2010 March | Mike Industries

Archive for March 2010

March 30th, 2010

VaultPress: A great example of an uncommonly useful beta sign-up screen.:

I love the MadLib style sign up screen for the newly announced VaultPress. Why? The main reason (among several) is that the line beginning with “I know you’re planning to charge about $30 a month for this” got me to *not* sign up. I love that they are not wasting my time signing me up for a service that I would never pay anywhere close to that price for. Kudos. Unless of course that’s just Automattic’s idea of cheekiness, in which case, it’s an atrocious sign-up screen.

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@mezzoblue Really? I’m not sure how I’m actually going to use it beyond the odd sharing of high resolution trip photos with people.

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Finally signed up for DropBox via @danbenjamin. Click this link for a free 250MB (2.25GB total) — http://tinyurl.com/ye8ufr8

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@H_FJ Yes, the old overnight delivery bait n’ switch. A true classic.

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RT @nasty_dancer: I love the new MSNBC Mobile site! I first noticed it as I sipped a mai tai in Taiwan with a beautiful lover. I gasped, …

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The dark side of dropshipping: ordering time-sensitive stuff online and getting an email a week later telling you it’s out of stock. Awful.

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March 29th, 2010

@adamhobson Yeah, it doesn’t do much for me.

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@adamhobson Not a bad idear. Spammers finally seem to have gotten around my javascript-based trickerations.

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@AndyBorgmann Wow, all three of Dodd’s rules are silly. Not sure why/how that guy still has a job. Not sure what any of that solves either.

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Lazyweb WordPress request: a way to disable the commenter URL field and URLs in comments on a per post basis.

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Solitude and Leadership:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information…

Takes a little while to get going, but overall a great article about the virtues of seeking solitude from distractions in order to develop your own original thoughts.

“I think you’ve got a pretty good imagination, despicability-wise!”

“Look Around You - Computer Games”

Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this BBC series before. Brilliant. Make sure to watch them all. (via daringfireball)

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers:

Do you think Chelsea Clinton asks herself if her mom would understand something complex? No. Because her mom is a badass.

How Doctors Die:

If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity.

This is the most concise, easily understood article on the perils of end-of-like care in the United States I’ve ever read. It is a must-read, and frankly, a must-heed, in my opinion. (via kottke)

Lost Type Co-op | Browse Fonts:

A nice collection of pay-what-you-will typefaces from Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran.

How to interview a designer with the perfect design exercise:

These sorts of tests are common for engineering hires, but it’s nice to see an example of a good design-oriented one.

Jessica Hische's Lovely Blog:

Embarrassed I had never seen this until today. Lovely work all around. (via drawar)

This recently unearthed video of Steve Jobs at work during the early days of NeXT is a remarkable look inside how he ran meetings, how he created culture at his startups, and how others — like Joanna Hoffman around the 11 minute mark — called B.S. on his reality distortion field. It’s also remarkable in that it reveals Jobs to be a man who picks carrots in pressed work shirts.

Paper Birds by Diana Beltran Herrera

View.js — A simple, lightweight, jQuery photo viewer for the web

The Republican Clown College by WMxdesign. These are so great. Make sure to check out the whole set.

BuiltWith: Web Technology Usage Statistics:

Sometimes when you are deciding on technologies to use on a new site (e.g. jQuery vs. YUI or MS SQL vs. MySQL) it’s instructive to examine what everyone else is doing. BuiltWith has an incredible amount of trending data to help you out in that regard. Very, very cool.

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design:

Lots of good thinking here. No solutions, but a nice reminder that two-dimensional touch interfaces are transitional, not permanent.