It’s possible to choose from a set of standard motion types like the basic ease-in and bounce or modify them to create your own. The two advantages it has over Flash’s native tweening engine are:

- It’s possible to create complex motion from just two keyframes rather than having to create multiple ones and fine tune each section of the animation

- It can export the motion envelope you’ve create to ActionScript with is a big plus for the developers.

You can download the component for free here http://laco.wz.cz/tween/

This Wednesday and Thursday, the 16th and 17th of July, we’re exhibiting as part of the West of England Design Forum Designers’ Showcase at Paintworks, Bath Road, Bristol.

We’d be really pleased if you could join us. It’s open from 10am - until 6pm Wednesday and 5pm on Thursday.

It’s exciting to be part of this celebration of the local design community. We’re one of more than 50 contributors from all over the South West, each given a blank 8’ x 4′ board, on which to display whatever we want.  Naturally, we’ve got something rather special up our sleeve, and so it will be well worth coming along to see. Drop us a line if you’re planning to come along and we’ll get some coffees in.

“Do cars have to be made out of metal?” (as a side note, did you know that if every office worker in the UK used one fewer staple per day, we’d save 120 tonnes of steel every year?) …

“Do computers need to have separate processor, monitor, speakers etc or could we throw it all into one tidy package?” …

It makes me wonder how we’ll be looking at designing and building websites, and indeed other areas of design. What paradigms are we following out of pure habit, that instead we ought to be questioning? What things are we doing just because “that’s the way we do it here”?

So, to this end, I thought some opinionated suggestion wouldn’t hurt!

It doesn’t take a particularly seismic shift in content authoring to contextualise link copy. Simply describing what will happen or where the user will end up is an easy habit to adopt. And when you consider that a well designed style sheet will quickly highlight a link at a glance, then why not take advantage with link text that is unique as well as useful. A page full of ‘click here’ does not inspire the reader.

And you don’t have to take my word for it, as Mr. Jakob Nielsen agrees in his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 (see section 2).

Further resources:
So, don’t click here, instead…

Find out more about how to use descriptive link text on www.universalusability.com and how this will also lead to Increased usability as shown on www.webcredible.co.uk

The same website also contains more information on Improving usability for screen reader users

I hope this has been useful? If you’ve any comments to add, please use the appropriately described links below..!

I cycle to the train station as part of my commute so I often want to check the weather. I may either look on my imac downstairs before bed in the evening or sometimes I may have forgotten and so I use the mobile BBC weather site on my Sony Ericsson k800i if I am upstairs already.

I often listen to music in different parts of the home as well. In the kitchen we use the iMac, in the lounge I plug my iPod into the surround sound system and elsewhere in the house I use the iPod with a set of portable battery powered speakers. (I have thought about wireless speakers but never found the reason compelling enough to justify the financial outlay).

Now there are gaps in my consumption of media. How to get a decent weather forecast wherever I am without having to boot up the iMac? How to have an alarm clock that plays more than just radio or “beep-beep”?

So along comes chumby! I will leave you to go and look at the site for more info but it is basically a clever little blob thing that does loads of stuff like show photos and get info from the Internet and play music etc. On the surface it may be a bit scary - a Linux mini computer. Not the best spec for normal people to latch onto. However, if you think of it as a media device in the home then it feels very different. Also they have done a clever thing in the aesthetic design in that it is like a little beanbag. This probably helps for all the times you will drop it but it also makes it look nice in the home - very important to my wife this bit. I can imagine it looking nice on my bedside table as it wakes me up with some rocky music and then shows me the weather report for today. I can equally imagine it in the kitchen with some recipes widget, or on top of the TV in the lounge to play music and show photos.

The other point is the price - a device like this has to be cheap otherwise you might as well buy a laptop or a big iPod.
It costs $179.95 which is great as that is only £90 by current exchange rates!!! This is less expensive than the posh remote from Logitech! What a bargain. Let’s just hope the interface isn’t horrendous!

I will leave it there but I would be interested what other people think of it. Add your comments below.