TapIt Water
Posted under: 
I think this is a wonderful idea. As I sit in my office after lunch, I’m always struck by how much plastic I throw away. It boggles the mind. Plastic cups, plastic bottles, plastic forks, plastic gum containers and the list goes on and on. Well, an organization has sprung up in New York that hopes to change that. By partnering with cafés, restaurants and other foodie shops, TapIt Water hopes that we can ditch the plastic bottle for good. I hope this changes our use of plastic bottles just as much as reusable grocery bags have done to the question: “paper or plastic?”
Here’s an excerpt from their website:
“Some people say its easy to go bottle-less: grab a glass from the kitchen cabinet and fill it from the tap. But what about when you’re away from your home or office? We’ve taken hundreds of local cafes and bound them together into a network that lets those who want water find those willing to provide it.
TapIt water bottle refilling network was founded in 2008 to give New Yorkers free access to clean sustainable water on the go. Café owners sign up as ‘partners’ to provide water to those who carry a reusable bottle. Partner locations are easy to find using our features (PC or Smartphone) or by downloading ‘TapIt Water’ from the . For those with limited access to technology, can be downloaded and can be found on café windows.”
Timelapse Sequence
I created this simple video utilizing a sequence of photos that were stitched together, edited and layered with an audio track. I’m exploring new avenues in the creative process by experimenting with various media types that can be merged and repurposed for conceptual presentation.More People are Macs instead of PC? How can this be?
“Mac NPD for the month of June needs to be flat in order for the entire quarter to be tracking in line with Street Mac consensus,” he wrote, adding — in a golfing metaphor — that he expected “slight upside to the flat bogey for the month of June, between flat and +5%” year over year. Well, the NPD numbers came out and they blew past even his most optimistic expectations. Rather than up 5% in June, as he hoped, they were up a whopping 16%.Beautiful Buttons with CSS3
Interesting read on new ways to implement beautiful looking buttons with less code utilizing CSS3 and RGBA:“We love CSS at ZURB. We love it so much that we’re using the new, yet-to-be released version (CSS3) in some of our projects. In the works for nearly 10 years now, CSS3 is finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel as new browsers like Firefox and Safari continue to push its implementation.”
SXSW Interactive 2009 Notes
I had a wonderful time this year at the 2009 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. I met lots of great people and absorbed the passion that people have for their work, clients and creativity. I am sharing my notes from SXSW in hopes that others will do the same with me. There are so many panels and events at SXSW that it is impossible to see everything.Creative: Show the Path, Not the Destination
Jim Coudal, Brendan Dawes
The Search for a more Social Web
Dave Morin, Facebook
Tony Hsieh – Zappos.com
At Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh has fostered a culture where extraordinary customer service is the norm. Hear him talk about how good deeds can help you leverage the power of your audience to massively extend your brand.
The Future Of Social Networks
Charlene Li – Altimeter Group
Journey to the center of design – Sunday Panel 11:30
Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering
User-centered Design
- For the most part has always been a failure
- How do the best teams create great designs?
- Analogies: cooking, government inefficiencies
Process – does not have to be repeated
Methodology – formulate to make it repeatable
Dogma – belief systems ex: TSA (311)
Techniques – building blocks of the process
Tricks
The Goal of User Research: To Inform Design
Measuring Brand Management
- Loyalty, confidence, integrity, pride, passion
- Experiment done with 40 people who filled out a questionairre
- Results: starbucks-consistent, customer satisfaction, mcdonalds-majority didn’t like, apple-very best, microsoft-bad
Measuring enagement while buying electronics
amazon (6.2>5.5) circuit city (4.5>4.3) dell (3.0>1.4)
The Three Core UX Attributes
- Vision: Questions: Can everyone on team describe UX of using the design 5 years from now?
- Feedback: Questions: In last 6 weeks have you spent 2 hours or more watching someone use the design?
- Culture: Questions: Have you rewarded a team member for a design failure?
How Social Networks are killing the revolution – Social networking sites today do as much for real world action as paint on the walls does for the structural integrity of your home. Come discuss how we are creating a false majority-view mentality and how to overcome this to achieve large scale change in the world.
- Why doesn’t it translate?
- False-majority view (sampling bias)
- Bigger silos (validating groups)
- Noise! = Action (anonymous)
- Can we do better?
- Feedback
- Redefine social network retro
- Mobile
- Making the message actionable
Sidebar conversations on privacy, open standards and sharing information across social networks. e.g. facebook used to manage events and information cannot be shared. PETA – strong base on social networks to create change.
