About two weeks ago, I turned on my iPod Touch (1G), which I’ve used daily for three years, and found it wouldn’t connect to my wireless network. When I went to the Settings panel, I got this No Wi-Fi message:

I quickly found several others with the problem. However, none of their suggested fixes worked for me. I also noticed, as indicated in the forums, that with this problem came a simultaneous drastic reduction in battery life. Even when not in use, my iPod was dying in just a few hours.

After attempting the 5 R’s without success, I eventually decided it was time to try getting in touch with Apple. I found their Out-of-warranty Battery Replacement program, and decided it fit the bill. For $89 CAD, Apple appeared to be offering a new or refurbished iPod Touch to replace my broken unit. I skeptically filled out the forms, and with not a little hesitation packaged up my iPod and sent it off into the bowels of the postal system. At this point I half-expected to never see my iPod again, let alone get a working one in return.

To my surprise, a week and a half after putting my unit in the mail, I got a barely used working replacement delivered to my door. The back is still mirror-shiny (unlike my incredibly scuffed one), and other than coming out-of-package, is indiscernible from a new iPod Touch of the same generation.

Why is this so amazing? The transparency and responsiveness of the process really impressed me. Upon opening the claim, I was immediately given a repair status URL where I could track its progress. As you can see, I requested my service on the 15th. Apple diagnosed the issue, decided on a replacement, and shipped it within 24 hours of receiving it. They then gave me the tracking number of the UPS delivery, slated for the 21st: 6 days after I sent it. The only problem with this incredible efficiency was that I had anticipated a 2-3 week turnaround and had submitted the repair with a shipping address in Ontario, where I am traveling for the month of July. Given that they had turned it around in less than a week, this presented a problem. I emailed Apple to see if I could update the address. Again, they responded in less than 12 hours, this time with an actual person notifying me that they had updated UPS with the details and I should expect my shipment within the week. Sure enough, the UPS tracking information was updated shortly in their system, and I tracked it from there to my door in Vancouver. After a quick restore of my data, I now have a working, refreshed iPod in my possession! Check out the crazy list of locations where it was shipped or scanned by UPS:

First off, that an incredibly large corporation offers a reasonably priced out-of-warranty replacement service is excellent: $89 + tax + shipping to replace a $459 device three years after purchase. Second, they turned it around in less than a week (plus the added time for the address change). Third, I was well-informed and had an open channel of communication with said corporate giant throughout the process. This makes me feel really good about Apple, especially when most interactions with corporate entities (ie. insurance companies, telecomms, auto makers) leave me feeling ripped off, powerless, and angry. It would have been easier for Apple to not offer the service, decline repair, or charge far more in the hopes I would just upgrade. Instead, they offer a humane, environmentally responsible (assuming they don’t just trash the old one), and efficient service to their customers.

So, thanks Apple, for putting as much effort and thought into your customer service and repair program as you do into your products. Upon such things is loyalty built.

Shark Truth is a not-for-profit consumer awareness campaign that seeks to engage consumers in a collaborative discussion to find alternatives to shark fin soup. We are dedicated to promoting awareness around the irreversibly detrimental effects of the shark finning industry, specifically working with (and not against) consumers.

My friend Claudia Li co-founded the effort with Vivian Kwong in the summer of 2009. Along with a great team of volunteers, they have been working hard to make Shark Truth an effective and engaging campaign. The team realized that existing campaigns (such as
WildAid’s Shark Conservation Program and Sea Shepherd’s Defending Sharks campaign) were not creating a dialogue with the Chinese community about the practice of shark finning. While these campaigns and others have done a great deal to raise the profile of this issue, they have mainly focussed on the supply side of the situation. Shark Truth, by choosing to focus their efforts on the demand side, have a chance to develop awareness amongst the culture and community that constitutes the largest market for shark fin. As Chinese Canadians, the team’s sensitivity to both the cultural and ecological facets of the problem provide them with an opportunity to effect real change. They know that another attack campaign full of images of blood and gore is not going to reach the Chinese community, so they are instead seeking ways to collaborate with the consumers of shark fin soup to find alternatives.

As a city, Vancouver represents the largest market for shark fin soup in Canada, and a major proportion of Canada’s Chinese population: 75% of Canadian Chinese live in either Vancouver or Toronto. Shark Truth’s organizers hope to make Vancouver the first step in a broader campaign. They have begun both Personal and Wedding Pledges to “Stop the Soup”, and have provided information on the website and other campaign materials (including Shark Truth info in fortune cookies!) about the unsustainable and inhumane practice of shark-finning.

I have been interested in the campaign and their unique approach since I first heard about it. In order to assist, I undertook the development of the Shark Truth website. In collaboration with the team, I designed and implemented a custom look and feel for the website, using WordPress as the CMS, and developed identity materials to match the existing logo. In addition to this role, I advised on web and social media strategy, and consulted on technology selection and maintenance.

The campaign is off to a great start. The Launch Event at Wild Rice was sold out, raising over $2000 for the campaign, and featured a presentation by world-renowned marine biodiversity researcher Dr. Nick Dulvy, IUCN Shark Specialist Group Co-Chair. Since then, we’ve had lots of interest from the community, including a pledge to not serve shark’s fin soup at a 1000 person wedding! That’s a lot of sharks who get to keep swimming a little longer.

It’s been a pleasure working with the team, and I fervently hope their passion and perseverance will help to slow and eventually reverse the demand for shark fin. Sustainability requires a thorough reassessment of how we use our planet’s limited resources. Sometimes this means slow changes. In other cases, such as this, change must be rapid and resolved in order to make a difference, else we risk losing one of Earth’s oldest and most beautiful predators, and with them the balanced ecosystems that have sustained our oceans for millenia.

Team North will design and deliver North House, a compelling, marketable solar powered home that makes use of the latest in high-performance architecture and mobile communication technology, while building Canada’s next generation of leaders in sustainable engineering, business and design.

This October, after a two-year development cycle, our team traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the US Department of Energy‘s Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall:

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

The architects and engineers on the project did an incredible job: combining leading-edge technology, modern aesthetics, and innovative materials to produce a net-zero solar powered home that is viable for the Canadian climate. After a challenging two-week competition, we placed 4th overall! Full results can be found on the Solar Decathlon scoring page. We were pleased with our performance, and feel proud of the achievement we’ve made with the house. Full details on the specifications and innovations of the house are available from the team website.

SFU’s contribution to this undertaking involved the development of a control system for the North House, and the design and creation of a suite of web-enabled applications to provide feedback, control, and community networking to the residents of the house. My role on the project was comprised of contributing to the design team for each of these main pieces of the interactive system, and then undertaking the development of each with a small team of programmers.

For the control system, I worked closely with Chris Brandson of VerTech Solutions. He wrote custom drivers for each of the house’s hardware systems (lighting, shades and blinds, HVAC, retractable bed, etc.) and configured them to communicate with Embedded Automation‘s mControl. I then developed a Ruby on Rails application to interface with mControl using SOAP. This allowed the design team to develop a custom interface for the residents of the home instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution. The controls were then presented on three embedded touchscreens: a 17″ display mounted in the western end of the kitchen backsplash and two 8″ displays at the north and east entryways. The central panel provides digital controls for all of the house systems, while the entry panels provide local controls for nearby lights. Additionally, from each control point residents can put the house into user-configurable Presets such as Home, Away or Sleep. These presets represent configurations for various activities or times of day that can be activated with a single button press. The control and monitoring system we developed was noted as a standout by software developer Patrick Smith in his Survey of Home Monitoring & Control Systems at the Solar Decathlon.

I worked with closely with interaction designers Kevin Muise, Jenny Thai, and Jin Fan on the web application. These talented designers delivered high quality HTML, CSS, and image assets that I then incorporated into the Ruby on Rails application and populated with dynamic data and enabled with interactive behaviour. The house data was made available by Rob MacKenzie’s datalogging systems. Along with this contribution to the project, his invaluable talents at network administration, hardware procurement, and his knack for pulling off last-minute hacks can’t be overlooked!

Finally, Kevin Muise and I completed the Mobile application together. He led the development with nearly solo design and prototyping work. I then developed the final version based on his prototypes and integrated it with the Rails app and control system. The mobile application provides access to a subset of the features of the desktop web application, including graphing utilities, house controls, and community networking.

Interactive demonstrations of the web application and iPhone application can be found on the Team North website under Interface Demos. Also, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by David Gura from NPR for a brief segment about the iPhone application that aired on All Things Considered during the competition. The segment is available online.

The competition and project as a whole were intense and challenging. The difficulty of channeling the talents and perspectives of students and faculty from a range of disciplines across three universities and two timezones cannot be overestimated. Over the course of the year, I clumsily learned to speak the languages of architects, engineers, computer scientists, and project managers while participating in many teleconferences and email exchanges. I learned how important priorities can sometimes be missed when working in large geographically distributed teams because each person and team thinks someone else is doing it. And I learned a great deal about what not to do (…and less of what to do!) in software development. That being said, everyone on the project undertook their part with such enthusiasm and determination that we were able to overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver a house that is beautiful, powerful, and viable.

My sincere thanks to everyone on the team for their dedication and determination over the course of the project. It’s been a truly memorable experience. Also a huge congratulations to all the teams and great people that participated in the contest, especially those I met from Germany, California, Louisiana, and Cornell. In the coming year, I’ll be applying much of what I’ve learned on this project to my ongoing research into information visualization and tools for feedback on energy consumption.

Other media links:

• Globe & Mail: North House Waves the Flag
• CBC News: The National (October 8th)
• SPIE: Students shine at the Solar Decathlon (video)

The general idea of the last iteration is carried over: minimal structure with the focus on the presentation of the photos. However, by avoiding the use of Flash, the site is made both more accessible and better performing. The ‘lights out’ feature and scaling images are achieved with JavaScript in this version, while the content is again managed with an XML/PHP backend. A new cross-browser font replacement technique called Cufón was used to enable the use of a non-standard font for the site, maintaining the look and feel of the mockups in the translation to a dynamic version.

I think JD’s photography, Lukas’ design, and my development work have come together to make this latest iteration of www.jdhowell.ca minimal and lightweight, while effectively communicating JD’s unique brand and style. As always, the primary emphasis is on the photos, with the design and functionality serving the work.

MarsEdit

Despite the recent overhaul of the WordPress interface, I still find their post editor somewhat clunky. As far as web apps have come, desktop apps are still superior in many ways when it comes to responsiveness, task focus, and interface affordances (think menus, panels, and native UI elements). To address this situation, MarsEdit takes the post writing and management features of your favourite blog software (including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Drupal) and puts them on your desktop, allowing you to focus on the most important part of your blog: writing. It has just the right feature set, and allows me to write, edit, and preview (and tag, categorize, and edit the metadata of) my posts offline – a crucial aspect when traveling or working away from wireless. I particularly like how it allows me to manage all of my blogs from one interface, rather than having to login to each in turn. Also, the Media Manager makes it effortless to upload, link, and embed images and other media, including those from my Flickr Feed, something that I do every time I write a travel post. Great job, Red Sweater Software! A steal at $29.95 (after a 30-day free trial).

