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EveryBlock adds Charlotte and Philly
Congrats to my friends at EveryBlock, who have launched a couple new cities, as well as some new functionality. Good stuff.
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An interview with Tara Hunt
My buddy Mel Kirk interviews online community guru Tara Hunt — who, for the record, I finally got to hang out with a few months ago in San Francisco and found to be downright awesome.
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Build a Custom CMS with Django: My Carson Workshop
I’ll be heading over to London, my favorite city in the world (so far, anyway), to give a full-day workshop on building a custom CMS using Django. The workshop is being put on my the awesome folks at Carsonified, and you can register right now, if you like! Having been to several Carsonified events, I can say with a great deal of certainty that no one out there runs conferences and workshops more smoothly than this crew. Should be a great day.
I will definitely blog at more length about this event in the near future, but for now, head over to the Carson Workshops site and check it out.
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Carsonified: Matt
My good friends at Carsonified are building a web app in a week, and live-blogging the process. Ryan says:
> Keir recently came up with a really fun web app idea … so the whole team is taking a week off to build it. It’s going to be called ‘Matt’ and it’ll be built in Django on a popular API, include a desktop AIR app, and will be hosted on an elastic computing cloud (probably Flexiscale, but yet to be determined).
Sounds like fun. Should be entertaining to watch the blog as they do this. Good luck, guys!
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Goin’ (back) to Kansas City
I’ll keep this one short. Michelle and I have left our digs in Seattle and are moving ourselves into an apartment in Kansas City, Missouri this afternoon. Meesh and I absolutely love Seattle, but unfortunately, there are some personal matters we must tend to back here in the Midwest. We hope to move back to Seattle just as soon as possible — but it’s hard to say when that might be. I’ll be continuing to work for Blue Flavor for the foreseeable future; I’ll just be doing so remotely.
The past year in Seattle has been perhaps the best of my life. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I love the city, all my great friends there, and my job with Blue Flavor. It’s tough to leave — but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
See you soon, Seattle.
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Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses), the Microsoft years
Even ignoring all the charitable work he’s done and focusing solely on his tenure at Microsoft, it’s hard to deny that Bill Gates has had an incredible career full of hit products. People love to make light of the misses (Vista, BOB, Windows ME, Zune) and ignore some of the truly outstanding products the company has put out under Gates’ watch (XBox, Visual Basic, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mouse, Windows Media Center). Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny his impact. So long, Bill. The industry will definitely miss you being a part on a day-to-day basis.
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NBA record five Jayhawks drafted
In last night’s NBA draft, a record-tying five players from a single school were drafted when my Kansas Jayhawks’ Brandon Rush, Darrell Arthur, Mario Chalmers, Darnell Jackson, and Sasha Kaun were all selected by the league. Compare that to North Carolina and Duke who had, um, none. Just sayin’.
The Jayhawks were promptly treated like the school slut, passed from team to team in a fury of trades. All five KU players were dealt at least once, and Arthur was traded three times!
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Authentic Jobs: UI Engineer at Apple
Sounds like a good gig for the right person!
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Mike Davidson: Enterprise CMSes vs. Blog CMSes
A good discussion ensures after Mike asks a simple question: for news organizations, which is better, a blog CMS or an enterprise CMS? My answer? They both suck.
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The Website Is Down
Hilarious video presentation by Josh Weinberg. If you’ve ever had to work in technical support, you’ll love this.
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Andy Rutledge: The Employable Web Designer
Really, really great piece by Andy on what sort of skills one needs to be a good and employable web designer in the industry today. You’ll note that Andy’s list of skills focuses on understanding the foundations of design as a craft (as well as basic communication, interaction, and business skills needed by a professional in nearly any industry), and not on individual design packages such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver. To that point, this quote at the end is particularly interesting:
> …you may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers. Take a job with a company asking for a Photoshop expert and I promise you’ll never be allowed to engage in design.
Andy might be over-exaggerating a little bit, here — I wouldn’t say every listing that mentions Photoshop and Illustrator is absolutely a bad gig — but his point is very sound. Such a mention is definitely a red flag. If you’re being hired as a designer, your employer ought to be much more interested in your ability to design than your expertise with a particular software package. And if they are more interested in your expertise with a particular software package, it’s probably because they really want you to be a Photoshop jockey, not a designer.
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Retro Gaming on real backgrounds
Awesome.
