Month: June 2008

Big Picture

Each entry tells a story through high-quality newswire images displayed at large sizes

by kogokiak.
2009-05-31:

Hello blog folks, it’s been a while. 1 year to be exact… 1 long crazy year. This time last year, I announced my project called The Big Picture, hoping, of course, that it would do well. It has really blown me away how well it has done. I will happily take some of the credit, but much of the success belongs to the photographers who consistently deliver amazing imagery that makes choosing and editing both a pleasure and a difficult task.

the state of the big picture

MEMS robots 100x smaller

Each microrobot is shaped something like a spatula but with dimensions measuring just microns, or millionths of a meter. They are almost 100x smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less. The devices are about 60 microns wide, 250 microns long and 10 microns high that each run off power scavenged from an electrified surface. Propelling themselves across such surfaces in an inchworm-like fashion impelled by a “scratch-drive” motion actuator, the microrobots advance in steps only 10 to 20 billionths of a meter each, but repeated as often as 20000x a second.

choco-nano bots can’t be far off. hmm chocolate!

Skip Photoshop

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop:

  1. You can’t click a Photoshop mockup.
  2. Photoshop gives you too many tools to focus on the details.
  3. The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web.
  4. Photoshop puts the focus on production, not productivity.
  5. Photoshop is repeating yourself.
  6. Photoshop isn’t collaboration friendly.
  7. Photoshop is awkward.