Papers

Having recently become a member of the graduate level academic set, I’ve been learning that managing a research project by haphazardly stuffing attachments into hastily-named folders in Finder can lead to a needle-in-a-haystack situation in record time. Papers is an elegant solution to this problem, allowing you to manage the proliferation of article PDFs on your hard drive. Geared specifically toward research, the program combines database search with article management, reading, annotation, citation, and import/export features. Again, a desktop app trumps the online equivalents of each of these steps. For example, Papers allows you to add the proxy URL of your academic institution, so that when working away from campus you can seamlessly browse and download results from a variety of sources (Google Scholar, ACM, CiteSeer, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, etc) without being blocked by login pages every few clicks as when using a browser. Once downloaded, articles are scraped for bibliographic and other metadata, and organized by author, journal, and user-specified collections.

It is also possible to set Papers to automatically rename and sort the original PDFs into a Library in Finder, so that your files are as neatly organized as your annotations. Also, in addition to citation information, the metadata features allow you to rate your articles and track which you’ve read or printed – a simple but very useful feature. Another similarly well thought-out addition is a one-click Email button which formats a journal URL and citation and attaches the PDF to a new message in Mail. Makes sharing a relevant article with a colleague absolutely effortless. Finally, as a reading environment, Papers tops Preview by offering a magnification slider, improved full screen access, and intuitive icons for continuous/discrete paging and 1-up/facing pages. This has already become indispensable in my research workflow. $42 for a single-user license, after 30 day trial. And 40% off for students!

Xtorrent

Xtorrent is the only remaining BitTorrent client on my Mac. After trying the original, Vuze/Azureus, and others, I settled on Xtorrent for the perfect OS X look and feel, integrated search and download, freedom from ads and other media content that slow down the app (I’m looking at you, Vuze), and well thought-out sorting and selection interaction. From the (Canadian!) genius behind NewsFire, Acquisition, and Inquisitor. Xtorrent is $25 for Pro and free for a 10 kbps download cap after an hour into each session…anyone remember 1996? Worth the cash.

Rivet

When I crumbled to the pressures of consumer society and bought an XBox 360 last fall, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find that Microsoft had delivered a fantastic user interface and software platform for the system…that won’t talk to my Mac. This meant that if I wanted to stream any media or use my wireless network on my XBox, I’d have to run XP or Vista on one of my machines. Not a very appealing prospect. Rivet addresses the media sharing part of the equation, allowing you to stream your music, photos, and videos directly to your TV through your XBox. The app runs as a discreet menu bar icon (next to your clock, battery, etc) that allows you to specify which folders to share with your console. Shared files fit in seamlessly with the XBox media interfaces, allowing you to play slideshows, listen to music with visualizations, and watch videos. Also, Rivet improves on competitor Connect360 by reproducing the file structure of your media directories in the XBox interface, rather than compiling everything into one flat and difficult to navigate list. Incredibly, streaming doesn’t hiccup at all, even when playing from a USB or firewire connected hard drive! Sure beats tossing everything onto my USB key every time I want to watch a show. $18.95.

MindNode

Though I haven’t spent a lot of time with it, MindNode‘s intuitive interface and simplicity have caught my attention. It’s a ‘mind-mapping’ application that allows you to quickly map out hierarchical or networked data in an attractive visual layout. I haven’t quite found the sweet spot where MindNode’s feature set makes the most sense to use, but I do find myself playing with it. For example, I’ve used it to quickly sketch out XML tags and attributes, and database tables and columns, but find that once I get to a reasonable level of stability in the information design I switch to a more powerful app for adding metadata and so on. Perhaps this is the point of the software – as a mental sketchpad – and it’s just taking some time to get accustomed to the paradigm. I wish that the formatting inspectors were integrated with the main app window as sidebars or drawers, instead of left floating as (Apple default) external panes, but besides that small criticism, this is an intriguingly simple and intuitive app that’s worth checking out. Free. * A Pro version is available for $14.95, but I can’t seem to find any information about what is different between the two versions. The free app doesn’t seem to be handicapped.

World of Goo

And last but not least, World of Goo is a physics simulation puzzle game that has to be played to be appreciated. The game is clever, fun, addictive, and constantly surprises with moments of spontaneity and subversion of expectations. I haven’t enjoyed a puzzle game this much since Lemmings on the Commodore 64. It’s getting in the way of my to-do list in ways that only the best games can! The game speaks for itself, but the story behind it makes it even sweeter. 2D Boy, an ‘indie game studio’ made up of two gents from San Francisco, has been turning heads by returning game development to its roots…namely fun and creativity. Amazingly, they built the game with all open source tools and just $10,000 in personal savings. I think EA must have spent $10,000 on dynamic puck reflection alone in NHL 09! $20 for full version, single chapter demo free.

Everyone at the conference was very welcoming, and gave valuable feedback on various aspects of the project. Thanks very much to Brent Nelson, who was the primary organizer of the conference at University of Saskatchewan, and to everyone who attended the session.

Here are the slides that I presented:

And the Demo video from the slides, put together by Stéfan Sinclair:

A video of my presentation (forgive the camera angle). This is posted for posterity, and as a record of my very first academic conference presentation (on my birthday nonetheless)! It’s about 33 minutes long including Q&A:

Finally, the poster that accompanied my presentation (click to view larger):

Sadly, the Safari on Windows experience hasn’t changed Apple’s approach. While working the other day, I was interrupted by the following prompt:

Firstly, the wording in the prompt indicates a Software Update. Despite the fact that .Mac is being replaced, Mobile Me is still new software (ie. not an update to existing software). Apple’s marketing department certainly wants you to believe this, and the $109/year (CAD) price tag would seem to underline it. So, Apple has interrupted my workflow (as far as I can tell launching this prompt independently of Software Update or any other process) to sell me something. That’s not OK. This follows the same sneaky pattern as prompting Windows users to install an entirely new browser on their systems as a ‘software update’ to their iTunes service.

To add to my frustration, this prompt for new software comes after weeks of idiosyncratic activity in Leopard. Notice the default Apple wallpaper behind the MobileMe prompt? That’s not there by choice. Rather, the Desktop pane of my System Preferences has been buggy and inconsistent for weeks, as I swap between monitors. Without going into detail, the folders for my desktop images (including the OS defaults) become inaccessible, rendering me unable to change my desktop wallpaper. I’ve found various workarounds…but this just underlines that Apple’s philosophy is broken. Rather than fixing bugs in existing software that I have paid for, I’m prompted to install and pay for new software that I don’t want! Apple’s always been known as a ‘Design company that makes computers.’ Perhaps they are actually a ‘Marketing company that makes software.’

So, a bit of an annoyance, and a reminder not to trust Apple. Then, this:

As you can see, when connecting my (hacked) iPod Touch, my iTunes interface becomes an advertisement! Again, a new piece of software (indicated by the price tag) labeled as a Software Update. What’s worse, the ‘update’ is primarily intended to install new software (the App Store) to allow me to give yet more money to Apple! Secondarily, it adds features to support MobileMe (which I would also have to pay for), and finally to install software that should have been on the device in the first place. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, maybe I’ll be convinced to upgrade to get the scientific calculator…

To add insult to injury, this message will be displayed every time I connect my iPod for all eternity, as the only options to dismiss the message are “Buy Now” or “Remind Me Later.” What about an “I’m not interested, stop using my desktop as a billboard” button?

UPDATE: Two days after posting this, the iPod software update interface changed. I knew Steve Jobs would read my blog:

For the past few months, I’ve been working on and off on a redesign and interface overhaul of Bitstrips, a social comic creation and sharing application launched by Toronto-based Core Matrix this past spring. Bitstrips allows anyone to create great looking comics and characters with easy to use tools, and share them with their friends and others in the Bitstrsips community. After launching their initial beta, the guys behind Bitstrips wanted to improve the look and feel of their application. To this end, I was hired on to create some design mockups, sort out browser compatibility issues, streamline and improve the site’s HTML and CSS (and push them into line with best practices), consult on the information design and navigation flow of the site, and put together and polish lots of the interface graphics. The latest version takes Bitstrips out of beta and incorporates these and a huge number of other improvements to both the backend functionality and frontend user interface of the site.

Since the site’s successful launch at SXSW, the Bitstrips community has been steadily growing, with over 70,000 comics created so far, and has gained a buzz with numerous mentions in Wired magazine (1, 2, 3), on blogs around the web, and a feature interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. For their part, the Core Matrix team has been tirelessly adding new content and artwork, fine-tuning their comic, character and scene creation tools, and passionately giving their all to the Bitstrips community.

Bitstrips is free and fun. The best part is creating characters of your friends and putting them in awkward situations in your comics! I’m excited to see how the site grows and develops over the coming months, as the community gets bigger and more involved. The guys at Core Matrix are putting on a Best-of-Bitstrips Awards Party in Toronto on July 16th, so if you’re in town, check it out! Unfortunately, I won’t be in the area, but hopefully I’ll be there for the 2009 edition.

Digital Texts 2.0 is an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm of electronic texts. We intend to preserve and expose all of the existing qualities of digital texts (rich hypertextual associations, refined encoding practices, analytic affordances, etc.), while enhancing them with additional characteristics provided by Web 2.0 and social networking.

[Therefore,] the Digital Texts 2.0 project is a preliminary attempt to better understand the phenomenon of social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts.

Read more at the Digital Texts wiki.

As described above, Dr. Sinclair is interested in applying some of the interesting features of current web trends (social networking, folksonomies, web service mashups, ajax interfaces, and an emphasis on interactivity) to the realm of electronic texts. The primary focus on social networking led to the Facebook Platform being chosen as a good starting point for the project. Early prototypes that I wrote in PHP were thus aimed at learning the integration points afforded by the Facebook interface and scaffolding some of the basic functionality. After this brief stage of experimentation, I restarted the application in Ruby on Rails, and linked it to the Facebook Platform with the RFacebook ruby gem.

Since then, successive iterations of the app have been released every 2 to 4 weeks, as new functionality has been requested or imagined, flaws have been identified, and new features have demanded new interface design patterns. Current functionality allows users to:

• Create, edit, and share Texts, Authors, and Collections
• Join Groups organized around a particular theme or topic
• Tag everything in the application
• Comment on Texts, Authors, Collections and Groups
• Browse other Readers profiles and records
• Generate statistics based on records in the application (generated with Google Charts)
• Search and browse search logs
• Lookup and add information from Amazon, Google Books, and soon Freebase

Future versions will further integrate application activity with the Facebook Platform, link records in the database to other web services and resources (libraries, text analysis tools, etc), and offer a suite of import/export tools for managing larger data sets. Additionally, Dr. Sinclair is interested in experimenting with hybrid searches that would allow data drawn from the overlapping properties of authors, texts, and readers to be explored. For example, what are the relationships between the age, gender, education level, nationality, and so on of readers and the authors of the texts they read? What does this information tell us? These and other questions will be explored.

Project management has been handled with Trac, extensive release notes, a dedicated mailing list of beta testers and collaborators, and lots of notebooks. Learning to be a part of a very smart team of people while managing a technical project has been really interesting. The practical side of things has also emphasized the quality and breadth of the open source community as a resource for these kinds of projects. Of course, Rails is open source, but I have had the pleasure of using over a dozen other open source projects during the course of development, from free icon sets to JavaScript snippets to Ruby gems to Rails plugins. All of these have made development more productive, more fun, and the end result more polished and powerful. As an academic project without funding outside of a grant, open source has offered the savings in time and sophistication needed to create a professional application in a relatively short period.

