BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 28, 2007, 04:11PMRechargable Ideas
This is why the Internets is cool. You can share an idea, and name that idea and if the idea is interesting enough, it can catch on. Since sketchcast.com debuted, the idea of "sketchcasting" finally found a tool that made it a whole lot easier. Next thing you know, the term "sketchcast" is showing up in over 320,000 Google results. I'm guessing there aren't a lot of false positives in there because the term didn't exist three months ago.
You have to appreciate the organic nature of the Internet. Your idea or concept still has to fight for attention, but if and when people do connect to it, it spreads on its own fumes. It's this self-sufficiency that makes the Internet so powerful. In the old days, it required brute force to blast out an idea. Marketing campaigns. Conventions and presentations. Branding and co-branding. And so on.
I suppose this is what's called a meme, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. I personally prefer to distinguish an idea that people actively connect with (like the term "ajax") and something that you just pass along (like a 30 second Youtube video).
There is one other wrinkle to all this. We'd like to think that this all happens in some elegantly organic manner. Little by little the masses congeal and form an Idea Movement of sorts, but alas the megaphones are still out there. You could make a strong argument that an idea like sketchcasting would've never reached such heights without the Techcruch post. Either way, it's fun to track its proliferation.
Someone needs to call Sharpee for a co-branding deal.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 27, 2007, 09:51AMFlickr Foldr Monitr
We'll forgive them for boycotting the letter 'e' (it's Flickr's fault anyway I suppose) but Flickr Foldr Monitr watches your pictures folder in the background and when there's new stuff in there - it automatically sends it up to your Flickr account.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 26, 2007, 09:46AMFree Music Zilla
Grab the music streaming from a slew of hosted music services. Free Music Zilla (terrible name, cool app) sits in the background and allows you to snatch up songs from the likes of Myspace, Pandora and Last.fm.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 24, 2007, 05:37PMSketchcast.com
About two months ago, I debuted sketch.basement.org with an introduction to a new style of blogging: sketchcasting. Sketchcasting is essentially podcasting with a whitebaord. Draw, talk and describe some stuff while you draw. It's a neat, and in some cases, more effective way of conveying ideas and concepts. It was also released as an Arc90 Lab Experment.
There was one problem with sketchasting: it's pretty hard to sketchcast. It require a set of tools and and a level of tech-savvy-ness that a lot of people don't have. I took a crack at showing people how to sketchcast, but I think that served as more of a reality hit of how much work it actually takes to start sketchcasting easily.
Enter Sketchcast.com, a really neat Flash-based web app that lets you record your sketches and share them or post them Youtube-style. Very, very cool and well executed. The debut of Sketchcast.com was actually covered by Techcrunch today.
It's pretty exciting to see an idea take hold and watch others build something cool around it. Best of luck to the team behind Sketchcast.com. They've built a really accessible tool for the masses.
Now let's see what the masses come up with!
Heading To Adobe Max
A fairly large contingency (six of us to be exact, including myself) from Arc90 will be attending the Adobe Max conference in Chicago next week. It should be a lot of fun. We're looking forward to meeting new people there and spreading the Arc90 Love beyond New York City.
If you're going to be attending and you'd like to meet up, email me and we'll exchange contact information. We can share a few ideas, technical approaches...and beers (depending on the time of day).
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 20, 2007, 09:31AMGraphical Freebies
Freebies are good. Always. Go Mediazine has some free hi-res watercolor textures as well as a slew of other art (vector and such) for the small price of free. Have at it. (via Bittbox).
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 19, 2007, 10:00AM5 Reasons Why The iPhone Is Older Than You Think
Robert Fabricant of Frog Design talks about how the iPhone, that wonder of modern technology, just isn't modern enough. Ouch. A good read.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 18, 2007, 09:10PMCSS Menu Maker
This is pretty frickin' handy. CSS Menu Maker asks you some questions and spits out a nice lookin' CSS menu.
The Google Search Box & The Outsourcing Of Our Brains
We've all done it:
- "What was the name of that actor from that movie?"
- "I forget his address. He used to live in or around New Brunswick."
- "I'm pretty certain it was 1983. Not 1984. Let me me check.."
By typing in a few spuriously connected words into a search box we get our answer. Hell, I still type "pizza ninos 11209" to get the Nino's Pizzeria phone number.
We've come to accept the harsh fact that we use our mobile phone address book as a crutch. Excluding maybe three or four numbers, we've committed none of them to memory. Why should we? They're all right there in our pocket. The mobile phone, that wonder of communication, is a crutch. And we use it.
Well if the mobile phone is a crutch then Google is a wheelchair. Google is getting smarter. Other search engines are as well. As a result, we've outsourced part of our mental labor to the Internet. Face it, we recall a lot less not that the search box is everywhere. It's no longer about getting to a computer anymore. Wifi is everywhere and its on our phones as well.
I wonder where we're headed with all this? Does this dependency make us better? Do we reclaim that bandwidth for far more umm, "advanced" processes and higher thinking?
