May Randoms
Possibly useful thoughts collected throughout May:
sIFR 2.0.1
Sorry about the point release, but we had a tiny regression bug between RC4 and 2.0 which was only noticeable under rare circumstances in old versions of Mozilla. It is now fixed, and the update, as usual, requires only the swapping of your sifr.js file. Head over to the Official sIFR Landing Page for the download.
The Other Mike D.
I’ve always loved Mike Doughty’s lyrics and vocals but could never figure out what I didn’t quite like about his former group Soul Coughing. Now I know. The rest of the band. I went to Doughty’s show in Seattle earlier this month, and it blew me away. Usually when singers leave bands to go solo, they get worse, but Doughty has not only gotten better as a singer, he’s a better songwriter as well. More soul, less coughing, as one magazine puts it. The guy loves touring too. Before the Seattle show, he stood on the streetcorner outside the club with his acoustic guitar taking requests from fans and cracking John Curley jokes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Oh, and not only does the man play for free on streetcorners, but he’s a Movable Type user as well. How can you not love that? *Note to Doughty’s IT guy: The man gives you music. Please get him onto MT 3 or WordPress already.
The Decemberists
Their latest album “Picaresque” is my Album of the Year so far. The band’s previous release “Her Majesty the Decemberists” never did a lot for me, but this effort is epic. Long live folksy pirate music.
Downloading Live Shows
Croftie may not like live music but I do. As a result, I’ve found myself downloading a ton of shows lately off of Archive.org. It’s a bit frustrating that most shows are only available in lossless (see: overkill) formats like SHN and FLAC, but you can convert these to MP3s with a program like xACT. Can someone please point me in the direction of an app which automatically tags your converted MP3 files from a playlist file or something? Manually entering song info for each track you download is a pain and a half. Is there an AppleScript perhaps (or Automator workflow maybe?) which will convert an entire folder of FLAC/SHN files to MP3 and then tag them? That would be of incredible use.
Hybrid Bikes
If anyone is in the market for a good city bike, I just picked up a Marin Fairfax and I love it. Hybrid bikes are usually either heavy, ugly, or both, but this thing is only slightly heavier than a road bike and made of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber. I got mine for $599 at a local shop, but you can get the 2004 model for $329 online at REI if you don’t mind different components and a few other details.
TV Season Is Over
Thank god the end of good TV season coincides with the beginning of summer. This year, we had some great reality shows and some dud dramas. Survivor made a strong comeback from last year’s miserable season proving that it’s still the king of all reality shows. The Apprentice was entertaining, if not much better than the previous two seasons, and finally The Donald hired someone who isn’t a white male. Surreal Life was its normal entertaining self, making you embarrassed to be a human being, in a good way. And the newcomer, The Contender, proved to be a great addition to Mark Burnett’s lineup, despite Sylvester Stallone’s and Sugar Ray Leonard’s complete incompetence as hosts. On the flip side, I’m sad to say that the hitherto spectacular show 24 appears to be on its last legs. This season went south after about the 8th episode when the plot climaxed prematurely, the most interesting characters were killed off, and the least interesting (a.k.a. Tony Almeida) were brought back. The most pathetic episode saw mild-mannered Chloe O’Brien wielding a machine gun and shooting up a Jeep. Ummm, yeah. Time to put this show to rest. Quit while you’re ahead Fox. Somehow I don’t think they’ll listen to me, and somehow I’m sure I’ll still watch season five.
New Favorite Ice Cream Flavor
Haagen Dazs Crème Brûlée. I can’t believe it took this long to invent this flavor… or maybe it just took me this long to find out about it.
Kicking the Soda Habit
I’m not too concerned with getting off of coffee, but if you’re looking to kick your Coke and Pepsi habit instead, I highly recommend replacing your thirst for fizz with high quality mineral water. I didn’t drink mineral water for the first 20-something years of my life, but I’ve really taken a liking to it lately and have been virtually pop-free for about six months now. I recommend San Pellegrino especially if you’re new to the stuff. It’s a lot milder on the fizz than most other brands.