The ongoing project has been a fantastic experience for me. I have had the opportunity to work with a great team of beta testers, explore the Facebook platform, and integrate a Rails app with a variety of web services. I’ve also had free reign to iterate over a series of increasingly sophisticated interface designs. I will continue to contribute to the project until August, and hopefully beyond.

If you’re interested in the project, or would like to become a beta tester, feel free to add the Digital Texts 2.0 app on Facebook.

Working in Flash allowed us to implement some cool features – background ‘lights’ that turn on and off to suit the photos in each collection, subtle animation that brings the navigation to life, automatically resized images that scale to fill the browser window, and a header and menu that fade out when inactive. All the features are designed to showcase the photos, and keep distractions to a minimum. Check it out!

Conversations with the presenters

Due to the relatively small size of the conference (~400 people), and the friendliness of the various speakers, I was able to have 1-on-1 chats with several of the folks I was most interested in talking to.

Molly Holzschlag spoke about “Why Web Standards Aren’t”, and how the original vision of the Web Standards Project (“anyone, anywhere, any platform, any user agent”) has run aground. She argues that what we should be aiming for isn’t this kind of universal standard, but interoperability, and that what we are really talking about are Best Practices, not Standards. I spoke with her about IE’s non-cooperation with such practices, and Microsoft’s relationship to the web dev community. Molly has already discussed the politics of these issues on her blog (how sweet is her URL: molly.com!). I asked her whether she thought that we as an industry have the opportunity/responsibility to educate users why they are better off using a standards-based browser, rather than pleading with Microsoft (in vain) to get their products up to date with their competitors in this area. The most tedious aspect of web development is browser compatibility testing. My experience is that catering to IE6 takes up hours and hours on every project, not to mention that it bloats your CSS and markup. She didn’t have a clear answer (nobody does), but after chatting for a while she suggested that a set of real tests to demonstrate the loss of time (and consequently, profit) caused by Internet Explorer’s lack of standards support would go a long way toward convincing institutions and companies to make the switch. After all, I’d be willing to bet that the greater proportion of those 1/2 billion IE installs are on corporate or institutional intranets.

Liz Danzico, of Happy Cog and A Brief Message, gave an interesting talk about “The Framework Age”, and how we can help users to ‘perform’ the interfaces we build by helping them detect patterns and organize them into frameworks for interaction and improvisation. I actually thought I was going to a talk on development frameworks (should have read the programme more carefully!), but it turned out to be quite an interesting discussion anyway. Liz definitely has the experience to back up her arguments that we need to focus more on use, interpretation, and evolution of interfaces rather than the traditional paradigm which puts all the emphasis on their (initial) design and composition. During her presentation, Liz used a few examples of the soon-to-be-launched redesign of the WordPress Admin interface, which she worked alongside Matt Mullenweg and Automattic to develop. After the failed Shuttle Project, Happy Cog stepped in to assist with the redesign. I liked the look of the redesign which Liz briefly displayed, but as an avid WordPress user and open source developer, I was curious to what extent the WP and open source community was involved with the redesign.

I asked her about this during the after party. She explained that the community had been involved to some extent throughout the process, but that it had been very tricky to balance the needs of all parties. She related that there had been a serious backlash when Matt delivered a prototype of the redesign in a nightly build without explaining the changes. WordPress 2.5 (scheduled to be released in the coming weeks/months) will have the new design embedded, and will be included with both the hosted and non-hosted versions of WordPress. I discussed the surrounding issues with another developer I met (François from Catalyst), and I am as yet unresolved on the question which the WP situation raises for me: can open-source communities (in their current form primarily made up of programmers) successfully deliver high-quality, progressive design solutions to match the quality of their code? François argued they could, given the right tools, and he may be right. I believe strongly in the open source philosophy, but I wonder if the same structures can support good design. Is design (and here I am more concerned with simple aesthetics than the tangled question of usability) an intrinsically different beast than code? Would open source designs suffer from the dreaded flaws of design-by-committee? I need to develop these ideas more and get others’ input to work through the connected concerns.

I also spoke briefly with Craig Nevill-Manning, director of Google New York, and Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager at Google. Craig gave a fascinating talk on “Why scale makes things interesting and useful”, about the opportunities offered by the staggering scale of data which Google has access to. For example, the Google spellchecker which notices your mistyped queries and asks “Did you mean: _____?”, is incredibly accurate because it relies not on the Oxford English Dictionary or some other top-down, centralized source, but on the 100,000 other people who have misspelt or mistyped the same query into that omnipresent search box. And thanks to this mass of data, it also knows that different misspellings indicate a search for different content (see photo above).

Chris DiBona compressed his existing “History of Open Source” talk from its 3 hours down to a speedy 46 minutes, covering the beginnings of UNIX, GNU, Linux, and everything else along the way right up to today’s open-source web frameworks and tools. It was interesting to hear Chris’ take, as he has been involved with these projects for the entirety of his professional (and amateur) career. After his presentation, I asked him about the potential for open source communities to contribute meaningfully to humanitarian projects such as One Laptop Per Child and the social aspects of the Ubuntu project. He said that he believes that the idealism embodied in open source is a natural match for social projects, but that it’s really hard for open source devs alone to make dramatic change. He pointed to Google’s investment in OLPC and other projects as a good combination of big business and open source know-how.

Microsoft Resentment

Despite being one of the primary sponsors (along with Provoke and Google), and having a well designed booth in the lobby (running a 24″ iMac, nonetheless), the resentment toward Microsoft amongst the presenters and attendees was tangible and vocal. I can’t count the number of speakers who made insults toward or bitter jokes about MS during their presentations. It’s true that they’re an easy target, but the anger at the company’s lack of regard for an open dialogue with the people using their products to develop and deliver web content was evident throughout the conference.

Sigurd Magnusson, an organizer of Webstock and Chief Marketing Officer of SilverStripe (a Wellington-based company building an impressive open-source CMS and accompanying web dev framework called Sapphire), indicated the frustration at this lack of dialogue in his recent blog post, The Internet Explorer 8 Doctype Smackdown. A List Apart also recently released a discussion of the issue, criticizing Microsoft for their heavy-handed approach to browser standards: The Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?. An excerpt:

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches. In its current state, version targeting is a cure that will kill the patient. Version targeting could have been an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate innovation. Instead, the proposed default behavior demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web, a place that according to its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will always be “a little bit broken.”

The rest

The conference was absolutely packed with activity and information. A high-resolution experience if there ever was one! Simon Willison gave great presentations on OpenID and Django, Tom Coates shared his insights on ‘designing for a web of data’ (as opposed to a web of pages), Damian Conway had the audience in stitches during his sarcastic “26 Ways to keep the Morlocks from using your website” (hint: use tiny type, inconsistent navigation, bright clashing colours, and lots of JavaScript and Flash), and Kathy Sierra gave a really useful talk on creating passionate users (I’m very glad she’s back doing speaking engagements after her ordeal last year). And of course, I met and had interesting conversations with dozens of other attendees, and got to know a good number of people in the Wellington (and NZ) web industry, including the great guys at SilverStripe. I’m skipping over so much, but have exhausted the limits of my tiny brain to regurgitate everything it was fed. In short, a fantastic experience, and one I will repeat at every opportunity!

I did a couple new things this time around. I’m a big fan of Google Maps and thought it would be cool to embed a map of the various locations we visit in the sidebar of the blog (the long skinny shape of New Zealand helped make this fit!). It was very easy to do. After creating the map, I grabbed the Paste HTML to embed in website iframe source from Google and dropped it into the sidebar.php file of the WordPress Sandbox theme that I had built for the blog. Piece of cake! Check out the map or see it embedded on the blog. It’s a simple thing, but I think it helps to make the country and places more tangible to readers of the blog back home in Canada. I think this is a tiny pointer toward the need for a more cohesive web service for travel blogging. Writing travelogues was my introduction to the blogosphere, and it’s still what I primarily use blogs for. A service that could easily integrate travel data (maps, photos, stories) into a blog would be very useful! The public API’s of Flickr and Google Maps make this just a matter of programming and time, but as such a service doesn’t exist yet (to my knowledge), I have to mark my map in Google, post my photos to Flickr, post my entry in WordPress, then path my entry photos to Flickr. Also, I have to modify the WordPress theme files by hand to embed the results in the sidebar. Kind of a lumpy process.

Speaking of Flickr, the other new thing I did (after adding a similar feature to my website) was add a randomized Flickr badge to the sidebar of the blog, which pulls 10 random photos with the tag newzealand on each page load. This too was a very simple task. Simply use the wizard to generate your badge (HTML or Flash), select whether you would like your photos limited to a specific set or tag, select layout and color options (or none so you can write your own CSS), and you’re done! I dumped all the junk that the generator spits out (ugly HTML tables and verbose CSS selectors) and just grabbed the one line of JavaScript responsible for the communication with Flickr. All the parameters selected in the wizard are appended as a query string to the script URL, and can be edited inline. I embedded the script and tried to edit it to select more than 10 photos, but Flickr doesn’t respond to requests over this limit. No bother – 10′s enough, and the badge adds a little bit of random Flickrness to the blog! Now I just hope Microsoft doesn’t end up buying Yahoo, rebranding Flickr as Windows Live Photo Sharing Utility for Vista Internet Service Pack 2 and breaking the badge

2007 was Creative Creature’s first year of 1% membership. The experience has been a very positive one so far. I believe strongly in the mission of the organization, and the practical commitment they ask for is a tangible force for change. As interested as I am in environmental progress, it’s unlikely I would have looked up CPAWS and made a donation today, had I not been a 1% member. The structure offered by 1% FTP makes it easier to organize these individual efforts to contribute to something bigger. It’s exciting to be a part of. I can only imagine what a difference could be made if a 1% environmental commitment were applied across the national or world economy. It really wouldn’t be so hard.

I had fun with the theme. The underlying architecture supplied by Sandbox avoids a lot of the CSS headaches that can go along with blog theming, and allowed me to focus on a minimal, content-oriented theme that complements my recent site redesign. Where the Creative Creature site is dark and rich, Recursive Loop is light and airy, but both maintain the same colour scheme and typography choices. The developers of recent versions of WordPress have implemented a fairly flexible Widget system that allowed me to easily add Tag Cloud and Calendar widgets to the sidebar, both of which I find to be really useful navigation tools.

Let me know what you think! Anything not working quite right? Any posts showing up strangely within the new structure? I already had to tweak entries with Flash embedded in them, but I may have missed other little errors. I’ve got a batch of entries to post that I’ve been writing during a recent trip to the beautiful but internet-sparse South Island of New Zealand, so keep an eye out for them!

So long, version 1.0!

v1 (June 2007)	v2 (November 2007)

These changes are partly in preparation for a set of upcoming changes in my life. For the majority of 2008, I will be living in Palmerston North, New Zealand. I will be working while my girlfriend pursues a second degree, this time at Massey University. In between hikes and other Kiwi cultural pursuits, I will be dedicating a good amount of my time to working on Digital Texts 2.0 with Dr. Stéfan Sinclair. Additionally, I hope to meet some new people in the NZ web industry, and continue to provide services for clients here in Canada. Keep an eye here for a link to a new travel blog about our experiences in the southern hemisphere. After returning to Canada, I hope to enroll in a Masters program. The times they are a-changin.