Now that I've vented a bit, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Do I stop using search engines for "quick lookups"? Flush my cell phone's address list? How do get my fat brain off the couch and start exercising some more?
One of Google's lofty goals is to "organize the world's information." That's all well and good. Access to information is a powerful, seemingly altruistic end. Or is it? Digging slightly deeper, I'm not sure its about accessing the world's information as much as it is about making the world's information immediately accessible...which begs the question: who said we wanted all information to be a few clicks away?
I'll close with yet another bit of Short-Attenion-Span Theater. This one has a somewhat relevant message though:
The above is a clip from Nitin Sawhney's Prophecy (an excellent album).
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 17, 2007, 10:06PMNY Times Now Entirely Free
The NY Times, effective midnight tonight, will eliminate the paid portion of their online presence (aka TimesSelect). In short, online advertising growth is outpacing subscription paid growth. (via Anil Dash).
Jquery UI
JQuery just got a whole lot sexier : "JQuery UI is a set of themable widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications."
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 14, 2007, 02:20PMUrban Ghetto Model Train Set
This is ridiculously cool: Peter Feigenbaum has allowed crime and lawlessness to creep into his train set. The result is a stunning model ghetto train set reminiscent of New York City in the 70's.
Winamp 5.5 : Aimed Right At iTunes
I remember first messing with Winamp many years ago. It was so slick and lightweight. The bad boys at Nullsoft are at it again with a new version 5.5 that is aimed right at iTunes. Nothin' like a nice dose of healthy competition to get things going. The Wired Blog has more.
Slick CSS Menus
I'm a sucker for slick looking CSS. Here's a nice series of menu styles from CSS Play: the Professional Horizontal Series.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 12, 2007, 10:49AMRun Web Apps On Your Desktop In 10 Seconds : Introducing Airifier
Back in 2004 and a few times thereafter, I've rambled on about how your browser is leaking. About how a confluence of web technology trends would bring applications to the desktop. This trend is slowly becoming a reality today.
A major player in the web-to-desktop space is Adobe with their compelling AIR technology. AIR is "a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop." So with AIR, you can take a web, Flash or Flex application yank it right out of your browser and throw it on your desktop.
Well, this is all great...for developers. But we ("we" being the crew at Arc90) wanted to give end-users the ability to grab any web destination and create an application out of it. Just visit Airifier.com, punch in the URL, click Download Now and create a desktop install of any web application. It works great for applications like Google Reader or Gmail. The Airifier site also lets you share your installable applications with others.
For the less technical among us, here's a sketchcast on Arifier and why it will change your life (or something) :
Here's a helpful tip: All those shiny new iPhone applications out there work great right on the desktop. They're small, lightweight and specifically designed for the bite-size web. Check out Pickleview and Netvibes for iPhone.
Airifier is an Arc90 lab experiment.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 10, 2007, 08:50AMComing Soon : The iPod (Don't) Touch
Let me get the disclaimer out of the way first: I go to Starbucks. A lot. It's good coffee. It's just outside our offices. So yeh, we ("we" being the handsome crew at Arc90) go there a lot.
Our frequent visits have at times led to a cultural crisis of sorts for us. The White Stripes. Beck. Wilco. They're playing at Starbucks. And we're not sure how to react. "Hmmm...do I not like Wilco now?" "Is Beck no longer cool?" We're not sure. We usually just grab our coffees and quietly shuffle out without an answer.
Cause & Effect?
Starbucks is everywhere. Along with its coffee, its creepy monolithic culture is everywhere too. The charming mugs. The seasonal treats (I think it's time to put pumpkin in everything). And of course, the music. Starbucks, in its tireless drive to be the cool "third place" is constantly seeking out, playing, and peddling music.
The problem is that Starbucks underestimates the force of its own brand. Rather than the likes of Beck & Yo La Tengo helping make Starbucks cool. Starbucks makes the artists lame. Today, I sit in fear wondering if my current artist of choice is bound for the Starbucks counter. Propped up right next to that weird gum they sell in little tin cans.
The Apple Adhesive
Against this backdrop, Apple announces that you can now grab whatever's playing at Starbucks and purchase it right there and then. That's right. Starbucks' creepy little hands are going to reach into your pocket and grope your music collection. So even after you leave, you don't really leave. With help from Apple, the Starbucks monoculture is getting...stickier.
Hackers Of The World, Save Us
Since the iPhone's release, hackers have been tirelessly working to open up the iPhone. Custom ringtones. Homebrew applications. Even SIM activation. They've done a very impressive job. Well, we need their help again. We need a feature that would cleanse our souls and protect us from the rampant homogeneity of Starbucks.
When we stroll into a Starbucks and a song is playing that is already in our iTunes library, our freshly-hacked iPod needs to show this:
The "Almost Web" Web
With the release of the iPhone and now the iPod Touch, its clear we're headed on a slightly divergent path when it comes to Web standards and mobile devices:
- Mobile devices are getting more powerful from a raw CPU-horsepower perspective. They can do more.
