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By Ash Pro ashpro@hotmail.com
A beautifully designed website celebrating the album of the same name by former Beatle, George Harrison, though it is "not for the faint of bandwidth", due to some graphic-heavy illustrations and plenty of soundbites. Explore the witty interpretations of the work's tracks, as you explore psychedelic landscapes, featuring George sitting alongside some friendly gnomes, and enjoying some flowering Flash drawings to the tune, "Let It Down".
A kind of higher brow, more focused "Adbusters", Hocus Focus takes on the Apple "Think Different" campaign, and re-invests the hijacked images with something closer to their original, non-corporate identity. The group reworks the ads, which feature iconic images of the likes of Gandhi, Bob Dylan and the Dalai Lama, and affixes provocative statements to encourage the viewer to "Think Different" a second time.
A fiercely repetitive sonic fire provides the soundtrack to this one-idea site, which hopes to illustrate the interconnectedness of the fluid internet. A single-action script (the piece of code that determines the animation that Flash will produce) is rendered in 10 different ways, each with a subtly different shift, creating vectorised mini-universes, which shape-shift according to the mouse movement of the visitor.
Another vital stop-off on the trail of the subgenre of organic creatures Flash design, where the clean and the slick of the screen replaces the goo and the ick of the petri dish as the growth culture solution of choice among the discerning new-wave of microbial Dr Frankensteins operating on the web. The site promises to "navigate machines through division pelagic", so keep your cyber-snorkel handy.
The latest issue of web design mag, Magnasoma, has, according to the creators, taken four months to deliver and weighs in at a hefty 5 MB, but it will be hard to be disappointed at these eye-candy hybrids of futuristic architectural monoliths and tree-like roots sprouting madly from the buildings' bottom floors. The previous three issues, "Velocity", "Tsunami" and "Retrospective" are similarly unusual and striking.
Using another city theme, always a popular one with the urban jungle kids that seem to populate the web, scrap-pile.org has had an update worth checking out. The site's creator, Richard Merwarth, has enFlashed photographic landscape elements of Boston, to create a silhouetted vision of the city, which twists and turns as you click through the map navigation system, throwing up shapely surprises along the way.
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/
Our ever-helpful friends over at Nasa tell us they created J-Track, a satellite-tracking applet, "so you could quickly and easily keep track of your favourite orbiting objects". Well, how we've ever coped for so long without it, I'll never know. But now it's here, keep in touch with where Mir, Hubble, the Shuttle and various common-or-garden weather stations are as they zoom gaily around the planet.
http://sodaplay.com/constructor/index.htm
Why should only coders get the chance to animate? The makers of SodaConstructor at SodaPlay believe playing with lifelike vector graphics is a right not a privilege, and encourage you to build spindly beasts from nodes and lines that obey the built-in gravity laws. Tricky to get the hang of at first, but lots of fun to be had for the persistent.
Way back when, some of you may remember playing Lemonade on something like a BBC Micro. That classic game involved you running a lemonade stand on a beach, and having to buy the right amount of lemons, ice and sugar, while keeping an eye on the weather to ensure there were plenty of thirsty customers. Play a basic java version of the game here.
In an example of lo-meets-hi-tec fusion, the aesthetic of Lomo photography is finding favour with the digital crowd. Check out the homepage of the International Lomo Society to find out more. It celebrates all things Lomo, including the camera itself and the striking imagery it captures. There is a large database of lomographic images and tips on how to get involved in Lomo picture-taking.
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