Good news! Today we received our 1 millionth hit, according to our stats dating from December 2007. And it's all thanks to you liquidicity readers and GoSquared enthusiasts. What a nice start to the New Year.
Happy 2009!
It's busy busy busy here as we gear up for the new year! 2009 should prove to be an eventful year for GoSquared and the Sites on the GSN as we roll out the new features we have spent the best part of 2008 preparing for all you wonderful folk; most notably a newly reworked and restructured Control Panel to coincide with the release of a beefed up advertising system. We're really excited and we know you'll like what's coming.
If you're particularly curious to take a peek at what we've been working on, we are running a Private Beta of the new features for registered members. Apply for access to the Private Beta to test out the new features. We're currently looking for more beta testers so it's likely that you'll be invited to join the beta. Not a registered member? Sign up and then you will be!
Want to keep track of what the GoSquared team is up to? Friend us up on Twitter:
James - http://twitter.com/gosquared
Geoff - http://twitter.com/TheDeveloper
Ashcroft - http://twitter.com/MediaD00d
And JT needs to get Twitter!
Or you can chat to us directly on GoSquared Discussions
Here's to a fruitful, prosperous and happy New Year!
To show how much we appreciate you contributing to Liquidicity and GoSquared, we thought we would make you a little present. Instead, we decided to make you 64 little presents - each a freshly made, tasty vector icon.
We hope you like our latest icon set, an array of arrows in vector format for you to play with, use, or just look at.
Get the Adobe Illustrator CS2 File [420 KB]
Don't have Adobe Illustrator? Download the SVG.
As always, they're entirely free, but in the spirit of Christmas we ask for a link back to show the love and festive cheer.
You may also like some of our other icon sets: 40 Vector Icons for your Photo Editing App, 85 Vector Window Icons, 40 Vector Icons for Apple Products, and many more.
Are you an existing member? Like finding bugs and answering questions? Become a Private Beta Tester and see what we have planned for 2009!
Merry Christmas everyone, and here's to a fantastic 2009!
It's here. The all new design for Liquidicity. We hope you didn't mind waiting, but we think it's paid off. We went back to the drawing board and decided to rework the blog from the ground up. Before we waffle on, let's get into the reasons why we decided to redesign Liquidicity.
* People like our icons.
* People like our design reference posts - like Help Sheets.
* People want to be able to see what other posts we have produced without having to Google for them.
* We had a lot more people going to the site than reading our RSS feed.
* We never thoroughly looked at the Comments area before.
* We weren't making it clear that Liquidicity was just one part of the GoSquared site.
* People often find it easy to search for stuff.
As a side note, you may be interested to know we've been working on redesigning the rest of the GoSquared site, so many of the concepts we're playing with here on Liquidicity will soon be making their way across the whole site.
So what have we done? We've been very keen to clean up the many different areas of Liquidicity and form a more unified, easy to navigate interface, so we worked to a grid pattern (of 980px width) to structure the page. All navigation now falls strictly into the grid, from our subtly modified top navigation menu, to the Liquidicity navigation menu, to the sidebar, to the category and archive pages. We've tried to stick to the grid wherever possible.
We broke the grid on purpose for the RSS badge in the Liquidicity navigation menu for obvious reasons - we wanted the element to stand out as much as possible. Trickier than it looks, but it makes sense. Along the same lines, with the aim of increasing awareness of our RSS feed, we are now showing the number of subscribers in at least two locations: the Liquidicity navigation menu and the sidebar. We didn't want to use the ugly Feedburner widget, though, so we dug a little deeper and found we could use the Awareness API to pull our feed count from Feedburner's servers without needing to show anything but pure text.
We wanted to improve the appearance of comments so we added Gravatar support. Now your Global Avatar will show up along side your comments on every post. We also ensured the actual form that members use to submit comments looked a bit better. We worked hard to design some new buttons that have multiple states so your click is rewarded with a grateful "active" state.
A lot of time went in to improving the footer area of Liquidicity. We now show the (new) global GoSquared footer, along with a breadcrumb trail to help you find your way in the navigational structure of the blog. Further helping navigation, we have made some new buttons (in the style of the comment submit button) for browsing back and forth in time through the list pages of posts. Again, we hope these will encourage people to further explore more content on Liquidicity.
All in all, we hope you like the new Liquidicity. Have a quick look through the images in the gallery below to see close ups on what we've done, and a few sketches we made when planning the new design.
As always, design gets better with feedback, so we would love to hear your thoughts on the redesign.
Thanks!
The GoSquared Team
It's Halloween time again, and we haven't made a new wallpaper in a few weeks, so we thought we'd treat you to some vectorised pumpkin scariness.
Available in a 320x480 iPhone friendly size, all the way up to a freakishly large 2560x1600 for you lucky ones with exceedingly wide displays.
Here's the large one (click it to go to the full size image):
Here's the iPhone sized one, click to go to the full size image:
Wow this post is long overdue but here goes anyway! A few weeks ago we attended the popular Future Of Web Apps Conference at London's ExCel, two busy days of mingling with like-minded tech enthusiasts and web entrepreneurs, drinking free beers sponsored by Google and Facebook, and attending various lectures on all that is important to web applications. Oh and of course, gathering free stuff. Lots of it!
