Heute vor 55 Jahren wurde die Gründung des „Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” abgeschlossen und obwohl man es in diesem Prozess gleich in „European Organization for Nuclear Research” umtaufte, wurde die bereits etablierte Abkürzung CERN behalten.

Und heute vor einem Jahr hatte ich die Möglichkeit eines Rundgangs durch diese großartige Forschungseinrichtung bei Genf. Hier ein paar Eindrücke davon. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag CERN!

Beschleunigte Teilchen

Der Large Hadron Collider (LHC) war zu diesem Zeitpunkt leider nicht mehr für die Öffentlichkeit zugänglich, immerhin konnte ich mir aber unter anderem den Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) ansehen. Dieser ist die erste Station in einer Kette von Teilchenbeschleunigern an deren Ende bei richtiger Weichenstellung der LHC steht, wo die Partikel dann mit annähernder Lichtgeschwindigkeit ihre Runden drehen, nur um dann aufeinanderzuprallen und Wissenschaftlerherzen höher schlagen zu lassen.

Und wo Forscher auf die noch fehlenden Seiten vom Bauplan des Universums hoffen, sehen Pessimisten an allen Ecken erdverschlingende schwarze Löcher. „Alles Unfug.”, versicherte man uns, „Die Prozesse, die im LHC herbeigeführt werden, kommen in der Natur ständig vor.” Und wer sich immer noch nicht sicher fühlt, kann ja immer wieder einen Blick auf HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com werfen. ;-)

Where the Web was born

Und was wäre ein CERN-Besuch ohne einen kurzen Blick in die Ausstellungsräume zu riskieren, wo der Computer zur Schau gestellt wird, der die Welt verändern sollte. Richtig, die Rede ist vom NeXTcube-Rechner von Tim Berners-Lee, der darauf einfach so das World Wide Web erfunden hat (bitte nicht zu verwechseln mit dem Internet). Auf der Tastatur liegend sieht man auch seine Arbeit über „Information Management”, die dazu den Grundstein gelegt hat. Gut sichtbar ist darauf auch die Anmerkung seines Chefs „Vague but exciting…”, die quasi grünes Licht für die Weiterentwicklung bedeutete. Der Rest ist Geschichte.

Alle Bilder

The game

If you live in Austria and are a fellow citizen of the Social Web, then you probably have already heard of The Vienna Project, a LARP spy game which will take place in Vienna on 22^nd of August. Until then, interested parties have to solve a series of riddles in order to be recruited as one of 16 “agents”, who will then participate in the game with the mission to unravel the mystery of a vanished colleague.

The game is mostly organised and promoted via social networks like Twitter and Facebook by its creator Roman Mittermayr and his team, all in their free time. Although I’ve never played a single LARP game, this one kept my interest and I was looking forward to the unveiling of the official website:

I must say, while I really liked the image of the hatted agent, the website just wasn’t what I had expected. But a few minutes later, Roman twittered:

“And pls don’t destroy me on usability, design or the small font-size :) Do a new awesome design for free and I’ll make you god for a day.”

Having had a few hours on my hands, I didn’t need to be told twice.

The inspiration

To get myself into the right mood, I compiled a playlist of a few suitable film scores and started to scribble.

Being a huge fan of spy movies (especially those with Bond, James Bond), I wrote down a few attributes I like about them in particular: Secrecy, puzzles, suspense, action, deception, … Now I had to decide which ones I could incorporate into the design within the limited time at my disposal.

The design

I wanted to give the viewers the feeling of already being part of the game, so I created a scene, where they slip into the role of an agent who’s browsing through confidental documents in darkness, using a flashlight. To add atmosphere, the light can be moved with the mouse on the start page.

The Austrian passport was added as tribute to another characteristic I love about spy movies: The numerous locations shown. Bond, for example, travels halfway across the world in the course of a single mission.

The resources

Providing a layout for free is one thing, having to pay for the necessary graphical material out of your own pocket is another. ;-) Luckily, SXC proved to be a valuable resource for royalty-free photos for this project. A big thank you to:

• slafko for the folder.
• rodnem for the white paper.
• Dippes for the paper with lines.
• Scyza for the Polaroid picture.
• alaahammou for the light effect (used as reflection on the iPhone).

For the moving flashlight on the start page, I used a PNG image, a few lines of JavaScript (on top of jQuery) and CSS. No Flash.

The reactions

I received a lot of positive feedback on the redesign like the one above. Thank you!!

I know, it’s a bit early to to pit the iPhone against the Prē, since the latter hasn’t even come out yet. But having been a Palm user for years, I was very excited to learn about the Prē, which could be the first real competitor to the iPhone. Let’s compare the two devices.

