Archive for the design + tech category
Using Twitter? Friend me up!
Apparently, Twitter is really starting to take off. I’ve been on it for about 6 months now, yapping away in to the twitter void. It’s got a tech heavy following, but over the past month or so, Twitter has really started to take off with the non-tech folks. Twitter can be many different things to many different people, which is why it’s so cool. I use Twitter in a few different ways:
- Throw-away blogging, it’s for the kind of things you don’t want laying around on your blog, archived for posterity sake, and picking up negative comments years later (example)
- It’s the best way to have any question imaginable answered promptly
- Kinda like a passive IM chat room or IRC channel, where you get to pick who’s messages you get to listen in on
Twitter is pretty bad ass and I just thought I’d put a post out there (mostly for the benefit of you rss headz). Friend me up, if you’re a twitterer.
Left: Original | Center: Photoshop | Right: Aperture
Yesterday, I came across a great tutorial called Curvy Cross Processing by Mark Fleming, on using Photoshop’s s-curve to approximate a cross-process look for digital images. Reading my way through Mark’s curves-only tutorial, it became clear that I could probably replicate his approach using Aperture’s levels tool. Since Aperture’s initial release people have been clamoring for a xprocess adjustment block or plugin and I wanted to see if I could get a pretty good xprocess look using levels combined with a little contrast and A2’s new Vignette tool (which rocks!).
Above are two example images. On the left is the original image, in the center the Photoshop image and on the right the Aperture image. The altered images are pretty similar. The photoshop image is slightly punchier. Further along in the primer I’ll get in to the differences.
Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote this post last year about the iPhone coming to Mexico (if/when). The post still gets comments daily, most of which point out that indeed the iPhone is available in Mexico, albeit not officially supported by any of the major carriers.
I thought I’d follow up with some up-to-date facts:
- Yes, if you’re coming from the US and want to use your iPhone in Mexico, it’ll work on the Telcel network (edge). You’ll get voice and data.
- If you’re in Mexico, you can buy an iPhone, have it unlocked/chipped and use it on Telcel’s network and Movistar’s (assumably Movistar’s network is edge, also).
These are what 90% of the commenters seem to be saying. But no one is commenting on how the iPhone works once you actually get it up and on to the network. And more importantly, how much it costs to use the iPhone.
What I’m interested in are the following:
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…or otherwise known as “The Current State of Online Shopping”
I really dig the work of Isamu Noguchi. His lamps are particularly beautiful and have ungodly light qualities. The small table lamps are under a hundred bucks and make the perfect gift for those of your friends and loved ones with modernist inclinations, balanced with a good dose of wabi-sabi.
Recently I tried to gift one of the table lamps to a friend, making the purchase online. I was unpleasantly surprised at how discombobulated most online check out systems still are. Admittedly, I only use a small selection of online retailers regularly, so I guess it’s my own fault that my expectation baseline is calibrated by sites like amazon and apple. To be honest, Noguchi lamps are a specialty item and often have a two to four week lead time, since they’re made in batches, by hand. So I had two criteria for the purchase: 1. to have the order ship in 2-3 days 2. to be able to include a gift message. So without further ado, here are the results of the four places I found that sell Noguchi lamps online, I’ve left the guilty nameless:
- Site 1: Ships immediately but no gift message option.
- Site 2: Ships in 2-4 weeks, has a gift message option, but if the message is longer then 100 characters the final submit screen gets a Microsoft Database error message, you can resubmit the order 100 times and it won’t go through, you won’t know what went wrong til you call customer service.
- Site 3: Akari (the manufacturer of the lamps) uses a Yahoo store that ships in 2-4 weeks and no gift message option (yahoo?! come on, how 2002 is that?!).
- Site 4: Ships in 2-3 days and allows you to add a gift message and the check out is relatively pain-free.