The event was magnificently organised by the friendly people at Carsonified, who had brought in speakers from 280North, Digg, Google, Revision 3, Twitter, Yahoo... the list goes on. If you were unfortunate enough to miss the event, you can catch the lectures online at the FOWA video page. Between lectures we explored the floor, meeting countless numbers of people and introducing them to GoSquared, who we are and what we do, whilst giving them free special edition copies of our Help Sheets which by general consensus proved to be extremely popular.
Conference day two ended on a high note with a live Diggnation and afterparty sponsored by Facebook! We were fortunate enough to arrive just as they ran out of room in Diggnation... dayum! Luckily, Ryan Carson (head honcho at Carsonified and all round nice bloke) managed to sneak us in through the side door... but shhh - many people were turned away. To be fair, we did have conference passes.
OK, fine they weren't premium seats... or seats at all for that matter, but hey, it's still a live Diggnation.
The lively after party was held at the nearby bar, Fox's. Beers were on Facebook and we seized the opportunity to meet the Diggnation crew in person. We'd like to extend our thanks to all of the Carsonified team and a special thanks to all the cool people we met!
If you didn't get a chance to attend FOWA this year, you should seriously consider in the future. The event should return at roughly the same time next year to London, so look out for it! Carsonified hold conferences all around the world - in New York, Miami, Paris, and more, so there should be an event within 5,000 miles of you soon!
* Apologies for the less than professional quality photos. We have a number of excuses for that, including (but not limited to) our only camera being an iPhone, and the availability of free beer.
I'm not too sure how long this has been available, but it would appear that Google are now putting a search field inside the embedded YouTube video player that you see everywhere. I tried it again just now and the search bar didn't show up, so I would give an educated guess and say Google is still playing with the idea and testing it out on a selection of videos.
I found thus just as I was browsing around after checking my thousands of RSS Feeds, I decided to pop over to MacRumors and read up some more on the upcoming Classics app. It's gonna be fantastic - plus it's had the influence of awesome designer Sebastiaan de With which can only be good thing.
The other day, I went back to this piece by Richard Sprague (Senior Marketing Director at Microsoft) from January 2007.
The whole article can be summed up by:
"So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict [Apple] will not sell anywhere near the 10M [iPhones] Jobs predicts for 2008."
This is referring back to the original announcement of the iPhone, and the time when Jobs, being asked by numerous reporters, publicly clarified that Apple aimed to sell around 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008.
On Tuesday of this week, Apple held their quarterly earnings call. The results for the last quarter were stunning, there's no denying it. Apple sold more iPhones than RIM sold Blackberries. Apple is now the THIRD largest phone retailer in the world, in terms of revenues. And Apple has only been making ONE phone, in the market for just 15 months.
Jobs gave this comment, showing their uncertainty (like everyone else) about the future of the World economy:
"Now, both of these things, beating RIM in units and becoming the third largest mobile supplier in revenues are amazing feats but part of this was the result of expanding into over 50 countries and there’s no guarantee that sustained sales will equal initial sales. And who knows what the future results will be, given the worldwide economic slowdown but we actually outsold RIM last quarter and ranked as the third largest mobile phone supplier in revenues. Not bad for being in the market for only 15 months."
Referring back to Sprague's article, he posted again the other day asking people why they thought the iPhone performed so differently to his predictions.
The problem is that he didn't see the iPhone as the versatile device it is. He compared it to existing phones. Whereas the iPhone is not really a phone, it's everything you could possibly want in one device. And it's all of these things combined beautifully.
There are numerous reasons for its success, but to name a few:
The existing massive consumer base of iPod owners already have a major part of the iPhone equation on their computer: iTunes. No other phone company has anything near the power of iTunes (the software) or the content and quality (the iTunes Store). The ability for Apple to reach its already happy customer base of iPod owners through iTunes, and the email lists that the majority of them have joined is a greater advantage than many realise. Everyone I know knows of the iPhone and what it can do. They have the expectation of it being a well built, well designed device like their existing iPods. We can conclude that one of the strongest selling points of the iPhone is that it has been released after the iPod - it must be better.
The iPhone ad campaign is aired worldwide to huge audiences. The ads show off a beautiful product with a beautiful interface that performs tasks that normally seem mundane, easily and with flair. These ads are also localised to each country so show that Apple has genuinely considered the needs of each nation (even if all it has done is hired a native speaking commentator and shown a national newspaper as the news site in Safari.)
The price of the iPhone (the original iPhone) was exactly the same concept used for the original iPod. Price it high to gain artificial scarcity - the select "elite" have an extremely attractive device that is difficult to obtain for the rest of the population. Bring out a newer, better iPhone several months after at a (still relatively expensive) but cheaper price point and the customers flood in. The iPhone is still expensive, and it is still a product owned by the minority, but as Apple revises the iPhone again, and inevitably releases a second device to the line, the customer base will grow and grow.
