Archive: December 1st, 2010

It’s the start of the Christmas season. I know it’s the start of the Christmas season, not just because Brighton is currently blanketed in snow, but also because 24 Ways—the advent calendar for geeks—has kicked off with its first article. Hurray! And this year, all of the articles will be available as a book from Five Simple Steps for a mere £8, with all the proceeds going to charity. Grab a copy before the end of December because this is a time-limited offer.

This year, 24 Ways isn’t the only advent calendar for geeks. While I was off galavanting up and down the west coast of the US last month, my cohorts at Clearleft were scheming up a little something special: an advent calendar for fonts. Every day, for 24 days, release a Fontdeck font for one year’s free use.

When they told me, I thought “great idea!” …then they told me they were going to call it an “adfont” calendar and there was much groaning and gnashing of teeth.

The Adfont Calendar 2010 (groan) is now live.

The lovely visual design comes courtesy of Michelle, the latest addition to the Clearleft team, and it mimics a type case; just like the one we happen to have in the office. Every office needs a type case.

Originally, the interface was going to be one looooong type case with some JavaScript layered on top to allow smooth horizontal navigation. But when Rich asked me for some advice on implementing it, I steered him down a different path. Instead of displaying everything horizontally, why not use media queries to show just enough drawers to fit the user’s browser window and allow the rest to stack vertically?

I didn’t think he’d take my challenge seriously but he’s only gone and bloody done it!

Have a poke around and see what’s behind drawer number one.

When I was gushing enthusiastically about Old Weather, I tried (and failed) to explain what it is that makes it so damn brilliant. I’ve just experienced some of that same brilliance. This time the source is Spacelog:

Read the stories of early space exploration from the original NASA transcripts. Now open to the public in a searchable, linkable format.

You can now read the transcripts from the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions, and every single utterance has a permalink. For example:

Houston, we’ve had a problem.

The beauty of the idea is matched in the execution. Everything about the visual design helps to turn something that was previously simply information into an immersive, emotional experience. It’s one thing to know that these incredible events took place, it’s another to really feel it.

Spacelog shares the spirit of Science Hack Day. It’s a /dev/fort creation, put together in an incredibly short period of time; Norm! has the low-down.

Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 are just the start. If you want to help turn more transcripts into an emotionally engaging work of hypertext, everything is available under a public domain license and all the code is available on Github. Transcripts are available for Gemini 6, Apollo 8, and Apollo 11.

I can’t wait to read Charlie Duke as hypertext.