I’m a little behind on my reading (and posting) but work has been busy and taking time off for SXSW didn’t help things. I found myself reading the February issue of How while I ate my lunch today. February was the issue on typography. I was surprised to find an article on web typography but even more surprised by what it wrote:

Of course, you can create text as a graphic using any font in your arsenal. The drawbacks to this tactic are that it’s not easily changed later, it can’t be copied and pasted with other text on a page, it doesn’t scale in size when the user chooses a different default font size for the browser, and it’s not accessible to people with visual impairments who use text-speaking devices. The benefit, however, is that the text you create in Photoshop appears exactly as you want it to appear, with your font of choice and any graphic effects or other visual stylings.

Now, there was a little bit of FUD there about the screen readers (text-speaking devices). If you provide the text in an alt attribute for the image it will be perfectly accessible. However, I found it amazing that a magazine for designers, primarily print designers, would be so astute as to point out all of the failings of using images for text.

Later in the article was another paragraph, this one about Flash:

When designing Flash projects, most of the same typographical rules mentioned above still apply; you’re simply gaining the freedom to use whatever font you like. However, Flash isn’t nearly as accessible as HTML, and certainly not as flexible as CSS if you want to change the appearance. Frankly, waiting for Flash animations to load can be annoying to site users, even those with broadband internet connections.

Steering designers away from Flash because of accessibility and load times? I’m not religious but Hallelujah! I take this article as a sign of the maturity of the online design community, our tools and our pool of knowledge. We’ve come a long way in the last 10 years and pieces like this give me hope for the next 10.

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That would be “married web designer / writer seeks illustrator / animator for fun.” Not like that you dirty minded pervert. I’m married! I have a cartoon and website that a friend and I want to make. I’m looking for someone in the Austin area who can draw and might be interested in joining the project. The story is very South Park-ish. It’s written and ready to go. Interested? Drop me a line.

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An amazing thing happened to me today. I was sitting at my laptop working when, all of a sudden, the connector for the power cord that plugs into the laptop caught on fire. I yanked the cord immediately. The thing gave off a few thin tendrils of smoke and then died a quiet, peaceful death.

Had I not been at my computer when it happened I’m quite sure my computer would have burned up. Had I not been home my entire house might have burned down.

Apple makes really shitty power connectors. What are the odds that on the same day this happens to me I would pop over to read the “Cult of Mac” blog and see a discussion about a power cord melting down on a MacBook?

Different laptops, different situations. I really doubt that guy’s cat pulled the cord out of his laptop. I think the magnetic link broke once the connector caught on fire and the thing fell out on it’s own.

In my case, my connector had been previously bent when it had been yanked out of the laptop on accident. Over time the thicker part of the cable at the base of the plastic plug (the one that goes into the laptop) split open. I can’t say exactly why. It could have been a stress fracture from the new angle of use or heat from the electrical wire inside acting on a point of weakness that developed when the cord was yanked or, most likely, some combination thereof.

The split got worse but the plug still worked. I was planning on using the Ultimate Tool to Fix All Problems (duct-tape) but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I really don’t know what the final straw for it was today but I do have some advice for people with broken power cords. This may seem like really obvious advice, but go with me here, as I made the mistake myself and I’m not a total idiot:

Don’t use broken power cords.

Bent may be okay but once the electrical wire inside of the plastic is exposed stop. It’s time to buy a new cord. It hurts. Apple charges $80 for the $%@! things. Your house or business most likely cost more than that though, so it’s worth it.

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Monkey Bites has a quick post up called “A heap of AJAX tutorials” which links to 30 tutorials + one.

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I don’t know how he did it but somehow he managed to steal this list straight out of my brain. Sure he added a few things like move to New York and picking up music again, but it’s basically my list. Compare:

• Start drawing (both offline and with a sweet pen tablet)
• Write those stories I keep starting (and participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month
• Look out for myself (okay I’m stealing that one from him)
• Stay in better touch with my friends — and get out more
• Practice my Spanish*
• Design more and code less — including designing some t-shirts
• Start blogging about things I’m passionate about (design and the web)
• Redesign my site — I’m using someone else’s design!

