The following video shows Simendo in action:

Techcrunch Website

Alignment:
Text is aligned well to pictures appearing in articles, good examples can be seen on the hompage or by clicking on any of the articles. All the buttons, such as the those found on the social media bar (under each article headline) or those found at the top of the page, are well layed out and grouped together.

Repitition:
All the article headings are done in the same font, along with the text in articles. Layout from the homepage is mimicked throughout the website, for example advertisement size and layout. Because of the unified layout between homepage and other pages you always know you are still on the website.

Contrast:
A visual theme is easily identified throughout the Techcrunch website. They use large images to catch the user attention to certain articles. Different images notify users when articles end or stop.

While being quite expensive, it will still be a success due to the market share of apple and its devoted fanbase. Hopefully competitors, such as Microsoft, will fight back with their own technologies thus reducing costs for us customers. This seems to be a step away from bulky laptops and netbooks, to a more lightweight, classy almost book like design. In the future, I believe this technology will become just as mainstream as a blackberry or a laptop. Though it will take a few months, or maybe years before we can see laptop like power and stability in these small devices.

Platforms, such as iTunes, have changed how music is distributed. CD’s that you buy in the shops are soon to be phased out now that broadband infrastructure is becoming more readily available throughout the world. This means record labels will get less of a cut, and will impact on their performance and monetary funds for bands.

But while some might see Multimedia as a bad thing, others state that online distribution is easier, faster and cheaper than anything that has come before it. This allows more bands, even those without record labels or big names, to get their music to millions of people across the globe, almost instantly.

Perhaps this change of habitat will lead to more innovative music and musicians in the future. Although for the time being, it seems that large sums of cash and a big record label are still what you need to go worldwide, hopwfully thanks to future developments, this will change and smaller bands become more widespread than they are now!

Typical Online Economic Simulator

Economic simulation games are games that focus on the management of economic processes, usually in the form of a business.

With the growth of the Internet users, a large market for online games was formed. These economic simulations games, such as Virtonomics and Industryplayer, offer users a online gaming environment, but simulating real-world conditions, such as a countries economy.

These simulation games are seen as very real and are used as tools to study economic markets. These simulations can be also be used to study consumer behaviour. These games also offer users an improved learning environment, when compared to classrooms and blackboards, due to the increased user interaction with their businesses or markets when using the simulator.

Ryanair vs Aerlingus

A test on 3 usability heuristics,by Jakob Nielsen, will be conducted on both the Ryanair and AerLingus websites. The test will include buying of 2, return flight, adult tickets from Dublin to London in the month of July.

Test 1: Consistency and standards
The first step of booking, the selecting of your airports, the return dates and number of passengers is simple and efficient, albeit nothing special, but in this case simple is better. Both websites have similar interfaces, although I do prefer the simplicity of Ryanair when selecting airports. It seems more cluttered when dealing with AerLingus and its ‘All Countries’ list. Although Ryanair do have the selection menu in the center of the page cluttering both sides with flashing ads and banners which is quite annoying, unlike AerLingus who keeps the menu to the left and other information to the right, which is a nice professional touch.

After clicking on the Book Now option, you are immediately taken to a page displaying available flights and prices on both websites. Here both sites are similar with simple display of total prices and taxes and fares. Both of the Total Prices columns are located in the bottom right hand corner, although I do prefer the standards on AerLingus websites which is a lot clearer to view information and change flight dates.

After clicking the Continue button, which is located bottom right hand corner on both sites again, AerLingus takes you to a flight times and details page which displays information on your flight, such as leaving times and flight number, while Ryanair takes you to a Passenger Details page. Both pages are well laid out, with lists and buttons in the proper place, being consistent with their previous pages. The next page includes a Passenger Information page, where credit card details and other information is added to purchase the tickets. Both websites use similar layouts, which is nice to see from a standards point of view. Although the Ryanair one seems a lot more cluttered than the more spaced out AerLingus site. I do like, however, that Ryanair shows you the total cost, unlike AerLingus.

Winner: Ryanair

Test 2: Aesthetic and minimalist design

While I did mention this in the above test I will go into more detail here on both the design and aesthetics of each website.

Starting from the homepages of each again, AerLingus wins by a mile. Ryanair is far more cluttered with banner ads and flashing text. The tab format of browsing is used by both websites, although AerLingus is much more aesthetically pleasing, due to a clutterless home page.

After clicking to the next step, RyanAir relieves its users of the advertisements and becomes a lot more pleasing to use. Changing flights is simple on both websites, but information is more consistent and pleasing on the AerLingus site again, as it continues with the same homepage standard of less cluttered, minimalist design.

The next page is a lot more user friendly on the AerLingus site, displaying need to know information clealy at the top of the page. Once again Ryanair feels more cluttered with no spacing used between information. The final, passenger information page, feels more user friendly and pleasing on the AerLingus website. Its offers easy use for the different functions, such as voucher option, clearing laying out terms and conditions of the voucher when click, unlike Ryanair where the user must click the information link themselves.

The breadcrumb system seems flawed in Ryanairs website. When clicked it displays garbled information, probably because the session timed out perhaps. Still this is very confusing and not intuitive for the user.

Winner: AerLingus, less cluttered, easier to use.

Test 3: Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
First off AerLingus include an easy to see Start Again button, which is good to see when you’re dealing with as much pages as you are when booking a flight. This is a simple way for users to recover from any errors they previously made quickly.