Thanks to my clients who have made the past couple of years so enjoyable. I hope the next few can teach me as much and offer as many exciting opportunities. Here’s to new beginnings!

Welcome Page

We adapted the Portfolio interface to suit the Wedding photography, keeping things consistent, minimal, and graceful. Each Wedding that JD adds appears in a list on the left, with a representative thumbnail from that event appearing on the right on rollover. Clicking on either the menu item or the thumbnail then takes the user to an interactive contact sheet of shots from the Wedding.

Weddings Interface

Susan & Angelo Wedding Index

The shots are gorgeous and touching. Having a regularly updated selection of Wedding shots online will help to promote this aspect of JDH Photography & Imaging, and will give clients a broad idea of the quality and scope of JD’s work.

Thanks for another great project, JD. To the rest…book early!

Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in the availability of “nostalgia” compact discs. Nostalgia CDs are reissued compilations of pre-rock ‘n’ roll era music, especially recordings by swing bands, dance bands, singers, and small jazz combinations. Because this repertory was originally recorded on 78 rpm records, which held about 3-1/2 minutes of music on each side, the producers of nostalgia CDs make numerous aesthetic, practical, and even curatorial decisions as they select, remaster, and package their products. These decisions are also at play for the increasing number of CDs featuring off-air recordings of historic radio broadcasts. The modern technologies of digital recording and the World Wide Web have helped make old music more available than ever: this website addresses the role that CD reissues play in shaping understandings of popular music history-and historical memory more broadly.

In order to bring her research and data to a broader audience, and to develop a set of tools which would facilitate further research, Dr. Baade and I worked together to build Swinging Nostalgia into a fully searchable, highly editable web application. At the site, researchers as well as casual users can search the database to find information about the Artists, Labels, Collections, and Songs from this era, each collated to the others to indicate the popularity, relationships between, and relative importance of each as it pertains to the genre of “nostalgia” releases. Additionally, readers can keep up to date with and contact Dr. Baade as she continues work on the project.

Swinging Nostalgia Home Page

Search Form

Search Results

The site was developed by Creative Creature using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. It also includes a number of features to improve user interaction and ease of use in the administration of the site and application data, including significant use of AJAX techniques, and a cohesive, communicative interface design.

Contributors to the project can add Artists, Labels, and Songs to the database, and associate them through Collections, which in turn contain multi-disc Tracklistings as well as Album Artwork. This data can then be edited and manipulated as the project grows. Furthermore, each element can have Notes and Documents associated with it, to enrich the data with the researcher’s own thoughts and connected materials (links to external URL’s, PDF documents, images, etc.). The result is a dataset which is flexible and powerful enough to offer researchers a venue in which to ask complex questions and develop answers in collaboration with one another.

Administration Interface

Collection Creation View

I hope the site is a useful research tool for Dr. Baade and her colleagues, and a good resource for those interested in learning more about Swing music. I also hope it is the first of many Ruby on Rails web applications I have the pleasure of working on!

The solution was fittingly named Amass: “to gather together or accumulate (a large amount or number of valuable material or things) over a period of time.” JD has selected a range of images from his archives and organized them into events he has photographed, and a group of images he calls Heart Felt. These images conjure views of a realm that is unsettling, intriguing, emotive, and which always seem to hint at more than the subject offers at first glance. Feeling that such images should be searchable by mood as much as subject, JD has tagged his images with emotive, expressive keywords, rather than restricting his descriptions to subject and composition.

Amass has been integrated with JD’s Portfolio in two ways. First, a beautiful tab has been embedded on the right side of the browser when viewing the Portfolio. On rollover, it slides out gracefully to reveal itself, and a click takes the user to Amass. Additionally, images featured in the Portfolio which are available in Amass are marked with a subtle purchase link which appears above the image in question. Selecting this link presents the user with that image’s details and purchase information within Amass. The works are available in both digital and print format.

The design of the site reflects the ‘floating’ nature of the Portfolio design, keeping visual distractions to a minimum and the work at the forefront. This is further emphasized by the minimal, muted colour palette and font treatment, all of which suit the elegance and austerity of the images.

As always, it was a pleasure to work with an artist of JD’s calibre. I’m sure this won’t be the last innovative project to come from his direction.

After missing the Purolator guy by ten minutes on Friday, I had to wait out the weekend to get my hands on Leopard. However, once I let it out of its cage, I found it had eaten the following parts of my favourite pet Tiger:

• My hard drive! Well, then it regurgitated it. Upon initiating the install from the Leopard DVD, I clicked through the setup options (Language, License Agreement, etc), only to get to the Select a Destination screen…with no hard drives displayed. Confused, I clicked back through to the beginning, wondering what was happening. I then moved back through to the Select a Destination screen, again with no drives displayed. I opened up my old iBook and went online to see if anyone else was having the same problem, and found this forum post, which explained that Leopard was inspecting the drive for problems before offering it as an install disk. I waited, as suggested in the Apple forum, and after a few minutes, my internal hard drive appeared, but greyed out. After another 30 seconds, it became opaque, and I selected it to install. Not so slick, Apple. Would a progress bar have been so hard to implement?
• My custom icons for Terminal, Grab, and my external drives (but not for other apps, including Address Book, Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto). Not sure why it would lose some and not others.
• Inquisitor. Perhaps because this isn’t really its own app, but rather a ‘plugin’ for Safari that resides as a Preference Pane in Safari Preferences. It’s fully compatible with Safari 3.0 and Leopard, but I guess it was too tasty to pass up .
• My hotkeys in Adobe Illustrator CS (but not Photoshop CS). I hadn’t realized how consistently I use the hotkeys until they stopped working. Apparently, forthcoming Adobe updates will address these kinds of bugs, although this quote has me concerned: “Users of older Adobe applications, including Creative Suite 2, may find unexpected compatibility issues. Adobe stated that it has not tested its older applications for compatibility, and will not provide any Leopard-specific updates for pre-CS3 apps or the applications it acquired from Macromedia.” (source). Really? CS is only 3 years old, and they will not test it for compatibility with the OS that the majority of their creative professional users will upgrade to? That’s disappointing in a lot of ways.
• My custom Terminal welcome message.
• My energy saving settings. I don’t want my display to go to sleep after 1 minute, thank you.
• My (everyone’s) black arrow active application indicators, though you can get them back with a little bit of hacking. I find the new glowing blue dots inferior both aesthetically and functionally. Change for the sake of change is not a good thing!
• My Junk folder in Mail. I got it back by selecting Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail > Enable junk mail filtering. Not sure why this would be turned off by default, as it was on and working in Tiger.
• My notes in iCal. The new pop-up interface is kind of cool, I guess, but not as functional. Plus, it keeps opening up halfway between my two displays, rather than recognizing the screen edge and opening in the appropriate direction.

The Things Leopard Threw Up

When downloading an application and opening it for the first time, Leopard prompts “‘AppName’ is an application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” I know this is here to protect users from accidentally running malicious software, but I should at least be able to disable it. It’s just annoying. Also, it’s the first time I’ve seen OS X copy a Vista ‘feature’, especially after making fun of it.

Besides that small thing, the new aesthetic generally feels heavy:

• the darker drop shadows on the Apple menu and active window
• the darker metal on application windows
• the chunky iTunes-style menus in Finder
• the new default folder icons
• the heavily depressed active buttons in toolbars
• the more heavily saturated red yellow and green window icons
• the over the top highlighting of matches using Safari’s Find feature
• the gears System Prefs icon

It’s all quite dense and technical looking. Not sure how I feel about it just yet, but I’m not sure that most of the visual changes are improvements. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just not as graceful as Tiger. However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

There are lots of good things about Leopard: spacebar to QuickLook a document (awesome!), Spaces, WebClips, improved Safari functionality (movable tabs, finally), and many more that I haven’t yet found. Additionally, the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard was actually remarkably smooth, especially in comparison to other operating systems. And it must be said that OS X is still the finest operating system interface design yet invented, both visually and functionally. These are just a few odd changes/omissions I thought I would point out!

So, rather than a rant about the issue, I’ve decided to restrict myself to a list of the things I feel I’m doing right for the environment in my everyday business, and those that I need to improve upon. The latter are combined with a commitment on my part to actively pursue those improvements. Since this blog is dedicated primarily to my business, I will focus on those activities to do with Creative Creature.

The things I’m doing right

• I work from home, eliminating the need to commute.
• I turn off my monitors and speakers when I’m going to be away from my desk for more than a couple of minutes, helping to conserve energy. I also unplug my computer overnight (though I do leave it sleeping).
• I bike to all meetings, reducing the noise and pollution caused by car traffic. Thanks to the climate in Hamilton, I can do this throughout the year (though it gets chilly sometimes!).
• I use recycled paper for all printing, and use both sides of the page most of the time. I also recycle all fine paper waste that my activities generate.
• I donate 1% of my sales to environmental organizations through 1% For The Planet.

The things I can improve on

• I leave my routers, hubs, and telephones plugged in and running when I leave the house for days at a time, consuming unnecessary energy.
• I have not converted to CFL bulbs in my home. I have doubts about the Mercury in the bulbs, but this is debatable based on the method used for generating electricity in your area (ie. the method of energy production (coal plants) may produce more Mercury to power an incandescent bulb than a CFL would use in production and use combined). The energy mixture in Hamilton is primarily hydroelectric (Niagara Falls) and nuclear, so I’m still not sure about this.
• I use a wide variety of electronics loaded with plastics and heavy metals, every one of them manufactured under loose environmental guidelines in Asia and shipped overseas. The seemingly low environmental impact of the web industry (“It’s all digital! It’s all so perfect and clean!”) hides a lot of toxic waste. Not sure what my options are for this right now.
• I’m sure there are many more. Any suggestions?

Save Our Forests!

Finally, as a little goody for those interested in making the small changes, I’ve put together a little “No Junk Mail” 2.5″ x 3.5″ badge that you can download, print out, and put on your mailbox. I printed mine on sticker paper, but regular (recycled!) paper and some tape would work as well. If you’d like, you can download the artwork in Illustrator format and rework to your needs (maybe a skinny mailbox door?). Enjoy! I’d love to hear if you use it.

Download Formats

• 150dpi PNG
• 300dpi PNG
• Adobe Illustrator CS Format

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

After holding out for years, I finally got tired of waiting for ‘the next generation’ and bought my very own iPod. After the most recent product line was announced, I had a variety of choices. The Nanos are too small for my liking. On the other end of the spectrum, the sheer size of the 160GB ‘Classic’ was appealing, but after playing with one at the Apple store, I was let down by the extremely sluggish interface. The hard drive contributes to this, but the new motion graphics and sophisticated interface of the updated iPod software can’t help. There were noticeable, regular delays when browsing between menus and options which I found unacceptable.

