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.
iPod Giveaway #1: Make a Meatspace Shuffle
Did you play with your food as a kid or perhaps as an immature adult? If so, you’re in luck, because the first episode of the Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition™ starts today, and it involves perhaps the least appreciated of the culinary arts: recreational food sculpture.
Conceived by Jason Anderson of Columbus, Ohio, this first competition involves the construction of an iPod Shuffle using nothing but food. Jason wins one Shuffle for thinking of the idea, and whoever posts the best photo of their shufflicious creation in the comments for this entry wins the other Shuffle. Jason’s idea was inspired by the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where Roy Neary makes the Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes.
Even though there are already plenty of great ideas (over 200!) for the iPod-A-Month competition, I will keep the submission pool open through the end of the year. I’m trying to do a good mix of design-related, photography-related, writing-related, and music-related competitions, so don’t feel bad if you don’t feel particularly suited for any given one.
Others will follow.
Also, it’s very possible that you’ve already submitted an idea for a contest and that I plan to use it… in which case, you’ve already won a Shuffle. I just can’t reveal that stuff in advance for fear of giving people a head start on preparing entries.
So here are the guidelines for this first contest:
- Entries must be made entirely out of food and then photographed. The term “food” may be used loosely, but it must have some legitimate nutritional value and not cause death or other debilitating injury when ingested.
- When submitting your entry, please do so via the comments. Please first list all ingredients, followed by a standard <img> tag pointing to an image measuring exactly 418 pixels by 418 pixels. If you don’t know how to do this, simply send me an e-mail and I’ll take care of it for you. The image must be your own creation, and all cheaters will be publicly shamed. I’m serious. I have a special domain reserved for the shaming. Don’t make me use it. :)
- Try not to get hung up on color. The average person only ingests a handful of foods which could be considered “white” and I’d rather not limit our pool of submissions to those ingredients. Pretend the Shuffle comes in a rainbow of colors… it probably will eventually. And if worst comes to worst and you just don’t feel right submitting a green Shuffle, just pour some powdered sugar on it before you take the photo and call it a day.
- The deadline for submissions is midnight April 30th.
Note: The technical name for this competition is “Best Interpretation of iPod Shuffle as Food”, so if people want to get super-creative with that and break all of the guidelines I’ve set forth above, go ahead. Nothing is out-of-bounds here. If your submission is creative enough, you might win.
UPDATE: We have a winner!
Mitch Hedberg – Rest in Peace
Mitch Hedberg has died. The news is just now percolating across the web and details are tough to find, but this is extremely sad news to all who have ever listened to or met Mitch. Mitch was only 37 years old and the cause of death appears to be a heart attack.
Rather than write an unsolicited eulogy or anything like that, I’ll just say that Mitch was and is my favorite comedian ever, and I’ll leave you with these two clips from his two albums:
From “Strategic Grill Locations”
From “Mitch Alltogether”
If You Love Something Give It Away
I want to give away some iPod Shuffles. I’d like to give away at least one a month and possibly one every two weeks for the rest of 2005 if that’s okay with everybody. This isn’t some freeipods.com network marketing dealio… I just really want to give some Shuffles away.
The only problem is, I can’t think of a really inventive way to give them away right now. Earlier this year, I gave Isaac Lin and Jay Robinson an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and a Wireless Mouse in a haiku contest that turned out great, so I may go that route again, but I’m thinking there might be a better way.
In light of my lack of creativity at the moment, I’ve decided that the very first iPod Shuffle will go to the person who comes up with the best way for me to give the rest of them away. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when coming up with your pitch:
- Each iPod Shuffle will essentially be purchased by me online and shipped as a gift to the winner, so the contest cannot involve me personally doing anything with the iPod such as looking at a serial number and making people guess it.
- Entries should be relatively quick to complete. A haiku is a perfect example. I don’t mind if they take a few hours or a few days to do, but nothing ridiculous please.
- Entries shouldn’t involve performing any illegal acts.
