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April 21, 2007 | Taken from
E-Visions of Creativity by
April Holle
Vista.Dreamscapes
I recently upgraded to Vista on my home environment and I absolutely love the new Dreamscapes™ Beta!
For those of you who don’t have Vista, Dreamscapes is video/animated desktop wallpapers. Most of them are just a few seconds long, and right now, since the technology is still so new, there aren’t a lot to choose from out there. But imagine the branding possibilities!
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April 17, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
Sick Web 2.0 App
 Pun intended. Who is Sick is a mashup of Google Maps and user supplied health (or lack thereof) information. From their web site:
Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information to the public - without the hassle of dealing with hospitals or doctors. With a strong belief in the power of people and a faith that user generated content can be extremely valuable, our team set out to create an entirely new system for tracking and monitoring sickness information.
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April 16, 2007 | Taken from
refactor by
Joel Neubeck
hack-a-thon 2007
Wikipedia defines a “hack-a-thon” as an event where programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. An event where a group of people meet at a specific time to “hack” on what they want to, how they want to - with little to no restrictions on direction or goal of the programming. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon)
This begs the question, could the idea of a “hack-a-thon” be repurposed to crank out a professional web site in less than a day?
Last Thursday Terralever gave it a shot, and held the first Annual “Terralever.com Hack-a-thon”. The goal was to take a new Terralever.com creative design, and give it life between 4PM Thursday and 6AM Friday morning. All this after a full day of work. Equipped with some creative comps, 20 eager employees, and a ton of Red Bull, we set out to test all of our skills, expertise and ultimately our focus.
I would love to say that we made our goal, but at about 5AM it became evident that as hard as we had worked, we just would never have the whole site complete by 6AM.
So did we fail?…hardly! Success was not about getting to the finish, but about the journey to get there. I have been in development for quite some time and never embarked on such a challenge. It was exhausting, but a whole lot of fun. I was extremely impressed by how focused and driven the entire development team was throughout the whole night. There was a great balance between having fun and working hard. There is no question that by 5AM most if not everyone was mentally fried, but no one gave up, everyone was still focused on completing there tasks.
It is not fair to measure this experience solely on success or failure, but if a complete site was our goal, there are certainly things we can learn from this experience. I my opinion it all came down to better planning. Timeline, IA and design comps are essential but just not enough. The best chance we had at completing this task was to make a more formal script of who was going to complete what, and in what sequence. All design should have been formalized prior to the event.
When we attempt this challenge again (and I hope we do) we need to have designed the entire data model, object model and site architecture as part of preparation. On Thursday development spent the first 2 hours just thinking about how we would store and deliver data to the end user. This time investment was necessary to get started, but irreplaceable by early morning. Decisions we made the day of the event had a direct effect on the order we should have cut up the site, prepared copy and integrated interactive with development. In the future, every employee needed a clear understanding of what individual tasks they would be assigned, giving them an opportunity to better research solutions and look for existing code to leverage during the event.
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April 11, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
Making Money How?
At the SXSW Conference, one of the sessions I attended was a panel discussion called Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses. There were representatives from various online web sites who had tried various ways of making money with their web sites. A good amount of the chatter was to be expected:
- If you think you're going to get rich off of Google AdSense ads, good luck—you're going to need a hell of a lot of traffic (and most likely a web site about asbestos lawsuits) for that to pan out. By the way, if you see any Google Ads on my web site, feel free to click on them.
- Selling and managing your own advertising space is another option. It sounds kind of cool—you're in the driver's seat of your own advertising outlet. It stops being cool and exposes itself as work when you realize you must serve as the (a) marketer, (b) sales person, (c) bill collector, (d) accountant, and (e) customer service extension of this cool new facet of your web site.
And of course there were the usual suspects (you can sell your own merchandise, you can sell others' merchandise, etc.). And then... the not so to-be-expected topic...
Virtual Gifting
Virtual gifting is exactly what it sounds like: One web site member sends a virtual gift to another web site member. The gifts are virtual. The price to purchase them, however, is not. In the U.S. market the runaway sophomoric hit turned dating site Am I Hot or Not is widely credited for bringing virtual gifting to the table. Other popular web destinations including Facebook, Dogster (and Catster) are also offering virtual gifts.
