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nGen Works is looking for a Web Standards Ninja
nGen Works is unquestionably one of the best bunch of guys I’ve met in this industry, and they’re looking for a great production person to join their team. If you’re a great HTML/CSS/JS person, you definitely want to check out this job. nGen is based in Jacksonville, FL, but the job description says, “relocation optional.”
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Apple Says White Is Cool Again… But Is It?
I’ve been saying it all along: white rules! I never got the facination with the black MacBook, and all my iPods have been white. If I get the new iPhone (which I haven’t fully decided on, yet), it’ll be white. White FTW!
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iPhone 3G must be activated in-store
There’s a lot of good news about the new iPhone today, but it’s not all gravy. One thing that saddens me is that you can no longer activate the iPhone using iTunes in the comfort of your own home, like you did with the first generation Jesus phone. You now have to activate in-store — a process which takes 10-15 minutes. Man, that launch day line is going to suck.
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Sizing it up: iPhone 3G vs. the rest
According to Engadget, the new iPhone is slightly thicker than the old one. Now, we’re talking about .7mm, so it’s not something that is going to make a difference in real-world usage. I just think it’s interesting that it’s thicker, considering that Steve Jobs apparently said it was thinner during the keynote today, where it was introduced.
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CNN thinks flash memory is owned by Adobe.
> Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos. Apple has said that Adobe’s flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn’t perform up to Apple’s standards for the iPhone.
Wow. Just, wow.
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NYTimes: Those Intense iPhone Users
A handful of stats, according to Nielsen Mobile, about how iPhone owners use their phones. Most interesting bit to me? 33 percent said they use their iPhone for “instant messaging” — despite the fact there is no IM client on the phone. Weird. Or wrong.
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The New Yorker: The Gerbil’s Revenge
Sasha Frere-Jones has a great little article in The New Yorker about Auto Tune, the effect so commonly heard in today’s pop, R&B, and hip-hop (it’s the effect T-Pain owes his entire career to). I’ve been a fan of this sound for at least 15 years or so — but when I discovered it (back in the days of Livin’ On A Prayer and California Love), it was generated by a instruments, like a vocoder or talkbox (see Peter Frampton, Roger Troutman, or Stevie Wonder). Today, a strikingly-similar effect is created in post-production using Auto Tune.
I personally have no real objection to the use of Auto Tune, and there are times I quite like it. However, I do see one glaring problem for artists like T-Pain that use it so extensively: you can’t perform live. Since Auto-Tune is a post-production effect and not something that can be done in real time (as can reverb, distortion, phasing, wah-wah, and many other effects we’re familiar with), there’s really no way to incorporate it into a live show. I once saw T-Pain sing “Buy You a Drank” on a TV talk show and it was laughable. It just sounded so wrong (and it wasn’t helped by the fact that T-Pain isn’t actually much of a singer).
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Digital Pot Gives Your Plant a Face
It definitely seems unnecessary and a bit ridiculous, but damned if it isn’t pretty freaking cute.
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Working With Blue Flavor, Part Three: Enabling Design
In part three of Keith’s ongoing series of post about working with Blue Flavor, he talks in detail about how best to empower our designers and get their best work out of them. I think many potential clients do have a misguided perception of how the relationship between client and designer should work, and Keith aims to quell some of those misunderstandings. Really good stuff.
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Sprint Instinct Full Video Walkthrough
Gizmodo has some walkthrough videos of the Sprint Instinct, the company’s “iPhone Killer.” In watching them, I definitely feel like this is probably the second-best thing to an iPhone out there, UI-wise. It doesn’t look quite as simple, elegant, and sexy as the iPhone, but it is a pretty well-done copycat. And, it does have a few features the iPhone doesn’t (3G, GPS, text-to-speech). I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer, but it’s probably the closest thing to one made thus far. I wouldn’t blame a Sprint customer for buying this guy instead of paying $200 to switch to AT&T.
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How much do you make?
Bret Walker’s simple Django-powered web app related to salaries. Its data is user-generated: you put in your job title, location, and salary. Hopefully this build a nice database of salary info, which is incredibly useful for many, many reasons.
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WE WILL BE OK
Jeff Palmer’s attractive and inventive tumblelog design. I love it. Via Wilson.
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Boston.com: The Big Picture
A great a simple idea: show awesome photos from great photojournalists really freaking big. It works great. The only thing I wish it has was a more readily available link to the related story (as far as I can tell, you have to click through and scroll down to the bottom to find the story link). Good stuff.
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Why we don’t skip Photoshop
Yesterday, our friends at 37signals started an interesting discussion on their blog with a post entitled Why we skip Photoshop. But the post actually has very little to do with the actual tool (Adobe Photoshop), and is really more related to workflow.
37signals doesn’t do a visual composite phase in the process of developing their products. Instead, they jump directly from rough sketches (on paper or in their heads) to development using HTML and CSS. At Blue Flavor, we go from rough sketches to creating high fidelity visual comps that look as close to the finished product as possible before diving into HTML and CSS.
So who’s right? The answer is simple: we both are.
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Vanity Fair: How the Web Was Won
Vanity Fair has “an oral history of the internet,” in which several pioneers, from Steve Case to Marc Andreessen to Jeff Bezos to Jerry Yang to Craig Newmark to Cindy Margolis (yes, Cindy Margolis), right up through Larry Page, Fake Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg discuss the history of this medium. Pretty awesome.