- Entries can involve the written word, photography, natural media, or any other creative outlet.
- I am open to this contest changing slightly with each round, so the entry criteria don’t need to be exactly the same every month or week.
- If your idea for this giveaway involves a novel use of the internet that I hadn’t thought of before, it is likely to win.
- If no idea turns out to be better than the haiku contest, I will stick with the haiku contest and award myself the first iPod Shuffle. Woohoo!
UPDATE: Tons of tons of great suggestions so far! I think I’m going to have to pick 9 of them and do a different one each month. The people who came up with the ones I use will get iPod Shuffles, and the people who win the associated contests will get them as well.
sIFR 2.0 Is Almost Ready… Please Test
UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.
Alright, sIFR 2.0 is finally ready for release! Before Mark and I release it, however, we’d like sIFR developers to run through a short set of testcases over on the sIFR Wiki.
The testcases represent some of the more complicated things that are happening under the hood of sIFR and can be found here.
Since we’ve only added two small things (a tiny Opera tweak and the ability to show browser text while the sIFR text is loading), we don’t anticipate any problems, but these testcases are meant to insure nothing was overlooked.
If you have a free minute, please run through the tests and let Mark or I know if you experience anything out of the ordinary. The whole suite should only take a minute. If every seems to work ok, please also feel free to post a comment on this page saying something like “Win XP/Flash 7 — Firefox 1.0, IE 6, all tests passed.”
Many thanks, and sIFR 2.0 will follow within days.
The Saltine Challenge
While on business at our New York offices a couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a peculiar competition known as “The Saltine Challenge”. Apparently this has been around for quite awhile but I’d never heard of it. In a nutshell, one must ingest 6 Saltine crackers in 60 seconds without the help of water or any other digestive lubricants. The crackers must also be of the salted variety. Seems quite easy… that’s what I thought.
With a small crowd of onlookers, I tried and failed badly on the first attempt. The second attempt was a failure as well. Not even close. I managed to get all 6 decently chewed, but there were still two full crackers worth of dough when the minute mark passed.
So I went back to Seattle thinking, as I was told, that less than 1 in 10 people can accomplish this. Not wanting to give up, however, I sent out an all-office e-mail summoning Saltines from all corners of the building for use in further testing. I administered the Challenge to four more people, and sure enough, everyone failed. Before giving up, I decided to give it one more try using a special chunking strategy that my co-worker in New York Phil Berberian had mentioned in passing, and lo and behold, I did it! Six down the hatch!
Just to see if this feat was repeatable, I tried three more times over the next three days and lowered my time in each trial. Could seven be next? Absolutely. After all, if six Saltines was a great bar trick in itself, seven would bring the house down. Sure enough, I did seven on my first try yesterday.
And now a day later, I’ve officially reached the addiction stage.
I’ve already tried eight twice today and although I failed both times, 70 seconds was all it took to get everything down. It’s definitely within reach and I’m not stopping until I achieve this dietary milestone.
Has anybody else tried this? Care to post your results?
UPDATE: Chunking strategy revealed!
UPDATE #2: 8 Saltines accomplished!
Implicit Personalization on Tribe.net
I followed a link from PhotoMatt this morning over to Tribe.net and noticed a very cool feature they have over there: Upon visiting the front page, the site immediately redirected me to “seattle.tribe.net” and showed me information local to the Seattle area (where I live) even though I had never been there before and never entered any geographic information.
How cool.
A quick glance at the address bar told me exactly what what going on. The complete url is listed below:
“Guess=true”. Very nice. So what’s happening is that Tribe is looking up my IP address in a table and mapping it to the Seattle area. We use IP lookup tables at Disney all the time for targeted advertising purposes, but I’d never seen someone actually use them to redirect you to a localized version of their site. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I’d just never seen it.
One of the hardest things to do in the web business is to get users to actually use personalization options (as counterintuitive as that sounds), and by performing this first personalization step implicitly and automatically, Tribe provides users better information without forcing them to ask for it. Smart.