After a long fight that started when I handled the Nikon D90 Digital SLR camera at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October I finally lost my battle against the upgrade bug and bought one to replace my 2 year old Nikon D80. I had been on the fence about the upgrade being worth it. I knew the D90 would be a great camera, but my D80 doesn’t yet feel like yesterday’s technology and I wasn’t convinced the newer body given my expectedly light use of big bang features like video would pay off for me.
Sometime in the last couple weeks I started noticing that my browser would hang while loading some Flash content, and since I’ve been too busy to diagnose the error1 or even just to reinstall the Flash player I’ve been surfing with Flash disabled via the built in Flash block feature in Camino.
A funny thing happened between noticing sites loading faster and lots of ads missing — prompted by the sight of the Razorfish redesign I noticed how many web development agencies had sites that were just big empty flash movies and thus all looked the same. Nothing but a big empty browser window, with a big “F” or play button, and sometimes a background color other then black.
Clockwise from top left: Razorfish, R/GA, Schematic, WDDG, Organic, The Chopping Block, EVB, Big Spaceship — all looking nearly identical.
I’ll again be attending the Future of Web Design conference in NYC tomorrow [after running out to vote] and as usual I’ll have the camera in tow. If you see me, say hi.
