January 2010
75 posts
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“It’s like a Ruby Goldberg Machine as drawn by Escher on LSD. In...”
– Not Invented Here - 1/28/10
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The UX Design Process for the Boxee Beta →
whitneyhess:
More than a year ago I very proudly announced that Boxee, the much-loved social media center software company, had hired me as the user experience designer for their beta. In the five…
Awesome stuff. Thanks for the writeup, Whitney!
Sympathy for the Devil →
Jack Nack has published a great piece addressing the recent uptick in Flash-bashing. As usual, he’s very fair and his points help keep things in perspective.
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WatchThe trailer for Colosseo, Cameron Moll’s upcoming typographic masterpiece. The amount of work that must have gone into this is almost incomprehensible to me. Do yourself a favor and watch in on Vimeo in HD.
“The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look...”
– The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak (via soxiam)
SublimeVideo →
davidkaneda:
SublimeVideo provides a custom user interface for playing HTML5 videos. The design is Mac-centric (though well polished) and offers a “Full-window” mode which is very visually impressive—and I believe more useful than Flash’s “Full screen mode”. The script will eventually be released free for non-commercial use. (Note: Open the link in Safari/Chrome to view)
Very impressive stuff.
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I Love/Hate the "Load More Posts" Pattern
I just came across a nice post by Kevin Nuut where he talks about the recent trend of websites (Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) using a “Load more posts”-type link to dynamically pull down more content. The benefits are obvious, but the downside is that most implementations don’t preserve the state of what you loaded so that when you leave the page and hit the Back button, you’re...
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Does the coin toss really decide NFL overtime...
After watching the Saints win the coin toss in overtime last night and marching down the field to kick the game-winning field goal, I once again began to wonder how often the coin toss determines the winner in overtime NFL games.
It turns out that it used to be close to 50% of the time - in other words, the coin toss didn’t really play that large a role. In more recent years, with kickers...
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Mozilla's VP of Engineering on H.264
Regarding Mozilla not using the H.264 format for their implementation of the HTML5 video tag:
For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded...
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Does Avatar's Political Agenda Matter?
GOOD has a nice piece on all the hullabaloo surrounding the various overanalyzers in a huff over Avatar’s political messages. The Weekly Standard bashes its showing the military in a bad light (because, you know, that’s unpatriotic and all) and in an NYT Op-Ed, David Brooks says that “it rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial...
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“Tumblr is typical of the new New York startups that have great engineering...”
– Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass (via veken)
Organizing inspirational screenshots
Like most designer types, I tend to save screenshots of sites and UI elements that I come across for future reference and inspiration. Right now I’ve got some of these scattered across iPhoto, Flickr, LittleSnapper, Ember, and some plain ‘ol folders on my desktop.
I like the idea of the LittleSnapper/Ember combo, but the free Ember account has low upload limits and I’m not...
The new Jawbone Icon headset has multiple voices...
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Visualizing customer reviews
FAIL - (Sears) The stars are being used as labels, not as a representation of rating values - it looks like a nice, neat linear distribution at first glance. The most important data element (the number of reviews for each star rating) takes up a miniscule amount of space. Steve Krug wouldn’t be happy (you’re making me think).
SUCCEED - (Amazon) I can tell at a glance how the...
Is your phone rocking the worst ever ringtone from...
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WatchA Model Day at Epcot
Tilt-shift photography just doesn’t get old. And if you missed it, here’s the video from The Magic Kingdom.
Why Internet Forums Suck
This is dead-on. A Core77 blogger rants about the typical nonsense replies you’re like to get when posting a question in a forum.
Here’s an example: Let’s say I wanted to buy good tomatoes in Chicago. That’s it. Here are the responses I would get:
Q: Does anyone know where I can buy good tomatoes in Chicago?
1. Forget about tomatoes, you need to buy zucchinis. Try...
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Attention .htaccess gurus
My htaccess-fu is really crufty these days. Does anyone know what rules I’d use to redirect all requests for a given directory to a different subdomain?
For example, redirect:
http://example.com/foobar/blah.jpg
to
http://foobar.example.com/blah.jpg
Anyone?
UPDATE: turns out cPanel will do this for you. Here’s what it generates:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$...
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Morning Coffee & Punch in the face
embracethemagic:
Design by : Cristobal Karich from france
Daniel Suarez's new book
Almost two years ago, I read devoured a great book called “Daemon” and posted a mini-review of it here. Two days later I received an email from the author, Daniel Suarez, thanking me for the support.
Then, about this time last year, Daniel sent me autographed copies of both the original trade paperback and the new hardback edition of “Daemon”.
Fast-forward to...
Three Random Pet Peeves
Plus signs (+) are valid email address characters. Gmail (and other mail systems) support the ability to create throwaway addresses like jason+yourcompany@blackantmedia.com. Please update your validation rules if your app thinks this is invalid.
OS X is pronounced “oh es ten”, not “oh es eks”.
It’s Mac, not MAC.