My friends, the action has moved

No, of course Imagery's development ain't dead. It has only appeared so because it's new reincarnation, Domburi, is undergoing labor pains. Yes, I'm starting afresh, new name, new domain, new engine. After all, Imagery was always meant as a mere proof-of-concept and it was only with its onslaught reception that I realized I was on to something.

I detail it all in a recent (long) post, Road Map, on my personal blog. The scheduled there hasn't been strictly adhered to, but it still serves as a good glimpse of what's to come. Among other things it means that this (extremely) short-lived, malnourished blog ends prematurely as of this post, but to make up for your visit I will let you on to the scoop that Domburi's current working version (not online yet!) is finally IE 6+ (and Opera 9!) compatible, that it allows you to choose between Google, Yahoo!, Flickr or stock.xchng, is heart-breakingly gorgeous and contains so many improvements Imagery looks clunky and amateurish (it was!), and that it'll set a new standard in web interfaces. Really.

Thanks for dropping by and hope to see you around Septemerish at Domburi.

Bravado Quotes & Sample Searches

I just added more pretentious quotes and showcasing searches to Imagery's front page. If you have another quote on interfaces you love, or think of a good search query to showcase Imagery (and correct my male-bias), please let me hear it.

"The interface is the software."

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"Our interfaces are stories we tell ourselves to ward off the senselessness, memory palaces built out of silicon and light." [Far and away my favorite!]

"Steven Johnson, Interface Culture, p242

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"It's the interface, stupid."

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"The interface came into the world under the cloak of efficiency,and it is now emerging—chrysalis-style—as a genuine art form."

"Steven Johnson, Interface Culture, p242

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"We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form—perhaps the art form of the next century."

"Steven Johnson, Interface Culture, p213

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"If the visual task is contrast, comparison, and choice—as so often it is—then the more relevant information within eyespan, the better.Vacant, low-density displays, the dreaded posterization of data spread over pages and pages, require viewers to rely on visual memory—a weak skill—to make a contrast, a comparison, a choice." [This one's long but surprisingly relevant.]

"Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information, p. 50

July24 Update:

People who get hooked on computers.. don't become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they're junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture, p95

Image search is Google's most popular service past search itself

With 9.54% of all visits to Google domains, Google Image search is Goog's most popular service past search itself (that has a whopping 79.98%—it's still all about search for these guys); GMail ranks third with 5.51%.

This is according to Google Properties - Understanding the Breakdown a recent post by Hitwise, an internet-usage analysis firm. Since they started reporting on Google in 2003, Google Images has remained the most popular subdomain past the main Google URL, and image searching itself has grown in overall market share, increasing from .32% of all Internet visits in December 04 to .48% for the week ending May 14, 2006.

When I embarked on Imagery I had no idea about any of this and it makes for a shocking discovery. I always thought of image search as a quaint forgotten feature, which as far as supply goes it is, but its demand is breathtaking. I obviously had no idea what I was getting into, I'm glad.

The weird future of image searching

Wired News: A new brain-computer-interface technology could turn our brains into automatic image-identifying machines that operate faster than human consciousness.

Google Images new layout

As I explain in Imagery's about page, "I started thinking on the project soon after getting a 23 inches monitor and getting irritated by all the space that was being wasted when googling for images." Recently (I'm not sure of the exact date but it can't be more than a month), Google finally upgraded its image searching layout engine. It now uses javascript to place the images liquidly and to (slightly) better apportion screen real-state.

I don't have a screenshot of the old Google Image Search (funny how memoryless the web is as a medium) so I'll use a screenshot of how the current Yahoo Image Search (which still wastes space grandiously, à la old-fashioned Google) looks in my monitor, to contrast it with the new Google Image Search interface. For good (self-promoting) measure, I also throwed in a screenshot of Imagery, which easily displays 80 thumbnails (4 times as more as Google or Yahoo) in the same space.



Anyway, slight though it is, it's a change that does improve user experience noticeably and I'm all nervous and jittery. There's no such thing as a static target.

In the beginning...

...was this post.