Archive.
Sunday, December 31, 2000 Link
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Insert obligatory new year's message here.
Friday, December 29, 2000 Link
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At long last, Howie unveils his heartfelt obsession with vintage decorator vinyl products. Now presenting, the one and only Blue Ramona. Sometimes I feel so proud to host this site. Sniff.
Useful "Page Not Found" Error Pages
If you're even the slightest bit concerned about the experience viewers have when visiting your humble excuse for a site, take heed. The last thing some poor, unsuspecting sod should ever see is a 404 message. No matter how careful you've been to redirect obsolete pages, support ancient, if not quirky, browser behaviour, and purge the residual linkrot from the dwindling ranks of the search engine elite, somebody somewhere will end up having a keyboard seizure and type a creatively obtuse and completely invalid path to your site. Every web server in existence has some means to allow customization of the humble "file not found" error message. Why some sites still insist on returning generic error pages is beyond me. How hard is it to add a link back to your home page or at the very least a freaking email address so the user, who is now probably now in some state of wtf, can contact you regarding the spurious, accidental message they have just witnessed? Looking for prime-time examples of this inconsiderate technical oversight in action? Try CNN, Hewlett-Packard, and FedEx for starters. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
User-Unfriendly
This article wouldn't be nearly as funny if it wasn't such a painfully accurate assessment of the current state of software and hardware design. Technology breeds complexity. Convergence breeds complexity. Complexity breeds complexity. Hell, even an attempted grasp at the promise of simplicity through disassociating yourself from all of this technology, convergence and complexity breeds complexity. Have you even tried spending a day without using any technology whatsoever? Did you life get simpler? Probably not initially. Via svn
Thursday, December 28, 2000 Link
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Warning. This is a blatant product plug. My favourite geek gadget gift this Christmas was the SwissTech MicroPlus super rugged, hardened steel, black oxide finish pocket tool. This isn't just some wannabe Leatherman that's been left out in the rain. It's a beautifully engineered chunk of precision machined, miniaturized hardware sweetness you can take (and hide) anywhere. Thank you for your attention. This concludes our presentation of the blatant product plug. Please enjoy the rest of the blog a your leisure.
Wednesday, December 27, 2000 Link
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Cool things in small packages. My five year old daughter showed me a keyboard shortcut the other day that I didn't know existed. In the Desktop Patterns control panel, you can use the left and right arrow keys to scroll through the patterns. For all you diehard nomenclature precisionists out there, we were using System 7.5.3 at the time. This shortcut also seems to work while cruising through your theme settings in the Appearance control panel under Mac OS 8 and above.
What's ahead for OS X?
Stephen Beale swings back and forth on the fence while diligently asking a bunch of questions that really need to have answers. With Apple so teasingly close to releasing a decent, shippable version of OS X, why does it still seem so far away?
Tuesday, December 26, 2000 Link
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In writing for Time Digital, Charles Herold professes that he is "a little annoyed that Microsoft is making better software for the Mac than for Windows". Part of me wants to jump up on my desk and do a little "I told you so" dance. The other part of me slides into a sullen state of "remember the pain and suffering when..." as ghostly, translucent images from Word 6 and MS Mail screens silently appear in my peripheral view.
This was sent to me a couple of weeks ago, but a thought is was worth sharing. A residual bit of kiosk-fermented travel commentary from Jon:"So ironic, isn't it, that just as the average browser screen size goes up to 800x600 (and we change the EyeWire site), we are faced with the explosive growth of cell phone- and PDA-based browsers! Not to mention free internet services like this one, with 40% of its 800x600 screen filled up with ads and AOL-type "navigation" elements. I took a picture for you. I think it leaves the browser window, oh, about 600x480 pixels..."
I love it when an experience with technology leaves the user in a muddled state consisting of both a sense of progress and regress at the same time. Let's use the lower prices of larger format displays to our advantage and eat up the additional screen area with superfluous ad-candy. Let's pump a bunch of assumptive guess-work into the feature set for next iteration of our software, and then change the all the functions and commands that we know our customers already use. Let's implement those features using the most gaseous code-bloat imaginable so that the new version of our software runs slower than the previous release, even on a faster processor. Becoming a Luddite looks awful attractive sometimes.