Walking into the store, I hadn’t seriously considered the Touch. Firstly, because it seemed too small (storage-wise), and secondly, because it wasn’t due out for another week. However, I calculated that I could still fit around 300 albums (or 2 seasons of Lost!) on a 16GB model, and after asking a sales rep about why I might want to wait for the newest of the new, he pointed out that they had them in stock ahead of schedule (I was lucky to be at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC). After playing with one for a while and taking a day to think about it, my choice was pretty well made up. As the rep pointed out (or had been directed to point out), Apple is leaning toward multi-functional, network-capable iPod designs in their marquee line of products, so it makes sense to swim with the current. Living in Canada, the iPhone still seems a distant possibility. Moreover, I’m not interested in having a cellphone (and the accompanying charges). So, the iPod Touch it was!

I’ve had the device for about a week now, and I’ve been filling a text file with notes as I’ve gotten to know the Touch’s functionality, dis-functionality, and possibilities. Gathered below are the edited results of these impressions. Get a cup of coffee…it’s long!

Packaging and Accessories

• No plastic covers on dock/USB connector. As my girlfriend’s 1st-Gen Nano came with these (and I assume every other iPod did too), I was surprised they were not included. It’s a small thing, but given the easily damaged/vulnerable design of the iPod connector, it seems unwise to leave it open when not in use. What about dirt and dust?
• The cheap plastic stand that comes with the Touch doesn’t allow the iPod to be connected to the dock connector or the audio out, rendering it essentially useless except as a prop for a disconnected (or upside-down) iPod, or to prop the iPod up in horizontal orientation. Really, who designed this? Maybe I’ll go lo-tech and make one of these. Guess I’ll have to buy the dock.
• Headphones are the standard iPod white earbuds. They’re adequate, but full-size headphones will be needed for longer trips.
• A simple black cleaning cloth comes with the Touch. A bag would have been nicer (like what sunglasses come in).

Interface

• Immediately and completely intuitive.
• Of course, the screen gets smudged and fingerprinted, but these are for the most part invisible when viewing the device directly (while in use). The cloth does a good job of cleaning it up without the need for a liquid cleaner.
• Elegant transitions between screens/modes. These are good-looking, but also generally well thought-out in terms of visually communicating the result of a given interaction. The transition between open and newly launched pages in Safari is a good example of this.
• Icons at top of Home screen (iPod, wireless signal strength, clock, battery) are grey, and look cheap/inconsistent in comparison to the rest of the interface, especially since the same icons ARE coloured in all applications except Photos and Calculator.
• Inability to reorder or remove the application icons on the Home screen. For example, I do not regularly use YouTube, and I do not need a dedicated icon for this app.
• Terrible icon for the YouTube application, and the Settings and Contacts icons could be improved.
• Say you’re browsing the web and listening to music, and need to turn the iPod down. There is not a physical set of buttons to control volume (as on iPhone). Fortunately, double-clicking the home button brings up a play/pause/volume control for music, which helps to compensate for the lack of a physical volume control. However, part of trusting an interface comes from knowing that you always have access to such shortcuts. So, when I double-click the home button in CoverFlow mode and nothing happens, I get confused (and frustrated!). I have to instead turn the ipod into a vertical orientation, where the double-click still does nothing, but I have a volume control onscreen.
• The Wallpaper function in the Settings section allows you to set a wallpaper for your Touch. Only problem is that the only time you ever see this wallpaper is when waking the device from Sleep (for as long as it takes you to slide your finger across). I spoke to an iPhone owner who confirmed that this is essentially the same for that device, except that on the iPhone you see the wallpaper behind the keypad during calls. Why the wallpaper doesn’t display behind the Home screen icons is completely beyond me. The black Home screen gets boring quickly.

Applications

Music

• Works as expected, with very nice menus, album artwork support, and transitions. I especially like the artwork/tracklisting dual-sided interface elements, which mimic the real-life experience of holding a CD or LP and turning it over to look at the tracks.
• CoverFlow works very well (snappy), and is a nice visual way of quickly browsing your albums. However, it does not seem to include singles (only albums), and is only as attractive as the completeness of your album artwork collection. Before spending 25 minutes manually updating all the artwork in my Library, CoverFlow was mostly a bunch of black musical notes (the default album graphic) for me.
• Along with Photos, the most polished application on the iPod Touch, and justifiably so! This is a music player, first and foremost.

Videos

• Haven’t spent much time with the videos, but after converting a handful of episodes of a show to .mov format (using FFMpegX) and loading them onto my iPod, they worked as expected. Good quality video and audio.
• Titles don’t scroll when viewing your Videos as a list. This is frustrating when browsing the episode listings of a show, most of which will start with the same show name prefix (putting the episode number/title offscreen). This makes it difficult to tell which episode you are selecting, without watching a clip from it. The way older iPod’s scroll long song titles and episode names would be welcome here.
• Can only be viewed in one orientation (Home button on right), as opposed to photos which will rotate to fit any orientation. Likewise with YouTube. Why? This seems like a feature that Apple just forgot to implement/rushed. Yet another instance of the interface’s inconsistency.

Photos

• Very nice application. Splits your photos up into the Albums which they are organized into in iPhoto. Nice slideshow functionality, with great transitions. Flipping through pictures with a flick of the finger is very rewarding, and a genuinely easy way of quickly sharing digital photos with a friend. Nothing bad to say here!

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store

• Cool, works as expected. Nice design. I really only use this as an encyclopedia to look up tracklistings and preview songs. Combined with the upcoming Starbuck’s partnership, this is going to make Apple a lot of money, and yuppies very happy. I wonder where I can download the theme music from that new VW commercial…who Wilco? No, I’ve never heard of them.

Safari

• Depending on the site, the experience of using Safari is either seamless (you forget you’re using a mobile device), or terrible (can’t view content, difficult to navigate, uncomfortable). The general distinction I’ve found so far is between sites which are standards-based and those which are not. For example, browsing www.alistapart.com is a dream. Browsing www.torontobluejays.com is agonizing.
• You can view online PDF’s in Safari, and they look great. However, there is no pagination functionality, leaving a lot of scrolling to be done on large documents (including Apple’s own iPod Touch Features Guide PDF). Seems like an obvious oversight.
• In Settings > Safari > Developer, there is an option to turn on the Debug Panel in Safari. This is a good sign, along with the WebKit Web Inspector, that Apple intends to make Safari a better platform for web development. The Debug console integrates nicely with the browser. However, there is a weird red line on the error view (fixed in 1.1.1), and I can’t really see myself debugging on the actual iPod, so the whole thing is a bit confusing. Is this a leftover from the device’s development which they decided to leave in for end-users?
• NO FLASH OR QUICKTIME SUPPORT. Based on reviews, I knew it didn’t support Flash going in, but no Quicktime? Really? Considering YouTube videos are in Flash format, and the Videos application is surely using some derivative form of Quicktime, why can’t I view .swf‘s and .mov‘s in Safari? Let’s connect the dots, guys. This means that Apple’s own highly produced introduction to using the device, the iPod Touch Guided Tour, can’t be viewed on the iPod Touch without first downloading it to your computer and then loading into the Videos section of the device. Dumb!
• No Find function to search for keywords within a web page. I use this so often when surfing that I really miss it here. It wouldn’t be hard to implement, though I suppose it may have been purposefully left off to avoid ‘feature-itis.’
• JavaScript support is good, although the nature of the multi-touch interface renders drag-and-droppable/sortable elements inoperable on the Touch. This is a shame, but I understand the interface design decision.
• At first, I was disappointed that there wasn’t a dedicated RSS app on the Touch (though I still think there should be), but after reading RSS feeds in Safari, I was pretty impressed with the reader.mac.com/mobile format which they are displayed in by default. If you read RSS in Safari on your laptop, this interface will be familiar to you. It works well, though it could use some more polish.

YouTube

• As I mentioned, I’m not too interested in this app, but it works as expected, minus the single orientation option for viewing videos.

Calendar

• When I saw a Calendar application on the Touch, I assumed that it would function similarly to iCal. And it does. Except that you can’t add or edit events. What??? A Read-Only Calendar? You’ve GOT to be kidding. This is one of several instances where the intentional handicapping of the device’s functionality is evident in comparison to the iPhone.

Contacts

• I can add, edit, and delete Contacts…which makes it even stranger that I can’t do the same for Calendar events.
• Interface for Contacts is quite good, although when adding Contacts, I want to be able to turn the iPod into its horizontal orientation to take advantage of the larger, sideways keyboard. Alas, as in many screens, only the vertical orientation is supported here.

Clock

• Some nice, useful features, and a slick interface. The multiple world clocks are great for traveling, and the alarm clock works well (though the sound effects are kind of cheap – I would have preferred the OS X standards like purr, ping and submarine).

Calculator

• Nothing to be said really – nice interface, works properly. A tipping function would have been nice.

Settings

• Wi-Fi setup is easy, and surprisingly sophisticated for more complex network setups. I was online within seconds of turning the Touch on.
• Brightness control has an auto-brightness option to automatically adjust to ambient light conditions. This feature was introduced with the Intel-based Apple laptops, I believe, and it’s put to excellent use here.
• General Settings allows you to set a lock on the iPod with a pin number, which works well if you think somebody undesirable might be messing with your stuff. Here you can also set date, time, international, and keyboard settings, and choose your Wallpaper (see gripes above). I haven’t figured out how to remove the default Wallpaper folder (or add to it for that matter). The shipped wallpapers are your standard nature/fine art options, as well as a handful of graphics based on the most recent iPod commercials (with the silhouetted dancers on tropical looking backgrounds). However, the Wallpaper section also gives you access to your Photo library (in which I’ve created my own iPod Wallpapers album).
• There is then a Settings panel for each of the apps, which allows you to set the options you would expect. Works well, nicely laid out.

iPhone vs. iPod Touch

If you can afford the $70-100/month for service, the iPhone gives you a lot more bang for the same price (since they dropped the 8GB price from $599 down to $399). Dedicated applications for weather, maps, stocks, and e-mail, a camera, a phone, a working Calendar…and I’m sure a 16GB model can’t be far away. All I can guess is that the premium price for the iPod Touch ($299 and $399 USD for the 8 and 16GB models) is due to its first generation status. Given the wide gaps in functionality between the iPhone and Touch, the same (initial) price is difficult to stomach. Although as a friend pointed out, Apple must make a killing on the services in their deal with AT&T.

Final Thoughts

This is the first generation (2nd if you include the iPhone) of this device, and even a company as accomplished as Apple is bound to make some mistakes. Nevertheless, the kinds of inconsistencies I’ve pointed out hurt the user experience, and tarnish Apple’s vaunted design reputation. While these may be improved by software updates, and will become less noticeable as I get used to them, they remain missteps which I expected Apple to avoid. The good news is that the platform is solid; these are software/interface design issues, not hardware problems.

The possibility of purchasing additional apps (through iTunes or otherwise) would improve my evaluation of the device. Games would be nice (sudoku, crosswords, etc), and if Mail, RSS, and Weather apps are released, I would buy them instantly, given a reasonable price point in the $5-$25 range (cheaper for single-purpose widgets like Weather and more for the sophisticated features offered by Mail or other complex apps). The sheer number of apps you get on the iPhone that are missing or handicapped in the iPod Touch is really frustrating. How hard would it have been to give me Notes, Maps, and a working Calendar? Let the iPhone’s phone capabilities and camera distinguish it from the Touch…don’t purposefully downgrade my $400 device. For example, I can still check the weather forecast through Safari, it’s just less convenient. The Weather app is a basic piece of software that already ships with iPhone and OS X Dashboard. Why isn’t it here?