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Put the Instinct in a YouTube Clip, Sprint Will Give You $20
If you’re one of the first 1,000 people to feature a Samsung Instinct in your YouTube video, Sprint will pay for, well, about a third-tank of gas. Wow, thanks, guys.
I wonder if it would count if I featured it in a video explaining the thousand reasons why the iPhone’s UI is better than the Instinct’s?
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Ralf Herrmann: Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3
Firefox 3 gets big kudos for its incorporation of kerning and basic ligatures in the new version of the browser. However, these improvements are negated by the fact that it also enables discretionary ligatures by default, which is likely to destroy the look of pages rendered in certain typefaces.
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42 Topics: An Interview with Adrian Holovaty
A nice interview with Django co-creator and “journalism via programming” pioneer Adrian Holovaty. If you’ve been drinking Adrian’s kool-aid for a while (as I have), you’re not likely to find much new here, but if you aren’t familiar with Adrian and what he does, this interview should give you a nice overview.
42 Topics also has interviews with several others in the Django community, including Jacob Kaplan-Moss and James Bennett, available for your perusal.
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Matt Brown: Brown Blog
Matt, a great web designer and friend in Seattle, has finally launched his blog. After I met this guy at a Refresh Seattle shortly after he moved to town, we exchanged several e-mails that got into some rants and saves about the industry. I told him, “dude, you’ve gotta get a blog.” And he finally has. Trust me, you want to subscribe to this one. Plus, it’s got a nice design.
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Ice T vs. Soulja Boy
So basically, Ice T said Soulja Boy sucks, and Soulja Boy came back with a long-winded video that basically called Ice T out of touch with the modern game. But more importantly, Soulja Boy noted that the last time he saw Ice T, he was acting in an episode of Law and Order. Soujla Boys said, “How you gonna make a song called ‘Fuck Tha Police,’ and then 20 years later, you’re playing the police on TV?”
Which sounded like a really good point, until about 10 seconds later, when I remembered that Ice T didn’t make a song called “Fuck Tha Police” — Ice Cube did (with NWA, of course).
I guess they’re both out of touch with the other’s generation. Via Rex.
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This Ain’t No Disco
A nice site for interior design geeks like me, This Ain’t No Disco showcases creative workspaces around the work. Some very cool stuff within.
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Authentic Jobs: Senior UX Designer, Amazon.com Lists & Registries
This looks like an interesting job for a UX designer in the Seattle area (and I know one who’s looking…so get on it, girl).
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iPhone Clone Battle: Which One Is the iPhoniest?
Short story: the Samsung Instinct on Sprint is the best “iPhone killer” made to date, and it also happens to b the cheapest (at just $129, after this week’s price reduction to compete with the iPhone 3G). Being from the Kansas City area (where Sprint is headquartered), I know a lot of people locked into Sprint contracts. While it’s still not an iPhone, the Instinct does seem like a solid buy for someone stuck on Sprint — especially at just $129.
All that having been said, I sort of suspect phones like the Nokia N95, Samsung Soul, and Garmin Nuviphone are more likely to take business away from the iPhone — even if they’re not as directly positioned to compete with it.
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Stewart Butterfield’s bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo
Wow. This is absolutely fantastic. I can only hope that one day I’ll be in a position to resign from a company, knowing full well my resignation will be leaked onto the interwebs, and I have enough wits about me to compose a letter even half as amusing as this one. If that day ever comes, I’ll know I’ve made it. Kudos, Stewart Butterfield.
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Chad Mueller: Web Typography At It’s Best
Chad’s got a nice post showcasing several great examples of web typography. His selections are definitely good, but it’s worth pointing out that they’re almost exclusively examples of great display type on the web. Very little body type is showcased here.
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Adam Polselli redesign
Adam has redesigned his personal site, and it’s gorgeous. Well done!
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NYMag: The Microfame Game
> There’s a new class of celebrity powered by the Internet. The stakes are smaller, but the rewards are within anyone’s reach. These are the rules.
Rex Sorgatz’ piece in New York Magazine is a guide to becoming internet famous. It’s good stuff — entertaining and accurate at the same time. Nice job, Rexy!
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Brand New: John McCain’s new logo
McCain’s campaign apparently has a new logo (although I’ve not seen it in use anywhere; johnmccain.com doesn’t use it). It’s worse than the old one by a long shot. Despite the campaign reportedly wanting to shed McCain of his military, Iraq-war-loving image, the logo conjures images of GIJOE and NASCAR, and uses harsh colors that appear aggressive and militant. For a mark, the logo choose a five-pointed star — the same star used by the United States Army.