Sunday, December 24, 2000 Link
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Christmas eve day was a long, trying desparately to keep busy sort of day when I was a kid. It's an even longer, trying desparately to keep busy sort of day now. In an hour or so, our house will be full of family and friends, and the part of the day that we have been waiting patiently for will have arrived. My two daughters are so excited right about now, that I swear they're both about to wet their pants. When you're a kid, this is a great feeling to have. When you're a parent, you pray that the description remains metaphorical. If you happen to celebrate something around this time of year (or even of you don't), have a extremely happy whatever it is. We'll chat on boxing day.
Saturday, December 23, 2000 Link
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Ten Passed Technologies
Elegant, simple, and disappearing. Of the ten technologies and products mentioned in this article, I have five of them stored somewhere in the recesses of my garage. I grew up using both an Amiga and a slide rule (occasionally, at the same time). And be honest now, what eBay-frequenting, technology craphound wouldn't want to install a jiggy little pneumatically driven messaging system in their house? Forget the notes on the refrigerator, just send stuff to the kids through the tube. Laundry. Toys. Food. Homework assignments. Small pets...
Friday, December 22, 2000 Link
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My nana is in town and that means one thing. Cabbage rolls.
Indulge me momentarily while I describe the day before Christmas vacation. Poured cup of coffee. Sent out updates to a pair of thousand name mailing lists. Created a framework of graphics for a feature article to be published in January. Added substantial amount of Bailey's to aforementioned cup of coffee. Posted the winners of the design contest. Built and rolled out a page to support a new product line being introduced. Compiled a spreadsheet full of domain name transfers and mail exchange pointers for the unix boys downstairs. Documented two cases of products being advertised in the catalog but not available on the web site. Finished drinking cold cup of coffee. Hassled our tech services admin about some server redirects that were supposed to be in place last week. Eliminated a crapload of pointless email fluff. Somehow managed to pinch out several dozen other minor page revisions. And finally backed up 20 gig worth of data from my workstation. And now, with any luck at all, I can relax for an entire week.
Wednesday, December 20, 2000 Link
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I haven't had a beard for eighteen months or so and I'm really starting to feel the need to update my photo on this site. Or maybe just replace it with a pixelated animation of some sort. Calling waferbaby! Would you be willing to do the honors? You know, it never hurts to ask.
A kind viewer submitted yet another spiral logo for my collection today. In the spotlight is the freshly rejigged identity entity from the dogpile.com search engine. I was immediately broadsided by its eerie resemblance to the late pets.com logo and its swirling paw print motif. Dogpile had been using a spiral in its previous logonic incarnation, but up until the recent self-detonated implosion of pets.com, it wasn't augmented with those cute little puppy toes. My guess is that the folks at Dogpile assumed that nobody at what was left of pets.com would notice if they borrowed that particular iteration of corporate trade dress because of the preoccupation with trying to liquidate all those stupid sock puppets. On a related note, when did petsmart.com pick up the pets.com domain?
I hate it when this happens.
Tuesday, December 19, 2000 Link
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Is Apple Falling?
Crap. Hold on to your hats kids, here we go again...
Fontly Speaking
Sometimes satire is more effective when you can't tell whether it's actually satire or just hyper-realistic depiction. If this article had appeared on creativepro.com instead of on The Onion, it probably would have been tossed off as just another chunk of flawed and biased editorial akin to any one of dozens of flatulent John C. Dvorak columns. What's truly sobering about this is that we've heard most of it in person. Thanks to Danyon for forwarded this and deftly pointing out that "...it's funny because it's us."
Monday, December 18, 2000 Link
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I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has attended a CHI conference in the past couple of years. The next one takes place in Seattle this coming March, and any feedback would be appreciated.