We’re Hiring In a Pretty Big Way
Just a quick note to let all Mike Industries readers know that the Walt Disney Internet Group is looking to fill over 80 positions in our North Hollywood and Seattle offices right now. These are mostly technical positions ranging from the creative side of things to the engineering side of things, and I can tell you from the over four years I’ve worked here that it’s a great place to get your groove on.
To list every position available in this blog entry would take quite some time, but just in the Seattle office, I know we’re looking for engineers, technical producers, designers, managers, Java people, SQL people, project managers, and a handful of other positions. The North Hollywood office has other openings as well.
If you’re a talented, motivated person who is interested in working for Disney, please check out the Walt Disney Internet Group job site and submit your information through there, or also feel free to send me your stuff through “disneyjobs at mikeindustries.com”. I’m not sure every opening is listed on the WDIG Jobs Site so if you’re a talented web professional, send us your stuff and we’ll try and see if there’s a fit.
UPDATE: If you’re interested in WDIG jobs out of the Orlando office, there are some openings there as well.
iPod Giveaway #2: Great iPods in History
Picked up by the New York Times, Toronto Star, San Jose Mercury News, Kottke.org, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Popular Mechanics among others, the first installment of the Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition was a bigger-than-expected hullaballoo. Thanks again to all who entered.
For the second installment, we’re going with a nostaglic theme: Great iPods in History. As is the case with all of these competitions, the person who suggested the theme will win one iPod Shuffle, and the person who wins the actual contest will take home the other (suggestion pool still open through the end of the year). Congratulations to “Getmeparu” for suggesting this contest… as soon as I figure out who you are, a Shuffle will be forthcoming.
As is illustrated by the slightly modified 1945 Alfred Eisenstadt photo to the left, the aim of this contest is to place an iPod Shuffle into notable historical context. You can modify famous photos, upload audio narratives, shoot video, or even design a mini-site. I expect most of the entries to be altered photos, which works well for this particular contest, but I just wanted to remind everyone that rules can always be broken. You are free to submit anything you like, as long as it’s yours and it was created specifically for this contest.
This contest, along with the remaining seven, will run for two weeks. The deadline for entries is midnight, May 31st.
Submission rules are as follows, and cannot be broken:
- If you’re submitting an image, it must be exactly 418 pixels by 418 pixels. Use a standard
<img src="yourimage.jpg" />tag to enter it into the comments section below. Please also keep your filesizes reasonable (as small as possible, but definitely under 80k or so). - Please submit any audio, video, or website entries as a standard link.
- Multiple entries are allowed.
- Nothing overtly offensive or in otherwise poor taste please. Mike Industries is a family establishment.
Good luck!
UPDATE: Please, it’s a very simple rule: 418 pixels by 418 pixels. Anything smaller or bigger will be deleted. Also, please keep images under about 80k. Thanks!
UPDATE #2: Maybe the big red exclamation mark will help here — all images must be EXACTLY 418 pixels tall by 418 pixels wide. Not 418×200. Not 500×500. It is not a “maximum width”. 418×418 please. The management thanks you.
UPDATE #3: iPodLounge.com has just offered to send a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds and a sportcase to the eventual winner. Thanks iPodLounge!
UPDATE #4: We have a winner!
Baton Ruse
What is a musical baton?
I don’t know, but my beard idol Rob Weychert and my Google-juice idol Keith Robinson just passed me one. I will now waive it over my head and tell you all sorts of things you never asked about!
Total volume of music files on my computer:
18.05 GB… Mostly from actual pressed CDs
The last CD I bought was:
“The Runaway Found” by The Veils
Song playing right now:
“Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
- Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin
Best group ever. Any suggestions to the contrary will be deleted. - Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone
If you live in Seattle and you’re in your 20s or 30s, this is your anthem. - The Pink Life by Mike Doughty
This pick is currently in ridiculously heavy rotation. Over 50 plays in the last few months I’m sure. And I’m seeing Doughty live tomorrow night. Bam! - Salvation by Citizen Cope
Unclassifiable music is the most impressive music of all. Citizen Cope and Calexico are two of the least classifiable bands I know. - Bonnie and Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg
The all-time winner for song most ahead of its time. Sounds like it was composed in 2005. Was actually composed in 1968.