See? Same damn list. He might have tried to customize it a bit to “make it his own” but we all know the truth. James Craig reads minds. I don’t know if he has to get close to you to do it, so I want to make sure I get these out now:

• Finally create my web-based cartoon — it’s been six years
• Start a t-shirt company (hey, everybody else is)
• Create some sweet WordPress plugins:
  • Real estate listings
  • Events calendar using the hCalendar microformat
  • Contact list using the hCard microformat

Okay, it appears that Structured Blogging is way ahead of me on the whole microformats-for-WordPress thing, so I’ll have to check that out.

* This one is major since my wife’s family doesn’t speak English and we visit them several times a year. I would also like to learn German since my own extended family doesn’t speak English either. As it stands right now I can’t communicate with her family or mine.

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I’m normally a “play-it-cool” kinda guy. I don’t like to fawn over people or even go out of my way to meet them. They’re just people. And if they’re well-known people they probably already have enough of that going on and wouldn’t mind a little bit of personal space.

But a combination of fascinating people, one day after another of free booze (top shelf stuff too!), and a lot of really interesting discussions combined to push me past the bounds of propriety.

Did Matt Mullenweg need to hear me tell him that I make money off of his product that he gives away for free? Probably not. Did Tantek çelik need me stalking him for 20 minutes to take a picture ? Definitely not. (I was really just sitting two rows behind him and trying to get a shot when he turned his head.) Did the guys who make Red vs. Blue need me to take advantage of their open bar tab? Well, that one’s their own fault.

I’m slowly recovering from SXSW Interactive, which ended last night. I’ll (hopefully) post more on it once I’m a little bit caught up on work. Like it does every year, it has left my head bubbling over with ideas.

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Random notes from the panel which is still ongoing. Maybe I’ll liveblog!

1. Web design should be controlled by designers
2. AJAX is the future of the web
3. Every big company should have a usability lab
4. All web apps require ethnographic research
5. 99% of Flash is BAD

The above are all DOGMA. Forget it. Let’s talk about the direction we need to be going. –Dirk Knemeyer

Savant
Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. –Steve Jobs, Apple

Scientific Method
Introduce cautious, well-measured changes and introductions of new features and products. […] UI is a science not an art. –Marissa Meyer, VP Product, Google

The above pair of quotes were presented on a slide

Hey, I’m am liveblogging [Update:]

Grossman is talking now: discussing how usability testing can be taken to extremes and become dogma. It reminded me of a common theme today for the smaller businesses that are creating beautiful products that work well. Amazingly they have product release cycles measured in days or, in some cases, hours! (I can’t even conceptualize that.)

They pointed out something that has been obvious to me for years: Amazon has a horrible interface. Yet they do a ton of usability testing and A/B testing for any change they make to their site. A/B testing is like comparing McDonald’s burgers with mayo to McDonald’s burgers with mustard (analogy stolen from one of the panelists). At some point a radical change is required to move forward with the design of the site or product or whatever.

Of course the example of good usability testing is the Apple iPod product line which also popped up on a slide.

Conventions are a useful thing. Jakob Nielson is not. (That one is my own.)

The Leadership Triumvirate

1. Ideation
2. Communication
3. Implementation

Design normally comes in at the implementation stage as the production part of the product assembly line. It should start after the initial idea stage (design as communication is a strategic value add).

“He who can define the problem can define the solution.” –Goto

Really neat process map by Wroblewski:

http://www.gotomedia.com/goto/lifestyle/process/

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Flickr photo stream

I’ve temporarily added the Flickr Flash app to display my SXSW photo stream below the menu on this site. Temporary because I don’t like the Javascript implementation but I don’t have time to put up anything else right now.