So to wrap up a long, tortured, wandering diatribe, if you’re looking to order a Noguchi lamp online, as a present for a friend, look no further then Design Warehouse. These guys rock. Their check out process is great, if you you have a question, their live customer support is friendly, quirky and ultra-helpful. They’ve go stuff stocked and they get the details. and it’s always about the details. They only have a few lamps in stock, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? At least they get the whole online customer experience thing.
if i wasn’t neck deep in about a thousand other things, right about now, I’d do a up a new redesign for this here site. I’ve already got it all planned out in me little noggin. oh where shall i find the time? and is 1100px width (non-collapsing) too wide? Doesn’t everyone have apple cinema displays by now?
My soul brother Isaiah needed a slick little website that gets his beautiful handmade music videos across to potential clients in a lightning fast manner. I hooked him up. We decided on a one-pager that uses Lightwindow, so viewers don’t have to leave the page to view the videos. The result is sofreshnsoclean and easy to use. Past the website design, Isaiah’s videos are labors of love, all handmade and with feeling. Each is gorgeous in its own right. Isaiah is on a different level than most video directors I see. Take a peek, you won’t regret it.
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An online hotel booking agency sent me a form to fill in and send back. I tried to do the whole thing digitally with Adobe Acrobat and my scanned signature. The whole process was so frustrating, I had to resort to printing out the form, filling it in, with my chicken-scratch handwriting, scanning it back in and sending it off.
Acrobat’s ‘digital signature’ features were definitely designed for some heavy and secure business usage. The only problem is that the software is so hard to use, I can’t imagine a business oriented user having the time to figure this application out. Most business people just don’t have the time to read manuals, like it or not. Simplicity is not on display in Acrobat. There’s so much useless bloated feature creep, it’s ridiculous.
I’d consider myself a power user and this application totally had me doing limbo moves. Once I finally made it through the torturous maze of figuring out how to fill out the form and adding my signature I had five different versions floating around my desktop. Adding insult to injury, I checked the finally pdf in Apple’s Preview app and the signature isn’t even on the form?! You mean to tell me, whoever recieves this form, has to have Acrobat just to even view the signature? How lame.
If I could give the Acrobat dev team my two cents, here’s what that would be: their current ‘digital signature’ feature should be called ’secure/verified digital signature’ and they should add a new feature called ’simple signature’ that just allows you to add an image file to the form that has your scanned signature. Wanna be a little bit more secure? Have the editing capabilities of the doc locked by password, upon saving. This ’simple signature’ functionality would suffice for 90% of most users’ needs. The ability to add 3D models to a pdf doc? I found it hard enough just to add a plain old image.
Some indie mac developer needs to come out with a pixelmator-style app for pdfs. Design a pdf editing application for 70% of users that has 30% of the functionality of Adobe Acrobat. I’d buy that for 10 or 20 bones.
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The Apple Aperture community is abuzz. After watching Leopard hit the street, we’re all biting our fingers hoping Apple is not too far off from releasing Aperture 2.0. It’s been over two years since the initial release of the product and to say that we could use an update, well, I’d drag out the desert/water metaphor but I’m so tired of waiting I’m just too lazy to put the whole sentence together.
O’Reilly’s Inside Aperture blog chimes in with two musings on post-Leopard Aperture goings-ons. The first, gave rowdy Aperture users a chance to sound-off on the features they’re looking forward to and the features they want (or else). The second, a roundup of useful Aperture community resource links that includes several ways to give your feedback directly to Apple (Tim O’Reilly is appreciative, but even he doesn’t have a direct line to His Steveness). There have been no concrete answers on when Aperture 2.0 will hit the streets with nary a peep from Apple (as usual). I have a laundry list a mile long of features I’d like to see in the new version, I gave my 2 cents in the first article above, you can click on over to read my abbreviated list.
