What is the new theme? Soft texture, less foreground in the site, most of the shine is on their products now.

The front page is dominating. Remember when Microsoft released their new website for Vista? You can hardly find vista on the front page now. It sucks that bad. Here you see the Leopard just dominating the page:

Now let’s see the Mac page, which has a great sliding navigation control that I am calling… linked…slider..thing. No. Wait.

Sliding tab… scroll bar… slidebar… linkbarslider…. thing. It slides like a horizontal scrollbar, or scrolls… and it also is linked… marked… yeah. Just look at the pic, and visit apple.com/mac

So the links are on the bar… and… like… wow. It works great. Hrm. WordPress’ thumbnaily generatory thingy has died. I like the design, love the way they have gone forward, the spacing is great, the areas well defined, I would say that the front page of the download section does need a little more focus.

I like it. Then you have some nice sections at the top, quite clear, let’s look at the iPhone page:

Hrm, no thumbnail option for that in my post.

I just made some beautifully numbered lists using dl, dt and dd tags inside a ol li structure. Some snappy CSS later, plus some IE 5/5.5/6.0 hackz and you have a beautiful css list.

Here is the code:

ol dl li {
list-style-type:decimal;
list-style-position: outside;
font-size:60pt;
position: relative;
top: 70px;
left: 65px;
line-height:normal;
color:#DDD;
_color:#FFF;; /* show to IE */
}
ol dl li dt {
_margin-top: -70px;
}
ol dl li dd {
width: 400px;
}
ol dl li dt, ol dl li dd {
_list-style-type:decimal;
_list-style-position: outside;
color:#111;
font-size:0px;
line-height:normal;
font-size:small;
position: relative;
top: -70px;
left: -70px;
}

You can play with different list-style-type: the one with 0′s padding is nice, the greek is beautiful and alpha-beta-gammaish.

dt {
font-weight:bold;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
}

dd {
background-color: #eeeee7;
padding: 7px;
}

Now the markup:

<h1>Lorem Ipsum</h1>
<h2>Dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</h2>
<ol>
<dl>
<li><dt>Ut auctor libero vel justo.</dt>
<dd>Cras vel ipsum a magna luctus laoreet. Nullam et arcu. Phasellus pede enim, fringilla non, egestas et, vulputate sit amet, nisi. Vivamus dapibus tristique eros. Donec facilisis varius nulla. Morbi non turpis.</dd></li>
<li><dt>Duis quam leo, dapibus vel, pulvinar vitae, tristique pretium, metus.</dt>
<dd>Morbi lorem dolor, tincidunt a, ultricies non, pharetra aliquet, ante. Nulla ut mauris vel tellus porttitor ultricies. Morbi scelerisque. Nullam viverra. Phasellus sollicitudin diam ac enim. Nulla quam est, congue nec, pharetra in, laoreet vulputate, sem. Nullam sed orci. Morbi rutrum, mi facilisis hendrerit semper, magna diam porttitor dolor, in auctor nisi ipsum eget dolor. Praesent sodales aliquet magna. Nulla dapibus ligula et diam. Fusce et arcu. Quisque non enim.</dd></li>
<li><dt>Pellentesque eros urna, suscipit vitae, fringilla sed, gravida in, eros.</dt>
<dd>Aliquam erat volutpat. Nunc hendrerit, ante malesuada ornare imperdiet, ipsum lectus vestibulum mi, vitae congue erat enim sit amet pede. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nonummy pede a magna. Praesent mollis nulla tincidunt metus. Proin metus magna, lacinia in, lobortis at, auctor quis, urna. Donec commodo nisi in pede. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.</dd></li>
</dl>
</ol>

And here is what it would have looked like without all that happiness of css involved.:

Lorem Ipsum

Dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

Ut auctor libero vel justo.

Cras vel ipsum a magna luctus laoreet. Nullam et arcu. Phasellus pede enim, fringilla non, egestas et, vulputate sit amet, nisi. Vivamus dapibus tristique eros. Donec facilisis varius nulla. Morbi non turpis.

Duis quam leo, dapibus vel, pulvinar vitae, tristique pretium, metus.

Morbi lorem dolor, tincidunt a, ultricies non, pharetra aliquet, ante. Nulla ut mauris vel tellus porttitor ultricies. Morbi scelerisque. Nullam viverra. Phasellus sollicitudin diam ac enim. Nulla quam est, congue nec, pharetra in, laoreet vulputate, sem. Nullam sed orci. Morbi rutrum, mi facilisis hendrerit semper, magna diam porttitor dolor, in auctor nisi ipsum eget dolor. Praesent sodales aliquet magna. Nulla dapibus ligula et diam. Fusce et arcu. Quisque non enim.

Pellentesque eros urna, suscipit vitae, fringilla sed, gravida in, eros.

Aliquam erat volutpat. Nunc hendrerit, ante malesuada ornare imperdiet, ipsum lectus vestibulum mi, vitae congue erat enim sit amet pede. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nonummy pede a magna. Praesent mollis nulla tincidunt metus. Proin metus magna, lacinia in, lobortis at, auctor quis, urna. Donec commodo nisi in pede. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

Yikes that was scary. Have fun with your sexy css numbery listy things; maybe I will find another even sexier way of doing this.

fig1: Project Gotham Racing 3

I love how computer graphics have evolved over time. From my first impressions of 8 bit games, to imagining the possibilities with Duke Nukem’s ability to look up and down.

Since then I have tracked many areas of artificial environments, and how to make them as realistic as possible using as little resources, and importantly as little specification of contraints as possible. Realistic organic, urban or alien* environments, without necessarily designing every blade of grass.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was a game that really made me wake up that others were actually pushing this direction with finesse. Large open expanses look interesting with light dabs of foliage, all designed to gel together. This aspect of realistic environments really interests me.

Another is photorealistic rendering – such is the direction of Project Gotham Racing 3. Using many cues from the human visual system and our optics, they have blurred out the background, applied motion blur to objects etc.

By removing visual fidelity the scene become more realistic, as we are used to imperfections, blurs and distortions.

I came up with this idea after a string of moderately successful nights out, involving a number of restaurants ranging from *thinks* $50 a head to about $150 a head, in downtown.

I would love to get restaurant reviews about restaurants near me, and suggestions too, that is nothing new, people are trying to do localised searches, and it is a no-brainer to cross lookup data about them.

But how do you get all that data into the intarwebnet?

Geobookmarking, or geomarks, often called landmarks in the realworld, allows you to press a button, and enter your text, photo, or voice media that is associated with that geomark.

Now, geomarks can be related via meta tags (all historic sites in London) or category (restaurants), or actual location and optional search queries.

Now the fun part is entering this stuff. You can make trails of geomarks, geotrails… or points of interest. Boooring.

The real fun is bookmarking shops, restaurants, open spaces, interesting views, memories, and personal notes. Not all geomarks should be public. I can think of many places where geomarking would help me, here is one:

geomark1092: back of sofa
item: car keys d’oh!

Of course, GPS cannot give you that accuracy right now, nor availability indoors come to think of it.

On a mass scale, people being able to enter location, temporal, and qualitative data would open up a rich ‘review’ society. People of similar interests can use similar tags to describe their posts, and a google search for these types of data, perhaps using GoogleBase extensions, would give this flight.

So, geomarking, geobookmarking, geo-bookmarking, whatever, you heard it here first!