This one is going to be quick - your blog ads piss me off. I know we all read feeds every day, but every once in a while (like everyone on Techmeme, I’ll assume), we end up reading blogs in our browsers (you know, like in the old days) - and you know when that happens, because your head explodes. Why does it explode, I hear you ask? Because you are spoon-fed ads all the time. Let’s look at a couple of examples of what I call “blog as chrismas tree” (I’m so ticked by this, I’m actually coining terms).

Engadget: In green, white space or elements that although can’t be necessarily called content, are okay (or useful) to have. In orange, pieces of layout that are mildly distracting. In red, elements that are just there to cause retinal pain or to make the user go away and never come back. Engadget, above, isn’t so bad - it actually comes out with about 50% content over the fold. Let’s look at someone else:

Born Rich: Don’t be fooled by the green, ladies and gents, you’re looking at 9% content, 91% advertising or white space. I don’t know if these people were actually “born rich” as the blog name implies, but they’re sure trying with all those ads. Seriously, if 10% of useful screen real estate above the fold is all I’m going to get, I’m getting the hell out.

The blog as christmas tree plague

Monetize, monetize, monetize. We all want it, we all need it. But people, we’re getting ridiculous here. We’re shoving ads in front of our users, when all they care about is the stuff we actually write about. If you really want to get people to visit your site, do think about how much of your page is useful.

Eh, I’m just having a bad monday here. Don’t mind the grumpiness.. And I usually don’t do this, but I’d appreciate the eyeballs on this matter, so if you’re keen, digg this.

It’s that time again, and if you’re an Apple user you know how it is. You wait around for a while, a new OS is announced, you wait some more and then when it is finally released, you know (again) how you’ve made the right choice in sticking with the guys from Cupertino.

A lot of ink is going to be spilled about Leopard and just how great it is in the next few days, so I’ll just give you the rundown on some of the tiny bits of Leopard that I’ve enjoyed. This was basically written in the first hour with the operating system, so bare with me when it comes to the excitement.

Spaces, stacks and the new UI

Stacks: Stacks are much more useful than I imagined. And they’re beautiful. Just noticed how stacks react when there are new files on the monitored folder (it just changed the stack icon when I saved this file into my Documents folder/stack).

Interface: A unified interface, finally. The new drop shadows are heavy, but I like them. I have mixed feelings about the new dock - it’s good to have a change every once in a while, but things like the new running application marks are somewhat annoying and not easily seen. Also, I personally don’t care much about it being like a shelf now - but it’s a minor change, I’ll cope.

One other thing I have mixed feelings about is the fact that they brought down the opacity of the top bar. It doesn’t look that bad, but I kinda liked the consistency it had across wallpapers (right now mine is a shade of purple because of the default Leopard wallpaper).

Spaces: Finally, proper virtual desktops on a Mac. I had been waiting for this one for a very long time after battling with releases of Virtue Desktops and earlier applications. If you run several things at once (applications that you might easily group together in different “spaces”), you’ll love it too. Each project in its own space, IM and email on another - it’s productivity bliss.

System preferences: I love the redesigns on some of the preference panes - particularly the new Bluetooth and Network panes, that were in dire need of a change. These actually make sense now - which is great.

Terminal, Utilities: The terminal being tabbed is sweet because it saves me from having to install iTerm. But more important than tabs and the terminal itself is how ruby, rails and quite a lot of ruby gems are installed by default. I knew rails was going to be one of the additions already, but some of the gems (capistrano, mongrel, redcloth, hpricot, ruby-openid, etc) they packed were a surprise. And the new Terminal has themes, too - What?

Finder: The new finder - wow, have we longed for this one. I love the new sidebar and I like how they integrate some smart searches by default to give you a sense of the possibilities. Honestly, I couldn’t care much about coverflow everywhere (in fact, it does sound a little bit like bloat), but it may be useful in a couple of cases, so we’ll see how often I use it. I guess it doesn’t really hurt to have an extra bit of eye candy if it doesn’t get in the way of work.

One small detail, not really about the Finder but Leopard itself is how there are now icons for Front Row, Exposé, the Dashboard and Spaces in your Applications folder. Makes it much easier to script interface behavior when there’s actually an icon that can be clicked.

iCal, Address Book: Took a bit of a revamp, good ol’ iCal, and it looks pretty good. I like how it packs some of the interface details we’ve seen on recent iPods and the iPhone - Apple is going for consistency and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that. Address Book looks the same, but I’m still to restore my contacts from my Tiger installation so I have nothing to look at there at this point.

Conclusions, if there are any

As with a lot of what Apple does these days, Leopard looks (and feels) great. I had almost forgotten the feeling of how snappy a fresh installation of an Apple OS is, but now I have been reminded. These guys aren’t playing around, and I definitely agree with the Wall Street Journal when they say that this thing kicks Vista in the butt. Still a fan. Sign me up for OSX 10.6 “LOLCAT”, Steve.

For those of you looking for larger screenshots of Leopard, I uploaded a few to this Flickr set. Have fun!

A post for the web-designers out there. Rejoice, for the blogosphere bears good news today - Webkit (the engine behind Safari) joins Opera in supporting @font-face rules in nightly builds. This means it includes the necessary functionality to link to downloadable fonts from CSS - or to put it short: typographic freedom (within licensing limits, naturally) at last.

One of the most frustrating things about designing for the web is how limited you are in terms of which fonts you can use. Today you only get a handful of safe fonts on all platforms, but that will change with @font-face finally coming into browsers near you. It will allow the designer to specify external fonts that the browser downloads and uses to render text in the page.

In theory, this gives you limitless possibilities, as long as you have the license to redistribute the fonts you want to use in your designs. The fact that the majority of fonts (and arguably the large majority of good fonts) can not be distributed freely will be a tough problem to solve, but this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

@font-face {
    font-family: "MyFont";
    src: url(http://server.com/font.ttf) format("truetype");
}

h1 { font-family: "MyFont", sans-serif }

Want to know more about how to use @font-face in the future? Refer to this article over at the always awesome A List Apart. There’s also a couple of interesting opinions and discussions over at Simplebits, Hicksdesign and Typographica.

As some of you may know I’ll be conducting the opening panel at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this November in Berlin. It’s going to be a panel about how design has changed in the last few years to take center stage in the business mindset.

In preparation, I am collecting statements about what design means to people and businesses today - and that means I need your opinion too. So how do you see design, and the role of the designer in your area and business? If you have any thoughts on the topic, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email. I’d love to hear what you have to say.