l-dopa

Most touch-screens allow for only one contact at a time. Not this one. That’s some hot fucking interface they’ve got there.

Now, we had a multi-contact touchscreen in my research group when I was in college, but for some reason, no one would write drivers for the thing for any platform and we were really a bunch of interface people, not driver-writing, crazy-low-level programmer types. So we never used the thing to its potential.

(This is cross-posted to Monkey Kings Play)

It’s a little bit crabby, but I’ve never seen such a manifesto that so clearly discusses just what a designer does for a client and how to get it out of them.

Some nuggets:

“Just as writers are not just people who can type, designers are not just people who can use graphics programs. Good Design is more than skin deep.”

“Tell your designer what you want to say rather than how you want it to look. Don’t ask for a color, shape, or style–ask for meaning or emotion.”

I would add something to this that’s hard for everyone to swallow: if someone “likes” it, it doesn’t matter. You don’t want people to like it if something they don’t “like” works better. Google is fucking ugly and it works great. It’s not that I don’t think they should have made some design decisions in the beginning that they would be less stuck with now, but I heard many people say that they “liked” Yahoo!s terrible, confused interface, and where are they now? People also “liked” Ask Jeeves. But something was lacking in those designs.

I’ve heard from clients every so often that they don’t like a design because it’s aggressive and they’re afraid it will scare away their customers. They’re wrong. Aggressive design grabs customers and, if what the client’s selling isn’t porcupine enemas, the customers then stay and next time, they remember where they got those great porcupine-reduced enemas. And that’s a design someone won’t “like”.

Now, if that design says something you don’t want to say, be clear and tell the designer. But if it says what you want to say more strongly than you thought it was going to be said, or it says it differently, well, that’s why you hired a designer.

Nifty tooltip pop-up bubbles, with detailed instructions how-to:

Link.

~jeff

Nifty fade-in image script, with detailed instructions how-to:

Link.

~jeff

I got my copy of iLife ‘06 in the mail yesterday, and jumped right into iWeb. iPhoto is nice (and I have never even opened Garage Band), but iWeb is what I was really interested in. Any software to help my clients create web pages easily is great in my book. All in all, I am impressed with what Apple has done.

The much touted “Apple designed templates” are in fact fantastic. They do fun things with web layouts that were mostly out of reach to the average person before now. Try sitting an elementary school teacher down in front of Dreamweaver, and see what you get. The templates aren’t terribly limiting, as you can move or delete almost every element on the page. There are templates to fit different needs, from photo galleries to blog entries and podcasts, each of which come with rss feeds built into the code.

The organizational structure is a blend of your high-powered html grinders, and the Keynote style. You can arrange your site in the sidebar, and make sub-pages as though you were making a nested list. The linking format is pretty set in stone, but some changes can be made about what is linked where.

I have four complaints about iWeb. It is huge. I mean huge. Weighing it at a porky 630 megs, iWeb is easily the biggest single app on my machine. Its weight is because it contains all the templates and images (in various languages) inside itself, instead of relying on external support folders, a la Photoshop. Which brings me to complaint number two. Why hide the stock images away? There are some great pictures in the templates, but users don’t have easy access to them to mix and match. Complaint number three is with the photo gallery template. Whenever I click an image to enlarge it, it comes up in its own window (which is fine), complete with .Mac style brushed metal borders added in (which is not fine) no matter which template I have chosen. Why spend the time to make fantastic templates if the photo galleries are going to break the aesthetic? The final complaint is that I have no idea where it has saved my site. Every site I create is available in the iWeb interface, which is a mixed blessing. It makes it simple for people to keep track of what they have done, but I’d rather be able to move them around myself.

I have really enjoyed playing with this app, and I think it will be a huge success if they can get people to plunk down the $79 for it. Easy to use, great results, and I’m glad to see them putting more value-add back into the $99 monster that is .Mac via one click publishing to your .Mac homepage.

Update: Running a program like Youpi Optimizer or DeLocalizer to strip the various languages you don’t speak out of iWeb will slim it down to a fighting weight of 98 megs. Your milage may vary, use these apps at your own risk.

Right on.

~jeff

Joomla is a really nifty CMS (Content Management System), it’s used for everything from small personal websites to large corporate installations. Setting it up on Mac OS X requires a little work, but luckily, not too much work, or we wouldn’t be discussing it at all. Here’s a half-half-assed (quarter-assed?) guide to getting Joomla up and running on your mac:

1. Install MySQL. This sounds like a pain in the butt, but the Mac OS X package installer is really not that bad and installs everything nicely into /usr/local/bin/ like it should. I don’t think you have to actually do everything this dude suggests, but his suggestions are in fact the right way to do it. Make sure to assign a root password, either by using the Terminal or the PreferencePane.
2. Install YourSQL into your /Applications folder. Use YourSQL to make a database by entering host (localhost) user (root) and password (whatever you set it to) to connect, then click on the column that says “localhost”, then click on “Create Database”. Name your database “joomla”.
3. Enable PHP on your mac.

