Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Went to An Event Apart, Seattle Thursday and Friday. It was my first conference since 1996 (I’m not a big schmoozer, and many of my big takeaways are things I could have picked up on the speakers’ blogs). Still, it’s nice to concentrate for a couple of days on how things ought to be put together. Perhaps I’ll be able to carry some of that idealism back to my day job! Anyway, here is a quick rundown of the talks and the stuff I thought was significant.

Eric Meyer: Secrets of the CSS Jedi

Mr. CSS talked about browser default stylesheets and how they caused the same page to render differently. He recommended against simply resetting margins and padding, but did suggest resetting things like line height, font size, and the like. He also showed some css wizardy that might make a good interview question.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Writing the User Interface

Zeldman spoke on the importance of text as the primary interface and urged designers to push back on poor text handed to them. He also talked about “guide text”, which helps users find their way around. He said it should be “Clear, Brief, Audience-appropriate, and Brand-appropriate” and cited some great examples of these. Blogger’s create-a-blog page was cited as a model of clarity and brevity, and Basecamp’s login page was the model for brand-appropriateness.

Jason Santa Maria: How to Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag

Jason mostly talked about the design process, including inspiration, brainstorming, morgue files, research, a little bit about grids, and about typefaces and some of his pet peeves. I’m not a designer, but I did get inspired to think more about my own web site.

Tim Bray: Reporting from the Engine Room

This talk was about the future of the design industry. He noted the incredibly large number of quality sites in the long tail that do not seem to have been designed at all and asked why good sites look bad but bad books look good? He suggested that somebody should charge $1/month for well-designed WordPress templates on a subscription basis and make a ton of money. He also observed that there were many more good design jobs than there are qualified designers, so he urged designers to get into places they were really happy.

Shawn Henry: Getting Real with Accessibility

Ms. Henry talked about screen readers, speaking browsers, running without images and the importance of semantic HTML, by which I mean making sure your site makes sense with the styles turned off.

Andy Budd: Are You Experienced?

Budd discussed the importance of the user-centered design. He cited Apple for both the retail store design and the iPod. He claimed that nobody reads manuals any more, so people learn by exploring. He also advocated talking with users, but not relying on them (he says the iPod would probably have failed initial user tests). Finally, he talked about the end-to-end experience, citing the Apple Store Genius Bar, Starbucks, and Innocent Smoothies (see picture) as examples of folks who pay attention to the little details. He told an amusing story about buying an SD card from a vending machine at the airport gate (which he thought was a clever location) but being unable to open the blister pack because he had no sharp objects. Very entertaining.

Mike Davidson: Civil Disobedience

This talk was mostly a rant about standards committees and the slow progress of releases. He gave several examples of revolt against the prevalent authorities, and used them to justify his call for the elimination of the W3C HTML committee with representatives of the major browsers and platforms and an arbiter. Sounds good to me — they don’t seem to be releasing anything!

Khoi Vinh: From Dots to Design: The Basics of Grid Usage Online

Vinh is the Design Director for NYTimes.com. He went through the process of laying out a grid for a 960px wide site, choosing a 14-column layout. He calls them “units”, reserving the word “columns” to the user-seen columns, which are groups of units. It was interesting to see how even the implied grid added some harmony to the site. I also thought it was interesting that he disregarded the grid in some cases (mostly where he had 4 items to spread over 5 units.

Shaun Inman: Evolving an Interface

Inman picked up where Jason Santa Maria left off. Instead of talking about the design process, he showed several iterations of the interface for his stats package, Mint. I liked getting to see the issues that came up over time and how he adapted to them. Solving the expandable horizontal nav problem (Amazon did stacked rows of tabs) was cool as well - he used Javascript to convert the horizontal nav to a dropdown list when his horizontal nav was too big.

Eric Meyer: The State of CSS in an IE7 World

Mr. CSS retook the stage to talk about IE7, the strides it has made, and to talk about strategies for dealing with IE6. Dean Edwards’ IE7 script came up as the best solution here, though an attendee pointed out that it doesn’t work well with ajax-loaded content yet. He also spent time talking about child and sibling selectors and fixed positioning.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Selling Design

Zeldman came back to talk about dealing with clients. His big points were to pick your clients carefully and sell ideas not pixels. He then went through several of his company’s designs for clients and talked about the ideas and what the clients eventually bought.