Wired magazine gets its typographic rocks off using a liberal dose of Helvetica, the satanic sans serif, in the January design issue. And with the exhaustively accurate timing of a fine Swiss timepiece, Andy Crewdson offers a possible explaination.
This morning, Matt asked the world whether squiggles are going to become the new swoosh. Personally, I believe the trend is leaning towards dots, dots, dots, dots, dots, dots, and more dots becoming the new spiral. But then again, I'm biased.
Today's web production adventure - a convoluted ballet of file format manipulation and presentation. Imagine if you will, a Java applet. Now imagine having the opportunity selling said Java applet as a downloadable product on a web site. Given this scenario, it would make some amount of sense to allow a potential customer to preview an approximation what the aforementioned Java applet looks like prior to the transaction. Since we can't assume that the customer has Java running, or that it is properly installed within their browsing environment, an appropriate method of displaying animation or synthesized interactivity provided by the applet would be using a gif file. I realize that if a customer can't display Java applets in their browser, they're probably not going to be buying more of them... but that's beside the point.
Start the dance.
Open a local html document containing an applet using Internet Explorer. Stare at the blank page for a while and then realize that you don't have Java installed. (See previous paragraph.) Slap hand against forehead. Download the latest incarnation of Mac OS Runtime for Java, mount the disk image, and install. Open a local html document containing an applet using Internet Explorer. Create an image sequence of the running applet using SnapzPro that spits out an uncompressed QuickTime movie of a specific section of the screen. Open the movie in Movie Player and export all of the frames to individual tiff files. Manually combine the tiff files into a single layered Photoshop file. Rest head in hands momentarily. Notice that the layers in the Photoshop file were combined in the wrong order. Reorder layers. Create animation frames from the layers using ImageReady. Resize, set frame timing, optimize, and save as gif. Repeat sequence twenty-four times. Sob quietly.
Saturday, December 16, 2000 Link
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My friend Jon has a particular way with words, and not just because he's a writer and an editor by trade. He chooses what he writes carefully, and I am sure he agonizes over the syntactical and lexemic subtleties of nearly everything that casts a trail of graphite across paper. The more I am exposed to it, the more I appreciate the time he takes to think about the details. For example, rather than call the permanent links in his blog the obvious permalinks, Jon calls them eternalinks. Either way, it's incredibly wishful thinking.
Friday, December 15, 2000 Link
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Big surprise. The Los Angeles Times would like to announce that the Mac version of Netscape 6 is laden with design flaws. The short story? They say don't bother with it. I say why not? People are using it. People will upgrade to it. Keep it. Test with it. Just make sure that you have another browser around in case you actually want to get some work done. Via MacCentral
Thursday, December 14, 2000 Link
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It must be the season. Rachel bought everyone in our department pet gifts today. Not gifts of pets. Gifts for pets. Sheldon got bone-shaped doggie snacks for Dex, Howie got some sort of strangely configured canine-themed chew toy to throw at his cats after they puke on the floor, and my jar full of stickbugs were the proud recipients of an entire head of presumably-organic iceberg lettuce. Too kind. Too kind.
BBEdit 6.0.2 Update
There's something truly comforting, yet genetically worrisome about the release of a new update to a piece of favourite software. Especially when it's another massive dot revision that takes the form of nearly six pages worth of anally documented changes, tweaks, and bug squishings. On one hand, you're positively vibrating from the adrenalin pumped into your pallid, code-numbed system by the prospect of finding a wonderful new preference to set or superfluous option to modify. Oscillating up the other side of the parabola, you can't help but wonder what serious defects the manufacturer has just fixed that may render all of last months code unusable. Don't panic. Just take comfort in the fact that the entities floater is now sortable and opening recent files via ftp won't flurb the password stored in the keychain.
Wednesday, December 13, 2000 Link
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Sorry. Blog all sold out today. Come back tomorrow.
