The Polls Are In
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I’ve wanted to add polls to this site for quite awhile now but never had the time to write a good voting component. Sure, there are some pre-made ones out there ripe for stealing but I wanted something fast, compact, flexible, and standards-based. Something I could just insert into any blog entry at any time to allow voting.
As luck would have it, we need polls at our new company, and so we busted one out. Several things like visual effects and more flexibility still need to be added, but I figured I’d let it loose for some early testing. Please make your selection on the right and post any suggestions or bug reports in the comments.
A couple of notes: You can only vote once. This is controlled via a combination of IP checking and cookies. The poll should work in all browsers, but we haven’t tested the obscure ones yet, so no guarantees at this early alpha stage.
The next thing on the plate is to add auto-updating, so for high-volume polls (certain not any on this here little popsicle-stand-of-a-site) you will be able to watch the results change on the fly.
The Blue Angels: Universally Awesome
There’s no better place to be on the first weekend in August than Seattle. Not only is the weather a spectacular 80 degrees and breezy, but it’s also Seafair weekend… a city-wide celebration involving hydroplane races, thousands of boats on Lake Washington, and one of the greatest airshows you’ll ever see, courtesy of the Blue Angels.
This year I managed to stay coherent enough out on the Lake to snap some nice shots of the Boys in Blue and even shoot a bit of video. This little Casio EX-Z750 continues to amaze me. The video quality is stellar, especially for something that fits in your shirt pocket. As planes pass over your head at near Mach 1, you tend to shake a little bit, so some anti-shake technology would be nice, but hey, I can’t complain.
Below is a slideshow of 10 photos from the airshow:
And here’s a 4-minute chunk of video from the show. The video in its original form is about twice the pixel size and quite a bit higher quality, but I wanted to get the clip down to about 20 megs so I downsampled and converted to Flash:
Bad Blur Jobs
I just read this entry on Scott Fegette’s blog about a really nice new feature of Dreamweaver 8 called “Code Collapse”, but that’s not really what got my attention about the blog entry. Check out the blur job on the screenshot below:
You blur out two phone numbers that are already fake (415.XXX.XXXX) and then don’t even blur out your own e-mail address enough to keep people from guessing exactly what it is? I mean c’mon… it ends in macromedia.com, doesn’t it?
Anyway, sorry Scott… I’m sure someone else is the guilty blurrer here. I just felt like bringing it up. UPDATE: Guilty! :)
And hey, great job with Dreamweaver 8! I can’t wait to try it out.
iPod Giveaway #4: We Have a Winner
John Whittet (whose illustration is to the right) said it best when he clarified the purpose of the 4th Monthly Mike Industries iPod-A-Monthly Creativity Competition:
“This particular contest is about telling a story, not writing one.”
With 60-some entries to read through over the last week, I encountered a great many well-written ones, but none told the story of a lost iPod more creatively and convincingly than the audio-blog-umentary by Ohio State University’s very own Josh Schoenwald.
You see Josh bought a very special iPod Shuffle about a month ago; one that not only had a personality but was also smart enough to set up its own account on Blogger, keep an audio diary, and even fade U2 songs into the ends of its blog posts. “Flit”, as Josh calls him, is no ordinary Shuffle.
As of today, I’m happy to say that Flit is indeed in my possession and will be returned to Josh first thing tomorrow morning along with a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds courtesy of iLounge.com (formerly iPodLounge). Congratulations Josh!
I also want to draw attention to a few other spectacular entries of note, the first one being John Whittet’s amazingly well illustrated animated docudrama entitled “Little White Cookbook”. John produced some amazing visual effects by overlaying his own hand drawn figures against a backdrop of photos pulled from Google Images and then Gaussian blurred. It’s a really cool effect and one I’d never seen before… you can read more about it here, and perhaps hire John for any illustration projects which require such awesomeness.
Another standout was Paul Santolaria’s take-off on one of my favorite films “A Shot in the Dark” starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Very creative and extremely well done.
My favorite two pure text entries (which each were worthy of first prize) were David Barrett’s account of his iPod-Shuffle-turned-pregnancy-test and Kat’s hilarious yet tragic home mugging.
There were five others I found very amusing as well, but I’ll leave those a mystery.
Thanks to everyone for entering, and the next contest will launch around the middle of this month!
The Mouse That Roared
True story
I was at the Seattle Apple Store just yesterday scooping up some iMacs, Powerbooks, and Cinema Displays for my new company, and as I was about to pay, Jason — the Apple Store Business Consultant — asked me if I wanted the “wireless versions” of my iMacs.
Me: “You mean with wireless mouse and keyboard?”
Apple Store Jason: “Yes. For $60 more, there is a version with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.”
Me: “Well if you guys would finally put out a mouse that was of any use to me, I’d probably take you up on that, but for now, I’ll stick with aftermarket mice.”
Apple Store Jason: You mean you want a multi-button mouse?
Me: Yeah. If you don’t want to give in on the whole “multi-button” thing, how about at least making a mouse that could sense where you push it and act accordingly?