Send a Virtual What?- On the "Am I Hot or Not" site, the virtual gifts are flowers. The prices aren't that different than the real variety.
- On Dogster and Catster, there are free virtual gifts that are awarded to members to hand out, but one can also purchase 'Zealies' (Dogster and Catster's Currency) which can be used to send virtual rosettes to their favorite pets (Dogster and Catster are social networking sites for dogs and cats—er, I mean, dog and cats' owners).
- Facebook, who implemented virtual gifting this year, allows users to send various virtual gifts to one another.
Is This a Viable Way to Make Money?
I would have thought not. How many people would send someone virtual flowers? According the panel, quite a few. Ok, but how many people would buy and send virtual kitty chachki from their cat to another? There can't be volume there-or could there be? In our virtual worlds, we have virtual places and virtual identities; maybe virtual ways of expressing ourselves isn't that far fetched after all.
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April 10, 2007 | Taken from
E-Visions of Creativity by
April Holle
dont.click.it
Over the weekend I stumbled upon this really nifty website who’s interface doesn’t require a single click to use. While flash intensive, it’s still pretty revolutionary to take the click out of web design. “Click Here” is the bread and butter of calls to action, but what will drive action when only a hover is needed?Check it out here, http://www.dontclick.it/. Pretty freakin’ cool in my opinion.
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April 10, 2007 | Taken from
("\(..:......:..)/") RAWR! by
Chris Hill
Flex Builder vs. The Other Guys
So I was attempting to think of good topics within which to blog about. In my current position I'm implementing processes more than writing code sometimes. But writing code is very dear to my heart. So the process of writing code, and writing quality code is something very blogworthy. There are lots of great blogs about this kind of thing. I really enjoy Paul Graham's work. Joel on Software is also fun sometimes.
Another topic is tools. Which tools to use for the job are something that coders get downright nasty about. Because using the wrong tool for the job is possibly the biggest faux pas a coder can make. Coders are, among other things, tool builders. Everyone at some point says to themselves 'there has got to be a better way to do this mind-numbing repetitive task. Perhaps I can build some sort of machine to do it for me.' And so coders do mental back flips massaging code to create new tools that do these tasks. If you're a coder and you are doing mind-numbingly repetitive tasks, then you're doing something wrong.
Adobe (and when I say Adobe I really mean Macromedia) has done the world a great favor with Flex and Flex Builder. They have built tools that are modular, understandable, fast, and stable. So many props for so many great design decisions:
The choice of java for their sdk gives it portability, reliability, and the headroom to focus on getting it right.
The mxml specification is easy to read, easy to work on, and easy to love.
The framework is great. Well documented. Very consistent. Great usage of constants, interfaces and strongly typed events make the framework a joy to work with. Data binding is fantastic.
I started out writing AS3 in Flex Builder 2. This was ok for a while. I appreciated the crutches that Macromedia created to get you started. The code completion worked fairly well. The automatic compilation is straightforward. Things only became more hairy when I really started to want more control.
So what are the options? Well, Adobe does tout their Flex 2 SDK. Well, how does this measure up to the commercial product? The SDK is simply a command-line compiler, meaning you really need to know about build software and how to use build tools. The natural fit for eclipse for building is Ant. This works quite well for flash too. So what about an editor? jEdit is a fantastic option for development that not only integrates with ant, but has syntax highlighting, and many, many features and customization, including a MUCH better search than Eclipse.
So how smooth is development of projects without Flex Builder? Well, its a give and take. I've found that using ant, jEdit and the Flex Compiler shell has given me a ton of freedom. Its also made setting up the same project on different computers very easy. The real price comes at the loss of code completion and compilation speed.
Flex Builder offers the slick 'Design View', too. This is probably not that useful for most programmers after about 3 weeks of use. I end up coding the final look anyway. Plus the faster compilation means its always compiling, which means I get random errors and popups when I'm typing. The interruptions and the sometimes not-so-responsive user interface is what really made me move on from Flex Builder back to jEdit.
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