* Honorable mention: Any of Inman’s favorites from the “Video Game Beeping” genre.
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
- Andrei Herasimchuk (as a last gasp attempt to revive Design By Fire)
- Jeff Croft
- John Gruber
- Matt May
- Stephen Lodefink
I’ve Been Adiumed
Have you noticed me bugging you a lot over Instant Messenger these days? If so, you’re not alone. Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally discovered something hundreds of thousands of Mac users already know about: Adium.
Adium is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client which lets you connect to all of your peeps on MSN, iChat, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, and a few others. I’d tried Adium in the past but found it too riddled with bugs and incompatibilities for everyday use, but I’m happy to report that as of version 0.81 (can I get a 1.0 please? have some confidence in your product!), Adium is most clearly the best instant messaging client in existence, and dare I say, one of the nicest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
I tend to judge software on its details. Most programs these days can do the big tasks correctly, or else no one would use them, but the true test of a great app is how it handles the little things. How does it look on screen? How does it react to certain clicks and drags? How does it alert you? How customizable is it? These are the very things Adium excels at. Here are some particularly nice examples:
First and foremost, Adium offers a beautiful customizable interface. I hate iChat’s bubbly chrome look. I hate MSN’s bloated windows. I hate Yahoo’s 1993 design sensibilities. Adium lets you choose from hundreds of design themes, almost all of which are better than what MSN, Apple, and Yahoo force upon you. My personal favorite is “Decay” (shown to the right), which combines a nice transparent black chromeless window with Kottke’s space-efficient Silkscreen typeface.
Adium also lets you customize the look of your message windows. I use the built-in “Plastic” theme (shown also to the right) which features subtle shadowing and rounded corners.- The ability to combine contacts from multiple services is brilliant. Even when I used Fire (another multi-protocol IM client), I liked to separate all of my contacts out by IM service, but then I realized this practice is pretty pointless. What IM service someone uses yields no logical information about how to classify them as a contact so you’re really better off putting everyone in the same pool. If you want to then group by “Work, Family, Friends, etc.” fine. Adium not only lets you lump everyone into the same pool but it also allows you to combine contacts with multiple IM accounts into one contact by simply dragging and dropping.
Adium uses Growl alerts. Those of you in the Windows world have this nice little built-in system notification called Toast. Whenever an application wants to notify you of something, it can pop up a Toast message from your taskbar. OS X does not have such a notification system built-in, but an add-on called Growl enables this functionality and in a much more beautiful and customizable way than Toast. Adium can be configured to fade in Growl alerts upon almost any event. The result is shown to the right.- Adium also pioneered tabbed chat windows. If you’re an IM whore like me, you may often have 10 IM windows up on your desktop during any given workday. Which looks better to the boss… 10 IM windows or one? I’d probably fire someone if I saw 10 IM windows on their screen all day. Adium’s support for tabbed IM windows doesn’t end there though. You can always drag a tab onto your desktop to create a separate window, and the tabs also act as status indicators for when people are typing. It’s these sorts of little touches which make Adium a superstar.
- If you have a bunch of wiseasses in your contact list like I do, you’ll appreciate Adium’s ability to hardcode names for all of your contacts. “Jer Supply” becomes “Jeremy Fisher”. “Karrne Asada” becomes “Steve Karr”. “Andy Clarke — And All That Malarkey” becomes “Andy Clarke”. Two “Mark”s become “Mark Budos” and “Mark Wubben”. And most importantly, the jerkstore on your list who changes his name everyday to something totally unrecognizable (a sin I was guilty of for over a year) becomes “Jake Thomas”. Don’t get me wrong… I’m all for creative IM names. But when your contact list is over 100 people, it just tends to slow things down when you’re trying to find somebody.