Apple Store Jason: “Yeah, that would be nice.”
Later on that day…
After setting our Macs up at the new office, we were paid a visit from a personal friend of Steve Jobs (or PFOSJ)… a person who is also involved in the formation of our company. Here is the conversation which followed:
PFOSJ: “Alright! You guys are going all Apple!”
Me: “Yeah, totally.”
PFOSJ: “These iMacs are really nice machines, aren’t they?”
Me: “Yes. Can you tell Steve to kill this one-button mouse nonsense already though? It’s getting ridiculous.”
Great day in the mornin’!
Fast-forward about 16 hours to this morning and we now have news of the Mighty Mouse! A multi-function mouse which can sense where you press it and act accordingly! Not only that, but there’s an omni-directional scroll-wheel as well, and pressure-sensitive side buttons.
I know you PC people out there are going to laugh at how happy this makes us Mac people (being that you’ve had multi-button mice for years), but it really is a momentous occasion. The one-button mouse was the last indisputable disadvantage of Apple hardware, and also the last vestige of stubbornness left over from the pre OS X days.
The one-button mouse is dead. Long live the Mighty Mouse!
UPDATE: Jason, the Apple Store Business Consultant, just called to tell us the Mighty Mouse sold out in 30 minutes this morning, but he set aside three of them for us! Alright! Thanks Jason! You are the man!
UPDATE #2: The mouse is in the house! I was skeptical right up until the moment I plugged it in, but this thing is actually pretty nice. Contrary to a couple of comments above, there actually *is* tactile feedback upon clicks and scrolls and it feels really good. The scrollwheel is amongst the best I’ve used as well. My advice is: if you like the general shape and feel of the stock Apple mouse but just wish it had more functionality, you will love this mouse. If you just don’t like the Apple mouse much to begin with though, you probably won’t like this either. Head on down to your local Apple Store and give it a try.
Too Much Cream of Wheat?
Are there any Cream of Wheat aficionados in the audience? If so, can anyone tell me why my local supermarket gives me four choices for what should be one of the most basic foods on the shelf? See the picture below that I snapped yesterday. We apparently have a 10-Minute version, a 2.5-Minute version, a 1-Minute version, and an Instant version now:
I haven’t eaten Cream of Wheat since I still had my baby teeth, but is there really such a need for so many versions? I guess I understand the “10-Minute” and the “Instant” because usually food that takes longer to cook is better, but is there a palpable difference between the three quickest versions? And perhaps more importantly, if the stuff is to be eaten hot, how much quicker could “Instant” really be than “1-Minute”? Who is the person who needs to shave a few seconds off of their one-minute breakfast drill?
I’m Not Ignoring You
Apologies for the generally worthless post, but I discovered the other day that I had inadvertently enabled a setting on my mail server which deleted all items from my inbox which were older than 30 days. There were probably 30 or 40 emails I still needed to return which are now gone forever. So if you wrote me something in the last few months and I haven’t responded to it yet, please write again!!! Especially if you’re the person who wrote in with those two really, really nice examples of sIFR-ized sites you’d designed or if you’re from that technical school in Seattle and wanted to say hi. Those are the two that I remembered clearly and tipped me off that something was wrong.
Anyway, that’s it. Sorry for the interruption.
P.S. Is anybody else as baffled as I am that after 10.4, 10.4.1, and now 10.4.2, Apple’s Mail program still takes 5-10 seconds to pull up a new mail window when you hit the “Reply” button? Is that really such a hard problem to fix?
P.P.S. Safari is also crashing on me about once a day now. Anybody else? Two years of virtually no crashes and now this? I think it’s a known issue with the newest Safari release but are we going backwards?
P.P.P.S. Anybody tried Vonage? Especially for a business? Any good?
Major Tivo Withdrawals
Behold the intoxicating powers of HD
After switching from my beloved DirecTV w/ Tivo service to Comcast’s HD w/ DVR service a couple of weeks ago, I now understand why every household doesn’t have a DVR:
Because mainstream DVRs, in and of themselves, suuuuuuuck.
This new Comcast 6412 box in my living room is such a royal pain to use that I’ve begun watching less TV simply because I hate interacting with it so much. I pull up the channel guide and it shows me only six channels per screen. I hit rewind and the box doesn’t even acknowledge my keystroke for a couple of seconds. I look for the 30-second commercial skip button and there is none. The amount of annoyances this little box ships with is almost unbearable. It’s a high price to pay for recordable HDTV, and I will probably continue paying for it, but it sure does feel like almost every other piece of Microsoft technology I’ve ever used: just good enough to tolerate and just bad enough to piss me off at every turn. If it weren’t for the fact that I can record Anna Kournikova in high definition and transfer the footage to my Mac for viewing over and over and over again (see actual screen capture above), this thing would be on the first van back to Philadelphia, or Redmond, or whatever heathen land from whence it came.
