Here’s my first official post on Molecular’s blog. Reprinted here for all my (less than 10, probably) subsrcibers.

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We all know—or at least have been told repeatedly— that we’re in a world that’s changing rapidly due to technology: while we don’t have flying cars quite yet, the ways in which we interact with the world have changed a great deal, even in the past few years.

Just how much has changed? Steve Portigal posted a link to Beloit College’s Class of 2011 Zeitgeist on his blog, and if it’s any indication, the answer is just about everything.

As of the Class of 2011, we live in a world where college students have:

• never rolled down a car window,
• always been able to slap mp3s up on MySpace or write on their friends’ Facebook walls,
• always had hi-definition television available,
• and always were able to fired of text messages back and forth.

In short, almost every interaction—designed or not—that I grew up with is a thing of the past. While growing up, I:

• always cranked down the window as fast as I could like it was some kind of game,
• never let my friends borrow any of my tapes (!) or CDs because I didn’t want them to get broken or scratched,
• never could get in any of the TV channels I wanted to watch without messing around with a set ofrabbit ears,
• and never really liked calling my friends on the phone to see if they wanted to play baseball in my backyard because you’d always get stuck with their mom or sister on the phone.

I’m not that far out of college, but I’m already far out of touch with college students. For product, service, and interaction designers like us, that’s kind of a scary challenge: we’re living in a world where the fundamental “laws” we build are thrown right out the window in a short span of years. For business owners, that’s even more daunting: how do young kids see your products and branding when they grew up in a completely different context than you did?

Here’s the real challenge for designers, developers, and business owners alike: we need to constantly and consistently keep creating new ideas, new products and services, and new ways to interact with those things we create before those old ways are already forgotten. As the Class of ‘11 can tell you, in today’s world, that’s happening faster than you think.

technorati tags:ifeelold, userexperience, ux, interactiondesign, ixd

I’ve been trying to find an open source or free Adobe Flex IDE, mainly so that I can avoid dropping hundreds of dollars on FlexBuilder. Why not just write mxml files by hand? Because I don’t know very many of the tags and I’m a sucker for code complete.

I think FlashDevelop might fit the bill nicely.

technorati tags:adobe, flex, oss, ide

via TechCrunch.

technorati tags:image, resizing, manipulation

With thumbalizr you can take screenshots of any webpage you want.Use it for your presentations, documentations, visualisations or your webpage.

thumbalizr - a website thumbnail creator

So much for the old ALT+Print Screen.

technorati tags:screenshot

I’ve been cranking out a bunch of presentations at work lately. That demands that I have a lot of stock imagery on tap. (Plain old words and bullets get boring after a while.) The best place for it? Flickr, of course.

I needed an easy way to do an advanced search that would let me fetch images open for commercial use under that Creative Commons license. So, I wrote Mozilla search plugin that accomplishes it. I creatively named it “Flickr CC+C” for “Creative Commons & Commercial.” (Choose the second one; the first one’s broken, but there’s no way to get it down.)

Technorati Tags: mozilla, search, flickr, firefox

Behold, the acts_as_enterprisey Rails plugin.

technorati tags:rubyonrails, ror

set rsCSS = db1.execute("select * from tblCSSClasses")

That line alone should gives a great peek into how that application handles Cascading Style Sheets in such a disastrous manner.

Overflowing Style Sheets - Worse Than Failure

Well, this is one of the worst disasters I’ve seen in a long, long time.

technorati tags:wtf, css

The YUI Compressor is a new JavaScript minifier. Its level of compaction is higher than the Dojo compressor, and it is as safe as JSMin. Tests on the YUI library have shown savings of about 18% compared to JSMin and 10% compared to the Dojo compressor (these respectively become 10% and 5% after HTTP compression)

Julien Lecomte’s Blog » Introducing the YUI Compressor

Saw this yesterday and should have blogged it then. If you’re not minifying or compressing your JavaScript before serving it to your users, you should be.

technorati tags:javascript, yui, compressor, minify

A really nice look at what it took to get YUI’s Rich Text Editor up and running. Good detail on the ins-and-outs of building an application like this that needs to support all major browsers.

technorati tags:yui, richtexteditor, cross-browser

This one took me a while to figure out, but here’s how to close all those NativeWindows that you’ve opened in your Adobe AIR app using HTML and JavaScript:

window.htmlControl.stage.window.close();

Wire that up to a click event on an element in your app, and you’ll be able to close the native window. window.close() only works for HTML windows, not AIR’s NativeWindows, but the Flash (Flex?) API sitting behind AIR can be used for cleaning up.