I was reading the other day this interesting article on the Smashing Magazine website by Jad Limcaco. The article was a challenge for designers to design something every day for 365 days. I thought that I would take up this challenge and try as much as possible to design something every day on the theme of Robotics. I’m hoping that this will be a great chance to improve my design skills and learn a lot along the way. I plan to only spend about 20 minutes a day on this, so there will be no master pieces, but hopefully some interesting works.

You can follow other designers who are taking up this challenge by following (searching)  #daily365.

So without further a do, check out the Design Something Every Day (DSED) 2010 Gallery.

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This was a “knock it up quick” project for Freedom Church Jersey. A6 and A4 flyers for a charity auction. Turn around time from being asked to print 2 hours.

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What is it

EyePlorer visually displays related facts about a searched topic , and it categories the relationships of those facts to that searched topic. It also allows you to drag and drop facts on to a notepad which then can be emailed or copied to your machines clipboard ready to paste into an application.

Example

I type in “Jersey”, (a place I use to live, small island of the north cost of France, not New Jersey), into the center of the wheel as soon as I hit enter it goes off and populated the wheel with related facts to the searched phrase “Jersey”. Imagine a brainstorming or spider document. It did a pretty good job. It slit the related facts into the following categories; Place, Time, Organism, Organisation, Person, Society, Science and Technology. This changes depending on your search-phrase and also how far you are “zoomed” in. You can also drill down into these categories further. The bigger/more common, the fact the bigger it’s text and dot. Click on a fact and a popup window displays the fact which can then be copied to the notepad.

A picture speak a thousand words so take a look below.

What I liked

· Interesting and logical way to research, better than just reading through long Wiki documents

· Clear interface, drag and dropped worked well.

· Ability to gather faces about a topic in one place

· Linking of facts worked well

· You can embed your search into a webpage

· The way you gain knowledge very quickly and centrally

What I didn’t like

· The facts are only, (I think) from Wiki, (not necessarily bad). Although when you click on a fact you do get three other tabs; Websearch, Images and Twitter. But you are unable to drag and drop from these tabs onto the notepad which is the main thing which turned me of, but I can understand this from either a licensing or techy point of view.

· The notepad is limited. It would be nice to be able to print straight from the notepad with maybe a few other export options.

Conclusion

For me personally I don’t think that I would use this for research too much, mainly due to wanting the ability to capture/store “everything” so I’ll stick to Evernote. But for a quick starter to get ideas for research project it will be useful. I could see it being a great tool for students doing home work. Or maybe in a team meeting looking up facts/ideas on a given subject.

Links

· http://en.eyeplorer.com

· http://www.facebook.com/eyePlorer

· http://twitter.com/eyeplorer

· http://blog.eyeplorer.com/

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Posted via email from darrenkilford’s posterous

Utilities

• Ultralingua – Helps me learn Spanish
• BibleScope – Great bible program
• Google – You know that you are going to like the voice search
• UniCon – Great little conversion program
• Zipcodes – Finds address from zipcode (a lot of countries covered)
• eWallet – keeps all my important private information safe
• VNC – the best remote control software I used. Has saved me time, when all I got is my phone and I need to connect to a remote desktop or server

Social Networking

• Facebook – Lets me keep upto date with what all my friends are up to and upload pictures and posts
• Palringo – Chat with my Messenger, Yahoo, etc buddies
• Twitterific – Lets me update my twitter posts

Games

• TapDefense – for some strange reason just cannot stop playing this one, and it is free!
• SimCity – if you got some time on your hands then this is great

Music/Radio/Movies

• Shazam – can’t believe how good this is. Hear a song in a shop, don’t know what it is, Shazam will help you out
• Last.fm – Internet radio at it’s best
• Movies (Flixster) – If you are like me and go to the DVD rental store and don’t know what to rent, this will help

Location

• Locly – gives you local information based on your current location

News

• NetNewsWire – All my news feeds through this.

As a designer/developer I’m always wanting to do things in the least amount of time possible and also feed my creative side. Below is my current list of FireFox Extensions that I have installed that enable me to do that.

Foxmarks

First up is Foxmarks. I don’t think that I could live without this one. I use a number of different machines and this extension keeps the hundreds of bookmarks I have up-to-date and synchronised. On a machine that is not your own but still want to see you bookmarks no problem just point any browser to https://my.foxmarks.com/ and login, you with then have all your bookmarks. The latest version now supports the synchronisation of passwords also, which is great.

Web Developer

Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick, has saved me hours in webdesign and development. It adds this great toolbar which gives you access to tools that can help with a number of different problems, such as; HTML & CSS diagnosis, submission for page vailidations, source views, rulers, etc, etc.

Firebug

Another great tool to help web designers and developers. Firebug has a great DOM explorer interface and helps to debug CSS, HTML and Javascript.

X-Ray

During the design process of a website I am always previewing the site and often when there is a problem I need to see the HTML kinda in-line. This little extension called X-Ray helps me in that process by displaying the HTML tags around the content.

Colorzilla

I’ve used this one quite a bit. Basically you get an colour picker in the bottom right corner of the broswer that you can use to pick any colour from a webpage. You then have a number of different options of what format to copy that colour (RGG or #code). Colorzilla’s webpage.

Google Toolbar

Google offer a great number of different services and solutions. The Google Toolbar helps me daily in the internet searches etc.

Tab Mix Plus

Hundreds of tabs open in the browser, wish you had more control over Tabs? Then Tab Mix Plus could be the answer to your wishes.

Smart Bookmarks Bar

Recommended for anyone who has a lot of bookmarks in their Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. Basically Smart Bookmarks Bar reduces the bookmarks down to a single icon for the site, and on mouse roll over expands the icon to revel the bookmark name. This just speeds up getting to you favourit pages and keeps your toolbar as small as possible.

StumbleUpon

I have ‘wasted’ many a creatative hours stumbling. The StumbleUpon toolbar gives you access to the Stumbleupon community service. Basic idea – setup a profile, pick some categorise that interest you and then click on the StumbleUpon button in the toolbar. This will open a random page based on the catorgories you picked and what other people have submitted to those catorgories. Like a page give it the thumbs up. You can follow different people so why not follow me on Stumble?