May 31st, 2008
Just brought my disposable camera from a New Years 2000 party to the drugstore to get developed. This should be fun.
Mike Industries
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Archive for May 2008
All I Want From Adobe CS4...
May 27th, 2008
So word came out today that apparently Adobe Creative Suite 4 is right around the corner. Greeeeeaaaaat.
There are only three things I want from this new release:
1. A new install/update process that doesn’t feel like Adobe is rewriting every line of code on my entire hard drive. This includes the congruent request that Adobe not launch and quit five different “agents” sequentially in order to accomplish the above.
2. A new codebase that doesn’t feel like it’s chewing up every last bit of processing power on my new enough 2.4 GHz iMac with maxxed out RAM. Unless Adobe has signed my machine up as a node in the SETI project without telling me, I don’t understand why something as simple as the Save-To-Web command should invoke ten seconds of beachballs.
3. The long-needed “I-Work-On-The-Web-So-Turn-Off-All-This-Color-Profiling-Crap-Until-I-Say-Otherwise” button.
Chances of any of that being in the next release? I say slim. But I hope I’m wrong. My opinion is that over the last few years, Adobe Creative Suite has become the Microsoft Office for right-brained people. They simply ran out of really useful things that people needed so they just piled on things people didn’t.
Personally, I’m about one more disappointing release away from giving something like Pixelmator a shot.
Zenfolio: A great way to sell your photos
Really nicely done e-commerce hosted solution for photographers.
May 26th, 2008
@girljournalist: I tend to shy away from bacon-wrapped things. Although I do eat bacon. I don’t know why that is.
Interesting. I just found out that polish sausage on a toasted bun with cream cheese is officially a “Seattle style dog”. So good. So good.
@simplebits: Cream cheese on a polish sausage equals money. Try it late night. You won’t be sorry.
Seeking Web Developer at Newsvine
May 23rd, 2008
People often ask what things are like at Newsvine after the MSNBC acquisition. Specifically, has the culture changed at all and does it still feel like a startup? The answer to those questions are, thankfully *no* the culture hasn’t been disrupted a lot and thankfully *yes* it still feels like a startup (minus the working for 1929-level salaries).
One of the many nice things about life post-acquisition is that we’re beginning to work on many projects that touch both Newsvine.com (little ant of 1.5 million users) and MSNBC.com (big elephant of over 35 million users).
As such, we’re expanding a bit…
The Newsvine Team is looking for an experienced, self-motivated, and passionate front-end developer to join us in building products and services for the Newsvine platform. Your primary responsibility will be to design and develop site features and functionality in a multi-tier web environment using PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and the YUI JavaScript library. Additional responsibilities include daily site support and maintenance. The ideal candidate is able to work on small teams under tight deadlines with little supervision. A computer science degree or equivalent is a plus, but experience, skill, and attention to detail are more important.
The ideal candidate will have a strong command of the following knowledge areas:
- X/HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript
- PHP or similar scripting language
- Mastery of web standards and cross-browser compatibility
Preferable Job Qualifications:
- Experience working on large-scale, high-availability web sites
- Successful industry experience using latest DHTML and ajax technologies
- Experience with SQL and relational database implementations serving as the backend to production web applications
- Experience with, or an interest in, working with the YUI JavaScript library
- Familiarity with Subversion a plus
The job will be based out of the lovely Newsvine offices in Seattle, down by the waterfront pictured here. If you’re interested, please send an e-mail and resumé to “newsvinejobs at newsvine.com”.
May 16th, 2008
Admiring – for the third time – Chris Matthews smack a fool down on air. http://tinyurl.com/634ohz
Shared
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.
- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.
Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!
Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.
"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.
Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :
I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.
Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:
I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.
LESS - Leaner CSS:
Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.
How 3D works, and why it's back:
Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.
The Importance of Removing Features:
This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)
Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???
Spezify:
New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).
Realism in UI Design:
Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)
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