A little over a year after it was launched, Google announced that they’re pulling the plug on their Wave product – the emailing, instant messaging, and picture-sharing progeny that was suppose to change the landscape of collaborative, online content. Google Wave allowed users to communicate in real-time and share documents, videos, and re-make epic Pulp Fiction scenes. If you haven’t heard of Google Wave you’re not alone. That’s one reason Google Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Hölzle, cites for Wave’s fate:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. [Google]

Though the product itself will likely be forgotten by the time Apple launches its next iPhone model, Google Wave has truly paved the way for many of tomorrow’s web apps. The principles we’ve seen with Wave will be resurfaced and the ability to drag-and-drop files from your desktop, playback the history of document changes and show real-time, character-by-character typing is just the beginning.

And don’t worry: Google isn’t sitting on their hands with rolling out functionality that proved useful from Wave. Better spell-check and drag-and-drop have already been ported into Gmail, while improvements to real-time collaboration in Google Docs seem to be happening on a very consistent basis.

Last month, Smashing Magazine announced a CSS Design Contest encouraging designers to put their creative powers to work and publish experimental CSS3 projects. For judging, Smashing took into consideration the originality of the technique and its uniqueness. To the judges, “The idea mattered more than the execution.”

The winning entry was a colorful pie chart (swappable to pyramid format via slider) illustrating the global usage share of web browsers over the past 6 quarters. My only issue had to do with the UI: the catfish navigation — which looked almost too integrated with the design — failed to resemble any kind of traditional CTA. Not a bad thing for more savvy users, but most may not realize these are buttons that control the morphing effect of on the graph.

Take a look at some of the other winners, all of which are pleasing indications of the great things to come with the impending adoption of CSS3. Keep in mind that the following pieces of awesomeness are very experimental and may not work or look the same across different browsers.

First place: CSS3 Charts [preview]

Second place: CSS3 Rubik’s Cube [preview]

Third place: CSS3D [preview]

Fourth place: CSS3 Monster Blob [preview]

Fifth place: A Rift In Time [preview]

Click here to see even more »

I have no immediate plans to visit the UK but when I do I’ll know exactly where to go to see some of the city’s most impressive graffiti. The savvy web folks at Bristol Street Art have put together a lovely interactive map that allows users to browse locations of the city’s pieces via Google Maps.

The app also lets you to filter the results by status (active vs. buffed), time period, type and artist. For traveling artists, the app may be useful for getting a lay of the land and quickly finding work from their favorite UK artists but I am a little worried this information would give Joe Law a good idea of frequently hit walls. Not to mention giving away the geo-specific location of Bristol’s best hidden spots.

Bristol Street Art Map »

Thanks to my  unfading will to scour the internets for all of life’s happy little secrets, I’ve stumbled upon this precious Pez dispenser of wisdom.

These inspiring notions of goodwill are indeed often forgotten by those of us caught up in our high-tech, fast-paced blur of a lifestyle. Reading through these was a welcomed screeching halt to my day of email drudgery. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

http://thingsweforget.blogspot.com/

For the past 13 years, life in Great Britain has been relatively good under the rule of their self described ‘Democratic Socialist’ Labour party. A closer look uncovers some interesting bits of information. These superb infographics from the talented designers at Propspect Magazine focus on immigration, health, technology, economics, lifestyle and education and show that, while more indebted and heavier drinkers, Brits are more educated, better connected through technology and living much longer lives.

After studying these graphics and learning more than I cared to about the changes undergone in our transatlantic, first world counterparts, I found the set to be very well done. They offer subtle yet effective iconography and incorporate a monotone palette with bursts of complementary color queues that keep the data interesting, even when it was explaining numbers that didn’t jump off the page at first glance.

In case you missed the link above, you can see the goods here: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/how-britain-has-changed-since-1997/

After seeking out a number of recommendations from the seedy underbelly of Denver (my friends), I’ve finally found an artist I trust to continue with more black work up my right arm.  Who, you ask?  It’s Joanna Steele of Sol Tribe. Her black work is remarkably clean and I have a feeling she’ll be the light-handed style of artist that’ll make the fills look perfect.  On top of that, she seems to have a lovely soul and was very personable when we sat down to chat.  Sadly, I’ll be among her last clients here in Denver as she’s off to ink the lucky citizens of Oahu later this summer. Guess I’ll be visiting Jennifer’s family a lot more often than usual.

Peep some of her work below. Masterful.

The New York Times continues to impress with their ability to integrate elegant and useful tools into their ever-evolving index page. Tonight, they displayed a Twitter ticker below the featured story showing Reader’s Reactions to President Obama’s speech on the Gulf oil spill.

I find this to be a wonderful example of a traditional media company breaking away from traditional UI practices to experiment with the user behavior of their audience. I can only guess that most users visiting the index while this was rolling felt as though they had more information, from an extended source of contributors in real time. It’s a pretty amazing way to incorporate the opinions of captain random alongside the musings of rock-star, online journalists.

The times they are a-changin’.

I recently posted some thoughts on music videos that I felt went above and beyond what’s generally expected in terms of aesthetics. Here’s another I recently came across thanks to my new go-to girl on good music, Robin. Click the thumbnail to play.

The video takes advantage of trendy retro style 3D elements via Cinema 4D while the the artist, La Roux, dishes out clever, catchy lyrics against tracks for those in need of dance inspiration. The song is uber popular as of late, but I should point out that Robin first introduced me to this red-haired maven of melodies months ago. I haven’t been able to stop listening ever since.

More awesome jQuery plug-ins just keep on coming. This time I happen to come across a very handy plug-in called Cloud Zoom that rivals commercial image zoom products already standard for many tier 1 online retailers. It’s lean, mean and is impressively browser compatible.

Other useful features include: adding colored tints over the small image on hover (shown above), placing zoom position inside the smaller image (useful if you want to keep the zoom area from obscuring other content) and the ability to apply a subtle, fuzzy blur over the original while zooming.

Peep and download it here.

Need a clever way to organize and present all your popular blog tags? Follow Techi.com‘s lead and use this useful and elegantly designed Slider Navigation. You can find their implementation of SliderNav towards the bottom of their right rail.

SliderNav is a JQuery plugin that allows you to add dynamic, sliding content using a vertical navigation bar. It’s made mainly for alphabetical listings but can be used with anything, though longer words can look a bit awkward. The plugin automatically adds the navigation and sets the height for the object based on how tall the navigation is, in order to make sure users have access to the entire list. The example I’m linking to below also uses the overflow: auto; property for the actual content so you can use your mouse wheel to scroll through the content as well. (Clever)

The CSS and jQuery is surprisingly easy to understand and implement so don’t be shy and give it a whirl. Click here to view the demo and download the code.