New Facebook!!!

So Mr Mark Zuckerburg has recently made a few changes to facebook recently and it seems to have caused a lot of different views and opinions on people within my contact list, now I must add these changes are mainly cosmetic and meant to improve the look and layout of facebook and but still people don’t like change!

As you can see in the images below there is quite a lot of difference




as you can see when you compare the two side by side the changes are very apparent the whole layout of the page is completely different this is a risky move to make as this can make the usability of the website far less familiar there for the users may become uncomfortable within the site as they are used to layout and can easily navigate around the site without much thought.

I have looked into this further and looked into what people actually think of the new facebook, just looking through my facebook I can clearly see that there are some strong opinions.

"Having used Facebook for about 18 months, I've grown fond of it. It's a great way to keep in touch with people, and my initial reason for joining was to view friend’s pictures from nights out. But I'm skeptical about the core developers' intentions. There has to be a way of making this move very transitional, instead of throwing it on (unsuspecting) users in one lump saying "here ya go, this is based on less than 0.1% of user's feedback, live with it, it's staying". Doing that is a bad way of developing anything, especially a living website with many million users."
http://www.new.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=34082321101

"The whole new facebook is bollocks to be honest. Your mini feed is bunched into a wall and then your home page is sent in to a frenzy of many little things cluttering it up and then your side bar is gone. Now, if they had given a choice to the current members to use the classic design and the new "bollocks" design for eternity, I wouldn't have minded but this just pushing people into the boundary that they would not like to be in."
http://www.new.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=34082321101

Having looked at all the opinions I found on my facebook and the forums I found the general opinion on facebook layout is awful everyone hates it!!

So here goes its time for my opinion. I don’t really want to sit on the fence here but I really don’t have a strong opinion either way, I have used the new version for about a month now after the new button on the right hand corner on there screen tempted me into trying the new version. When I first started to use it I didn’t get on with it at all. Now i'm used to I quite like it. I like the fact that you can see who is online constantly there’s no constant clicking to see who is online. from a practitioners point of view however I keep thinking about the complexity of the code behind the scenes that makes me worry about people that have slower computers, browser and broadband speeds than what I do, the same goes with the new chat feature. All of the other changes are purely cosmetic don’t get me wrong i’m not usually one for change and I do keep stepping back into familiar ground to the old facebook. I think given the chance like me people will grow to love the new facebook as much as the old one.

Pixels, RGB, File Formats and Web Browsers

Pixels and RGB
Pixels are small squares of colour/light that makes up an image. RGB stands for the three colour of light that make up the pixels it stands for Red Green and Blue these are the three basic light colours that can be mixed to make an image.

Bitmap/Raster Vs Vector
Bitmap/Raster
A raster image (also known as a bitmap images is made up of pixels. one of the advantages to this is because it contains lots of pixels it contain a high number of colours so it is good for photos that contain lots of different colour. A main disadvantage to using these images is that they cannot be resized easily, if stretched it becomes very obvious that is it made out of pixels (it becomes pixelated). These can be used on the web for high colour images that are not resized.

Vector
A vector image is made up for pixels but with lines between them. This is how they works the computer calculates all its points and lines which is then multiplied then the image is redrawn at the new size. So there is no loss of quality. These images are said to be resolution independent. Vector image have a limited range of colour and can be used for things such as symbols and logos.

File formats for the Web
JPEG
JPEG images can contain 16.7 million colours, therefore it they are ideal for images that contain a wide range of colours such as photos. These are small files as they are compressed using lossy. This means each time the image is saved data is lost therefore it is loss of quality i.e. Lossy. The trick is to find a balance between quality of the image and its file size. A main advantage is that they can handle lots of colour information disadvantage as this is a lossy file your image will never look as good as your original image

GIF
GIF images contain 256 colours. The colours within a GIF are organized and indexed. As it doesn’t have a large number of colours because they are index GIF images will find the closest colour they can. These file format are used for simple solid images and line drawings. Also these file formats are lossless therefore it does not loose data and quality. Gif files also have a transparency feature and are good for simple animation. One of the main advantages of a gif file is that they can perfectly preserve an image as it is lossless and doesn’t loose data. Disadvantages of a gif file is that they don’t support complex images like JPEGs, if you have a complex gif it can be a huge file size, does not support images that contain gradient areas.

PNG
PNG files have all of the advantages of a JPEG and GIF put together. They have good quality images and contain many colours and the transparency feature. they seem too good to be true right the only down side is that they are not widely supported by all browsers as much as JPEG and GIF. (This in my eyes is a little silly.)

Animation
Animation can be very attractive within a webpage and a very powerful way in which to get attention on my website, however they can be huge file sizes then therefore take a while to load in the mean time your will board and maybe leave you site.

Web Browsers
A web browser is a program that translates data on the World Wide Web into a webpage that we can read and use. There are many different web browsers used by everyone. This is frustrating as a web designer. So it is very useful to keep a track of the changes and trends within web browsers. One layout can be perfect within one web browser and a complete mess in another browser.

Back to Basics

I'm now finished second year and although I have learnt a lot of skills, I still think I’m lacking something in order me to take my work live and online. so here goes I’ve got a book and I’m going right back to basic so if anyone is reading this blog they will probably think I’m a little backwards but I feel if I do this ill learn the skill I’m missing in order for me to do more work for companies and have more confidence in my work.

so here goes

According to the book
The questions you should always ask when viewing a site whether it is yours or someone else’s are:
- Do I like the way this site looks? Why? or Why not?
- Can I tell what the site is about? Why? or Why not?
- Does the design seem appropriate to what the site is about? Why? or Why not?
- Can I find what I am looking for easily? Why? or Why not?

Using these questions will then make me look at things more critically and therefore help me to work on my design skills that I’m lacking at the moment.

Constructive criticism
Constructive criticism means recognising good things as good so that you can be sure to continue doing them. It also means recognising the bad thing as bad but also looking for solutions to the problems that they pose. It helps me to build myself and my skills not tear me down. It may give me an insight in order to become a better designer.