In the second article, a commenter suggests that we, Aperture faithfuls, huff it on over to Apple’s Final Cut Studio site to see what the new version (6.0) has to offer, the reasoning is that some of the technologies found in FCS could possibly make it into Aperture 2.0. I took the advice and checked out a bunch of the ‘new feature’ videos. I was absolutely amazed by what I saw. My biggest curiosity was with FCS’s new bundled color adjustment application, quaintly called Color. If only half of the underlying technology and features of Color made it into Aperture 2.0, I’d be a happy camper. It’s gorgeous, innovative and intuitive. Here are just a few of the features* of Color that I’m hoping will have some shared DNA with those of Aperture 2.0:
- GPU accelerated action all over the place
- Next Generation FxPlug Filter architecture - for internal and 3rd party filters
- Filter presets and grouping of filters into one preset
- Pre-built color effects and ability to create your own (think Xprocess, film stock simulation, etc…)
- Drag and Drop filter application
- Grab and lift on-photo filter manipulation
- Signature looks that can by applied over an entire project (and controlled/adjusted from one place)
- 3D color scope
- Gorgeous curves implementation for Hue, Saturation and Luminosity
- Selective filter application based on targeted Hue, Saturation and Luminosity
- Vignetting - circle, square or custom shape (using b-splines)
I’m sure there are a million others, but this list is pretty impressive. The more I look at Color, the more I think that Apple should just do away with the Adjustments HUD concept all together. It works for a handful of limited-functionality filters, but what I’m seeing in Color is on a whole other level of image manipulation. I can’t see how the Adjustments HUD in its current configuration can possibly contain as much functionality as Color provides. I could be wrong.
One thing I gotta say though, is that even after two years of heavy usage, I still love the Aperture user interface. Looking at Final Cut Studio’s and even Color’s, they don’t quite match the polish and shine of Aperture. I’m assuming at some point FCS will inherit that particular part of Aperture’s DNA, as Logic Studio just has.
After seeing Color at work, two things strike me the heaviest: A. Color is so advanced it makes Aperture 1.0’s image adjustment capabilities look almost archaic. B. I have never been this excited and enthusiastic to see what the Aperture team brings to the table and I can only hope that they are sharing technologies with the team that worked on Color.
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Unless you’ve actually got a life or have been living under a rock, you know that the webosphere is abuzz with news of Apple’s impending delivery of their next operating system Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Everyone’s giving their 5 cents on the best and worst features of the new system. All in agreement that Leopard is packed with great new features and Apple once again has raised the bar on powerful, useful features packed into deceptively easy-to-use interfaces.
Personally, I’m really looking forward to Leopard. Time Machine alone is worth the upgrade price. Quick look and Stacks are gonna be super cool and Spaces will pretty much do away with the need for a second monitor (I think this will most likely be a consumer favorite). But for me, personally, my money is on iChat and screen sharing. Let me explain.
I go for Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field marketing gimmicks just like everyone else. The mac is easier to use, your IT department will need to look for new jobs, things just work, etc… etc…
This just isn’t reality. Sure Macs need 10x less tech support then PCs running Windows/Vista and when something software-related goes fubar on the latter, you don’t need tech support, you need a new computer. Apple has made the OS so simple that someone with a pretty good knowledge of the OS can solve 99% of the trouble-shooting questions your average user has*. This means that if you’re a recent switcher, a mac novice or a technophobe and your friend is a savvy mac user, chances are s/he can fix any little problems you have. For most of the mac-centric people in my little corner of Mexico, I’m that person (the nearest Mac Genius is 3000 miles away). In addition to the people close to me, I have several friends in far away places that hit me up on a near daily basis over iChat/email to get quick help with some of Mac OS X’s “undocumented features” (read: idiosyncrasies). And in turn, I have a friend or two who I rely on when I get stumped.
At home I use Apple Remote Desktop, which is a heavy-duty version of the screen sharing capabilities that are built into iChat and the Finder in Leopard. I troubleshoot my wife’s computer almost daily, usually having something to do with MS Word/Excel. We have a mac mini that acts as our “entertainment hub”. I administrate both using Remote Desktop, over our home network, the screen controlling features are insanely useful and once you try it, you’ll never understand how you did without it.
Years ago, my good friend Steve showed me a new feature of Windows (back when he was confused and walking the desert alone), where you could share and control the screens of your friends’ computers, over the internet. I nearly shat my pants. If I’m not mistaken, this feature has since been removed from Windows because it was a security nightmare. Well, this feature has finally come to the Mac (albeit with a better security implementation). iChat and the new Finder now have built-in screen sharing capabilities and I think this is one of the “creeper” features of Leopard. Once I’ve had my fill of the glossy, marquee features, this is the one that’s gonna be the most life-changing.
