one of my extremely spammed email addresses and checked it every once in a while.

But now that the size is better, I might actually use it more often for certain things.

I think we should actually thank Google for this, as it’s their GMail service that made free email providers jump to offer more space before it’s too late.

Btw, I just read that Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers will get 2GB of email now, twice the space offered by GMail.
Obviously it’s a defensive move so that the Plus subscribers don’t stop paying them and move to GMail when it goes public.
Let’s see: 1GB for free, 2GB for about 12$, and it’ll take years for the average user to fill up even half a GB.
I still see GMail with a hand up over the rest.

So, Six Apart have heard blogger’s problems with their new licensing plans and have responded by sweetening them, changing them a bit and clarifying some points.

I personally think that now the licensing terms for MT 3.0 are better, more reasonable and more suitable for most MT bloggers.

It’s what every blogger who runs his blog on Movable Type is talking about: Movable Type 3.0 licensing sucks!

So what’s it all about?
Well, the guys at Six Apart have restructured their pricing plans and licenses and bloggers are pissed about it.
There still is a free version, BUT No support from Six Apart, No access to paid installation service, No access to fee-based services, No promotion of your weblogs through the Recently Updated list, No commercial usage, No more than one author and three weblogs and you may install the Software on only one (1) computer or server having a single CPU.

It also seems that you have to register with TypeKey to be able to download the free version, something that they assured wouldn’t be the case.

Bloggers are reacting badly to this and are throwing around ideas of alternatives such as Blogger and WordPress.

Personally, I like Movable Type and I think it’s a great blogging tool.
But I agree with other bloggers that the new pricing and licensing plans are sometimes against logic.

I think that there’s too big a fuss about it though.
I mean, if you don’t like MT 3.0 stay with what you have now or move to something else. It’s really as simple as that.

So Google have finally launched their official blog here and not here as some people thought.

I hope they use the blog to give even more insight into the company’s inner works and on what other stuff and goodies we can expect from Google in the future.

So Blogger have relaunched themselves in a new look and with a bunch of new features.

Blogger is the place where I seriously started blogging, even though the first blog I created was at Blog City, but I never wrote anything there.
My wife still uses blogger and all of a sudden, I kind of feel jealous because she’ll be enjoying all the new stuff 😛

Among the goodies are a ton of new cool templates by design Gods Zeldman, Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, …etc.
They also added comments, individual post pages, blogger profile page and email blogging.
For more details, go here.

The blogger site re-design is a collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path, and well the least I can say is that it rocks.
It’s cleaner, friendlier and well simply delicious.
Definitely a lot of nice CSS in there.

The logo and visual identity have also been slightly modified.
I think it’s better this way.

All in all, I think this is a truly great thing that Blogger have done.
I think it’ll push them even further ahead of their competition.

Melingo, Ltd., a company that has provided advanced search capabilities for complex languages, has just introduced Morfix CL, its English-Arabic-English Cross-Language Search with Embedded Translation (demo, IE only). What that means is that English-speaking researchers can search through Arabic material without knowing any Arabic at all ? and see a results page with a translation of each Arabic word or phrase.

Melingo, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., is carefully positioning its Morfix technology as a complement to other search engines. The company is concentrating its efforts on aiding the search process and not on highlighting the process of machine translation, which it says is still very inaccurate. Melingo claims that Morfix CL represents a breakthrough in Arabic language analysis and a boon to intelligence agencies and businesses, which today process growing amounts of Arabic data with limited numbers of qualified human translators.

Check out the demo of Morfix.

I think this is definitely cool.

Just the other day, I was thinking about how badly designed some newspapers were and how they were unfriendly and unattractive to readers.

The main problems that just shouted out loud at me were the following:

• Too many different fonts, font sizes and font colours.
• Bad organization of content.
• Too many colours that don’t blend well together.
• Bad choice of fonts for article content.
• Bad choice of pictures and picture sizes.
• Information looks too bulky.

I think newspaper design should be given more importance than it already gets.
It would make a really big difference for the people if the experience of reading a newspaper is made easier, friendlier and more attractive to the eye.

For an example of a newspaper re-design, check out what was done with The Jordan Times here.
A before & after is also provided and the difference is great although the old Jordan Times wasn’t that bad compared to other newspapers.

Thanks a bunch to Houssein for inviting me into Orkut.

Orkut is a social networking service created by Google but which is only joinable through invitiations from already registered members.

Maybe I should think of a way to start selling invitiations 😛
Just kidding…

The Tunisian “Le Quotidien” and “Al Chourouk” newspapers have gone online today at exactly 10:30AM local time.
Their online addresses are: http://www.lequotidien-tn.com/ & http://www.alchourouk.com/.

I think it’s great that more and more Tunisian newspapers are making the jump towards providing their content online.
I think that providing information online really helps build a bigger internet culture in Tunisia where people get used to going online to do more and more.
I hope more newspapers follow, and that other types of content providers and service providers take the internet leap too.

Back to the Le Quotidien & Al Chourouk websites.
First of all, it’s great the editor was able to release two websites in the same day without any problems. Bravo.

Anyway, the designs are really basic and dry for my taste. Plus they remind me of the Tunis Hebdo website design.
But then again, being newspaper sites, keeping it simple is rather acceptable for most people. The most important is the content.

Regarding the content; they seem to visually display all stories as if they have the same priority and importance which I think shouldn’t be the case.
There should be some way to visually distinguish between news stories based on certain criteria.
Another thing is that I think the sizes of the pictures used should be uniform. It’s friendlier to the eye and better looking that way.

I also don’t see any need to open news stories in popups, they should simply open in the same window. Popups are annoying and unfriendly.

Otherwise, I think this is a pretty good first effort, and I hope my opinions are regarded as constructive criticism.
I wish them the best of luck with their sites.