Comparison table

	Apple iPhone 3G	Palm Prē
Size (w × h × d)	62.1mm × 115.5mm × 12.3mm (2.4 inches × 4.5 inches × 0.48 inch)	59.5mm × 100.5mm × 16.95mm (2.3 inches × 3.9 inches × 0.67 inches)
Weight	133g (4.7 ounces)	135g (4.76 ounces)
Display	3.5 inches 320 x 480 pixels 16,7 m. colours	3.1 inches 320 x 480 pixels 16,7 m. colours
Multitouch support
Physical keyboard
Operating system	Mac OS X for iPhone	webOS
3G
EVDO
GPS
WLAN (WiFi)	802.11b/g	802.11b/g
Digital Camera	2.0 megapixels	3.0 megapixels
Camera flash		LED flash
Memory	8GB/16GB	8GB
USB mass storage support
Removable battery
Modem use
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 2.0, EDR	Bluetooth 2.1, EDR, A2DP stereo
Audio formats	AAC, Protected AAC MP3, MP3 VBR Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4) Apple Lossless AIFF WAV	MP3 AAC AAC+ AMR QCELP WAV
Video formats	MPEG-4 H.264	MPEG-4 H.263 H.264
Connectors	3.5mm stereo headphone jack 30-pin dock connector	3.5mm stereo headphone jack MicroUSB with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
Sensors	Accelerometer Proximity Ambient light	Accelerometer Proximity Ambient light
Data sources	apple.com	palm.com

Openness

Palm adopted a far more user friendly and less industry-imposed approach than Apple:

• USB mass storage (disk mode) support
• Bluetooth with A2DP stereo standard support
• Modem use
• Removable battery
• MicroUSB connector

Palm seem to have listened, because these features are among the most longed-for by iPhone users.

The keyboard

The physical keyboard of the Prē could be a selling point for people who are used to their Treo or Blackberry keyboards but in my opinion it can’t keep up with the virtual keyboard of the iPhone in terms of universal applicability and, of course, sexiness. Seeing the whole screen and having physical feedback while typing may be advantages of the hardware keyboard, but I don’t miss that on the iPhone.

I guess it is simply a matter of taste and I think it won’t be long until we see a successor of the Prē with a touch screen keyboard, utilising the promising Swype technology, which will hopefully also be available system-wide on the iPhone soon.

The camera

Its digital camera is a real weak point of the iPhone. It’s slow and far too sensitive to motion, most photos are blurry. The Prē features a 3 megapixel camera with a built-in LED flash which will hopefully provide for better photos. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any information indicating whether you can record films with the Prē or not.

Mac OS X vs. webOS

On the iPhone you can only run one application at a time for whatever reason, despite the multitasking-capable operating system. According to Palm, the Prē has been built with multitasking in mind. You can leave applications open, switch between them and even receive notifications from them when they are in the background, without distracting you too much from your current task.

Furthermore, the Prē promises to integrate the web wherever possible. For instance: The contact list not only shows you your locally stored contacts, but also the ones from Facebook, GMail and the like and combines the duplicates. Nice!

Above all, the Prē supports copy & paste. Yay! ;-)

iPhone SDK vs. Palm Mojo SDK

Only a few details have been released on the Palm Developer Network about their new software development kid named ”Mojo”:

Palm webOS applications are easy to write using Mojo, a new application framework based on the HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript standards that web developers already know and love. WebOS applications are installed and run directly on the device at native speed and have access to a wide range of device services.

Being able to develop applications for the Pre with my everyday means sounds exciting and has the potential of attracting hundreds of thousands other web developers. But Palm has yet to sell a decent number of their device to really be interesting to them, which will not be an easy task.

Conclusion

The Prē promises to be an exciting device and has the potential of being a serious competitor to the iPhone. If it proves to be as good as Palm advertise, I definitely will consider trading my iPhone for it. But it also remains to be seen, how Apple react to the Prē. At best, they will finally remove those silly restrictions from the iPhone and add features like the USB mass storage support.

More about the Palm Prē

• Official product site at palm.com
  
• ”Palm Pre overview and impressions from CES” at palminfocenter.com
• ”Palm Prē multitasking” and the ”Palm App Catalog” at Mashable
  
• ”In a nutshell: Palm Prē vs. iPhone vs. G1” at Gizmodo
• ”Hands on with the Palm Prē” at MobileCrunch
• „Palm Prē/webOS launch roundup” at Engadget

One thing I love about the Internet is that it encourages and facilitates creativity because of the quick and easy way to create, publish and assimilate ideas. In the last weeks, there was one source of inspiration like few others: the presidential election in the United States. Especially the almost perfect campaign of Barack Obama, who convinced more than 60 million people to vote for him and therefore made history.

Many designers and artists helped him to achieve his goal by creating tons of images, wallpapers and posters, which spread like wildfire on the Web. And even though the whole hoopla verges on a personality cult, its richness and diversity is really impressive.

Here are just a few examples:

via c3o’s soup

via fubiz.net

via notcot.com

via robotwalrus.com

by tsevis via flickr

Dieses Video erklärt es anhand einer sommerlichen Analogie:

(via Wissen belastet)

So, jetzt hab’ ich Lust auf ein Twinni! ;-)