The screen sharing capabilities of iChat will allow me to dip into a friend’s computer 2 blocks away or 5000 miles away to fix problems, show someone how to properly use and dispose of dmg installers or just to set my grand dad’s desktop to change images randomly every once in a while. I’ll have the ability to help a friend in San Francisco with a kerning problem in Adobe InDesign or a friend in New York City with organizational problems in Apple Aperture. This kind of screen sharing will be commonplace inside of 6 months. Your computer will no longer be an isolated piece of machinery, connected by text/audio/video chat and email. You can now share your computer with friends. Troubleshooting and asking for advice/help will no longer happen over a text chat or lugging your iMac to a friend’s house or the nearest Apple store. I’m really super excited about this feature. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take a fiber connection to work properly.
For an example of iChat screen sharing, check out Apple’s Leopard guided tour video. What I’m referring to starts at the 24 minute mark. This video is like crack for mac nerds. As I watched it, I was hooting, hollering at the screen in giddy anticipation. Reality distortion field, you are my friend.
For an added bonus, totally awol from the 300+ features page is the .Mac feature called “Back To My Mac”. This feature is gonna be killer. It allows you access and control your home computer (or other computers), over the internet, through .Mac. For instance, if you’re traveling and a client needs a tweak to a certain file. Instead of having to jibe a workmate into doing the change, you can access and control your work computer, make the change and send it off, viola. This feature gets super interesting when you think about how it could be integrated with iPhone or what happens when someone stupidly steals your macbook and tries to use it. Again, not even on the 300+ features list. but why? Right about now, I’m glad I renewed my .Mac membership.
So, what’s your favorite feature?
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After 3+ years of Bloglines, I’m finally getting fed up with its web based approach (images failing to load, repeated posts, no dedicated ‘clippings’ feature etc…). I’ve resisted NetNewsWire in the past, because of its inability to display several feeds at once, I think NNW refers to it as the ‘combined’ view (this is also why I don’t use NewsFire). Well, now that combined view is working, I’m testing NNW out to make the jump. There are a few nit picky things I can’t get past:
- While in combined view, the name of the blog is smaller then the titles of the post. This seams trivial but I’m stuck on it.
- It seems that the style sheet switching feature has no effect on combined view. but why?
- Do I really have to press command-k (mark all as read) after reading a folder of feeds? NNW doesn’t just mark them as ‘read’ after I’ve hit the bottom of the feed scroll pane?
- It seems the only way to delete a ‘clipping’ is by having to go to “News > Delete Clipping…” am I correct? and what’s up with the unnecessary “…”
Have any other tips for using NNW and integrating MarsEdit as well? drop it on me.
ps. For those of you using NNW in conjunction with MarsEdit (with WordPress), what do you do about wp tags, technorati tags and other custom fields?
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Ok, so this site has been down for the last 30+ hours. Folks on the rss feed obviously wouldn’t have noticed. The site went down at around 2:00pm yesterday (Monday) after using the Media Temple admin panel’s totally screwed 1-click install “feature”. I tried to install another copy of WordPress into a sub-directory for testing purposes and somehow it made all directories above (the install directory) inaccessible. After trying to correct things through trial and error, with no luck, I contacted MT’s tech support system through the admin panel. After 30 hours of not hearing a peep from tech support (and several additions to the support ticket noting hours passed), I got the bright idea to call them up on the 800#, doh! 5 minutes later and I’m back up and running. Turns out 1-click install created a new ‘www’ directory for qualitypeoples.com and screwed the apache config file. So even after I used 1-click to de-install the copy of wp, it didn’t make things right. Andre at Media Temple single-handedly saved MT’s ass, if it weren’t for him I’d have started the long process of moving my domains and hosting to a new fucking hosting service. I dumped Dreamhost for the same exact crap. Andre was fully apologetic about MT’s tech support lagging and having too many open cases to handle. That alone is gold. His next move was to say that I could have called anytime which, although comforting, made me feel a bit like a shmuck. If you’re a hosting company and it takes you more than 30 hours to respond to a tech support complaint, an apology better be the first words out of your mouth (or the first words on that response email), secondly you better higher more fucking people. And if your stuff is hosted at Media Temple, two things: 1. beware of the 1-click installs. They’re a recipe for 403/404 disaster and 2. fuck the MT admin panel tech support, go straight to the real-talking people, use the phone.