4. Download Joomla (currently at version 1.0.5), double-click to decompress the .gz archive, and rename the resultant messy joomla_1.0.x-blablalba folder to just plain “joomla”, then move it to the “Documents” folder in the “WebServer” folder in the “Library” folder on your hard drive.
5. Navigate via a web browser to http://localhost/joomla/
6. A lovely config page will come up and tell you what is right and what is wrong in the joomla installation. You’ll have to chmod a bunch of the files. Open the terminal, type chmod 777, hit space, then drop (one by one) the incorrectly set folders in the joomla directory, hitting return after each one.
   NOTE: I’m sure chmod 777 is too permissive, but who cares. It can be fixed later.

7. Reload http://localhost/joomla/ to check to make sure all the permissions are correct. When they all are, proceed through the rest of the install; you’ll be asked for the MySQL user, password, and database name (localhost, root, and whatever you set it to).
   NOTE: Using the mysql root user is probably bad, but again, who cares. This, also, can be fixed later.

8. At the last stage of installation, it’ll give you a box filled with words. Lots and lots of words. Copy all those words, put them in a text file, name the text file “configuration.php”, and save that text file inside the joomla folder.
9. Delete the “Installation” directory in your Joomla folder.
10. Go to http://localhost//joomla/ . Now you have Joomla! Lots and lots of Joomla.So much Joomla. Administer joomla here:
    http://localhost/joomla/administrator/ .

~jeff

Nifty tutorial on how to make those trendy little “web badges” here.

~jeff

An exceptionally elegant, Exposé-styled javascript solution to the issue that occurs when a user clicks on a “link to a larger graphic”, and the browser jumps to a new url: Lightbox.

~jeff

Next time you have about 45 minutes of free time, I really suggest you run through this cool Ruby on Rails “cookbook” example here, because there is, at one point, somewhere midway on page three, something that happens that is kind of akin to magic, and I don’t want to even spoil it for you by telling you what it is. And maybe it’s not so magic, but it seems magical to me. I’ve always considered myself “utterly database retarded”; database design was the one class in college that I flunked*, so that I can put together a little MySQL front end like this is pretty damn exciting to me. It’s like finding out you can swim (and without the gay little waterwings!) after years of being utterly terrified of the town pool.

NOTES: The tutorial is slightly Windows-centric, so Mac users probably want to do all this stuff before the tutorial, and to make the database, you can either gain a cursory understanding of mysql at the command line, or do what I did and download the excellent “YourSQL” and do this to create the database for the tutorial example:

1. Launch “YourSQL”. Add connection (i.e. “localhost”, “root”, and the password, if that’s how you roll) for your local copy of MySQL.
2. Click “Create Database” (and name it “cookbook”).
3. Click “Create Table” (and name it “recipes”).
4. Click on the newly created “recipes”, select the first (and only) record, rename it to id, change the type to int, set the size to 11, and check off “Auto Increment”; this will cause YourSQL to prompt you to ask if you want this field to be your “primary key”, and you will say “Yes”.
5. Set up the rest of the tables so they look like this.

…then proceed with the rest of the walkthrough.

~jeff

*(and flunked *hard*, embarassingly and publically. Sometime when you’re feeling low and you need a cheap pick-me-up and I’m feeling relatively decent about myself, ask me about it and I’ll tell you the story. It’s a story of: not-at-all reading the textbook, staying up way too late, coding an stunningly poor little web page to fake the assignment, and then being deeply, publicly — and justifiably — humiliated the next morning by the teacher in front of an entire auditorium full of people as Netscape 4.0 crashed over and over).

Panic sells some cool Mac software and some cool Mac shirts. And now they sell officially licensed and produced Katamari Damacy t-shirts too! Each Katamari Damacy shirt has comments by the designers, Takahashi and Kimura. I also have to point out that their web interface to Panic’s online store is just beyond sweet; I love the drag n’ drop shopping cart, and the smooth javascript fade from one product shot to the other is totally gorgeous.

~jeff

Run this script to find some gorgeous nature photos that are stashed away on your Mac’s hard drive:

Find Nature Patterns (requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher)

…part of the little-known “Nature Patterns” screen saver that silently snuck in to your hard drive via Mac OS X 10.4, they’re stunningly beautiful, high resolution JPEGs; and any or all of them would work really nicely as weblog header graphics, background elements, or just additional desktop backgrounds. Pretty!

~jeff

Wonderful tips on creating bar graphs with CSS here.

~jeff

Really cool demo of live photo scaling on a web page (ala iPhoto and Aperture) here.

Absolutely beautiful, but I can’t think of a single thing to do with it.

~jeff