Jeff Veen: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps

Jeff Veen closed things out with a talk about Web 2.0 apps and what makes them successful. He’s at Google Analytics and was a very energetic and entertaining speaker. He said successful products balance Feasibility (engineering), Viability (business) and Desirability (user expererience) and gave some examples of failures that didn’t have one of them. He talked about localization, designs that illuminate vs those that decorate (USA today graphs), and he talked about the design process for Google Analytics.

I’m trying out a paperless office solution. Lots of people use Yojimbo as their db of choice. I actually have licenses for EagleFiler (I was a winner in the Daring Fireball membership drive) and KIT (part of some MacZot bundle, I think), but integration with the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner is what put DEVONthink Pro Office over the top for me. It scans my documents, does OCR, and automatically puts searchable pdfs in my database. Pretty slick. I thought of trying to put together something with AppleScript, but coordinating three applications (scan, OCR, database) is too brittle.

My goal is to eliminate most of the paper (which takes up space and isn’t searchable) from my filing system. Obviously, legal documents can’t be tossed out, but most stuff can be scanned and shredded. Key features of any such system include effortless scanning, reliable searching, and some sort of auto-classification would be nice. Having to type keywords for each thing entered is one step it would be nice to eliminate, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.
I’m still in my 30-day trial period for the scanner, so if anybody has advice on this score, please chime in!

Okay, so you use zsh. A lot. And you have lots of places in your filesystem that you use. It’s a lot of work to type the same paths over and over again. What to do? You could make aliases or symlinks. Either of these require a fair amount of premeditation and work up front, which is the last thing you want to do at the time you think of it, which is when you want to change directory to somewhere to get something done!

So I wrote a couple of zsh functions to make it easy as pie. Here’s what you do.

You cd to a directory. You think “that was a lot to type.”
You type “here <name>”, thinking up a short, meaningful name.
Then, the next time you want to go there, you type “use <name>” and boom - you’re there.

This implementation uses symlinks under the covers so your names are persistent across shell sessions (I used to use environment variables, but this is better).

The code follows. Your .zshrc file is where it goes.

[[ -d ~/.use ]] || mkdir ~/.use
function here {

rm -f ~/.use/$1; ln -s `pwd` ~/.use/$1

}
function use {

cd -P ~/.use/$1

}

Finally, I discover that it’s been there, just hidden in awful UI.

Treonauts | Quick Tip: Treo Calendar Alarm:

Looking in the Calendar Preferences I couldn’t find anything and checking the Sound Preferences didn’t seem to be a ‘logical’ place to find it so I didn’t even bother… It was much later and by complete coincidence that I found out that the Sound Preferences is actually the place where I should have looked.

Since coming back home to the Mac, I’ve been trying to find a decent photo-management application to handle all the pictures I take of the kids. It’s a LOT, and so tagging them with keywords is critical if I’m ever to find them again.

Both iPhoto and Aperture support the drag-photos-to-keyword thing or the reverse, but when you have a lot of keywords, it becomes very cumbersome and slow to apply them to a whole host of pictures.

Enter Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager. It makes it easy. Just select the photo or photos, hit ⌘-K and start typing a keyword. With your first character, it picks the most frequently used match and then refines as you type more. It seems to learn the right thing. For a picture with Sophie, Fiona, and Ian, it’s just ⌘-K f <ret> s <ret> i <ret>.

Sweet! Thanks, Bullstorm! Now, just add an option to write my keywords out to the files as iptc keywords (automatically, of course) and I’ll be in heaven!

I’ve been a fan of Joel’s for a while - his blog is one I read regularly. Recently, he announced a new software service from his company - effortless tech support for all the people in your life. It’s called Copilot and it’s the bees knees.

A fun read: Jobs’ Years in the Wilderness - NeXT

TUAW says:

It’s an interesting story, well-told, and all of the characteristic Jobsian traits are on display, including and especially his quasi-maniacal perfectionism and demand for control. And of course since OS X is built on what was NeXTstep, it’s also a kind of genealogy of our favorite operating system as well.

[via TUAW]

I spent over an hour searching the net for the answer to this question, but all I found were people asking it. Anybody know? Or even how could I tell? Should the file size be exactly the same?

Oh, how I wish this were real!

Wil Wheaton calls attention to the telco scheme to extract protection money from internet publishers:

We’ve all taken for granted that we’ll have equal access to the Internet, both as consumers and as creators of content. Right now, very powerful, very greedy, and very un-democratic businesses are trying very hard to take that away from us. They must be stopped.

If you use the internet (and how else would you read this), please read Wil’s article and do something today. Thanks.