- Displays in general are getting bigger and resolutions are improving.
- Ajax and Javascript (albeit slightly watered-down) are running on the latest portable devices. The Archos 605 (a product that is available today) runs Opera 8 with Javascript & Flash in all its glory. Apple's products are running (more or less) a full-blown version of Safari.
It's also clear that the capabilities of these devices will only get better. While it's niche today, it'll be the norm tomorrow to have a near-desktop browsing experience in the palm of your hand. This raises two questions for me:
- Are we (the web designers and developers of the world) wasting our time targeting woefully watered-down versions of our platforms for your typical cell phone?
- Should we stop thinking about "versions" of the same content (a "mobile version" and a "full web version") and instead start thinking about how to make one version gracefully degrade to the limitations of a mobile device?
As for question 1, I think the answer is "yes." As much as we tried to make it happen for years, nobody is shopping on Amazon or searching through eBay on the typical flip mobile phone. It's too painful and frankly, it just plain sucks. So why design for it? As for WAP: it's a technology that has two things going against it: (1) Nobody asked for it and (2) it sucks.
Question 2 is far more interesting. Even with the iPhone, a device that comes with a fully capable browser, developers felt compelled to come out with iPhone versions of their apps. Why? Maybe there's too much stuff going in our web destinations anyway. Been to Espn.com lately or any of the Major League Baseball franchise sites? They are the web design equivalent of Times Square. Even well regarded sites like New York Times & CNN pummel you with information.
Let's face it, when you first saw that Apple ad where the user navigates around NY Times and zooms into a column, you couldn't help but raise your eyebrows. It looked damn cool. Coolness and usefulness, unfortunately, don't always jive. That's why the good folks at Blue Flavor put out - you guessed it - an iPhone version of the NY Times (along with all kinds of neat iPhone ports called Leaflets). Truth is, it wasn't very usable.
As designers, we need to design towards what appears to be a new goal that is materializing: The Almost Web. It's not completely dumbed-down, but its also not a drop-all-the-content-at-once free-for-all. Grab the bottom-right corner of your browser and see how your design reacts as you take it to 400 pixels wide. Increase and decrease the size of fonts and see how your containers behave. It's a new challenge: can we produce one version of our content that gracefully fills and morphs to accommodate the various clients we're going to be using?
So c'mon kids, start thinking about this new waypoint we're inevitably heading towards. It ain't your mama's mobile web and it ain't that fancy 1920x1200 screen you're staring at either either. It's somewhere in between. It's a healthy reset.
Until then, I'll keep navigating to the place that most closely mimics how the Almost Web should feel: printer-friendly pages. One of my favorite hacks is to tag printer-friendly pages on del.icio.us and then retrieve them on my PSP or Treo. It's a shortcut out of Times Square.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 5, 2007, 04:17PMNice Yahoo News-Style News Slider
Courtesy Brian Reindel with some help from the mighty JQuery, an accessible news slider is available for all to download, deploy and joyfully consume. Nice implementation.
Microsoft's Silverlight : Yet Another Hedge
When I think of Microsoft, I imagine a big fat gambler strolling into the casino in a three-piece suit and a cigar. He saunters up to the roulette table, drops a pile of $100 chips and proceeds to put a chip on every number, black and red. He can't lose.
Microsoft is in that enviable (or despicable, depending on your view on things) position of being able to address, attack and react to every single strategic threat that comes its way. It has such vast resources that it doesn't really need to sit down and think about which strategy is best. It can simply deploy them all.
Microsoft has just released Silverlight. What is Silverlight you ask? It's essentially a "cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for streaming video, games and other multi-media content" (Beet.tv's words). In other words, it's a Flash knock-off that the world didn't really need.
So why would Microsoft build Silverlight?
Consider this: Adobe just released numbers that show a 90.3% penetration for its latest version of Flash (version 9). What sort of real numbers does this translate into? Over 2.5 billion installations. Vista, on the other hand, has seen 60 million licenses ship by the end of June 2007. Now, it isn't entirely fair to compare a full-blown operating system to a lightweight runtime like Flash, but Microsoft is concerned nonetheless. Adobe has larger plans for Flash. They see it on the desktop (via Adobe AIR) and as a platform for building business applications (Adobe Flex). They also see it eventually running on smaller devices.
The world doesn't really need Silverlight. If you run down its feature list, it doesn't really bring anything new and innovative to the table. While some heralded its "immediate importance," that's feeling like a whole lot of hype at this point. Truth is, its just another $100 chip on the roulette table. It's a hedge that may well slow down and potentially eat into a competitor's market share. As for consumers, it brings little of value and maybe some unnecessary confusion.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 4, 2007, 09:48AMTeach Your Uncle RSS
Get hold of your non-English speaking, newly emigrated uncle (the one with the jewelry) and sit him down on this 4-minute sketchcast: RSS For The Masses. It's a quick primer on RSS and how to leverage it in Internet Explorer 7 (because let's face it, everybody uses Internet Explorer 7).