Microformats presentation by Tantek Çelik

I saw these applications on Jakob Heuser’s laptop and thought they were cool:

Textmate (Text Editor for OS X)

It first grabbed my attention because Jakob had edited his color schemes to be colored text on a black background. Silly reason I know but it took me back to my days of programming MUDs back in college.

The functionality took me back too. It was the best of both worlds with the syntax highlighting and robust features of a GUI editor and the aliasing system of Linux. I’m not saying I’m going to replace my BBEdit, but I’m definitely going to play around with Textmate.

Adium X (Messenger for OS X)

I have no idea about this one but it looked interesting and I saw it at the same time that I saw Textmate, so I want to check it out too.

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This panel defined folksonomy and the current state of tagging. During the course of the conversation there were a few suggestions on ways to improve upon the current state of affairs, which is what the panel was really about. I wanted to expand on that part of the conversation.

It seems to me that every time a cool new technology or idea comes around, we jump on the bandwagon with such enthusiasm that we leave behind everything that came before. When the discussion repeatedly turned to letting non-power-users rely on or draw from the knowledge of the group, either in the form of automatic tagging or keyword suggestions, people questioned how any one person could rely on the opinions of another. While I agree that no system is perfect (systems are, after all, created by imperfect humans), it seems to me that we’ve been developing methods of quantifying trust for a long time.

When I buy something on eBay I’m reasonably assured that I’m buying from a reputable seller. The same goes for opinions on Epinions. Does anybody remember when Epinions was the cool new kid that would empower the masses? I still use the site when making purchasing decisions. For that matter, look at any peer-to-peer network.

Simple ideas tend to be the best ideas. That’s my corollary to Occum’s Razor. Simple methods of user ranking can create a trust mechanism that would allow novice users to rely on the wisdom of experts. This could easily allow for experts in specific areas (Jazz was mentioned during the panel).

I want to repeat one suggestion that was brought up during the panel: tagging should be incorporated directly into the browser (and operating systems). Regular bookmarking should take advantage of tags. This should not replace categorization but rather be offered as an option to it. Just because you think it is better doesn’t mean it has to replace something people have already learned to use. There is something to be said for the efficiency of knowledge already learned.

That suggestion led directly to something that I have not heard mentioned by anyone despite it being extremely obvious. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to me until the panel. Tagging has been around since the early days of the web. It has been done by the experts in each subject area and it has been done to a vast quantity of what is out there. I’m talking about keywords. Remember meta-tags?

Why has nobody created a bookmark plugin or web utility bookmarklet that automatically includes meta-data with the link URL? This should be automated in every browser and bookmarking website and, at the very least, include the two most common meta-tags: description and keywords. Relying on past lessons learned: bookmark searching should be able to very easily include or exclude metadata in order to deal with keyword spamming (there we go re-using past knowledge to enhance the trust of the system…).

I’ll leave off there. Hopefully other attendees (and the panelists themselves) can offer more suggestions or point out the flaws in mine. The evolution of ideas is best accomplished through collaboration.

Related Links:
Panel Listing on SXSW
Beyond Folksonomies (great resource page)

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SXSW Interactive is just over a day away. It’s my favorite time of the year. Even better than Christmas.

Great article up on Salon right now called I, Nanobot. Definitely worth a read.

I just saw a great Twilight Zone. One of the old black and white ones. Man, I didn’t realize how much better they were than the schlock they put out in the color series. I saw two great episodes really, but the second one resonated more. The all powerful state, which banned books to limit knowledge, decided if people were obsolete or not. Obsolete people were executed. The obsolete person, a librarian, got his revenge on the state by getting his judge executed as well. What’s good for the goose…

This post was written at 1 AM but due to a power shortage wasn’t posted until morning. (I only mention that so that people don’t think I sit around in my underwear watching old Twilight Zone episodes on a workday morning.)

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