My Notebook: Design

I stumbled across this great tutorial by Brad Adams, titled ‘Islands of Richness with Silverlight on an ASP.NET page‘. Step by step it walks you through using and customising the ASP.NET MediaPlayer control and shows your how video can be added to an ASP.NET website.

Addendum: On the subject of Silverlight, this is an interesting development from Microsoft.

A nice blog entry from Snap2Objects, titled  How to Destory the Web 2.0 Look, takes a look at the ‘Web 2.0′ style that many websites have adopted and how others are fighting against it.

Back in August I asked several designers and developers for their opinions of presenting content within a flip-able, page-turning environment. At the time I wasn’t really sold on the idea, but a new service from Cubedesigners, called Fluidbook, does seem to be a step in the right direction. It seems much easier to view and browse than the previous examples I’ve seen.

Addendum: Additional sources for future reference.

• pageFlipper
• PageFlip

I’ve spent part of today scanning through various design and development blogs and have been very surprised by some of the site designs I’ve stumbled across. So, to make sure I don’t forget them and can find my way back to them in the future, here are a few of the more eye-catching ones:

• Doug Dosberg
• Web Designer Wall – A wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.
• Titofelix
• The personal website of new media designer, Christian Sparrow
• Coda: One-window web development
• Best Web Gallery – CSS and Flash design inspiration

And this will be a useful page when I finally get round to putting a custom theme on this WordPress blog.

I’m really interested in getting your developer/designer opinions on this type of Flash interface.

The concept of on-line publications with flip-able pages has been around for quite a few years now but has never really taken off. Why? I know my view on the subject but am very curious to know what others think of the concept.

• Do you enjoy using publications presented this way or would you prefer to view a standard web page/PDF document instead?
• Although the text is a little too small in my own basic example, do you think that you would take the time to read a document/magazine presented this way?
• Might the technology be better suited towards certain types of publications, e.g. photography based, “coffee table” books?
• Would the page ‘flipping’ begin to annoy you after a few clicks?

Further examples of this concept in use can be viewed at:

• Flipping Book
• Ikea
• My Home

As always, any opinions/observations/views are much appreciated.