Tuesday, December 12, 2000 Link
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Hats off to Danyon for pointing out that if you mixed together the yellow and blue from the Copyleft GNU General Public License t-shirt I wore today, you'd probably get same dark green as my Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops. It's not as if I have the full complement of Pantone Textile Color Swatch Files at my disposal when I get dressed this morning. Fashion serendipity dictates my wardrobe, my friend. Fashion serendipity.
Monday, December 11, 2000 Link
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MRAM To Allow Laptops To Sleep For Years
This is sort of like that episode of ST:TNG when Scotty suspended himself inside the transporter of a ship that had crashed into the surface of a Dyson Sphere. Or, maybe not. I seem to recall that his boot up time was significantly longer than instantaneous.
Minimizing 404 Not Found Errors
Step 1: Identify and fix incorrect and outdated links on your pages. Well, no shit. I cringe just thinking of how many gainfully employed, self-proclaimed web developers will read this article and actually come away from it learning something. Via LucDesk
Fan mail, fresh from the inbox:"Hey, r u the guy that i saw in the front page at splorp.com living from the grantcam? Cool though too slow."
I've always had a bit of trouble describing why I have a webcam, but I think this e-mail help nail it down. I'm "living" from the grantcam, that's what it is. But jeeze louise... too slow? What on this big blue marble do people expect from a nine year old Mac and a serial camera anyway? I guess it's time to give in and order up a family-size bucket of streaming content delivery services from the neighbourhood take out joint.
Saturday, December 09, 2000 Link
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Taking our annual family trek to the local garden center (inexplicably spelled Garden Sentre on the four story signage outside the building) to purchase the official Christmas timber is fun. Hearing our kids sing songs they've never heard before while hanging every last ornament, regardless of condition or æsthetic, on the now-thawed tree is fun. Sitting in the dark watching the lights sporadically blink, reflecting every which way on the stippled ceiling is fun. Now let me tell you what's not fun... sorting through hundreds of randomly named thumbnail images, attempting without much success to match them up their source files - source files that follow an equally random naming convention - so that the entire mess can somehow be manipulated into a downloadable product form and loaded onto a web site, sometime before the holidays mercifully take me away from the glamour of it all.
Friday, December 08, 2000 Link
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Oh my goodness, I think I may have actually posted something to my blog using the wireless edition of Blogger and my Newton.
Thursday, December 07, 2000 Link
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Flummoxed by the current state of web standards? Does talk of cross browser compatibility put your colon in a clamp? Relax. Like a reliable old country doctor, the wrench ape has just punched up a tidy overview of XHTML that will put a hot iron to your furrowed brow. Take two quoted attribute arguments and call me in the morning.
It's not enough that we find it necessary to comment on other people's commentary in your own blog. Why not let complete strangers comment on your comments on other people's commentary? Why not indeed? BlogVoices is a free discussion-like commenting system that you can slap into an existing Blogger-powered blog like a new set of Pants Savers. A little template edit here, a little JavaScript tweakage there, and you can easily satisfy your need to feed the perpetual textual machine.
Wednesday, December 06, 2000 Link
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Designing Web 3D Interfaces This is just wrong. Please make it stop.
Tuesday, December 05, 2000 Link
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The Foibles of Font Substitution
Nice ligs. Shame about the face. Remember when your original LaserWriter couldn't print using more than two or three different fonts at a time without hacking up a big old PostScript limitcheck hairball and defaulting your entire single-page document to Courier? Now those were the days.
Undoing The Mac OS Facelift
It can't possibly take anyone by surprise that people are trying to make Mac OS X more Mac OS-like. I used to run extensions under System 7 to make it look like System 6. I couldn't see the wonderful utility of those new-fangled disclosure triangles, because Apple decided to change the pristine, unichromatic look and feel of the windows into some sort of grayscale monstrosity. I got over it. I deliberately avoided Mac OS 8 for nearly two years before finally admitting that the Platinum scheme and its subtle dimensionalism wasn't so bad, and maybe I could use some of those new whosits and whatsits under the hood. I got over it again. The leap to Mac OS X is a larger one, regardless of the Aquatic upolstery. Through all the other iterations of the OS, the icons were always where you left them. Some things are meant to stay as they are. Others are destined to change. Give us stability, concurrancy, protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and a kick-ass imaging engine. But leave the trash can alone, darn it all.