Open Source Art
Graffiti Research Lab
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/
- Open source, contagious media, and the bored at work network.
- LED throwies
- Laser projected graffiti
- openFrameworks processing used for software
- FatLab – creative technology for the public domain
Conversations with GRL
- Discusses detainment after 2008 Summer Olympics – MC Yan, performed laser
- tag across Hong Kong harbor
- Synthetic Times
- Laser, adapter and stencil projector (handheld, parts bought at WalMart)
Interpretations: breaks visual taboos and spaces, tricksters (see: RESearch Studios book on pranksters), analogy to the myth of Hermes
Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability
- Dissection of sustainability and social media and how they work together (Lebkowsky, speaker)
- Social media facilitates knowledge production, processing and distribution.
- Knowledge production and sharing
- Robust advocacy of sustainability around social media (ex: austin350.org – reducing carbon emissions)
- Crowdsourced knowledge (popular in wiki formats, BrightGreenLiving)
- Communities of efficiency (myherefordshire.com, communities aggregating their carbon footprint
- Shared computational cycles (network CPU for R&D)
- Guerilla R&D (DIY, Green Fab Labs – Sustainable South Bronx)
- Who is Max Gladwell (Reed, speaker) – A Heroic Ideal
- Merged Social Media with Green Living entities (50/50) – entrepreneurship combining social media and green living to create solutions to environmental issues and sustainability.
Develop Super Senses: Tools to know your users
- Remote Testing
- Debates as to isolated user group testing
- Engage users in the experience to get feedback
- Share data with the team
MacHeist 3 Bundle Announced!
After nearly a year in the making, the MacHeist Bundle is finally back, and it’s bigger, better, and an even more insane deal than ever before!This year’s bundle features a core lineup of a dozen award winning and popular apps, games and utilities that represent the cream of the crop from the Mac development community. Whether you’re interested in cooking a meal, or playing the best puzzle game of last year, or selling off an old item on Ebay, the MacHeist bundle has you covered. And for the first time ever, the MacHeist bundle can be yours for just $39.
MacHeist is also donating 25% of each bundle purchase to a partnering charity of the customer’s choice. To date, MacHeist customers have raised over $700,000 for philanthropic efforts around the world. You can find out more about this year’s participating charities here.
Feel free to explore the bundle by viewing the screencast below, or click on the app icons above to find out more about each app. A treasure trove of software beckons… and it can be yours, instantly, for over 90% off.
CSS vs Flash
I have had the fortunate experience to have worked in a variety of disciplines as a designer over the past 10 years. I was immediately fascinated by the web when it first emerged back in the 1990′s. The ability to create and post something online for everyone to view was exciting and disappointing at the same time. The idea of having something accessible at any time and to anyone was great, but the lack of any substance or style to the end product was a letdown.I quickly learned HTML on my own and found it easy to work with but my goal was structuring content in such a way as to make it attractive. I played heavily with Fireworks, Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG tools and was able to build brochureware sites in no time. The problem was not that I could make a site look pretty, but that the graphics were so overwhelming that it bogged down the browser. The clients loved the sites and the graphics because it looked just like their brochure. But I was left feeling empty as the website was not allowing for the full potential of what it could truly do.
Over time Macromedia Flash became a very “cool” way to create a website. As a designer I could do anything I wanted and make it look beautiful by playing animations, music and video. I created lots of websites in Flash and thought this was the future of all websites from now on. Why wouldn’t anyone want a website that was perfectly designed, had every font render beautifully and was interactive on so many levels?
Then one day, a friend showed me the beauty of CSS. It was so simple and straightforward. What was this idea of separating design and content? I had read about it years ago and thought it was just a passing fad, but to my surprise I learned the community grew a hundred-fold. The idea of CSS blew my mind away. What a wonderful idea to style an entire website using a few stylesheets. It made obvious sense since graphic design had used it for years in page layout programs. Here was a way to design websites that were both beautiful and functional. I didn’t need a plugin created by a single piece of proprietary software that was owned by a monopoly. This was website design at its best supported by an open and supportive community working together to make web standards and design coexist in harmony.
So what do I think is better? CSS or Flash? Maybe you will have a different opinion than I, but I certainly feel that one must be better than the other. Some will argue that a tool is just a tool depending on who uses it. But I do believe that one tool that allows for the creation of so many more tools and that can democratize the web, must inherently be better by nature. In that respect, I have read and heard a lot of people for and against web standards. People working with Flash say it’s not that important. Screen reader technology is built into Flash. But what about those who don’t have the devices compatible with it’s screen reader? What about the designers who create Flash sites and don’t make content, usability, screen readers and most of all, the visitor a priority?
