Bruno Abrantes

Shelfari is a website for people who like to read. Put simply, you can create a virtual shelf containing all the books you’ve read, are currently reading and wish to read in the future. You can then share that with your friends, or maybe just jot down that perfect Christmas wish-list (I know my list is always chock full of books).

The concept may not sound all that innovative, and it really isn’t. Shelfari’s design is, though. Clean, crisp Web 2.0 looks combine perfectly with Wood or Mahogany textures reminiscent from that old study your grandfather used to spend whole afternoons reading, and the virtual bookshelf feature is really well implemented. No Flash here, it’s all CSS and Javascript under that beautiful hood. They also let you customize your shelf as a widget so you can include it on your blog or page. Visit the site, fall in love with it, and as long as you’re there, check out my profile.

A collection of videos and slideshow presentations from this year’s FOWA is online here. FOWA is a conference about, well, the future of web applications. Quite an interesting read, if you’re into this sort of thing.

Since at least the birth of the graphical web browser, we’ve been used to read webpages vertically, from top to bottom. This has become such a given that it actually feels awkward to scroll horizontally in almost every app (web or desktop) I can remember. Point nr. 3 of this article by Mr. Jakob Nielsen (an article which, let’s face it, I would have never have found if it weren’t for Google) actually states that horizontal web-design is a mistake. But this was written in 2002. (…) more after the jump ›