One more bad tech support experience like this and I think I’ll give Tilted a try.
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File this under: what if…
The new iMacs just came out and they’re glass. they look like an iPhone, which has glass. The iPhone has multi-touch. Now, what if the new iMac has a multi-touch trojan horse, that is stealthily hidden away unused until Leopard is installed. And then Viola! You can choose to use the mouse and keyboard or you can choose to use multi-touch. I wouldn’t use multi-touch for working, but it’d sure be dope to control iTunes at home. Most pros scoff at having multi-touch on a vertically oriented monitor, but there is one essentially very ginormous use for it: Front Row! why use a remote when you can get your dirty little fingers all over that nice monitor.
I’m just sayin’, what if…
This tutorial covers how to add Flickr slideshows to your blog entries, it’s WordPress-centric, since that’s the blog system I use, but you can definitely apply this to any of the other blogging systems.
Usually, I post individual photos to blog entries, like this one. With individual photos, when you click the image link, it takes you to the photo’s page on Flickr. Sometimes, I post photo sets (groups of images), this is an example of a photo set . Unlike individual images, I wanted the ability to be able to view the photo set directly from within my site, as opposed to linking back to Flickr.
I spent about a week implementing various forms of what’s generally called the “Lightbox”, a modal window that displays content over the current page, similar to popup windows (but without the navigation hassles associated with them). Here is a pretty extensive list of the various different kinds of Lightboxes. I tried to implement just about every one on this list and their corresponding WordPress plugins (most of these have wp plugins that were written by 3rd party plugin writers). Some didn’t fit my aesthetic standards, some didn’t have the functionality I wanted, some contain javascript libraries that I couldn’t get to work correctly, were too large in k size or conflicted with other js libraries. It would take me far too long to give a full and proper rundown of each implementation, and it would be boring. So, for this tutorial, I’m explaining how mine works (and mine alone).
Read the rest of this entry »
ok, so I’m messing around with SEO crapola and I’ve reintroduced adsense into the mix. This probably doesn’t effect 90% of you guys, as you’re smart enough to be reading the rss feed (hint hint). I tried adsense awhile back, and over a 6 month period, I earned enough money to buy myself a coke and a smile. Now, I’m trying it again, with some SEO tips and things. I know I know, adsense on personal blogs makes, well, um, no sense. This is usually because personal blogs have a tendency to be all over the place topic-wise and thus adsense puts in dumb, low cpm links. so if someone clicks on them, they don’t earn dink. Well, this blog is slightly different, I talk about a handful of subjects pretty regularly and Vallarta is a pretty hot destination, so there should be local businesses using Adwords.
So, I’ll leave the adsense up for a little while, again, and see how it goes. don’t be annoyed with me, everyone gotta eat and my future kids need a college edumacation. If anyone has a better way to get ads that better compliment the content on this blog, please feel free to drop the 411 in the comments.
Well, I spent the last day or so giving the ‘quality peoples’ stylesheet a little more lovin’. I haven’t been so happy with the colors and general vibe of the recent redesign, so this is my (what?) 3rd attempt at getting it right? I like the underlying structure, it just needed a little less bling. I guess time will tell, if this one sticks, but I’m really happy with the layed-back color scheme. Less emphasis on colors and more emphasis on photos! and the best part of all? no drop-shadows or gradients were hurt in the redesign of this site.
On and I forgot to mention that the logotype was done by my sister Beth. nice right?!
