Somewhere in my childhood, I forgot exactly how to cry. I can remember exactly two times crying and it was such a tremendously powerful feeling. I was watching a movie this evening and there was a really sad, sad scene. I wanted desperately to cry. I could feel the lump in my throat; I felt…
I have been reading (and really enjoying) Seth Godin’s book, Small is the new Big. His blog is chock-full of these little insightful nuggets of wisdom. He produces them at a crazy fast rate. In his book, he talked about Squidoo, which I have heard of but never checked out. I made my first Squidoo…
My least productive time of the day is 20-30 minutes before a meeting. I know that the meeting is coming, so I don’t want to be deep in the middle of something when that moment to leave my desk comes. So I end up doing a bunch of small things that are somewhat productive, but…
Recently, Mozilla Firefox has been challenged on my desktop as the default browser. I keep flip-flopping between Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5. I was really excited to see Aza Raskin taking the UX reigns at Firefox to see what someone with creative mojo could do with such a powerful program. At first, the ideas were…
Recently, I was in some conversations about development practices. I believe the methodology used in a technology company has a huge impact on the quality of the product. I drew up a little diagram to show the differences under ideal conditions. To be as fair as possible, I had the product launch on the exact…
I couldn’t help myself. I downloaded and installed the Office 2010 technical preview. It’s definetely not baked all the way through, but it clearly shows the direction Microsoft is going. The big news is that Outlook now has a ribbon. Additionally, they have made some significant changes to the Outlook UI. There are two very…
Check out this example of the new Kodak Gallery. Lightboxes have been done and done and done again, but for some reason, people keep improving (thankfully) on the technique. This example really impressed me. Some details: Nice mirror effect under the image to make it look like it’s on glass. Small thumbnails of the next…
A friend asked me for a list of books that are required reading for a User Experience developer. Specifically, this friend is a graphic designer and might want to branch out to UX in general. Feel free to add to my list here. The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design. Read these twice. They…
I need to upload one of these to YouTube. Which one is better? Matthew singing Puff the Magic Dragon with me on Ukulele. Click each to listen. First Take: Second Take: Matthew is alot of fun to be around.
I had referenced this piece of art in a previous post. I scanned it in. It’s a little hard to tell, but the layers are made out of tissue paper. There is a third wave of waves that is faint in the picture. It looks best on a window with natural light coming through. Anyway,…
This is going to be a little esoteric, but if you are one of the 6 people in the world who do this sort of thing, you will be interested. We made an outlook plugin for Marketo. It will pull HTML Email templates out of Marketo, so you can send them from Outlook. The first…
Just coincidentally, I saw my presentation from Ajax Experience on Adobe TV. The sound is excellent. Original Page. Embedded below. Hmm, the embedded version didn’t show the presentation. Oh well, just click the link. 🙂 I always hate listening to myself. I sound like my brother and stammer way too much. I also say “like”…
For years my hair has been slowly sneaking away, as if I wouldn’t notice if it went slow enough. Maybe it’s a third-life crisis. Maybe it’s a stroke of genius. It might even be the silliest thing I have ever done. Whatever it was, I shaved my head. Matthew was very excited and wanted to…
I think I have a good idea. The government is paying currently to winterize hundreds of thousands of homes. The energy savings are enormous. I propose two things. First, that when they winterize the house, they also add a battery system. The battery system would have a universal input that companies could build products to…