Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Must Also Make Excellent French Toast
I just got a job opportunity inquiry which listed as required skills:
- Oracle database design/development
- Graphic development in Photoshop
I’m not saying this person does not exist, but it would be quite a rare bird indeed. I don’t know what sounds scarier, an Oracle developer making graphics or a Photoshop artist running my Oracle DB.
Yahoo! Mail Beta
Since my usual email address has recently turned into a giant bottomless pit of spam, I’m planning on changing my address, likely to one of the “webmail” variety. Syncing my personal email between multiple computers is turning out to be a nightmare, especially since at work, we’ve switched to Microsoft Exchange. (Aside: I’m shocked no one has made a plug-in that will just sync up your mail folders — p-to-p style — between multiple Outlook installations. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Groove for too long…)
Gmail seems the hip way to go these days, but the UI there still seems a bit counter-intuitive for me. It feels like a web site, not a mail system. What I’m really intrigued by is the upcoming relaunch of Yahoo! Mail, which was fashioned after the little-known, but incredibly innovative OddPost (which they acquired). It basically offers all the interactivity of Outlook, but in a web browser.
The only problem is, you have to get an invitation from Yahoo itself, before you can use it. Grrr… Let me in, Yahoo!
Don’t Treat Features as Bullet-Points
This stupid, stupid device is a perfect example of what goes wrong when you treat a feature as a bullet point, instead of carefully figuring out how the feature will integrate into the device, and how people will actually use it.
The device in question is called the “RCA Rip & Go Digital Music Studio“. The big picture sounds pretty cool. It’s a bookshelf stereo system which has the ability to rip CD’s (sans PC) directly to an included MP3 player.
Problem number one. The included MP3 player has only a 128 MB capacity. This means it will hold about 30 songs. So, two albums-ish.
That’s pretty weak, but for the total overall price, I guess there’s at least some redeeming quality to the offering. The player is nice and tiny, so you can rip a CD to it while you’re heading out of the house and take your music along with you in a nice convenient size.
One problem – and here’s the huge head scratcher. The device “rips” in REAL TIME. If you have a 45 minute CD, it takes 45 minutes to rip. This is positively mind boggling. Freeware software available 5 YEARS AGO ripped CD’s faster than that. Not to mention… remember “High speed dubbing” on your dual-deck tape recorder?
Thankfully, it is actually possible to move the MP3′s to your computer after you’ve ripped them, so you can, I don’t know, do anything sensible with them. Oh, but the device doesn’t tag your tracks in any way (to be fair, that’s mighty hard to do without full Internet access), so get ready to keep renaming “track1″ and “track2″, etc.
But, if you had a computer, why in the world would you rip CD’s with this… thing in the first place?
With very, very few exceptions, the gulf between what consumer electronics producers make and what consumer electronics consumers actually want just continues to widen. And that’s just sad.
CSS Tab Highlighting
It’s time for another cool CSS trick. I actually learned it from “Bulletproof Web Design“, but it was only mentioned in passing, as part of a mostly unrelated section. I feel it deserves more credit, because it’s a great solution to a web design problem that’s bugged me for a long time.
The problem is this. If you have a group of navigation tabs that are pervasive throughout your site, how can you automatically highlight the tab representing the section you are in, without using different HTML code for each section?
eBay Buys Skype
So, eBay is buying Skype – for $2.6 Billion dollars. Skype’s 2004 revenue? $7 Million.
Perhaps eBay assumes that its general hugeness will magnify the profitability of Skype a hundredfold, but guess what?
Sure there’s a whole lot of “fudge” built into those numbers, but the point is they’re already on the same order of magnitude. I think eBay’s in for a rude awakening. The “Post-Post-Bubble Web” is about small companies executing on big ideas, happy to make a modest income (because they stay small). It’s about Flickr and Blogger and Craigslist (which “got it” even in the pre-Bubble days).
Skype is an awesome technology, it has an amazing user base, and it makes a decent income. But, don’t think that taking a small tech business and glomming it onto a big one is going to automatically greatly magnify its value. Whatever marketing clout eBay has is nothing compared to the word of mouth that propelled Skype’s user base into the stratosphere.
Of course, I’m sure the 150 employees of Skype are quite happy to divvy up that $2.6 Billion. I hear that kind of money can go pretty far in Luxembourg and Estonia.
Get The Look!
Adam Polselli’s “Get The Look” is like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy for web pages. Very handy! I’ve never seen a design guide quite like this before.