We finally got around to launching my sister’s new wedding photography website: www.elfoto.org. She’s been living down here in Bucerias for the past few months and trying to make it a permanent thing, shooting lots of weddings recently and her work is top notch. If you or any of your friends are thinking about getting married soon, think about Beth. Her site intro text says it all:
Destination wedding photography by Puerto Vallarta based photographer Elizabeth Lloyd. Contemporary wedding photography in areas as diverse as Chacala, Sayulita, San Pancho, Punta Mita, Yelapa, Las Caletas, Careyes, Huatulco, Cancun, Mayan Riviera, Cozumel and Los Cabos. Also, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida and more. Documentary style. Candid, evocative and totally natural.
As for the site, I’ve been tweaking it and getting it just right for awhile now. Like my photography site, it runs on Slideshow Pro and Director. The design is minimal and tries to frame the photos well, while staying out of the way.
I just upgraded to iTunes 7.3 and go this annoying message after iTunes tried to “upgrade” my library:
After hopping on to this thread at the apple support boards, I took the advice of someone who said to delete some video or podcasts from the itunes library. So I deleted an old podcast, restarted iTunes and everything seems to be working fine now.
here’s to small miracles.
Over the past month or so, I’ve been noticing something pretty funky in my site stats that’s actually gotten me the slightest bit excited. The percentage of mac users a month ago was around 21%, each week it’s been raising a point or two. I checked the percent two days ago and it was 27, now it’s at 28. If/when it breaks the 30 mark, I’m gonna take a silent moment to smile and be thankful for listening to sage advice and buying those shares of Apple, back when it was in the low 40s, all those many years ago.
Update: It just hit 30% as of this morning, July 4th ‘07. how high is it going to go?
I’ve posted a follow up article, that takes in to account everything we’ve learned about Apple, the iPhone and Mexico since this post was published last June (’07). I’m asking iPhone in Mexico users to give us a little feedback about their experience. The new article: iPhone in Mexico: A Follow Up. I’ve turned off commenting on this post.
Ok, so I’ve been doing some noodling into whether the iphone will ever make it to Mexico. My apprehensions start with the iTunes Store, which is currently not available in Mexico. I’m not gonna conjecture on why iTunes still isn’t available here. What is important is that you need an iTunes account to use most of the data features on the iPhone. No account, no dice. My next thought was that Telcel is a GSM network, but it turns out this thought isn’t entirely correct. Telcel actually has dual GSM/Edge systems in place. Hence, if you’re vacationing in Mexico, you can get international voice/data plans from Cingular/AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile that work on Telcel’s network.
The knife in the iphone-in-mexico coffin is most likely Apple’s deal with AT&T Wireless. Telcel, having a total monopoly on the cellular market in Mexico*, will never bend to Apple getting a slice of subscription fees, conversely Telcel would most likely demand a slice of iTunes booty, for songs downloaded over the phone and it’s network (if/when it’s added as a feature). Mexico is a huge and growing economy, but 99% of the country is still buying the subsidized $40 bottom-of-the-line Nokias. I rarely ever see Blackberrys here, they aren’t even marketed or displayed within Telcel’s stores and the Hip-Top/Sidekick is nowhere to be seen.
If there is a silver lining it’s this: iPods may be a total luxury item here, but I still see them everywhere. They are the ultimate in status symbol for mexican teenagers. The Motorola RAZR was also a huge hit (although it was subsidized), it was responsible for everyone and their mother’s mother re-upping their 2 year contract with Telcel. Telcel’s monopoly (and robust network) make people sign that contract without even blinking. Who ya gonna go to, if there’s only one player in town? I learned this the hard way: when I bought my first phone, down here, I payed full price without a contract and then found out that there is no other provider I could switch to even if I wanted.
So, to sum it up: the tech is here, iTunes Store is not, Telcel is a huge obstacle and I’m not quite sure if the market is ready for the iPhone. It may make one helluva splash with the fresas and the business community, but I don’t know if there is a large enough market to interest Apple. If I had a Magic 8 Ball, I’m sure it would say something like: “Dude, you’re SOL. Keep dreaming.”