Monday, December 04, 2000 Link
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The ridiculously indispensible FinderPop has been recently dot versioned and is now resting comfortably. If you have never used FinderPop, you should. If you use it, but have never registered, you should. Ding dang it anyway, go buy Turly a Beamish, feel good about yourself, and pop those contextual menus like they've never been popped before. I'm going to. Just watch me.
Help me out with something. Let's say a hypothetical web site uses a series of static, server-side include files to define portions of a hypothetical user interface. The elements that are created using the hypothetical include files are common across both dynamically-generated pages and hand-coded pages. These include files can be modified independently of any database-accessing code, compiled scripts, jsp servlets, or other hypothetical equivalent. The include files do not require any direct database hooks in order to provide functionality, but can contain urls that trigger predetermined direct-actions that generate hypothetical dynamic pages. If hypothetically modifying these include files will do absolutely nothing to affect the functionality, performance, or stability of the dynamically generated components of the hypothetical web site, do the developers of the database-accessing code, compiled scripts, jsp servlets, and other hypothetical equivalents need to know when the includes are changed? In my mind, no.
I'm just thinking out loud here... hypothetically of course.
Sunday, December 03, 2000 Link
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Screen Wars
It was bound to happen. The graphical user interface has become uptown just enough to get the treatment by Newsweek. With the lightly-rumpled Steven Levy driving the tour bus, we get a quick glance up the driveways of the current profluency of next generation operating system outerwear. There's not a lot of new information to be shared here, but you've just got to love some of the freshly plopped quotes in the article. Dig these gems:"Once the Web became popular, it was clear that the old Mac style outlived its usefulness." - Jakob Nielson
Once again our man in the field Jakob is trying to explain his way out of a wet paper bag. The funny thing is, I haven't noticed any real resemblance between the Mac style and most web page design, regardless of the celebrity of the medium. In most cases the current web populi sports the combined visual attractiveness of a self-published pizza flyer and a PowerPoint presentation formatted with a default template. The web would be fundamentally better if it would just shut up for a minute and pay attention long enough to follow some of the basis tenets set down by Apple in its Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines."We wanted to go and clean up all the barnacles that have been connected to Mac, crush them and start afresh as if we were first designing this today. Getting rid of all the crud and not redoing things, but rethinking them to make them far more elegant in today's world." - Steve Jobs on Mac OS X
Aside from the forced reference to Aqua with the barnacle spin, this is more like it. Although I seriously doubt whether pulsating buttons and mighty morphin power window effects are more elegant. Arguably, they could be considered crud in their own right."Folders are ridiculous! Computers have 20 things that are important, 10 things you use often and a bunch of crap. Let's put it all on one screen - go for it!" - Steve Capps on MSN Explorer
Keeping in mind that this is probably a fairly accurate statement regarding how many items are important on our computers. All on one screen, eh? How many of us can realistically decipher, let alone interact with, more than one or two things at a time? There's a reason why you shouldn't read a newspaper while you're driving your car. Then again, that rationale doesn't explain the continued existence of America Online. And I'd pay a dollar to see Mr. Capps functionally perform even a portion of his current position within the ranks of Microsoft without folders. Analog or digital.
Friday, December 01, 2000 Link
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This past week has been fairly stupid at work, with a relaunch of one site and nearly a full redesign of another (keep an eye peeled Monday, kids). I'm sorry if I haven't acknowledged everyone's hard work over the last couple a weeks, but my brain has been full of a multitude of things too. At any rate, I want to thank the incredibly spiffy team that I work with for all the effort. Magnanimous pats on the back go to Howie, Rachel, Duane, Danyon, and Richard. If Sheldon had a web site I'd point to it right now. Too bad. Last of all, I offer a slightly sad parting wave to Mike and dog-friend Benelux. Good luck on the coast. All of this is going to be worth it. Really.
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