Also, it’s ugly.
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James Bennett: Why HTML
James makes the case for choosing HTML over XHTML. He makes several good points, but overlooks what is, to me, the single biggest reason to use HTML: because HTML is clearly the future, not XHTML. Today, the choice is mostly arbitrary. In my opinion, neither markup language offers significant advantages or disadvantages compared to the other. But, it’s clear (at least to me) that HTML5 is where things are going, so stepping away from XHTML now may better prepare you for the future.
That having been said, I still keep using XHTML out of habit, even if I think HTML is the better choice. :)
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Caterina and Stewart leaving Flickr
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the husband/wife team who founded Flickr in back 2004 and then sold the site to Yahoo in 2005, are leaving Y!. Can’t blame them, what with the uncertainty around the company right now. Sounds like Flickr is still very well staffed with good people, so there’s probably no reason to worry about the site’s future. Good luck to Caterina and Stewart in their future endeavors!
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The Django Foundation
Django now has a foundation, similar to that of Mozilla and Apache. From the foundation page:
> Development of Django is supported by an independent foundation established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Like most Open Source foundations, the goal of the Django Foundation is to promote, support, and advance the Django web framework.
Predictably, LJWorld.com has the scoop. :)
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Mario Garcia has a blog
Newspaper design legend Mario Garcia now has a blog. Nice.
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Jon Tan: The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design
Jon has a nice piece on the paragraph and how to appropriately use it on the web. It’s an important topic and one I spend a decent amount of time on in my usual typography talk when I speak at events. Far too often, people think typography is all about picking typefaces; Jon effectively explains some of the more nuanced details in this article.
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Django 1.0: Save the date
Django 1.0 will be released in September. It’s about time. :)
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Daring Fireball: The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question
Gruber walks through the “should I upgrade to the new iPhone,” dilemma, one I’m currently having, myself. He correctly points out that the only real noteworthy advantages are faster networking and GPS. He doesn’t mention the flush headphone jack, which isn’t a big deal to me personally (I’ve already gone and bought V-Moda iPhone earbuds), but may be to some audiophiles who’ve been avoiding the iPhone because they can’t use their favorite headphones with them.
For me, I think it’s going to boil down to this: Will the location-based SDK apps work with the triangulation functionality of the original iPhone, or will they require GPS? And if they do work: how well? I’m excited about the location based services more than the 3G networking, myself. If these work reasonably well on the original iPhone, then I may not have much incentive to upgrade this time around.
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Romany Malco: Little Boxes
In the past four days, I’ve watched two and a half seasons of Weeds, and I’m really enjoying the show. In particular, I love the theme song (Malvina Reynold’s “Little Boxes“) which, in seasons two and three, is performed by a different artist for each episode. But here, Romany Malco (who plays Conrad on the show) drops his own entertaining version. Thanks to Bret, who pointed me to this on a comment on this site.
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Google Maps’ Street View now available in 37 more cities…
…and Seattle, the 12th biggest metro in the USA and the area that houses America’s second-largest population of Google employees, still isn’t one of them. WTF?!
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School of Visual Arts NYC Announces New MFA in Interaction Design
Wow. This is awesome. Liz Danzico and Steven Heller have put together a MFA program with a faculty that includes the likes of Christopher Fahey, David Womack, Jason Santa Maria, Karen McGrane, Khoi Vinh, Paul Ford, Matt Owens, Rachel Abrams, Jeffrey Zeldman, and more. The program will launch in the Fall of 2009. Only one question: where were you guys in 1994?!
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Qik Video Streaming Finally Comes to iPhone
Qik, which is totally rad, is now on iPhone. It looks like it’s just a demo of an unofficial app for jailbroken iPhone, but it’s probably safe to assume a more “legit” version will be coming soon. Awesome.
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Blik now has Super Mario Bros. Wall Graphics
If I had some kind of game/rec room….
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Seattle’s Most Walkable Neighborhoods
Walk Score, a site I really love, now has a ranking of Seattle’s most walkable neighborhoods. What’s really cool here, from the perspective of a web designer/developer, is the heat map and neighborhood boundary overlays they’ve done with Google maps. Good stuff.
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Fonts.com: Typography for Children
A nice overview on how to choose typefaces and set type in ways that are appropriate for children.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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