As you can tell, I’m not head-over-heels for the Touch. Overall, the truly impressive multi-touch interface, ability to browse the web on an iPod, generally high-quality media features, and solid construction of the iPod Touch have made me a satisfied, if not ecstatic, owner, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

UPDATE: As I wrote this, the iPod Touch 1.1.1 Firmware Update came down the pipe, and has been installed on my iPod. Haven’t had a chance to explore any changes which this update may have made, but I can only hope it’s the first update of many!

Yesterday I came across a banner ad for Blog Action Day while traversing the web. Interested by the title and graphic design, I followed the link to discover a pretty cool initiative started by a handful of (hippy, vegan, Baha’i) bloggers. The idea is this:

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

The issue for the inaugural Blog Action Day is The Environment. I like the idea of focussing a wide variety of blogs on a single (multifaceted) issue, especially when it’s the central concern of our time. So far, around 3600 blog(ger)s have signed up for the event. The initiative seems to be relatively nonpartisan, which will hopefully increase its impact across perspectives (as opposed to ‘preaching to the choir’). In their FAQ, they state the following:

2. Does Blog Action Day have a specific agenda?

As much as is possible we are aiming not to push any particular agenda. Aside from the choice of theme each year, we encourage bloggers to write their own opinions, give weight to what they think is important and to be themselves.

We believe in unity in diversity, not uniformity.

3. Why the environment?

We have selected the environment as the 2007 theme both for the clarity of its importance and the undeniable urgency that issues like global warming and pollution have. It is an issue that can relate to virtually any subject, any blog and anybody.

The organizers have suggested several options for participants to help make the day a success. The first is to post on the environment on October 15th. They suggest writing about how the issue is important to you, how you go about decreasing your environmental impact, and what you think should be done to promote environmental protection. The second is to donate your day’s earnings to the environmental charity of your choice (four of the big ones are officially associated with the initiative – Greenpeace, the National Wildlife Federation, The Sierra Club, and The Conservation Fund). Finally, they suggest helping to spread the word about the day, as I’m doing here! As I devote 1% of my earnings to 1% for the Planet, I’m not sure whether I will be donating my day’s earnings (*most days $0! But I guess my monthly average divided by thirty) to one of the charities.

I’m also not sure exactly what elements of the issue I’m going to write about yet, but I’m excited to contribute to the day. I’m interested to see what others write, whether Blog Action Day is covered in the mainstream media, and how the concept of collaboratively focussing on a single topic flies in the blogosphere. I think it’s an idea with a lot of positive energy behind it. It’s really easy to register, so if this is something that interests you, add your voice to the chorus. See you October 15th!

Hamilton audio-visual art collective, ablockparentcommunity, led by producer Rob Liston and visual artist JD Howell, asked me to develop an ultra-minimal new site for their project. The design reflects abpc’s focus on the work: imagery and sound that invite introspection and an embrace of the subtlety and beauty of the things we find around us.

In their own words:

ablockparentcommunity is a multimedia art project which attempts to explore the undercurrents of community living through the juxtaposition of musical landscapes and audio-visual snapshots. Providing a seductive mix of electronic percussion and organic melodies, producers Rob Liston and JD Howell take the audience on a soundtracked journey down Main Street Everywhere, highlighting the extraordinary within the ordinary, the beautiful within the mundane. Look a little closer. Listen a little longer. We live where you live.

The site required a way to showcase the work of the group without the need for an overly complex system of navigation. My experience of the group’s work is that they are always interested in what’s going on now, not in cataloguing their past efforts or focussing on what others have to say. Therefore, JD’s design offered a perfect, compelling insight into their process. Images may offer a diverse view of a variety of subjects, or focus on a specific theme. There may be instrumental, organic songs alongside hip-hop remixes, or just one song looping, reflecting the thread of ‘attractive repetition’ in ablockparentcommunity’s art.

To realize the design technically, I built a two-part system. All content is managed by the group using XML files which describe the content they would like to display at any given time. This data is then loaded into Flash, and is used to populate the interface that you see. Images are loaded at random from a small, constantly updated selection, and fade in and out of the view over time. Likewise, songs are presented in a simple media player which selects a song at random on launch. Besides these central elements, the site offers a simple way to get in touch, and a brief news feed, also updated via XML. The overall effect offers a minimal aesthetic which communicates graceful elegance, and invites the viewer to experience something different…yet familiar.

My responsibility was to work alongside Matt Bouchard with the design team, consisting of Milena Radzikowska, Piotr Michura and Stan Ruecker to design some JavaScript screen effects and animations to realize the responsive interface they were imagining for the Workbench. An overview and links to this work can be found on the Monk Wiki, and in the Monk client area. I also contributed the (unsolicited) logo for the event, choosing one of the many memorable catchphrases as our slogan (though “It’s more than just a red box” was a close runner-up)!

The event was a lot of fun. Thanks to the culinary wizardry of Maryanne Wynne, we ate like kings (and queens) at every meal (and several times in between). We were also well looked-after by Gary and the rest of the staff at Kramer Pond Lodge. Highlights for me included my introduction to extreme/pair programming at the suggestion of Stéfan and the steak-tearing jaws of Matt Bouchard, the hot tubs (at their varying states of ‘hotness’), and playing baseball and ultimate on the lawn. Oh, and the work was cool!

I’ve posted photos from the event on my Flickr page, which you can view as a set or slideshow. Here’s to next time!

Given Ian’s long term involvement with web technologies and open source projects, web standards were an integral part of the redesign. I was able to cater to this emphasis through a set of CSS-styled XHTML templates for the top level of content, thoroughly tested in as many browsers and platforms as we could get our hands on! These templates were informed by a visual design which is fairly minimal, yet friendly and professional. After a few iterations of the design, Ian and I arrived at a look and feel we were happy with, and I worked to extend it throughout the layout, various visual elements, and logo (which would also shrink to become the favicon) to present a consistent and attractive interface.

It was interesting and rewarding to work with Ian on his site. The breadth of content it contains, which spans a diverse career as a physicist, academic, author, and now consultant, offered a challenge for me as a designer. Usually, a project has a fairly narrow focus and audience. Designing for these instances offers more obvious directions for the look and feel of a site. However, with the various aspects of Ian’s content, it took a while to arrive at a design that communicated his professional life while making lots of room for the content of the site. I think the final product represents a successful integration of these factors. Thanks for the project, Ian!

I’m the proud new owner of a beautiful 24″ Samsung SyncMaster 245BW! After comparing monitors for some time, and lusting after the Apple Cinema Displays, I decided that the Samsung fit my needs perfectly. It’s huge, crisp, bright, comes with a highly adjustable stand (from 4″ to 8″ off the desk, 360 degrees around, and a wide angle of tilt), and is less than half the price of the slightly smaller 23″ Apple model. No comparison!

After doing a little basic math, I’ve decided that between my 24″ display’s 1920×1200 pixel resolution, and my 15.4″ MacBook Pro’s 1440×900 resolution, I should coin a new slogan. Creative Creature: 3.6 million pixels at your service!

Locomotive

Locomotive is a tool for installing Ruby, Rails, and the various libraries you need to get started developing on Rails. After installation, the interface functions as a server manager to run your Rails apps locally on the ports you set. When I started with Rails, I didn’t know about Locomotive: after manually downloading and installing Ruby, Rails, and the LightTPD server and spending a long while on the command line compiling and recompiling, I finally got my local environment configured properly. Then I came across Locomotive, and haven’t gone back to managing things manually since. It’s slick, lightweight, and does what it promises! What more can you ask for in a piece of software?

CocoaMySQL

CocoaMySQL is useful for anyone managing MySQL databases, whether for Rails development or otherwise. I got sick of phpmyadmin‘s bugs, outdated interface, and the need to use a browser to view and edit my databases. For Mac users, CocoaMySQL is a lightweight, well-designed MySQL management app that fits nicely into the OS X ecosystem. It’s become my always-open DB utility when I’m developing.

Railscasts.com

Railscasts are the product of the hard work and Rails expertise of Ryan Bates. After reading several extremely useful tutorials posted by Ryan at the Rails Forum, I followed the link to Railscasts in his signature. I’m glad I did. Three times a week, Ryan posts well thought-out, easy-to-follow screencasts showing various Rails techniques. The videos are short (under 10 minutes), well-produced, and very helpful. His presentation style is clear, gentle, and he thorougly explains what he’s doing on-screen. I’ve already put the lessons I’ve learned in the Logger and Pretty Page Titles episodes into practice, and I’m eager to learn more. And, unlike PeepCode, all the videos at Railscasts are free!

I have been using Panic Software‘s excellent OS X FTP client, Transmit, for about two years now. The Mac software maker recently released Coda, advertised as One Window Web Development for Mac OS X. The software has already won an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X User Experience, and it has been getting attention from a lot of web developers, if the buzz on the blog scene is any indication.

After my positive experiences with some of Panic’s other products, namely Transmit and Desktastic, I was interested to see what Coda would offer. Fortunately, it is available to download for a free two week trial. I used the trial period to give it a shot, and found it comfortable to use, beautifully designed, and fairly fully featured. Though there are several issues which remain for me (see below), the overall experience of the product convinced me to lay out the $69.95 USD (Transmit owner price) to have it for my own. What follows is an (incomplete) rundown of the features, limitations, and bugs that I’ve experienced so far, for anyone else interested in switching to the product.

* As I have used TextMate and Eclipse almost exclusively for web development for the past year, many of my gripes with Coda address features found in those products which are missing or, to my mind, not properly implemented here. However, Coda offers a more intuitive, streamlined interface than either of these environments, and so naturally there are trade-offs.

Best Features

• Built-in Page Preview in Safari, and a drop-down menu to view the page in the browser of your choice (this list is automatically populated with browsers installed on your system). The page Preview can also be viewed in a split mode, with your code and page visible simultaneously (all in one window, of course).
• Inline validation of XHTML and CSS.

  

• Clips is a floating panel which allows quick access to common code snippets to be inserted into your code. Comes populated with common (X)HTML snippets like DOCTYPE declarations and page structure, as well as Lorem Ipsum text. Also allows easy addition of custom Clips.

  

• Built-in Terminal. Very handy!
• Symbols/Functions Navigator, akin to that in Eclipse, a more fully functioned IDE.

  

• Simultaneous Local/Remote viewing of sites, with built-in Transmit FTP. Makes managing local and live copies of files intuitive.
• Sites view. Great GUI for the various remote sites you have to manage on a daily basis.

  

• Overall design excellence. The Panic guys are perfectionists, and their attention to detail really pays off in all the little touches that raise this application head-and-shoulders above the other options in terms of look and feel.

Limitations

• No code block folding/toggling. This is a simple but major feature to leave out. I use this constantly in TextMate, especially when editing XML documents.
• Cannot select and set the case (Upper, Lower, Camel) of a piece of text, as in TextMate.
• No Find & Replace in Project (directory) feature (again, like in TextMate).
• Site images in Sites view don’t display Flash content.
• Can’t arrange order of open tabs (files). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)
• Can’t move around views/perspectives. In Eclipse, I’m able to arrange my window as I would like, and even the minimal interface of TextMate allows me to set the directory structure drawer to open on the left or right. In Coda, the default view is your only option. As gorgeous as it is, some flexibility would be nice!
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You’re right, the File Browser can only be on the left of the screen, though you can hide it by selecting Hide File Browser from the View menu. Just about everything else about the layout is customizable through the use of splits, though. I like having my CSS in an editor on the left, and a preview of my HTML on the right. Vertical splits are great!”