CSS provides a simple framework with which to style content for almost anything imaginable. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and does what its name implies. Make a change to the stylesheet and the whole site gets updated with the new attributes. With CSS you are able to focus on the structure and form. It’s incredibly flexible and compact. It allows for the widest range of compatibility and accessibility than anything else we have. It’s widely accepted and promoted by designers and programmers alike in the sense that they are able to work collaboratively towards a common goal. CSS is intuitive and allows everyone to understand page structure, format, layout and style. It may have one of the largest and most dedicated group of followers. But the pure beauty of it is that content and design are separate. The content becomes a bit of digestible information that any browser or device can “read”. The design structures that content but does not affect it. If someone needs to view the website in all its glory, then it’s there. If not, then the content will always be there as well. Now, CSS does not always work all the time. That is too idealistic. But in the end, it is progress moving forward and lighting the way towards a basic level of standards, usability and accesibility that is one of many goals in the democratization of the web.
Flash, on the other hand, is a beast that has become an overwhelmingly bloated technology that ceases to be “user-friendly”. Imagine my shock and dismay, either because of my ignorance or denial, when I had learned that the finest design publications had been giving top awards year after year to sites designed mostly in Flash. I wondered how this could be! I decided to count the number of websites these awards had been given to and it resulted in over 80-90% of the sites had been designed in Flash. Sure, they were beautifully designed, interactive to the nth degree and a joy to look at, but what about the other factors? Every site I visited had a loading screen or animation for it. Why should I wait and view a loading bar? I thought that had been outlawed since the 1990′s. But no, as media conglomerates have grown, so too has their websites. Huge loading times waiting for graphics, sound, video and animation has become the priority and “content” has been relegated to the back of the line.
I understand that Flash has its strengths that cannot be matched by CSS and that developers are working hard to make it more accessible, user-friendly and optimized for the web. That is a noble pursuit and they deserve a gold star. The CSS community, however is made up of designers, programmers and others who pursue a higher ideal than what Flash can offer. We speak to a larger audience and are not confined by the limitations of proprietary software. With Flash, you are given one set of tools that plays well only with it’s brothers and sisters (Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver.) CSS on the other hand is open to the public and not built with the few in mind. We don’t need to purchase $1,000 in software and worry about managing vast amounts of content when it rears its ugly head. We don’t need to worry about SEO, browser compatibility and usability. Flash, on the other hand, does need to worry about these things despite the best arguments out there. Flash developers also need to worry about an extra layer of processing required by a person’s video card, browser and operating system which CSS does not.
The biggest reasons against Flash should be obvious to all and I compiled this tiny list:
- Flash is a proprietary and closed technology. The majority of developers are not allowed to make it better.
- Flash is very expensive for developers and designers.
- Flash only plays well with its brothers and sisters (Adobe Products: Fireworks, Photoshop and Dreamweaver.)
- Flash relies on CPU intensive tasks that require fast video cards.
- Flash requires users to wait for heavy graphics, animations, audio and video.
- Flash makes it very difficult to manage large amounts of content.
- Flash is not accessibility friendly.
- Flash plugins have become larger and more bloated than ever.
- Flash has allowed the medium to overpower the message.
- Flash is just plain wrong.
In conclusion, I could go on and on as to the reasons against using Flash over CSS but I think it’s pretty clear who I think is the hands down winner. CSS is the David and Flash is the Goliath. “He who wields the best stones and aims with skill and determination has a better chance of hitting their target.” I made this one up, but it suits my analogy just fine.
Wireframing Web Sites
This is a nice article on the importance of wireframing before designing your website. Form follows function is always a good design motto to follow.When 45royale first started, there’s no question we had a few bad habits. You see, way back in the day when we would get a new project, discuss the requirements with our client, maybe sketch out a few quick ideas, and then jump right into full color Photoshop comps. Our reasoning for that approach was that it was unlikely that we would hit a design home run right out of the gate, so we wanted to start the process as soon as possible to allow time for revisions. After a while we came to realize that we were spending way too much time on revisions and the revisions that we were making were far more complex. Not only did we have to adjust layout, but all of the corresponding graphic treatments as well. This was frustrating for us, worrisome for the paying client, and disastrous for the project schedule. However, it didn’t take us long to realize that we needed a new approach.
