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New University of Sydney website

05 Jan 2010 in University by Enoch Lau | 3 comments

When the uni­ver­sity launched its rebrand­ing last year, I was quite pleased: a glossy bro­chure explain­ing the kind of image the uni­ver­sity wants to pro­ject to the pub­lic, a new logo, new momentum for change on super­fi­cial and deeper levels.

Now it’s all ruined. Take a look for your­self (click to enlarge):

Yes, this is the new Uni­ver­sity of Sydney web­site tem­plate. I kid you not. A gen­er­ous per­son might call it “func­tional”. A less gen­er­ous per­son might… well, let’s leave this blog G-​​rated. It’s grot­esque. It has all the charm of a late 90s web­site. It car­ries none of the per­son­al­ity that the uni­ver­sity aims to pro­ject, and all of the air of design-​​by-​​committee and oh-​​look-​​I-​​learnt-​​css-​​in-​​24-​​hours. There’s no warmth; the design alienates.

For bonus marks, it even dis­plays in Arial on a Mac.

(For com­par­ison, here’s a screen­shot of the web­site as at 5 January.)

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Not a Safari convert

12 Jun 2007 in Computing by Enoch Lau | 4 comments

OK. So Apple’s released a Win­dows ver­sion of Safari (and I tried blog­ging from Safari, but it sub­mit­ted a blank page, and copy and paste from Safari back to Fire­fox was rather buggy *not happy*), and I don’t quite like what I see. This is why I’m stick­ing to Fire­fox for at least the time being:

  • Yet another look: It looks like a Mac applic­a­tion, feels like a Mac applic­a­tion and behaves like a Mac applic­a­tion. If I wanted to use a Mac, I’d use a Mac. (I know it’s sim­ilar to the deal with iTunes and Quick­Time, but I hate both as well.)
  • Font ren­der­ing is weird: It looks like they’ve copied over the font ren­der­ing from the Mac as well; com­pared with the Win­dows font ren­der­ing, the font smooth­ing looks uncom­fort­able and I’m not sure I like the char­ac­ter spa­cing. If this is what it’s like to use a Mac, this is even less reason for me to switch.
  • Another new set of key­board short­cuts: Fire­fox and IE keep their key­board short­cuts rel­at­ively sim­ilar so it’s not much of a pain to switch between the two, but Safari… just real­ised that Ctrl+Backspace doesn’t work, and it doesn’t min­im­ise when you go Winkey+M.
  • Down­loads: It down­loads straight to the Desktop, or to another folder. I want to be promp­ted for each location.
  • Plu­gins: It’s new so there are hardly any plu­gins yet.

Enough ram­bling for the time being, but no I’m not going to be using Safari as my every­day browser any time soon. I must agree it’s faster, but its memory foot­print is far worse than Fire­fox (150MB in ten minutes?). I’ll keep it around, how­ever, to test my website.

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Site migration complete… but still much to do

09 Apr 2007 in Meta by Enoch Lau | No comments

Just last week I slapped on the “moved house” tags on my old site at intrepix​.tri​pod​.com – yes, well over three months after I got this domain. Call it lazi­ness. But what actu­ally took me so long is that I wasn’t quite happy about how this site had turned out, so I wasn’t pre­pared to call this “home” just yet. What wasn’t I happy about? Well for one, I missed the design of the old site – the col­ours and the gradi­ent fills had been tweaked until I could call it per­fect. The new “envir­on­ment­al­ist” look on this site was designed with min­im­al­ism in mind, but I don’t think that suits me well. The new jazzed up home page sports some fancy trans­par­ency and css effects, but my wiki still looks rather util­it­arian I must say.

So why don’t I simply do some­thing about it? Sup­pose we have a util­ity func­tion U that factors in P, the pleas­ure I get from view­ing a beau­ti­ful design, and E, the effort that it takes to cre­ate said beau­ti­ful design. :-P I’d say we’re stuck at the first hump, a local maximum.

function.png

What’s left to do: cre­ate pages on the wiki for past and present pro­jects, pret­tify the wiki, add more inter­sec­tion links

(Just a thought: I’m begin­ning to think my writ­ing style is too stiff and rigid and verb­ose. Per­haps it’s just that noth­ing I write can com­pare with some of the stuff I reg­u­larly read.)

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