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

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.