Following is a comparison of my DirecTivo service and my Comcast HD service —
| DirecTivo | Comcast 6412 HD PVR | |
|---|---|---|
| Local, Recordable High Definition Channels | No | ★ Yes |
| Hardware Footprint | Big ugly dish on deck, receiver in living room | ★ Receiver in living room |
| Easy to Transfer Video to Mac | No | ★ Yes |
| Interface Makes Me Want To… | ★ Hug my TV | Never watch TV again |
| 30-second Commercial Skip | ★ Yes | No |
| Channel Guide | ★ Useful, efficient | Wasteful, maddening |
| Responsiveness | ★ Great | Awful |
| RW/FF Snapback | ★ Yes | No |
| Recordings Begin and End On-Time | ★ Yes | No |
| Remote Easily Controls A/V System Volume | ★ Yes | No |
| Channel Volume | ★ Normalized | All over the map |
| Standard Definition Channel Quality | ★ Digital, very good | Analog, borderline unwatchable |
I have decided to tolerate this Comcast box with Microsoft interface until a more Tivo-like product is available, but I’m definitely not happy about it. I also worry about DirecTV’s impending HD push because they’re offering their own box instead of a Tivo-powered one. That Tivo isn’t just owning every living room in America right now is a sad, sad tragedy. Here’s a message to Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, Microsoft and any other company trying to control my living room:
Make it harder for me to watch TV and I’ll watch less TV. Make it easier and I’ll watch more.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes
After checking out B. Adam Howell’s excellent IYHY.com site a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a good idea to write a little tutorial about how to make your entire site more mobile-friendly without even touching your pages. You may think that since you write valid code and separate structure from presentation at all times, your site already works great on mobile devices. You may also think bad things don’t happen to good people. In both cases, you’d be wrong.
The fact of the matter is that the state of HTML rendering in the wireless world is all over the map right now. Some browsers, like Pocket Internet Explorer, are actually pretty good at parsing through standard web pages. Others can scarcely handle layout rules at all. And still worse are the mobile browsers that load all CSS and javascript files, attempt to use them, and screw up the experience even more in the process.
What’s really needed until HTML/CSS/JS support is improved in mobile devices is a little server-side filtering. By pulling out everything a mobile device can possibly choke on before it even gets to the mobile device, we can create a mobile version of our site which is not only viewable on more devices but is much quicker to download as well.
And you know what? The mobile version of your site is probably going to be much easier on screenreaders too.
Four easy steps
Outlined below are the four steps to get this done in a matter of minutes, provided you are in an Apache environment and can run PHP. If you’re not, these steps can easily be adaptable to other technologies.
Read more…
Of iPods, and Music Videos
I know I’m an old man already at 30, but I think the last music video I watched was something from Christina Aguilera’s Slut-Yourself-Rich period a couple of years ago. Even then, I’m pretty sure I only watched the whole thing because I thought she was going to violate the “no live sex on TV” rule in front of my very eyes. Well, she didn’t, and I haven’t watched a music video since.
… which makes me wonder about all this talk of Apple’s alleged plans to sell music videos for display on iPods.
Is this really a viable market? I don’t think it is. The amount of music videos Apple will sell is probably much less than 1% of the amount of audio tracks they will sell, so it’s clearly not the reason the company is adding video capabilities to their iPods. More likely, it is a way to ease iPods with video capabilities into circulation until Apple has more compelling content to offer.
Conventional wisdom says the real money is in movie distribution, and while I agree to a point, there are so many issues being negotiated behind the scenes that it is understandable why this hasn’t materialized yet. Working at Disney for the past five years, I can’t even begin to tell you how long the chain of rights is to negotiate with regards to theatrical releases. The single biggest achievement of the iTunes Music Store was not the interface, the distribution, or the selection of music… it was the negotiating of rights by Steve Jobs. Jobs offered each music label the exact same deal, and being the most charismatic technology figure in the world (probably ever), he convinced them all to take it. Doing the same thing in the movie world isn’t impossible, but it’s going to be much much harder.
That’s also to say nothing of DRM issues in the video world. If you’re wondering why Microsoft is the only company in the world with industrial-strength video DRM right now, it’s largely because they settled a lawsuit with InterTrust about a year ago for $440 million putting them in the clear of any DRM-related lawsuits. Many companies are afraid to infringe on InterTrust’s patents right now, and Apple may or may not be one of them. If Apple feels they can create video DRM without infringing, they will. If they don’t, they will either have to sit on the sidelines or license.
Getting back on topic, I feel like Apple’s best move right now is not in music videos but concert videos. I wrote about this back in February when I suggested a video device with which to view concerts but the idea received only a lukewarm reception in the comments. Fast forward to July now and we have news of an AOL/AEG/XM cooperative called “NetworkLive” which will not only deliver live and archived shows via audio and video streams but actually play a part in producing the concerts themselves.
Big, BIG missed opportunity for Apple here in my opinion… especially since the rumored investment in this initiative is an extremely affordable $15 million.
If I’m Apple, I’m knocking on the door of NetworkLive right now and if no one answers, I’m busting the damn thing down.