We haven't even begun to spoke about the number of big names building high quality iPhone apps - EA Games, SEGA, Google, Facebook, the list goes on. The press's addiction to Apple fuels the hype given to their products. Whatever Apple does - or doesn't - do gets reported, (the shares usually respond, too) but it means Apple's name is seen by consumers every day. Apple is a household name unlike any other phone company around (other than Blackberry). You don't see Sony Ericsson's latest set of handsets on the 3rd page of The Times very often.
Other than starving the stock pre iPhone 3G launch, the last 15 months have been constant growth for the iPhone. As we enter very unpredictable times, who knows how many iPhones Apple will sell this quarter? All we tell is that Apple has historically sold double the number of iPods in the 4th compared to the 3rd quarter every year. If Apple does this with the iPhone, which is a stretch, Apple will have sold around 20 million in the same time frame they intended to sell just 10 million.
It's no surprise the iPhone is (so far) a success, but the future is very uncertain.
Today, we're introducing our all new Help Sheets. You loved our original CSS and HTML Help Sheets, so we went back to the originals, tidied them up, and gave them a sprinkling of coolness.
We're also pleased to bring you an entirely new Help Sheet - the PHP Help Sheet. This should be a saviour for you hardcore coders when you forget the odd array function or two.
You can download the full set as a ZIP (5.4MB) right here:
The all new PHP Help Sheet. Everyone needs a handy reference now and then, so go ahead and print this off. Stick it on your wall and never get lost again!
The HTML Help Sheet has been updated and tidied up, so now you have no excuses for not decorating your office notice board with snippets of usefulness.
The CSS Help Sheet - our first ever, but updated to match the set. Never forget those styling options with this at your side.
We hope you like the new Help Sheets, and would love to know what you want us to Help Sheet-ise next: JavaScript? Actionscript? JQuery? Tell us in the comments!
Oh and another thing, the other day one of our readers sent in a photo of our CSS Help Sheet on his office notice board. If you're using our Help Sheets at your office / home / garage / Starbucks we'd love to see! Email us a photo or upload to Flickr with the tag "GoSquared".
Enjoy!
There has been a lot of talk lately that Apple will be releasing something code-named "the Brick".
There have been many rumours and suggestions as to what "the Brick" may be. 9 to 5 Mac is reporting that, according to their sources, the "brick" refers to a new manufacturing process that would involve using lasers and jet cutting instead of the traditional method of pressing to construct new Apple MacBooks from bricks of solid aluminium. If true, this process would truly revolutionise the manufacturing process of consumer electronics. It would, yet again, put Apple several years ahead of the competition, and would ensure Apple gained control over even more of the manufacturing process.
However, let's pretend for a minute that we haven't heard that rumour. Let's think of "the Brick" as an actual product, rather than a manufacturing technique. What could it be?
Initially, when I heard the term, my mind thought power bricks - the bulky blocks that ensure your laptop (or Mac Mini) gets charged when you plug it into the wall. If Apple could innovate a way that would mean we didn't need a power brick for our laptops that would be truly astonishing. It would put Apple's laptops a major step out in front of all competition. However, as much as this would be groundbreakingly cool, I simply don't believe it is possible yet. Sure, power bricks are getting smaller and smaller, and Apple's are looking better and better (See iPhone 3G), but to eliminate the power brick entirely is, as far as I know, not currently feasible.
So, what else could "the Brick" be? Perhaps the Mac Mini. The Mini hasn't been updated for a very long time. It has almost been forgotten about. This means either a) it's going to be eliminated from the product line, or b) it's going to have a massive overhaul very soon. Personally, I think it is much more likely to be b). With the current state of the global economy, and the increased growth Apple has seen in the higher end of the computer market, their low end, affordable Mac is overdue a massive sales increase.
On the one hand, Apple could attempt to make the Mini even thinner, even sexier, and perhaps re-brand it to Mac Nano. This would be great, but it could well confuse consumers with the similarly sized, and similarly priced AppleTV. Instead, I believe Apple will need to differentiate the Mini in another way other than to make it smaller...
Let's take a look at Neil Curtis's idea for what could happen to the Mac Mini. He proposes that we dispose of "the Brick" entirely. Instead, we would have our entire computer inside the keyboard that sits on our desk. This would look simply breathtaking if you imagine that all that would be sitting on your desk would be a strikingly thin Apple Cinema Display (they're also long overdue a design refresh), a keyboard, and a mouse.
It is arguable that this concept would be possible, but I reckon, with Apple's knowledge, the Macbook Air's internals could be re distributed and altered to fit within the constraints of a keyboard shaped computer. Let's not forget that there would be no need for a battery, a trackpad, or even speakers, already saving a large amount of space. Neil even suggests that an optical drive could be crammed into this design, just like on the MacBook.
View the video above to see Neil explain his ideas in full.
It will be interesting to see what Apple releases in the next few weeks. So far, the rumour is that October 14th will be the day of announcements.
We can't wait!
Get the PDF [1.9MB]