  This is true, although I meant the ability to move around the various inspectors/navigators. For example, the Find and Replace interface, the Functions viewer, the local and remote site navigators, etc. These are not customizable, in terms of position. However, as I mentioned, the default layout and design of these features is excellent, and I’d rather have one well-configured layout than unlimited options to customize.

• Clicking twice on a file in the file navigator on the left does not allow Renaming (as any Mac user would expect). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)

Bugs!

• Undo continually fails. Several undo’s will work, then suddenly stop. The Release Notes for the most recent version state that this has been addressed, but I continue to experience this issue, and it is by far the most frustrating bug of the bunch.
• Block comment feature does not recognize in-head stylesheets (uses HTML comments rather than CSS comments). Likewise with Embedded Ruby – tries to comment out HTML tags with Ruby comments (#).
• Dual-monitoring: didn’t recognize to bring my Clips panel back onto my laptop monitor after unplugging my external monitor. I wasn’t able to get the panel back until I restarted Coda.
• Syntax colouring did not turn on automatically after saving a file as CSS. Had to close and re-open to get colouring. Also, mixed files, and less common file types, are often coloured incorrectly, or not at all.
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You can change the syntax mode from the Text menu, or from the action menu at the bottom of the editor pane. As for your less common file extensions, you can set up custom syntax modes in the Preferences, under Editor.”

• General crashes have become less common since upgrading to V.1.0.3, but there are still application crashes during regular tasks. Apple-tabbing to other applications and back to Coda seems to be particularly problematic.

The limitations and bugs I’ve mentioned are not insignificant, but Panic has an excellent track record of constant improvement of their products. It’s clear that they invest more than the standard effort to make their products stand out, and I think that Coda is already very impressive, even this early in its lifecycle. Thanks for a great tool guys!

After sending Panic a link to this article, I received a prompt reply from Tim at the company responding to several of the issues I mentioned (included in-line, above), and asking for more details on the bugs I outlined. Thanks for caring!

The most recent edition of the McMaster Museum of Art‘s newsletter has a segment on the project:

“Last September, the prestigious Goethe- Institut and the McMaster Museum of Art launched a website, designed to bring German art, language and culture to the fingertips of teachers and students globally. More than 10,000 unique visitors have used the site so far and it has garnered considerable praise from German, History and Art teachers.

The website and this project were the subject of workshops at the Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association’s annual conference in March. Educator’s comments were enthusiastic: “Loved it!”, “Very useful”, “Could be used in any Drama, Social Science Course”, “Would love a compilation of Spanish and French Art!”, “Excellent for cross-curricular involvement.”

Colleagues at the Goethe-Institut San Francisco also used the material at a teacher training session. Once back in their classrooms, the German teachers were pleased with how well the website activities and content engaged the students.

McMaster’s complementary exhibition continues until August 25.”

The newsletter is available online, and you can find out more about the project by reading about it in my Portfolio, or by visiting the site.

Over the past year, I have worked alongside Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Dr. Madeleine Jeay, and James Chartrand (Open Sky Solutions) to develop a literary research application at McMaster University. The result is a preliminary launch of PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire) (en français).

PBLit is an experimental project that aims to develop strategies for the simultaneous exploitation of multiples databases using a single unified interface. Many resources exist for literary research, but most are only available through their own interface. This makes research across a multitude of resources a time-consuming and learning-intensive task. PBLit offers a model prototype for navigation and research across literary resources, and functions as a proof of concept that multiple resources, in different formats and containing various datatypes, can be utilized simultaneously through an integrated web application.

PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire)

http://tapor.mcmaster.ca/pblit/accueil/
ROLE: Designer, Interface Developer
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, Cocoon, CForms, moo.fx

My role on the project was initially as a graphic designer and interface developer, and grew to include some responsibility for the XML/XSLT development of the project (particularly in the implementation of the CForms, and in the search results display), as well as writing and debugging a portion of the JavaScript, and managing the localization of the application using i18n. Several exciting features were developed to facilitate the usability of the application, including an AJAX Search Suggest mechanism on all search fields, and an Advanced Search form which has been developed to allow for future versions of the application to offer resource-specific search fields to allow users to refine their searches to target specific resources.

I have worked closely with Dr.’s Sinclair and Jeay before on SatorBase and Hyperlistes, and as always it was a pleasure to learn from their years of experience undertaking academic projects. Also, it has been an excellent experience learning from the process and open-source knowledge of James Chartrand and Open Sky Solutions. Thanks to everyone, and here’s to a job well done!

Steps

1. Download the template you would like in your preferred format:
   Adobe Illustrator CS (baseball_card_template.ai) [494kb]
   Adobe Photoshop CS (baseball_card_template.psd) [454kb]
2. Select a photo you would like to turn into a baseball card using your favourite photo management software.
3. Crop that image to a 2.5:3.5 aspect ratio and save it. This fits the 2.5″ x 3.5″ format of the baseball card.
4. If using Illustrator, Place the photo in the template by selecting File > Place… and selecting the photo.
   If using Photoshop, select the Paste Photo Here layer and paste your photo.
5. Resize your photo as necessary, making sure to maintain the aspect ratio.
6. Clean up extraneous elements in your file (extra starbursts and text, credits, etc.).
7. If using Illustrator, Export your card by selecting File > Export…. Select your desired file format (.jpg, .png) and file location and press Export.
   If using Photoshop, save your card by selecting File > Save As…. Select your desired file format (.jpg, .png) and file location and press Save.
8. Email your cards around to your friends/teammates, or take them to the print shop!

If you end up using the template, let me know! I’d love to see what people do with it. You can see lots of examples of the template in action at my Baseball Flickr Set.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

The animated graph demonstrates the different trends (historic and anticipated) in greenhouse gas emissions in the province from 1990 to 2020, with Kyoto Targets and specific milestones illustrated. It will not be available online until after the Minister’s announcement for the new climate change plan, so I will not post it here. However, here is a screenshot.

The graph uses XML data to load in the various trends, targets, and milestones. All information regarding the statistics and presentation of the graph is included in the XML document to allow the client to easily add, remove, or edit the data as new information becomes available. This is then loaded into the Flash Player at run time, where the interface is populated with the trends, and the user is able to selectively play, show, and hide each trend on the graph.

In addition to this work, I was asked to develop some ideas for how to visualize our carbon footprint. Each Ontarian is responsible for about 5.7 tonnes of carbon each year (excluding the impact of industry, which bumps each individual’s footprint to 20+ tonnes). Nobody likes the sound of this, but educators in the field recognize that such a number is not the easiest statistic for people to relate to. To that end, the following were some brief ideas or sketches which came to my mind to try to visualize these concepts. The materials are intended for an upcoming Ministry website intended for a younger audience (10-20 years).

It has been interesting and fun to work on this project, and I hope to continue to combine my work in design and multimedia with environmental education and awareness.

Whereas, we do not believe our government, or any government, is doing enough to protect and restore the health of our planet, to work toward sustainable commerce, to exercise full cost accounting in our use of non-renewable resources, and to tax them accordingly.

And whereas, we recognize we do not have totally sustainable and harmless businesses, or lifestyles, and we have an obligation to mitigate the damage we cause, regardless of whether or not we make a profit.

Therefore, we have decided not to wait for any government to do the right thing. We are committing our businesses to donate at least 1 percent of our net revenues to efforts that protect and restore our natural environment.

As we all know, this world will not be worth living in if we continue on our present course of overconsumption and thoughtless destruction. A 1% ‘tax’ on business sales seems a miniscule price to pay to help preserve and protect the natural world. Critics will say it’s not enough, or that it’s too late. Either or both of those statements may be true, but they offer little in return for their cynicism. I hope that this kind of thinking will catch on on a broader scale in time to salvage what is left and build a better future for all of us. Let’s do what G. Love says, and, “Save the whales! And the pygmy marmosets too!”

Interactive Matter

www.interactivematter.ca
ROLE: Designer, Blog Admin
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS

Interactive Matter is a collection of academics, industry professionals, researchers, technologists, students, writers, innovators and experimentalists concerned with imagining, creating and critiquing new interactive media: “Interactive multimedia is the new medium and we are just learning to create and communicate through it. Interactivity is not narrative, it is not image, it is not linear. It is more than an art and it is more than engineering. Interactivity is playful, it is like a conversation, and it matters to the arts, humanities, sciences and the new media industry. Interactivity matters now.”

This site is used as a hub for information about the project and its various participants and partners. It also functions as a repository for current information about Interactive Matter’s bid for continued funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The Goethe-McMaster Project

www.goethe-mcmaster.com
ROLE: Project Web Lead, Designer, Programmer, Conceptual Consultant
TOOLS: HTML, CSS, PHP, Flash 8, Flash Video

“German Expressionism in the Classroom is a website aimed at anyone interested in art or German as a private individual or within the field of education. 30 pieces of art taken from the collection housed at the McMaster Museum of Art are introduced as a virtual exhibition. This exhibition is accompanied by materials in both English and German providing background information on the time period, artists, and works of art and by exercises related to the works of art, German language and culture.”

I worked closely with representatives from the McMaster Museum of Art and the Goethe Institut to develop this resource in a short period of time in August and September of 2006. On September 14th, the website went live to accompany the launch of the German Expressionism exhibit at the museum, and has since been widely used by students and teachers of Art and the German language at the high school level.

SatorBase

www.satorbase.org
ROLE: Designer, Debugger, Programmer for certain updates
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, HTML, CSS

SatorBase is a relational database of literary topoi and their occurrences in texts from 13th to 19th century France. I was contracted to redesign the resource from the ground up, as well as to isolate and fix a number of application errors. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Madeleine Jeay, director of the Sator Society, to add in new functionality to the application.

Hyperlistes

tapor.mcmaster.ca/~hyperliste
ROLE: Programmer
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, XML/XSL

Hyperlistes is another literary research project created by Dr. Madeleine Jeay of the McMaster Department of French. My role on this project involved translating the core functions of the project from Perl CGI scripts to PHP, and setting up a MySQL database to house the site content, as well as tweaking the functionality of the XSLT transformations.

I developed the project in two stages. First, I designed an XML schema which the client could populate with albums of works, separated into Photography and Imaging sections. Each work can be tagged with an optional Title and Description. This setup allows the client to populate and update their current works without needing to use Flash, and without the need of a developer.

Secondly, I built the interface in Flash. After importing the XML, the interface is populated with Albums, each of which holds a set of works. When an album is selected, the works within it are loaded as thumbnails, to be selected by the user. The fun part was developing the animations which are generated dynamically between image positions. First, the border of the image tweens from the current to the selected image shape and size, then the entire interface shifts to center the new image. When this is complete, the image is loaded in, resolving in from a blur and oversaturation filter. Check out the site to get the effect, as these screenshots only tell part of the story!

