Bless you, sir. I can now open 1kb JPEGs in under 1 minute. (The short of it: if you have a slew of remote network printers mapped, Adobe Photoshop seems to want to query them all every time you open a file. Blow them all away and it will be good as new.)
Thomas Joos has collected everything you’ll need to design an iPhone app. Great, comprehensive resource.
We just won a rather prestigious “Stevie” award from the American Business Association for NikonUSA.com! I’ll be adding “award-winning developer” to the site sometime very soon. Congrats everyone involved for some fine work! I’ll have photos and such in a follow-up soon.
What a cool application! Moodstream lets you create and save a multimedia “moodboard” based on criteria you choose via dragging around some sliders at left. You wind up with a multimedia show from which you can select and capture different pieces of media.
This makes me wonder how they associate the metadata you’re selecting against with these pieces and how do they decide just how much that metadata applies? For example, if I crank down the “sad” slider, how does the application know that a video clip is more (or less) sad than any other piece in the repository? Is it weighted? Tagged? Do they let users themselves decide by seeing how many “sad” moodboards attract a certain image or by letting them rate how “sad” an image is somewhere else? (Or, maybe more “sad” just means fewer and fewer “happy” images appear in the rotation.)
One of the cooler apps I’ve seen in a while and an excellent way of promoting people to buy your stock media by bubbling up clips that they may not ordinarily find through an innovative way of filtering.
Thanks to the always-spectacular Information Aesthetics blog for digging this up.
Tags: design, moodboard, getty, multimedia, flash
Published over on Molecular Voices and mirrored here.
If you’re like me, you remember when (Hot)Wired’s Webmonkey was the source for tutorials, articles, and ideas on building the web. Ah, the good old days of the late-ish 90s when you had to learn why your <marquee> tag wasn’t scrolling, then visited a site like Webmonkey and learned that you shouldn’t be using <marquee> in the first place. (Before web standards were even conceived, places like Webmonkey and even eVolt started the push.)
Good news then! Conde Nast/Wired.com’s brought Webmonkey back, redesigned it, and wiki-fied it.
Why should you care? Though the content skews towards the basics, it’s still a good place to get up to speed on some stuff you might not know, learn new a few new tricks, and, most importantly, share your knowledge a bit. Here’s a place to put your gigantic wealth of knowledge for the benefit of all web-development kind: you were a kid just starting out once, and you have to remember that, without resources like these, you would never be where you are today.
Plus, they still have the logo of the monkey with the wrench (one of the classic emblems of Web 0.5). Welcome back, old friend!
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, but was waiting on a couple post-launch releases that added some “extras” that I liked.
NikonUSA.com was re-designed and re-built by my company, Molecular. We launched in late February and this was a total overhaul: new CMS (Interwoven LiveSite/TeamSite), new design, and plenty of custom code. I built the entire front-end here, from the overall architecture to writing XSL to build HTML to build pages.
There’s lots and lots of custom stuff I wrote from “Quick View” overlays to DOM stylesheet manipulations, and plenty of YUI, awesomebox, and yCarousel to go around, too.
Cool stuff to look for:
I’m most proud of being able to wrangle some nice, semantic HTML in there. The “AJAX” features feel natural, too, something I always like to do in an app: the lightboxes and carousel presentation makes sense and feels right in context; it doesn’t feel “bolted on”, like these flashy bits sometimes do. I can also now give dissertations on Flash/DHTML layering, ImageMagick, and many other cool things.
I may add a few posts describing bits and pieces of functionality in the future; the front-end here was huge, and I built a lot of stuff (and trained users, and designed pages…). But, it’s still a launch!
Tags: nikon, nikonusa, design, build, launch, javascript, html, flash
I’ve spent the bulk of the day getting CakePHP up and running on the www-side of the amodernfable.com domain. Why? Because I wanted to use a framework to handle things like integrating a database-driven portfolio with some static content and learn more PHP (and the Cake framework, which I’ve heard nothing but great things about) in the process.
The CakePHP installation here on Dreamhost was a snap. No real configuration necessary other than setting up my database config file to point to the right spot. I was expecting worse (I know I’ve seen some nasty stuff happen when I tried to get Ruby on Rails up and running before, but this was simple and easy).
Overall thoughts on the framework (from a couple hours’ use): if you’re used to Rails, you’ll know how things work or where they go right off the bat (there are some differences that will catch you, such as default layouts being enforced right off the bat, and I like the RoR approach better that way). Setting up routing was a bit easier than my last Rails attempt. Documentation is easy to find with the right Google search. My object oriented PHP is a bit on the slim side, but, when you’ve programmed enough, PHP is a quick learn; hopefully, the controllers and models will give me more experience there.
It’s nice to have a framework in place to speed things up. Also, I’ve built in Cushy CMS support right into my views, which should make it a snap to update things. I really dig Cushy for doing one thing (managing small blocks of content) very well. Let’s see how well it plays with Cake. (And, there’s two plugs in a single post!)
an online interface that allows the browsing & skimming of magazines by a Google maps like interface. pictures, articles & spreads are charted as maps, with the well-known navigation controls on the left top hand side.
reading magazines as Google maps - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics
The crazy thing is, it feels like a natural way to "read" on the web. It’s kind of like PDF, but the zooming + tiling makes it feel better.
Wow. Must-pass-along. Probably the most creative/artistic/pure awesome piece of art I’ve seen in a long, long time. Brian Dettmer’s insanely creative Book Autopsies via 37signals.
Tags: art
The hack Skip Intro was the perfect commentary on Flash madness. Set to an oh-so-current musical score and using all the best of Flash’s moving and shaking features, Skip Intro danced itself into user experience fame by throwing back the curtain on the true perceptions of the Flash site intro.
adaptive path » blog » Kate Rutter » Happy birthday, Skip Intro
Well, at least "skip intro" is now firmly ingrained in web culture. Unfortunately, so are the "do-nothing" puff pieces.
