“Imagine what it would be like to steer a car if it was always guessing at where you want to go instead of obeying your actual commands? Or if the steering wheel tugged you toward every McDonalds you passed because McDonalds is an advertiser and the car’s algorithm-obeying driver thought it knew you were hungry …
Category Archives: Software
9 Things Cullect Taught Me About Software
Forcing people to create an account to use your software is a bug. if you’re not scared to deploy, you’ve stopped caring. Murphy is alive and well. Google and a bookself of technical books can be equally useless. Good software is like an iceberg. if you ask for money, people will give it to you. …
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Planting Flying Meat Acorn Near Photoshop Elements Grave
Like most professional graphic designers, my career was measured in versions of Adobe Photoshop. v2.5: I decided I wanted to be a graphic designer. The dad of a high school classmate was one. I went to talk with him about it. He worked out of his basement home office with a view of the lake, …
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Google Gears and Joyent Slingshot – Take the Web Offline
My biggest issue with browser-based apps is their complete uselessness when I’m without internet access (or low bandwidth situations). Still happens quite frequently. I knew that situation wouldn’t last long, but of all the potential outcomes, I didn’t expect this one: Joyent Slingshot and Google Gears turn browser-based apps into offline desktop apps. Crazy.
When Not To Do a Holiday Logo for Your Software
Earlier this week, graphic designers everywhere swapped out regular logos for Halloween-themed ones. Google, MacUpdate are just two I bumped into within my browser. Outside of my browser – TextMate – also changed it’s normally non-descript logo earlier this week to a glowing jack-o-lantern. The difference is huge. Each day, I ignore Google’s logo microseconds …
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Free and Open vs Not – At a Glance
Steve Borsch weighs free & open against for-fee and closed. In in he brings up some great points – namely, if the problem you have is solved – good enough – by a hosted, for-pay service, then installing and setting up a “free”, open-source system isn’t worth it. Personally, I’m not keen on SurveyMonkey’s presentation …
Applications and Features I’m Interested In
Shared read/write calendar – so multiple people can change the information on a specific event. Shared presentation application – so a group of people could easily see the same thing, controlled by a single person, sans-projector.
Advice to Web Developers: Forget the Password
This weekend while wandering down the aisles of our local Super Target, we found a dinner table and a side board we though would go great in our living/dining room. After checking out, a couple of teenage boys wheeled the still flat-packed pieces to our awaiting PT Cruiser. Now, after flattening the inside of the …
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Software Distribution History: Shrinkwrap to Download to Appcasting
NetNewsWire, my preferred RSS reader, isn’t particular about the file type within a given podcast. Audio (podcasting), video (videoblogging), images, pdfs (like 101sheets), torrents, or even applications (appcasting?). As you can tell from the appcasting link, Fraser Speirs was the first I knew of using an RSS feed to distribute his excellent iPhoto Flickr plugin. …
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A Better Dircaster for the FastCast
In my quest to make podcasting as easy as possible, I’ve hacked the dircast (turns a directory of mp3s into a podcast) to support getID3() (reads the ID3 tags; artist, album, comments, from an mp3 file). I’ve also cleaned up the code a little, making it easier to customize. Download BetDirCaster from here The first …