Silverback Exposed
Since my last post people have been clamouring for more details on "Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/, so I thought I’d explain where the idea came from, then show you a few screenshots.
Since my last post people have been clamouring for more details on "Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/, so I thought I’d explain where the idea came from, then show you a few screenshots.
My antipodean adventure is coming to a close so I thought i'd reflect on my time away. The trip started with a two day lay-over in Hong Kong to break the journey. I've been to this amazingly vibrant city before and it's one of my favorite places in Asia. It's a bit of a cliche but Hong Kong really is a city where east and west collide. A city where hundred year old temples sit next to trendy bars and street hawkers compete with international food chains. Like many Asian cities, gadgets rule supreme in this town and none more so than the ever ubiquitous mobile phone. The streets are a blur of activity both day and night, and as dusk falls the city is lit by a forest of neon. Like stepping into a scene from Blade Runner, you expect Decker to come round the corner any minute.
A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!? So no pressure there then!
If you’re redesigning an existing site, and especially if the site is a traditional content driven site, then one of the best ways to start is by performing a content audit. The process involves going through every page on the site and noting what the page is about and where it sits within the existing navigational structure. Looking at the content from a macro level allows you to generate a clear picture of how the site is currently structured and whether this structure makes sense.
Hey sports racers. I'm in Auckland at the moment, on the second leg of my world tour and feeling decidedly disconnected. I'm not sure if it's just bad luck but I've been having WiFi nightmares down under.
A few weeks ago we organised a public speaking workshop for the whole of Clearleft. A lovely chap called "Alex Marshall":http://www.alexmarshall.com/ hosted the workshop, and asked us all to give a 5 minute presentation to the rest of the team. Each session was video recorded and then played back to help us see what we're doing well and what we're doing badly. I've been a dive instructor for several years, and have worked as a safety diver on shark feeds in the Great Barrier Reef. I've dived with all sorts of sharks in my time, from little white tip reef sharks in Thailand to schools of over 50 hammerheads in the South China seas. There is nothing like jumping in the water with a top level predator to get the heart racing. However my first ever experience of a shark underwater was dead, laying on the bottom of the ocean with it's fin cut off. Shark meat isn't worth much, so it's quite common to slice the fins off a living shark and then throw it back in the water to slowly drown. As such, I chose to do my talk on the terrible shark finning trade around the world.