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Big Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop
The Wall Street Journal has a piece on LoudounExtra.com, the hyperlocal piece Rob Curley and his team put together while at The Washington Post’s interactive subsidiary. WSJ calls the site a “flop” and talks at length about how Rob and his team failed to generate even the traffic they got in Lawrence, which has three times fewer residents than Loudoun County.
I have no idea why the site never generated the traffic numbers they were hoping for, but I definitely don’t believe this should be taken as an indication that hyperlocal is no longer a good strategy. But news organizations should also understand that hyperlocal is also not a magic bullet. There are many other factors at play when it comes to figuring out if one of the sites is going to succeed or not, and chances are no one — not even Rob F’ing Curley — has the midas touch to ensure every single project they work on is going to be a mega-hit.
One thing is for sure, though: sites can not continue to be successful simply by being LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com clones. Teams need to continue to innovate and come up with new and interesting ways to get the news in front of consumers. The biggest thing Lawrence.com did was something different. Lawrence.com has been basically exactly the same site since its inception in 2001. This was Rob’s vision, and it was executed very, very well. Since then, it has forged a plethora of clones across all sorts of markets — some successful, and some not. Seven years in Internet time is an eternity, and I don’t mind saying that because I know the guys working on Lawrence.com now understand it’s a project that drastically needs to redefine itself, and its place as one of the most innovative interactive news projects ever launched (I have it on good word that redefinition is coming in the relatively near future).
Bottom line? Being “hyperlocal” isn’t enough to get you anywhere, anymore. You need to be innovative and captivating. As much as I respect the team behind LoudounExtra.com, I’m not entirely sure it upped the ante any.
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Jayhawks honored at White House
My old buddies at the Journal-World have a whole slew of multimedia and other content related to the Jayhawks’ recent visit to The White House. President Bush saying, “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” is probably one of the coolest things he’s ever done. See also LJW’s great special online feature on the Championship, which I believe was mostly this work of Richard Cornish.
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CNN: Obama clinches nomination
> Sen. Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president, according to CNN estimates, making him the first African-American in U.S. history to lead a major-party ticket.
With apologies to Sam Cooke: It’s been a long time running, but I know a change is gonna come. Yes, yes it will.
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Tom Ford: Spring/Summer 2008
Tom Ford’s latest campaign is decidedly NSFW, but also includes some beautifully provocative photography. Overall, I really like these images. But what the hell is up with that last one? Seriously, that’s not a good photo at all in my judgement. It’s compositionally all over the place, and the lighting is downright awful. The shadows the people are casting are painful to look at. It just feels really, really out of place in an otherwise great collection of photography. Via Rex
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Mark at A List Apart: Developing Creative Ideas
Besides the afore mentioned piece from Ms. Bolton, there’s also a great piece from Mr. Boulton in the latest A List Apart. Mark talks about fostering ideas. He notes that the brilliant moment of creative inspiration is rarely a great idea in and of itself — it needs to be honed and fostered, and he presents some suggest on ways to facilitate that process.
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J.B. at A List Apart: Writing an Interface Style Guide
My good buddy Boltron has a great little piece in the latest ALA about writing a style guide for interface design. Style guides are commonly used for more overarching brand guidelines, but much less commonly address interface design for digital products — which is a shame, because they’re really very appropriate for many organizations, especially larger ones who have several different teams doing this kind of work (like, oh, I dunno…the company Jina works for).
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Where they stand: Obama, McCain on the issues
A simple but effective rundown of each presumptive nominee’s position on various social, economic, and military issues.
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The Griffey Card.
Loved this piece, which I found via Kottke. I was only 13 years old, but I was working at a baseball card shop when Upper Deck came along and reinvented the baseball card, choosing Ken Griffey Jr. (who Topps didn’t even put in their 1989 set) to be the first card in their final annual edition. Somewhere, I’ve still got about 15 “Griffey Cards,” (as everyone called them then). I remember we sold them for anywhere from $17-22 in the store, and I remember we’d open box after box of Upper Deck packs just to find them. Good memories. I miss you, childhood innocence.
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Barack Obama: Finding common bonds in different worlds
A long, but well-written profile of Mr. Obama.
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8 Best: Non-Wikipedia Pedias
Fun. And Lostpedia is the first one mentioned.
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Preview of Versions SVN Client
I had been excitedly awaiting Versions for a long time, until I gave up and declared it vaporware. Now, it looks like it may be for real. This preview is very enticing. Want.
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A Phone, an iPod, an Internet Communicator, and a Full-Featured Task Manager!
It’s great to hear that Cultured Code is working on an iPhone task management application — assuming Apple doesn’t do one themselves, this will no doubt be the single most-wanted type of application from third parites. Competition will be stiff, I’m sure. But, we know from Things that Cultured Code is able to do these things well. They have a great sense of UI design, and make things that are very Mac-like. However, like Things, if it doesn’t integrate with OS X’s system-wide to-do service, I’m going to have to consider it useless. I want to love Things, but I just can’t, in its current state. I hope the iPhone version doesn’t have the same limitation.
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CollyLogic: The best cover versions ever made?
Simon has a long list of what he considers to be the best covers in music history. Many commenters have thrown their suggestions into the mix. A lot of music to discover, here.
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Twitter: It’s Not Rocket Science, But It’s Our Work
In response to a Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch that as clearly designed to irritate, Ev and Biz at Twitter politely explain several details of their architecture and how Twitter works, and what they’re doing to make the service more reliable in the future. Nice.
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wmd - The Wysiwym Markdown Editor
Nice-looking Markdown editor for use in browser from (like, on this site’s comment, for example). Includes toolbar for easy Markdown entry, and live preview of the rendered Markdown output.
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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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