Google X Reveals Drone Testing

 News recently broke that Google X (a facility dedicated to technological advancements) have been testing drones as a part of Project Wing. Drones are essentially "flying robot planes" that deliver goods by air. Google X have not been permitted to test on US soil, so the testing has taken place in Queensland Australia. Google X states that the long term purpose of these drones would be to provide immediate relief to people in the event of a natural disaster. The Federal Aviation Administration has kept tight reigns commercial drone use, but is slowly and carefully, looking to change.

   Using drones to provide relief to victims of natural disaster, or residents in rural areas sounds great, but this is not the first thought that comes to mind to most Americans. Most people are excited over the idea of ordering a pizza, or something from Amazon, and receiving it immediately. Amazon has also been extensively working on their own drone delivery service, Amazon Prime Air. Although the potential cost savings and job opportunities would be great, questions about the weather and safety regulation can't help but arise. It will be a few more years before "ship by drone" is the next option after "express shipping", but Google X has been developing and regulating this project for 2 years now. Instead of flying cars, we could have flying drones.

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3 Sites, Then and Now

The first image is ebay in 2001. The first distinguishable difference between the old site and the current site, is there is now no side bar. ebay used to be solely an auction site, so a list of categories were crucial. A revised list of categories now resides at the top of the site and in a drop down menu. ebay essentially kept their same color scheme and logo with a few tweaks. The code for ebay has also changed a bit. Shown below, there is a meta tag for key words. Some words have been eliminated, but the sequence of the words have also changed. Orginally "ebay"was the last key word with "auction" being the first. Now it switched around, with "ebay" as the first and auction being the "last".

ebay 2001

ebay 2014

The next site is Twitter in 2006. The layout have significantly changed along with the logo. Twitter is now recognized by just a bird. Also Twitter is now mainly concentrated on as an app. The color scheme has also gone through many shades of blue and now shows no trace of chartreuse.. The homepage of Twitter used to show recent status updates as well. I remember when twitter first came out, I wondered why anyone would join a website based on status updates, now it is one of my most used apps. The code for Twitter used to be heavily based on separate divs, but is more prominent in javascript.

            

Twitter 2014

Twitter 2006

IMDb has continued to keep up with it's usability and layout, but now adding more graphics. Photos and graphics used to take ages to load, but now with faster internet they aren't a problem. The color scheme on the 2014 site has a more polished feel to it then the other one along with a more polished logo. IMDb has relatively kept their same logo, only changing the font and size. In the code, the old site had a lot of usage with tables. almost everything was kept in tables. In the new site, they heavily use iframes, giving users easy access to movie trailers and graphics.

IMDb 2002

IMDb 2014

Using sites like Wayback Machine, or any internet archive, give designers and curious minds alike a look back into the past. Internet archives have become a "yearbook" for graphic and web design. It's interesting and somewhat self satisfying to see how far design has come. It gives a chance to laugh at the earlier stages and compare sites to where they are now.