Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
MagStay PRO — Another Apple Accessory I Don’t Understand
The ironically named “ThoughtOut.biz” has created the MagStay PRO, a handly little plastic widget which prevents Apple’s MagSafe power adapter from accidentally being removed from your MacBook Pro. Which, incidentally, is the entire purpose of the MagSafe connector. But who am I to tell people that they shouldn’t pay $11.99 to de-fling-off-table-proof their laptop.
Want to Drive to Ireland? Google Can Help
The Google maps folks have a sense of humor. Check out their directions to drive from New York, NY to Dublin, Ireland.
Thoughts from An Event Apart
An Event Apart Boston was a great experience. Regrettably, I had to miss two of the talks — the danger of going to a conference two blocks from your office. But what I did see was fantastic. I have an incurable case of speaker-envy. Whenever I’m at a conference, I get an insatiable urge to drop whatever I’m doing with my life and become an expert at whatever the speaker’s talking about. So, Steve Krug made me want to become a usability guru, Jason Santa Maria – a designer, Jeffrey Zeldman, a… well, a Jeffrey Zeldman.
Anyway, a few notes.
1. Eric Meyer, CSS guru, presented a mindblowing way to render a standard HTML table as a bar chart. This guy’s good. Eric’s #1 take-away from his talk was to remember that CSS does not care how HTML elements are “supposed to” behave. (Ever tried adding style="display:block" to a style tag)?
2. Cameron Moll, in talking about the creative process, presented my favorite quote of the event:
“Instinct… is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and poorly otherwise” — Robert Bringhurst
In other words, all these people who seem to instinctively know the right way to design something, are actually subconsciously calling upon an enormous backlog of experience. This is why “basement-dwellers” often make lousy designers. You need to get out there and have visual experiences (art, books, movies) in order to create new ones.
3. Also via Cameron Moll, I learned how important typography is, and that I know nothing about it. I intend to fix this. I bought the excellent “A Type Primer” for this purpose. Expect a redesign soon.
4. Thanks to Eric Meyer, I learned about the “IE7 Script“, which basically makes IE6 act like a standards-compliant browser with one line of code. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s got Meyer’s seal of approval, so it must be good. Based on a show of hands, most of the other attendees didn’t know about it either.
5. Wisdom from Zeldman: When presenting multiple designs to a client, each design should convey (and be presented as) a different idea or approach, not simply an aesthetic tweak. This helps prevent clients from obsessing over individual details which, if changed, may water-down the overall idea.
At An Event Apart
I’m learning me some web stuff at An Event Apart.
Little Dancing Robot
There’s some kind of legitimate scientific research going on here, but whatever the purpose, some folks have created the world’s cutest little dancing yellow squishy Peep-like robot thing. Check out the video of it dancing to Spoon.
The YouTube of…
It used to be that to get attention, you had to be the “[X] killer”. Now, you have to be “The YouTube of [X]” The following sites were all found via a Google search for “The YouTube of”.
Scribd – The YouTube of Text Documents
SlideShare – The YouTube of PowerPoint
Teapotters – The YouTube of 3D
Swivel – The YouTube of Data
MyToons – The YouTube of Animation
AniBoom – Also The YouTube of Animation (Uh-oh!)
SingShot – The YouTube of Karaoke
Travelistic – The YouTube of Travel
VideoJug – The YouTube of How-To
And of course…
GodTube – The YouTube of Fundamental Christianity, where you can learn to become a Christian clown.
The Three Year Old Vs. the Monster
Best Slide Ever
I’m sure this is an ancient joke, but it looks so good with Keynote… [from: Presentation Zen]
Mac Users Sure are a Productivity-Minded Lot
I’m now a 100% Mac user (aside from the incident where my mom wanted to show my wife a “how-to-knit” CD-ROM that was Windows-only. I have an iMac in my home office, and i use a MacBook Pro at work. One thing I’m learning about Mac culture is that Mac users are a productivity-minded lot. Contrary to the stereotype that we’re noodling on GarageBand or iMovie all day, Mac users like to get things done quickly, their way.
There are so many Mac apps devoted to this goal. Some examples:
VoodooPad: A personal Wiki tool that lets you do damn near anything.
TextMate: A text/code editor that brings the “customize everything” ethos of Emacs into the modern world.
TextExpander: A tool that lets you create really cool text abbreviations that expand into long chunks of text that you would otherwise repeatedly type out.
Quicksilver: I haven’t even quite figured out what this does, but it’s some sort of major productivity enhancing tool with a cult-like following.
I bring this up now because I came across this great quote from a Mac user stuck working on a PC for a while:
One thing Windows does is make me want to give up earlier. I actually just don’t care if I can’t figure out a good way to do something. This is an exciting new feeling – I just give up and get back to work, and each time, I feel a little more like a real grownup. You know, how you feel after all your youthful dreams have died.
Microsoft’s Plan to Combat Google – Outright Bribery
Microsoft’s new plan to boost its search engine usage is to pay “service credits” to enterprises which “promote” the use of Live Search in their organizations. Companies will earn $2 to $10 per computer which complies with Microsoft’s demands – including the removal of non-Microsoft IE toolbars, or setting Live Search as its homepage. Will it work? Perhaps. This sounds exactly like the kind of thing “An Enterprise” would go for – saving a few bucks at the expense of letting employees use what work best for them. Is it pathetic? Yes.