Until the iPhone gets here I’ll keep dreaming, in the meantime, I’m going to NYC next week and I can’t wait to get my grubby mits all over one at the 5th Ave Apple store.
Update: I stumbled upon this post at mobilmag.com, in the comments someone writes, in spanish, that he hears from a reliable source, that the iPhone is coming to Mexico in September and Telcel will carry it. I am dubious, but I hold out a child-like hope that it’s true. I believe everything I read on the internets.
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For the past few days my sister and I have been knee deep, in Apple Aperture, editing down her hefty stack of photos for her website. Usually, I use ‘albums’ to order groups of images. Her vertical images need to appear two at once, on each screen of her portfolio slideshow (essentially combining two images to create one photo). Albums don’t have the flexibility to group two images together, in a sequence, so we turned to Aperture’s layout tool called ‘Light Table’. I was instantly impressed with how much more natural it seemed while ordering images, resizing images, pairing them up and laying them out into rows to represent different sequences. The unique idea behind the Light Table is that it gives me an environment, directly inside Aperture, to visually play with my images. A photoshop equivalent, would be to open a group of images into one new canvas and then to rearrange them based on their ‘layers’. Since their is no layer functionality, you just grab, drag and drop images into groups and order them. The Light Table gives me a sense of the visual flow a sequence of images will have and the functionality is 100% intuitive. The coolest thing about Light Table is that it exists next to my albums in my project file, it doesn’t take up any more space and there are no duplicate files to have to look after, it’s all just seamless within Aperture. Perfect, neat and tidy.
There is a small usability problem when using Light Table though,when dragging images to a portion of the Light Table that is off screen, the window scrolling is erratic and too sensitive. Before you know it, your photo is all the way at the far end of the grid and you have to drag it back towards your layout. As you scroll back towards the layout, you can just as easily over step it and reach the opposite side of the grid before you have a chance to drop the photo. This is even harder when using a mac book’s track pad.
I’m pretty sure the Light Table will have a serious overhaul in Aperture 2.0, it’s such an amazing part of the app, I can’t wait to see what Apple does with it. I’d love to see Light Table in use with a little multi-touch sensitive monitor (ala iphone), now that would be the jawn. Thinking about Aperture 2.0, my wish list for Light Table (for anyone who happens to be listening) would be the following:
- conformed heights or widths (being able to set a common height or width for a group of photos)
- snapping (when resizing images having the ability to snap the height or width to the underlying grid or to an image close by)
- creating new images from layouts (being able to lay out a group of images like two, three or four and then have Aperture create a new image based on the layout)
Ok, so I’ve finally launched my photographic portfolio site. So what’s so different about the new site then the one you’re reading now? Well, first off, this was always meant to be my blog, a journal of sorts, to record the daily events of my life. I like photos with writing that firmly plants the photos in context. I host my images on Flickr and participate in the Flickrverse. My modus operandi has always been to tell a story, photos don’t necessarily need to be technically good in the classic sense as long as they help move the story along. In contrast, my portfolio site was created to display just the very best of my photos. In a simple, easy to use interface. no links, no blog roll, no widgets, no fuss. Sometimes you just gotta go with less. So edfladung.com is a more minimalist jawn. Just the best of the best.
Technically, it runs on wordpress and uses slideshowpro/director to run the photo slideshows. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get slideshowpro to work nicely with flickr using Brian Sweeting’s flickrssp. It seemed like a great idea and after some serious code finagling I got the mashup to work, but not in the way I had wanted. So, I scrapped flickrssp and chose to use slideshowpro director. This created a small problem in that I have to upload images twice, once to flickr and second to the new site, but it was a small sacrifice to be able to present the photos as I have intended.
Underneath the hood, is a fully functional wordpress blog with the comments turned off and all meta data hidden. There are no archive pages (category, date, etc…). Everything else is essentially the same. The latest gallery shows up on the home page. Using All in One SEO plugin, I add keywords to each gallery that then show up as meta keywords in the html header. This allows me to describe the content of each slideshow for search engines and crawlers. Each gallery has an excerpt that describes the content of the photos (with screenshot), that shows up in the rss feed.
