So for those who didn't know, my final project for my degree in design at University of Montreal is a website called Lovehate. In a nutshell:

Lovehate collects love and hate off the Internet and displays appreciation through time of thousands of people, places, things and events it is tracking.

I'm really excited about what's it's been showing in the last two weeks, and I wanted to share since the site hasn't gone public yet.

Global Mood

in the last 10 days

The Oscars (graph + most loved)

tonight

"I hate mondays"

in the last 10 days

"I hate my life"

in the last 10 days

"I hate Canada"

last sunday, on US-Canada final

"I hate Sidney Crosby"

last sunday, on US-Canada final

Graphs allow you to see the evolution of love and hate over time.

But Lovehate also displays what's most loved and hated (global, and by category):

(download)

Click here to download:

What_Lovehate_is_showing_so_fa.zip (271 KB)

This should all go public in a week or two.

What do you think?

I wanted to do this a few months ago.

In case you don't know what antialias is, it's that thing that makes all the text you see around here smooth. If you're on a Windows PC, chances are you don't know what I'm talking about. In fact, if you're reading this on Windows XP, you're seeing the text on the web as if it was written in Paint. Uh.

Nicolas Negroponte asked the question in Being Digital (written in 1996), p.108:
"So, why aren't all computer displays anti-aliased? The excuse given is that it takes too much computing. Ten years ago, one could accept the argument (maybe) that computer power was best spend elsewhere[...]. Unfortunately, the consumer has been trained to accept the jaggies as a given."

So. Mac OS 9 (released in 1999) didn't have antialias:

Neither did Windows XP (released in 2001):

The first time we saw antialiasing as a common, widespread UI enhancement on the Mac was with the release of Mac OS X in 2001:

The first time we saw antialiasing on Windows, it was with the release of Vista, in early 2007:

Conclusion: Windows was 6 years late on antialiasing.

I'll leave it to you to draw conclusions on wether we care or not about antialiasing. I think anyone who's serious with interface should care. Have you ever seen you personal blog/website in IE on XP? It looks horrible. Beside the fact that IE messes it all up, text is really fugly. Anti-alias really helps reading and makes text sexier.

My first posterous post!

Just coming back from a conference by @guykawasaki. Apparently he's saying all the same stuff over and over everywhere he goes but man, I wish I would have seen this earlier. Here are his the 11 tips (I might have missed one) he gave at the "inspiring innovation" conference:

1. Build what you want to use
2. Pay 0$ for tools
3. Pay 0$ for marketing
4. Suck down/accross [not up]
5. Use Twitter and Tweetmeme
6. Pay 0$ for people
7. Put everything in the cloud
8. Ship THEN test
9. Avoid venture capitalism
10. Unique vs value 2x2 graph
11. Don't let the bozos grind you down

Cool quotes I noted:

"Nobodies are the new somebodies"

"The closest thing to Twitter is the CIA"

"Perfect is the ennemy of good enough. And good enough is good enough."

"The faster you ship, the faster u make money. The only way to know what people think of your product is to give it to the users and leave them alone."