You Got Your Flash in My Acrobat

My first thought when I heard this morning that Adobe has agreed to buy Macromedia was: poor Freehand, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Though I long ago stopped using that drawing program in favor of Illustrator, it was nice to know that it was still kicking around. Freehand was my first introduction to the Macintosh, and so I carry a quiet little torch for it. For me, anyway, if Adobe decides to finally kill it, it will be like the end of an era. Of course, there’s the possibility that the program’s owners — who licensed Freehand first to Aldus and, when that company was bought by Adobe many years ago (notice a pattern here?), then to Macromedia — will valiantly try to find yet another new publisher. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

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Programming Skills Wanted

Lionel RichieLionel Richie has a jukebox in his head, or so he said many years ago, and new songs pop into it all the time — a principal source of his boundless inspiration, apparently. I’ll never reach the heights of “Say You, Say Me,” but I’m starting to think I have a venture capital fund in my head, because new ideas for Web-based products and businesses keep occurring to me all the time. Over the weekend I had an idea for the funniest and most robust movie plot generator ever — not exactly a powerhouse enterprise, but something that I think a lot of people would find amusing for at least a while.

The problem, really, is my appalling lack of programming talent, a situation that’s becoming more and more acute with each new idea I generate and am unable to act upon, and compounded by the continual emergence of hot new technologies that seem like immense fun to play with.

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The Art of Wiki Design

JotSpotThis morning I spent some time fooling around with JotSpot, a hosted wiki-engine that allows anybody to create a new wiki and share it with authorized collaborators instantly. It’s a pretty cool piece of work with a lot of smart user information architecture behind it. The JotSpot team has put some laudable effort into making this tool a solid user experience — no installation or server configuration is necessary, and I got a pilot wiki up and running in under ten minutes. But there’s not much new to be found in terms of design, unfortunately; in spite of its competence, the application doesn’t look or feel particularly slick. In fact, JotSpot got me thinking that the rendering of wikis, by and large, has been quite lacking to date.

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The New New Methodology

New!Jason Fried made some waves at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference with a talk he gave entitled “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams.” It’s a little uncomfortable for me to talk about a competitor in a weblog post, even (or especially) one I respect as much as Fried, a principal at the justly lauded 37signals — but he raised some excellent and also controversial points that bear further discussion. Equal parts advertisement for his company’s hit Basecamp product and a proposal for a new way to look at Web development, his presentation might be grossly summed up thusly: set aside almost all of the time-consuming, preparatory measures of user-centered design and start designing the final customer experience — the interface — as soon as possible. You might call it something like “iterative design.” Fried published some initial thoughts on this approach in this weblog post, and if/when I can find a copy of his slide deck, I’ll link to it here.

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Day Three at SXSW

It’s day three at South by Southwest, and by yesterday at midday, I was already a little weary from all the panels and seminars. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t see some good stuff, because I did. It’s just that there’s only so much sitting still in an overly air-conditioned room for hour after hour that I can do. At lunchtime yesterday, we took off for Threadgills for some down home country cooking, and that helped. The more I see of Austin, the more I like. If it were as walkable a city as New York, I’d almost consider it a place I could feasibly move to one day, maybe.

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The Nav that Almost Was

While cleaning out some files on my hard drive this evening, I came across a discarded navigation bar for the version 7.0 redesign of this site that I had nearly forgotten about altogether. It was one of the first gee-whiz improvements that I pulled off in prototyping the redesign — I should say “nearly pulled off,” actually. Ultimately, I tossed it out entirely from my plans for the site, considering it too cumbersome to update (it requires no fewer than six separate images to be manually generated each time the cover image is changed) and woefully inadequate in terms of manipulating CSS to conform to my intentions.

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Bragging Rights

Vote: The Machinery of DemocracyFinalists in the South by Southwest Festival’s 2005 Web Awards were announced earlier this week. I’m really proud to report that two of the projects that Behavior launched in 2004 made the cut as finalists. Happily, both finalists happen to relate to our intense interest in last year’s presidential campaign: the site we launched for P. Diddy’s Citizen Change was nominated to the Green/Non-Proft Business category. And in the Educational Resource category, I’m really pleased and humbled to say that Vote: the Machinery of Democracy was also tapped. I’ve lost a little bit of my taste for Flash as a delivery method for substantive information, but I still like this project because we had access to some truly illuminating content taken right from the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s rich archives. Read more about it in my announcement post.

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New York to Nashville and Back Again

Time is a weird phenomenon when you’re holed up in a week-long series of business meetings, as I was this past week in Nashville. On Tuesday evening, it felt as I’d been there for a whole two weeks rather than just two days. Nearly every minute of every day was scheduled; if we weren’t meeting, we were preparing for the next meeting, and by Friday morning it felt like it had been a whole month we’d been there. But now I’m back in New York, and I can’t believe it was almost an entire week ago that I was leaving for the airport; I remember the sandwich I was eating just before walking out the door last Sunday like it was just two hours ago. Very odd.

Though I’m freakin’ exhausted, I have to say though that it was probably one of the most productive kick-offs in which I’ve ever taken part. We met with some forty-odd stakeholders and cranked through a huge requirements and information gathering agenda, led principally by our information architect. We do projects of all kinds of sizes at Behavior, but even the big ones aren’t always as intensive and well-structured as this, so it has me in a pretty positive state of mind about getting started on the design. It makes such a big difference to have properly conducted the necessary research at the beginning of a project. Now comes the hard part. Actually, now I take it easy for a day and a half first.

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Fictitious Weblog Name

DickensIn a roundabout, flirty kind of way, what I was asking in yesterday’s post was, “What is a weblog?” The question itself is so open-ended and suggests no definitive answers that even those who pose it seem to do so a bit wearily, which explains why I didn’t come out and state it that way. It deserves to be asked though, and I think a reasonable if still evasive way of answering it might be, “What is a book?” The most literal answer might be: it’s a technological vehicle for the delivery of ideas. But the form itself suggests few inherent purposes, uses or opportunities beyond the very basic one of communication, so why should a blog? Both a book and a blog can take just about any form that can be contained within their own rudimentary technical limits.

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Individual Style

Individual StyleSomeone, somewhere may have come up with this before me — if they did, I never saw it, I swear — but I’m nevertheless proud of this little trick that I developed for version 7.0 of this site. It applies unique styles to individual articles from within Movable Type in a more or less automated way. This post is an example of the trick in action: a little bit of PHP, a little bit of Movable Type hackery and a little bit of CSS all conspire to apply a completely arbitrary variant on the standard, black and white Subtraction.com article. Translation: this page looks different from the others.

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