Although, when booking a flight, AerLingus suffers from a flaw where it won’t tell you clearly that a flight isn’t running on your selected date. No message box appears warning you or anything and you are free to click continue. Ryanair has quite a technical message if return dates and departure dates overlap, which can be quite hard to understand especially for elderly users. Moving on, Ryanair seems to stick with the message box option which I prefer as users must click to get rid of it giving more of a chance that they will read what the box contains. AerLingus instead opts highlighted text at the top of the page outlining the user error, which I think isn’t as effective.

In the end, both websites have a well laid out error prevention system for users, which is great to see. I do feel however as I prefer message boxes method of error highlighting that Ryanair takes this, but not by much really.

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It has been in use since its inception in 1990 for Macs exclusively. It’s seen as the industry standard for photo manipulation and graphics design, so much so that the term “Photoshop” has been coined as a term for viable definition for any type of computerised image alteration, regardless of the software used.

Photoshop is used especially for advertising purposes, for example, these campaigns in the past show the power that this piece of software has. Not only is Photoshop used in advertising campaigns, it’s also been used for developing business cards, photo albums, album covers, and many more.

The almost limitless amount of options in Photoshop, coupled with its ease of integrating with other Adobe products, is sure to keep it at the forefront of the industry.

Photoshop recently celebrated their 20th anniversary, you can listen more about there past here.

In todays economy, where global business is where you want to be, what this software means for your business is that paying for employees to travel across the globe for meetings every other week can be a thing of the past. Your business can stand to save hundreds, if not thousands on travel fees, accommodation for employees and other charges.

Not only this, but instead of your employee(s) having to take one or two days off to travel to Japan for a meeting, they can have the meeting at 9 a.m and be working at there desks straight after, subject to timezone constraints of course!

Employee training and learning could also be made easier. Through the use of this virtual conferencing software you could host a training seminar on fire safety to your employees and not have to deal with them even leaving their desks (or serving them refreshments when they arrive!)

While this technology is still in its infancy, like the Internet, this is a piece of technology that I beleive will hold its place highly in global businesses and their infrastructure

In todays world, most businesses big or small have an online presence in the world wide web. This is usually through their own website which can accessed through browsers on PCs, laptops and mobile phones.

Developing and maintaining your businesses website to cater to your customers preferences is extremely important, but can be a difficult task. Luckily the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have developed web standards to help you with your decisions. Along with these standards, the creation of a website has been made a lot use through multimedia tools, such as Dreamweaver or other tools

These tools have steered website development away from programming languages and text files, to GUI’s and “drag and drop” features. This has lead to a large increase in productivity when developing web sites. Now instead of a web site designer having to wait for the programmer, he can do it all himself through this easy to use applications.

Alongside this, tools such as Adobe’s Flash and Photoshop, have lead to more options to creating an aesthetically pleasing website design. The Flash tool allows for increased interactivity and video media for browsers, although can be large in size and resource heavy on older systems. Photoshop allows users to create and edit pictures or designs with almost limitless options.

Technological advances have allowed for the increase in users of the Internet, and as a result of websites and company presence on the web. There are website design companies, such as Enhance.ie that can develop your website for you, although if you want to do it yourself and save a bit of money for your business there are plenty of development guides, and Do’s and Don’ts of website design to help you and your business get started in the WWW.

“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.”

-Ivan Sutherland

Born in Hartings, Nebraska in 1938, Ivan Sutherland had a mother who was a teacher and a father who had a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. This upbringing led Ivan to enjoy learning, especially geometry.

Ivan always had an interest in computing since he was young. During high-school he became one of the first student to successfully develop a computer program, known as Simon. Ivan then went on the study at Carnegie Mellon University with a full scholarship. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and then went on to earn a M.S. also in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. After this, Ivan went on to do a Ph.D. in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would go on to create the first program that could create graphics directly onto a computer screen, by use of a ‘light pen’

Sketchpad

Sketchpad had the first graphical user interface to easily allow communication between man and machine. Developed in the 60′s by Sutherland, after seeing and being impressed by Space War, the first ever computer game, Sketchpad allowed the user to create drawings using a light-pen tool. It also introduced memory to allow for storage of instances of drawings and the ability to zoom in and out of images. In short, Sketchpad can be seen as the first working CAD software system. Before Sketchpad, computers would run batches of jobs and was not interactive at all.

After finsihing college, Sutherland wento to work for the US army for the NSA as an electronic engineer. Afterwards, he was sent to work Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency were he performed on projects such as AI and timesharing.

Ivan then went to work as a teacher at Harvard University. After two years he went to the university of Utah where it became known as a school for computer graphics. In 1976, Sutherland became the head of the Computer Science department at Caltech. Here he integrated circuit design into academia. This lead to the large advances in computer chip technology and the ‘Silicon Valley’ explosion.

While Ivan Sutherland is more interested in hardware technology and Asynchronous Systems, he is still regarded highly in the field of multimedia. He has won many awards including the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in 1996 and First Zworykin Award, National Academy of Engineering in 1972

Dr. Sutherland has written over 49 Publications. He also holds many Patents including important window functions such as Display Windowing by Clipping and Computer Graphics Clipping for Polygons. His Personal Profile can be found at the SUN website.