All in all, I only have two complaints about Adium:
- The default theme and soundsets are not ideal. If a user tries Adium out for the first time and doesn’t take the time to customize, they may not have as high of an opinion about the product as they might otherwise. When someone sends me a message and I hear the obnoxious sound of a duck quacking, I have to wonder a little about what I just downloaded. I humbly suggest to the Adium developers that they ship their application with as subtle a theme and soundset as possible.
- I wish I could see my status in either the menubar or even better, the contact list (a la MSN IM and iChat). As of now, the only way to see your status is in the Dock icon or by pulling down the status menu. Since I auto-hide my dock, it means that nowhere on my screen is my status consistently visible. Bad… but hopefully something that will be addressed.
If you’d like to give Adium a try, here are some links to get you going. Everything is free of course:
- Visit the Adium site and download the latest version.
- Download the Decay theme to pretty up your contact list.
- Download a nicer Dock icon to replace the duck. This is an icon set I assembled based on Wesley Underwood’s “Speech Bubble” set. Full credit goes to Wesley as all I did was modify the set so that status is indicated by color. Clear is offline. Green is available. Yellow is idle. Red is away. Here is what the icon set looks like:
UPDATE: The Adium Extras server appears to be down right now. They are apparently in the process of moving servers. If you’d like to download the “Decay” theme, grab my copy.
iPod Giveaway #1: We Have a Winner
He entered early. He entered often. He is Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, and he is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition.
Sweet slideshow component made with SlideShowPro
Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food”. Davin followed up his well received goat butter creation with a Parsnip Shuffle, a Tofu Shuffle, and the eventual winner: The Banana/Apple/Spaghetti Shuffle (shown above as the first piece in our honor roll slideshow).
Davin’s winning entry was both creatively assembled and brilliantly photographed, which helped it withstand the onslaught of entries throughout April. Stephen Lodefink’s Spam Shuffle garnered the most attention around the web and gave Davin a run for his money, but the toughest test came only 90 minutes before the contest closed when iPod case designer extraordinaire Nikki Sevcik submitted her tantalizing “Morning Shuffle”, consisting of a frothy espresso drink, chocolate covered strawberry, and exquisitely placed “Shuffle wafer”. Nikki’s entry is the second in the slideshow.
The Mike Industries staff (me) thought long and hard about how to pick the winner, but in the end, there was no perfect solution. At least 12 entries were award-worthy, but since Davin had four of them, his food sculpting prowess was the most clearly established of all the contestants.
I’ve provided an honor roll of 20 of the most worthy entries above and I thank everyone for participating in this first of 9 contests. Besides the first two slides, the honor roll is in no particular order. Enjoy.
Thanks also to Jason Anderson for concocting the first competition. His baby boy is already enjoying his Shuffle. Remember, the submission pool is open until the end of the year.
And finally, although I can’t award a second place prize, I’m happy to point readers in the direction of Nikki’s portfolio of custom iPod cases. They’re one of a kind.
Dream Job at The New York Times
So the New York Times is looking for a Design Director to lead the redesign of their flagship site, nytimes.com. Wow. Talk about a dream position.
If I didn’t love Seattle and what I’m doing right now so much, I’d be talking to them in a heartbeat. A chance to lead one of the world’s all-time most respected newspapers in an all-encompassing redesign and live in of one of the greatest cities on earth? What more could one ask for?
If you or anyone you know fits the bill, head on over to the Times job site (direct job link here) and check it out. We need more good people running more major news organizations’ web sites these days.
Hat Tip: Mark Hurst of Good Experience
sIFR 2.0 Released
It’s released! A long effort of several months is finally complete. sIFR 2.0 is here.
I’m all worn out from writing the official sIFR landing page so I’m going to keep this entry short, but I’ll just say that this release is the realization of everything we’ve always strived for in sIFR: rich, accessible typography for the masses with no pitfalls under any reasonable browsing conditions.