Oh and this is my one-thousandth post! Dig it!
My sister needed a new brand identity for her work down here in Mexico, so I happily busted out a new logo, cards, flyers etc… for her. We definitely get on each others’ nerves when we work together, but the outcome is usually pretty good. I posted the process on her logo as well (view large). One of these days she’ll get around to finalizing her photos, so we can launch her new website.
My friend Molly asked me to redesign a logo for one of the (many) non-profits she works for. It’s called “Art & Philanthropy”, the organization teaches kids art and sells the work of several artists, with profits going directly towards philanthropic causes. Unfortunately, the organization didn’t like my version, so it remained tucked away inside one of my hard drives, until today! I posted some process for this one as well (view large).
Roots, our favorite little veg joint, is growing. Roots will be three years old this summer, in restaurant years, that’s like early 20’s. With it’s 3rd birthday, comes a new location and brand identity, logo, menus etc… Andrew asked me to whip up a logo for the new identity, so over a 3 or 4 month period (about a year ago) we went back and forth and came up with the new logo. I’ve posted my process, since there were a lot of directions I went in that I particularly liked (it’s best seen large). Since there was no real rush, it was nice to let the logo marinate on the back burner, putting in a few hours here and there, every few weeks. The M.O. of the logo changed on a weekly basis, so it was great to have an extended time frame to work on it. In the middle of the process, our buddy Ro joined Andrew as a partner in Roots and entered into the mix as well.
I’m fascinated by small living spaces. David and Im’s “One Space” is way cool. it was featured in Dwell’s May07 issue. I’ve been thinking about doing something like this in the Bucerias/Sayulita area for awhile now. Very small spaces (around 600 sq. feet) sharing a common lot, minimalist construction with warm mexican touches. I’m still in the formulatin’ stage, but this could be so much fun. who’s down?
So things around here may be pretty wonky for the next short while as i update this creaky, dusty theme to the hot newness i’ve been working on. if things look busted, come back in a few. wish me luck.
Update: well, all seems to be going well. the transition is 99% complete, just a few more tweaks to the categories and some misbehaving past entries. but for the most part, things went quite well.
Try resizing the browser. fun!
or where the hell have i been? let’s see…
I’ve been editing my trip photos, which should be appearing any day now. In the midst of transferring my files from the old G5 to the new Macbook, I seemed to have botched the job and my entire back-catalog of photos seems to have gotten munched on a Maxtor One Touch drive that went down, about a week ago. I had a vault back-up which was on the drive as well (I had the files and the vault on the same disk temporarily until I could transfer the files to a new hard drive). Big mistake. And I’ve been trying, with little success, to get the drive up and running again or at the least to retrieve the files. The head doesn’t seem to have crashed but the disk won’t mount and Disk Utility and Disk Warrior are useless. Through trial and error I found a way to view the files and to even copy a few off the disk and even though the Finder says they’re alright, they aren’t, when I load them in an app, all i got is crap. It’s been a ton of ups and downs and basically I’m to the point now where I’m about to swallow my techie pride and run the drive off to Drive Savers (that’s the silent sound of my bank account getting noticeable slimmer). To add salt to insult, the same thing happened to my pops about 6 months ago with his Lacie Porsche drive. I opened both drives up, today, during troubleshooting and it turns out both drives are Maxtor. Thank you Maxtor.
Word of hindsight wisdom: Kids, don’t skimp on back-up drives. and don’t try to put 80 gigs of photos into Aperture at one time. not good.
On the flip side, I’m 90% done with a much needed graphical overhaul of this site and it should be good to go in a few days or so, if all goes well. and I have a great surf/music adventure I’ve been working on and I’ll post that in a short while.
so stay tuned.
My friend Michael hipped me to Article.1. they have really wicked tshirt blanks. washed, faded, distressed, even inside out! a great alternative to American Apparel and girlfriend approved. You can be sure you’ll be seeing these with my “tacos and gorditas” mexican folk typography tshirt line. snap!
