Yes. I may seem cynical, but this wasn’t an accident. Apple purposely instructed that guy to leave his prototype at the bar. Apple is in the zone right now. They are dominating everything they do. The iPad is a runaway success, despite the menstrual name. The iPhone sales are through the roof and profits are…
I’ve tried many different methods for font replacement on my site. I just can’t help wanting to use a fancy font. I just switched techniques, but here is the complete rundown. Cufon. A JavaScript implementation that uses Canvas tags to change the fonts of specified tags. It uses jQuery to find the fonts and a…
An open letter to the Microsoft Office team: You have to produce ONE specific feature to secure your future. If you do as I suggest, you will kneecap Google Docs and breath new life into MS Office. Just one feature. It may not be easy, but you have smart engineers and they can figure it…
Jeff Atwood wrote a post about ideas being very cheap and execution being worth millions. Although, I think the lots of terrible ideas are executed and fail miserably, his point is not lost on me. How do I translate an idea into reality. People do it all the time, but what are the steps. DISCLAIMER:…
http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/ The challenge is to find places in your application or website, where you can add a touch of this kind of magic. It’s can’t be gratuitous. It has to be fun and natural. I found a place where it will work in the enterprise app I am designing. I am excited to see it…
Big release of jQuery 1.4 today. This version has alot of new stuff and tons of optimizations. It should be a smooth upgrade for most people. jQuery was a central part of my daily life for several years. Recently, I have been doing more UX Design and have fallen off the web developer wagon. I…
Put your cell phone in your pocket. “Lock it” if it has that feature. Now walk around for a little while. If your phone has dialed three people and text messaged two more, then your phone has failed the Cell Phone Pocket Test. Just for full disclosure, my phone has failed this test miserably. What…
Devices are going through an incredible period of experimentation on form factor. Some examples: Kindle: Super lightweight, fits in my wife’s purse. Highly targeted functionality. EeePC: 10″, lightweight, long battery life, Windows 7 laptop. iPhone: Fits in your pocket, uses your finger as stylus. Specialized OS favoring apps. Tablets: Swivel screen that folds to reveal/hide…
<rant> Last night, I upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.5 (from 6.1) on my HTC Touch Pro2. I have to say that I am getting really annoyed with this operating system. I don’t understand how they could achieve so little in so much time. Droid and the iPhone are so much better than Windows Mobile that…
It aint cheap, but plunk down a bunch of money and you can have a new xBox with extra controllers, a cooling fan and a brand new Rock Band 2. Our 3 boys are between 5 and 10 years old and have never practiced an instrument. Katie is musical, so I am hoping they inherit…
For the past few months, I have been using Balsamiq and loving it. It doesn’t have everything I want, but it has plenty and the design is charming. I am sketching designs very quickly and effectively. However, last week I had a new challenge. There were a series of sketches that strung together to form…
Last night, I finally had a chance to sit with a developer and try and style something inside of an Adobe Air application, using Flex 3. I have about 1 hour of that under my belt. Here is what I learned so far: Flex 3 is a mess for styling. In HTML, I feel like…
The other day, I needed to use a desktop sharing tool. For the last few years, I had a corporate version of Gotomeeting. It worked pretty well and even had a conference call number that worked most of the time. I wanted to find the same thing, but free, and without the conference call number.…
Yesterday, the topic of competitive analysis came up. I quickly Google’d the topic and realized that there was virtually nothing out there. I am shocked that there isn’t a SaaS product that crawls the web gathering competitive analysis into one spot. The UX would be pretty straight forward. In fact, I quickly (15 minutes) whipped…