Release Candidate 4 was pretty solid, but this final release adds two improvements to the already rich feature set: the ability to show browser text while Flash text is loading (if desired) and graceful degradation to HTML text if users have FlashBlock installed. We’re particularly jazzed about working through the FlashBlock issue because it was the only circumstance where we felt sIFR wasn’t degrading perfectly, but thanks to the FlashBlock folks’ willingness to work with us and upgrade the FlashBlock extension, all is good in Flash-blocking land now. :)
I’d like to give a final thank you to the following people for the following reasons:
- Mark Wubben — Mark’s world-class javascript skills are the reason that sIFR is as robust and well-formed as it is. He and I have been working together long-distance from Seattle to The Netherlands for several months now, and I can say he’s the easily the best javascripter I’ve ever collaborated with. His only shortcoming is that he doesn’t have a Mac yet, but that will change before the summer I’m told. If you’re ever in need of a great javascripter or just an object-oriented developer genius, Mark is your guy.
- Shaun Inman — I can’t really say anything about The Wolf that hasn’t already been said. He is the man. His original IFR DOM-based Flash replacement routine was the catalyst for the creation of sIFR, and to this day, he’s still the first person I bug on Instant Messenger when I have a problem. In fact, I find him so useful that I embedded him in a Dashboard widget earlier this week… details possibly forthcoming (seriously). Shaun has some interesting things he’s getting ready to release as well, so keep an eye on him.
- Stephanie Sullivan — Hot beach volleyball mom by day, rabid sIFR advocate by night, Stephanie has helped write a lot of the sIFR documentation on the official sIFR Wiki as well as evangelize the technology at conferences and classes around the country. Tonight, Stephanie’s introducing sIFR 2.0 at TODCON in Las Vegas… we wish her luck.
- Danilo Celic — Along with Stephanie, Danilo is a key contributor over at Community MX. Danilo took the time to create a Dreamweaver extension to export sIFR swf files and even made sIFR tutorial in the form of a slick Breeze presentation… go check it out.
- Matt May — As an accessibility expert, member of the W3C, and just all around great guy, Matt’s opinion means a lot to us, and when he gave a clean bill of accessibility health to sIFR, we really started to feel great about what we’d done.
- Joe Clark — Much like Matt, Joe’s opinions on accessibility mean a lot to us. And much like Matt, Joe sees nothing inaccessible about sIFR. We like Joe.
- Dave Shea — Dave provided a very even-handed review of sIFR back in the beta days which helped us focus on making the good better and making the not-so-good, not-so-bad anymore. Thanks for a good post and the healthy discussion which followed.
- Andrew Hume — Andrew wrote a great article on his site, Usabletype.com, about how and when to use sIFR. He’s also been helpful in explaining proper usage to people when the opportunity arises.
- Jeff Croft — Croftie’s a big sIFR guy and much like Andrew, he’s been helpful in mitigating some of the discussion around the internet about proper use of this method. Jeff’s site is also a great example of beautiful sIFR use.
- Everyone who has used sIFR — Without the pool of hundreds of developers putting sIFR through its paces, we wouldn’t have made it as good as it is. There are simply too many combinations of browsers, OSes, plug-ins, and extensions out there to properly test something like this by yourself. To all who have helped us over the last several months, a big thank you.
Alright, now go check it out already!
BitTorrenting Tiger
While playing poker last night, I was telling a friend from Microsoft how excited everyone is about the coming release of OS X 10.4 (Tiger). He asked me when it was coming out. I told him April 29th, but apparently it was already beginning to make its rounds on P2P networks.
To which his response was “Why didn’t Apple just release it on P2P networks?”
To which my response was “How would they collect money from the sales then?”
To which his response was “Require activation.”
To which my response was “Umm, yeah. I’d already have it by now then, wouldn’t I?”
What a great idea. Distributing something like a song or a movie on P2P where you want people to voluntarily pay you a few bucks is a tough proposition because of the extra effort involved for the sake of a few bucks, but Tiger is $100-$130 and people are already planning on making the same payment to Apple or Amazon or whoever for a mailable copy of the OS, so what’s the extra effort here? There isn’t any. Combine that with the fact that by using BitTorrent, it wouldn’t even cost Apple any bandwidth to distribute, and you have a winning proposition in my opinion. I’d gladly “activate” my copy of Tiger were it made available to me in this way. How many of you would?