JD makes beautiful images, and it was a pleasure as always to work with him on this project. He had a clear vision for the site, and it was fun to work together to get the transitions and effects right to suit it.

However, after about 3 months of solid performance from my new machine (a MacBook Pro 15.4″ 1.83 GHz Core Duo), problems started to crop up. I had already grown accustomed to the intense heat put out by the machine (particularly on the bar over the function keys and precisely where you place your wrists while typing), and I had found a wonderful little app to stop the incredibly annoying whine (QuietMBP). However, the new noises were much scarier, and seemed to originate from the right fan near the power button:

Shortly after this began, my CD/DVD drive began to have problems, routinely ejecting a disc multiple times before finally loading it up. Then, the death knell: my power adapter stopped charging. If I held the laptop vertically with the adapter pressing into it from below, I could sometimes get it to charge for 30 seconds or a minute, but then it would cut out again. So, without power, I was forced to take my book in for service.

After about a week’s wait, my warranty covered the replacement of the following:

• Logic Board
• Right Fan
• Power Adapter
• Superdrive

And all of this after my battery got recalled! My little guy is starting to resemble Frankenstein, stitched together from the warehouses of multiple generations of Apple laptops. I realize this computer is the first generation of Intel Macs, but the widespread problems encountered by users, and first-hand experience with my machine and those of friends makes me wonder if Apple didn’t rush these to market without sufficient hardware and real-world testing. Nevertheless, the warranty covered everything, the shipment of parts was relatively quick, and everything seems to be running smoothly (and quieter and cooler) now. I still wouldn’t trade this for an older (though perhaps more reliable) machine.

Edit: Three months after this round of repairs, both fans failed again. They were again covered by warranty, but again I had to wait while the fans were ordered and installed. As a small business person, being without my work machine is extremely frustrating and potentially costly. I am considering requesting Apple cover the cost of an Extended Warranty (3 year AppleCare), as the track record for this machine since its purchase has been so dreadful. I doubt they’ll go for it, but it’s worth a shot.

For others having problems with the heat and fan noise caused by the MacBook Pro, try downloading smcFanControl 2.1 by Hendrik Holtmann. It’s a free app that sits in your Menu bar and displays the temperature of your machine and the current fan speed (in RPM). This helps to monitor which applications are causing the fans to run fast and the computer to heat up, and also indicated to me that both fans were dead (running at 0rpm). When this was the case, the CPU heated up to 89 degrees C and Mac OS X became extremely sluggish. Needless to say I unplugged and took it into the ER asap!

However, shortly after getting XP up and running, I belatedly realized that a *stable* version of Vista had been released by Microsoft. The chance to try out Microsoft’s long-delayed, much-hyped, overdue operating system? Let the fun begin!

Disclaimer: The following is not a technical look at the new OS or the installation process, but rather a visual walkthrough of the Vista install process, and some thoughts on the look and user experience of the new OS. It is intended to be helpful to others attempting to install Vista on their Macs. All times are generalized, and dependent on my overworked machine.

Software:

• Windows Vista (Release Candidate 1) 32-bit
• Parallels (Build 1940 – then Build 1966, see Step 23)

Hardware:

• MacBook Pro 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo (1.5GB RAM)

I used the tutorial and many pointers from this thread at the Parallels site to get Vista running properly. I set up the Virtual Machine as described here using the Vista .iso file downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx.

The newest build of Parallels (October 12th, 2006), has a VM Setup Template for Vista. This seems to work perfectly, though it does require 16GB of free hard drive space. After a bit of re-organizing, I managed to find 16 free gigs, and continued.

On to the install…

1. A pretty Vista loading screen greets me, asking to set language properties. So far, a much better-looking installation than XP (blue screen of death!)



2. The first step, Copying Windows Files, was very quick – perhaps a minute.



3. The second step, Expanding Files, took much longer, approximately half an hour, though I was working in other applications in OS X at the same time.



4. The VM restarts to a black and grey screen which indicates that Windows is loading for the first time.



5. The installation window is displayed and quickly zips through Installing Features and Installing Updates.
6. The Completing Installation step takes about 12 minutes.



7. This black screen displaying the Windows Vista Build number is displayed for around a minute.



8. VM restarts to the same screen. After about a minute, with the pointer displaying an animated circular green icon beside it, the Set Up Windows dialogue is displayed.



9. Next, a computer name and desktop background dialogue. Interesting how the setup emphasis to this point is on personalization, customization, and demonstration of the UI. The gorgeous background photos update on selection, and it’s at this point that I realize I’m IN Vista – I can drag around the Setup window, and select options from the language drop-down menu. However, it’s also at this point that it becomes evident Vista is still Windows – after some dragging around, my window skips a bit and whites out the background image. The setup hangs for a second and then refreshes.



10. Time zone and clock setup.



11. No no, Thank You. Very slick!



12. Back to the green and blue nebula, with a progress bar: “Please wait while Windows checks your computer’s performance.” A series of icons with adspeak fade in and out: “Quickly find anything”, “The most secure Windows® to date”, “Information and tasks at your fingertips”, etc.



13. At the end of the progress bar, back to the black screen from steps 7 and 8.
14. Familiar Windows login sound, with a cool animated Windows logo burst, then “Welcome…” and “Preparing your desktop…” with the animated circle thingie (I like it). Looks like this Release Candidate is a version of Vista Ultimate (Ultimate, really? Why not Windows Beefcake, or Windows to the Max? Those are equally stupid.)



15. Vista has landed! First screen is a Welcome Centre displaying details about the machine, and the usual Getting Started… type stuff.



16. All elements of the UI are smooth, often animated, and very ‘Web 2.0.’ First impression is a good one, although the icons in the system tray look like Windows 3.1 – I’m sure these will be glossified. I like the minimal start button orb and the black base colour of the UI.



17. After boosting the resolution, I started to look around. The wallpapers shipped with Vista are substantially more impressive than XP. Better than OS X? Hmmm….some of them are. I like the option of Widescreen wallpapers, and the organization into categories all in one display is faster than the Mac folder selection approach, which I often find tedious.





18. Most of the familiar options are available in each screen, and laid out similarly to XP. I expected the Color Scheme option under Appearance to allow me to change the base colour of the OS (the black carried through the Start menu and task bar). However, only the Windows Vista Basic option looks good – all the other options are hideous ports of XP (95?) colour schemes. Maybe more polished versions will ship with the retail version. I do like the Recent Tasks menu in the sidebar which is updated as you navigate windows – useful and subtle, and faster than Finder’s ‘Go > Recent Folders…’ option.





19. Next step, setting up the Parallels Tools to allow OS to OS mousing, and other improvements. Interesting warning from Vista on install.



20. First look at DashBar, or SideBoard…err Windows Sidebar, with GadgWets, or WidgGets…err Gadgets. Only joking, nothing wrong with borrowing a good idea. Performance seems pretty slow, but the Parallels Tools are still installing.



21. Restart after Tools are installed. Vista boot is around 1 1/2 minutes. I can now mouse between Vista and OS X seamlessly…wow. On second login, Vista still looks good. I’m beginning to like this.
22. Gadgets load a bit slowly (but no more slowly than Dashboard sometimes). However, they can be dragged on to the desktop to be perma-gadgets, a feature I have heard people wish Dashboard had. Screen savers are almost all 3D oriented, and at this point 3D graphics are not supported by Parallels, so I’m stuck with the Windows logo (a new angular flourish?).
23. First problem: can’t get online. I found a newer build of Parallels which attempts to address Shared Networking problems. Power down the VM and update Parallels to Build 1966 (from 1940). Doesn’t work on first try, but after browsing the Configuration for the VM (in the Parallels Property Page View), I found the Network Adapter tab, which allowed me to set Shared Networking (Virtual Network Adapter), as described here. I can see that Mac OS X has detected a new connection with a local IP (192.xx.xx.xx) (using iStat Pro), so I try Vista again.
24. On reboot, having detected a connection, Vista launches a Network setup wizard, which I click through without editing, selecting a ‘Home’ network setup. Works like a charm!
25. First look at IE7 running in Vista. UI looks significantly more polished from the IE7 Beta I’ve been running on my PC. Also, new front page…look familiar? Perhaps the Microsoft user interface designers are finally getting the point that simpler is better. Page loads seem extremely fast – faster than Safari or Firefox running in OS X. This could be for a number of reasons, I suppose, but a nice surprise, as my Beta version of IE7 was incredibly slow. Navigating to a flash-driven site, IE7 automatically recognizes the necessary plugin and installs it with two clicks in about 10 seconds. I’m impressed. Flash performance is great – streaming a video with sound quickly and without jitters. Also my first experience with Vista sound in Parallels, which others have had problems with. Seems fine so far.



26. I’m also able to access my local server from Windows by browsing to my Mac IP address. I’m running MAMP at port 8888, so my local server address looks something like http://24.xx.xx.xx:8888/. Seems fast, and to my great joy, my in-development websites seem to look and behave in IE7 exactly as they do in Firefox! Praise for .png’s and standards-based CSS!
27. Browsing to a .pdf document calls up a dialogue to find software to read it. So, no built-in PDF reader like Safari. Anyway, two clicks take me to a list of suitable software, and I’m directed to the Adobe Reader page. Download speeds also extremely fast. Good. After install the Reader interface is integrated with IE7, and works well.
28. Nice new feature of IE7, which I expect will show up in other browsers, is a view which allows you to see all tabs which are open in a window in a tiled layout, to quickly navigate between. It also shows if a tab is loading, and allows you to open new tabs without exiting the tiled view. Nice feature for people who often have lots of tabs open.



29. The emphasis on security in Vista is understandable, but as usual a bit clunky. Each potential ‘threat’ (unsigned certificates, software downloads, installs) prompts a fullscreen shade-out with a dialogue asking you to verify that you would like to continue the given action. Only one-click to continue, which is nice, but still seems a bit extreme. For web prompts, I prefer the option in Safari to confirm a downloaded application which pops up from the Download panel. It’s less intrusive and doesn’t interfere with other things you might be doing. The shade-out demonstrates Vista’s improved screen effects, though.

All in all, I’m impressed with Vista’s visual overhaul, and the UI designers have thought of some nice features and implemented them smoothly. It’s still not OS X, and I’m sure there will be problems under the hood, but my first impression is certainly a positive one. Good luck, Bill!

Notes on Parallels:

1. Three times during installation, Parallels prompted me with: “Parallels Desktop has detected that the virtual machine is running without Parallels Tools. Installing the Parallels Tools will make your work with the virtual machine more comfortable: the tools smooth mouse moving, enhance video susbsystem functionality and other characteristics. To start installing Parallels Tools, please select VM->Install Parallels Tools in menu.” This dialogue didn’t seem to interrupt the installation, but it seems odd that Parallels would display this message during an OS install.
2. I could run the install in Fullscreen mode on my second monitor, but Parallels had to switch back to console view to take screenshots. Still, nice that a screenshot feature is built right into the application – saves image editing.
3. Shutting the VM down using the Power Off Virtual Machine button caused Vista to display a ‘Windows was not properly shut down’ black screen on the next startup. I guess Vista needs to be shut down using the Start menu before powering down the VM.
4. XP boots from the .iso in about 15 seconds. Vista takes closer to a minute. More overhead, I guess.