April 27th is...

Happy World Graphic Design Day! 

Autobots Beware

A blow to 'bots everywhere. The electronic playing field might have just gotten a new entrance exam: 

Google has released research results about a new test to foil computers pretending to be humans by requiring them to orient an image so it's upright.

A persistent problem on the Internet is screening out automated computer systems that can be used, for example, to sign up for spam-sending e-mail accounts or post comments designed to improve a site's search results. Google, which already devotes a lot of resources to block e-mail and Web spam, has tried a new test to keep the bots at bay.

The test is the latest variation on a screening technique called a Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The idea is that people can often tell which way is up in a photo, but computers have a harder time.

Captchas are in widespread use today, usually in the form of obscured or distorted text that people can still read. But there's a lot of work in the area, including identifying 3D images and distinguishing between cats and dogs.

Full story: What's up, bot? Google tries new Captcha method [cnet news]

Britain's Got Buzz

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

By now, it’s hard to scroll down any kind of social media blog, news outlet or networking site without hearing at least one mention of viral darling Susan Boyle. This inspiring story has attracted attention from online and traditional media alike; the singing sensation even nabbed an interview on Larry King. 

On the off chance you haven’t heard of her, she’s a 47 year old unemployed woman from Scotland who recently appeared on the UK show Britain’s Got Talent (a variety show seeking the most talented people in the country). It's a classic story of triumph and defeating expectations: her frumpy appearance, down to earth manner and drab clothing had the judges and audience preparing their most effective eye rolls. But when she opened her mouth, a truly stunning rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from musical Les Miserables filled the theater—and every person in that place who had judged her prematurely was left speechless. 

It’s always hard to pinpoint why a particular online element ever becomes viral, but why is this one in particular so popular? It’s fast becoming one of the most watched YouTube videos of all time, slowly gaining traction on YouTube mainstays like Obama’s victory speech or Tina Fey’s infamous Sarah Palin appearances. 

Graphic from Mashable. 

It’s hard to say exactly why, naturally, though plenty of online sources have tried to figure it out. Cal Thomas called her a “phenomenon” that teaches a superficial media to focus on inner beauty first. Kendall Allen of MediaPost Publications chalks it up to the human need to feel something—from metaphors to media—at a instinctual gut level. 

I think when the dust settles on this Susan Boyle chapter of social media, what will remain as the more remarkable story may not be her considerable vocal talents—but the reactions of an online community to hearing it. 

IE8 On the Horizon

Potentially big news for Internet Explorer users and designers alike:

Microsoft have announced that Internet Explorer 8.0 will be released via the Windows Automatic Update starting on the third week of April 2009 (view the IEBlog announcement). The final version of the browser has been available for download since 20 March, but its uptake has been fairly sedate and is probably limited to web developers and early adopters.

The Automatic Update is likely to change the situation significantly. All IE6 and IE7 users on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 will receive an IE8 update notification. It will be marked as “High-priority” in XP and 2003, and “Important” in Vista and 2008. The roll out will initially target a small audience but expand to cover the entire user base over the coming weeks.

However, IE8 will not install automatically and a welcome screen will give users the option to install, ask later, or abandon the upgrade. The company have also released a blocker toolkit so IT administrators can disable the update.

Despite the massive roll-out, what most web developers need to know is: will this finally eradicate IE6?

The only real way to test these waters is to wait and see--in the past, IE6 users have opted against getting the upgrade, choosing to stay instead with an interface they already were familiar with.

Story at Sitepoint.

Uploading YouTube Backgrounds

By Gregory Pike, Web Developer

As it stands right now, YouTube really limits your ability to control to appearance of your Channel. A Channel owner has no more than the power upload a background and change a few colours. Many developers have come to realize the power of using backgrounds to define how the channel appears (take Applecore's YouTube channel for example) but even that has major limitations.

To change this, you'll want go to your Account, and find Channel Design. You should see a screen like this: 

 In order to set a background on your YouTube channel, first you need to upload the image directly to the YouTube server. Unfortunately, this means they control a number of factors. The image has to be a PNG, JPG, or GIF and it has to be less than 256kb in total file size. When you upload a file it will be converted to JPG and compressed.

Scroll down the Channel Design page, and you should find this option: 

Browse and upload your image (which should fit the restrictions). But even if you follow all of these guidelines you may still encounter this error:

 “Please upload a valid background image.”

Now, the file we were uploading was not only a PNG but it was also only 37kb (we also tried a JPG for good measure). We were left trying to figure out what could have caused this error.

After much searching and double checking, we found it. There seems to be a hidden restriction on the dimensions of the background image. We continued to receive this error as long as our background was 2400 x 4800 pixels. When we scaled the background image back to a height of 3600 pixels, we had zero problems uploading it as a background for our YouTube Channel.

So when you go to upload your own background, keep this mind if you encounter that dreaded error message. It will save you valuable minutes of your time you'll never get back. 

Happy Birthday, Gmail!

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

Wishing Gmail a happy birthday may seem like whispering into the wind tunnel: with all the accomplishments Google had racked up in the past few years, why stop to pay attention to any one anniversary? But looking back and how and why Gmail came about tells us a lot about how far we’ve come in such a short span of time. 

When Gmail was first introduced, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. I can vouch for this firsthand: my old Hotmail account was perpetually full, and I had to resort to saving treasured emails in a file on my hard drive. It was hardly time effective, and made managing mail a chore. Then came Gmail, offering a full gigabyte of space; for some hardcore users, this was barely an upgrade, but for the typical email user, even one gig opened up a whole new world of storage—it’s five happy years later for me, and I’ve barely cracked 4%. And I delete nothing. 

Gmail was designed with one group in mind: the people who racked up a lot of email, and thus, needed a lot of space. Much of common email interface were frustrating to the designers, so they started essentially with nothing, building their new intuitive interface from scratch. Their site architecture was a hybrid of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which was smoother and faster. This becomes important when you keep in mind that broadband connections and 56k modems were still the norm.

In the years following, Google has developed any number of additions for the basic Gmail structure that ranged from the practical (an ‘Undo Send’ app, ‘To Do’ task lists) to the personal (design themes, custom date formats) to the funny (Google Goggles, anyone?). But by any rate, Goggle’s worked hard to improve an by all accounts stellar service, paving the way for even bigger improvements to personal email in the near future. 

Here’s one stat that can’t escape highlighting: today, thanks in large part to Google, it’s almost commonplace to a 20 megabyte attachment—making that one email four times the size of an entire webmail account in 2004. 

Photo from Official Google Blog entry.