April Randoms
Every month, I end up with several items I’d like to post about, but none is particularly worth dedicating an entire entry to. Rather than let these little things go unposted, I figured I’d just aggregate them into one post per month, and perhaps together, they are worth one post. Here goes:
Logotypes.ru
I’ve used this site for years but I don’t think most people know about. It is a huge repository of logos from various companies, mostly in vector format. If you’ve ever found yourself doing mockups involving corporate logos you may not have easy access to, check out logotypes.ru before trying to grab badly compressed web versions from production sites. Is it legal? I don’t know. But the .ru means Russia, and I doubt our comrades overseas really care about such formalities.
Safari 1.3 is out
Dave Hyatt announced the release of Safari 1.3 today, which uses the same codebase as the version of Safari (2.0) that comes with Tiger. I just downloaded it and I’m quite impressed. Aside from the 35% speed improvement, Safari 1.3 adds support for such features as getComputedStyle and contentEditable (yay!). This version of Safari also squashes the long running bug whereby Safari would need an innerHTML “kick in the ass” in order repaint elements which had been changed via the DOM. As you can imagine, all of these under-the-hood improvements benefit sIFR greatly. In fact, we used sIFR to help Dave and Apple squash a DOM bug a couple of months ago. I personally can’t wait to begin using contentEditable on some of my projects. I’ve always loved how it works in PC IE, and now finally Mac users can use it too. Firefox, where are you?
UPDATE: There do appear to be some newly introduced bugs in Safari 1.3 from looking at all of the latest comments over on Dave’s site. Some caching issues have arisen, as well as some JS and DOM issues. Hopefully a quick update will be forthcoming.
Levis Jeans
Did you know you can’t even buy Levis at most department stores anymore? I walked into my local Macy’s last week to buy some Silvertabs and was shocked to find no Levis whatsoever. The salesman told me that barely any department stores carry them anymore because most Levis are now sold through discount warehouses like Costco and Sam’s Club. Turns out that in order for Macy’s to sell Levis at a competitive price, they’d have to take a loss on them. I know there are plenty of other jeans around these days, but I have to wonder if Levis’ decision to whore their jeans out to discounters might bite them in the long run. In the short run, I’ve been reduced to shopping at J.C. Penneys (ouch!) in order to get a pair of Levis… they still sell them for now.
Incomplete Redesigns
There seems to be a practice lately of relaunching sites before they are ready. It’s mainly blogs, but I’ve noticed a lot of relaunches lately with disclaimers like “try not to pay attention to the navigation” and “the comment system doesn’t work yet” and all sorts of other warnings. Maybe I’m just old school about design, but I would never dream of launching anything that was less than about 90-95% ready. If you have a few chunks of invalid code or a couple of enhancements which aren’t ready yet, fine…. but if the state of your site requires a disclaimer of incompleteness, it probably isn’t ready to be launched. And if it isn’t ready to be launched, then don’t launch it.
The Pontiac Solstice
I have never come close to buying a Pontiac. I’ve never seen one which had any appeal to me whatsoever. Being a European/Japanese car snob my whole life, I’ve pretty much tuned out American cars as being anything I’d ever want to own. Pontiacs, to me, have done nothing to dampen this sentiment. They are often rental cars, and they are just never fun or attractive (apologies if you own one). But wow… have you seen the new Solstice??? It was featured on The Apprentice this week and I am just completely taken aback by how beautiful it is. Take the emblem off of there and you’d think it was an exotic car. The Apprentice has really set the new standard for product placement on TV, and I must say, whatever Pontiac paid for that placement was well worth it. I’m still not big on two-seaters, but the Solstice’s appearance on The Apprentice is enough to at least get me out to the lot.
Mind Control
If you’re at all interested in the power of persuasion, check out some of Derren Brown’s tricks of the trade. Interesting, and a tad scary.