Adam Corkett

Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed something very strange happening with photographs being synced from my phone to my G+ account; I would login on a computer and then see strange animated versions of burst shots right through to panoramas, the feature apparently, is known as auto-awesome. I was instantly impressed, the standard of the photos produced automatically without any kind of deliberate action was good, but when I realised that Google had added an edit button to the gallery, then I saw the potential and another dimension to G+ that surely cannot be ignored. I would suspect that this is an attempt to pitch G+ right up against Instagram now, and with the additional bells and whistles it is definitely a contender in that court, as before against Facebook and Twitter alike. Google don't do things by halves, G+ is maturing into some kind of super hero social network; they have the resources, you can't fault them for using them to stay ahead. The thing is, ha...

Sometimes you find yourself questioning the direction technology takes, including such conundrums as; why has it taken so long for fibre-optic to take off when we have known of its benefits for decades? why has it taken so long to converge tv, radio and internet into one product? Why did it take so long for SVG to be popularised? And for me most recently, why didn't APNG take off; it seems almost illogical. APNG is a format for animated PNG sequences, a format itself which is widely used and arguably the best for internet usage, certainly the most versatile. APNG has all of the characteristics of PNG including complicated alpha transparencies and a 24bit colour palette; it just seems to defy all logic that the format didn't become supported and part of the W3C strategy for HTML 5. Animation with APNG is just better when compared to GIF, and if browsers supported the format there would have been little need for plug-ins for simple short animated sequences. It isn't interac...

The new logo on Google UK 'looks flatter' according to BBC News's Leo Kelion (2013); I have to admit I was unsure if this was an actual change or not, to start with and took a double take, but it appears to be on a slow roll-out, the changes to the interface are subtle but very focussed on removing distractions and streamlining both the page layout (if it could be any more streamlined) and the user experience. Clearly, there are larger changes afoot, but if they are as subtle as these most users perhaps will not notice so much. The logo itself does feel cleaner now that the bevel has been removed, but could this be argued too simplistic? Eddie Kessler of Google (2013) stated in their official blog that they have also updated the colour palette and the letter forms, but these are very subtle differences indeed; the relationship between the first 'G' and 'o' does seem still to be quite awkward, but as ever this logo is as much about the negative space as it ...