I hate feed readers. The idea for creativescrape was midwifed by that hate (a fiery, passionate hate it is). Like email, feed readers are almost exclusively uniform—and uniformly bad. They try to make everything in the world fit into the same mold, however cramped and unpleasant it may be. As developers we naturally find this […]
Hello, friends. We’re your usability consultants. Is your web app tired? Run down? Listless? Does it poop out at diggings? Is it unpopular on del.icio.us? The answer to all of your problems is in this little bottle consulting package. Hyphenated People Prix Fixe. Yes, Hyphenated People Prix Fixe contains vitamins, meat, vegetables, and minerals and […]
Having just torn through two “brain vacation” novels (Maxx Barry, if you must know), I’m back at it. I just can’t stay away from non-fiction long enough. I need a vacation. Anyway, I’ve begun reading The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, which so far is […]
There is an inherent problem with the definition of design as “solving problems”: There isn’t a problem to solve. There is only the assumption that things present themselves, walk up to you and say “Hi! I’m a problem. Solve me.” Life doesn’t announce itself. Problems don’t self-identify. Neither do their best-seller-management-book alternate, opportunities. In fact, […]
Twistori, as implemented, was a whim—I woke up that morning with the desire to ship something. I picked something I’d been thinking about a while, but had never committed pen to paper or pixels to Photoshop, and stripped it down to its bare essentials, something that could be achieved in a day. The challenge was […]
This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later. Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted […]
You’ve probably heard of Ze Frank (if not, shame on you!). If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of ColorWars, a sort of Twitter-based prank-experiment created by Ze Frank. You probably found out about ColorWars the same way I did: logging into Twitter one afternoon and going “Holy crap! What the hell is all this… […]
It’s taken a longass time, but Slash7 Interviews are soooo totally back. My first willing victi—I mean, guest—is Ryan Norbauer. Ryan’s a hard person to peg in one sentence: he’s got an academic background in the social sciences, became a web application developer for himself out of frustration, started a company trying to change the […]
Thomas Fuchs, of Script.aculo.us fame, has gone out on his own again as a consultant. If you need some of the world’s best JavaScript expertise, he’s your man. Heck, I’d hire him. Or at least, I’d contribute design ideas and photographs for his site (which I did). A site which, by the way, is powered […]
In a whirlwind of part-time activity, my buddy and long-term partner-in-crime Erik Kastner and I have launched a little toy we call Befuddlr. The premise is simple: browse Flickr groups, click a button, and race to solve a custom photo puzzle… as easy or as hard as you like. You don’t have to take our […]
