Why We Skip Photoshop vs. Why We Don’t Skip Photoshop - I think the lesson learned here is that teams work the way that suits them best. 37Signals has the luxury of being able to design for themselves, and has established a set of design standards that they can ripple throughout their products. Whereas at Blue Flavor - which is a business more similar to PowerServe, I’d imagine - Photoshop is an integral part of the design process that cannot be ignored.
I like the concept of sketching things down on paper and then going directly to HTML, but in most cases, that’s just not practical - especially if your goal is to design something that doesn’t look vanilla. What works for one person, one team, one company isn’t necessarily going to work for another.
One of my biggest complaints with Twitter is that users were left in the dark when the site was having problems. That’s changed. Twitter’s more transparent than ever.
Recently Techcrunch asked Twitter several questions regarding their infrastructure, policies and more (Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too). Twitter answered back with “It’s not rocket science, but it’s our work.“. In their response, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone answer each of TC’s questions honestly and directly. As TC put it: “Twitter continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism. They respond to this post here, saying “We’re working on a better architecture.” Kind of takes the air out of the balloon when you can’t get them riled up.”
Twitter is now serving as the model for transparency. Yes, they’re experiencing growing pains, but they’ve learned from their mistakes and are embracing the idea that the more they let users know, the more understanding they’ll be. Other companies should take note.
I’ve been toiling over the idea of integrating DISQUS into my site to provide a better way to allow site visitors to comment. I’m not sure how it’s going to work out, so consider this an experiment for now.
The idea behind Disqus is that commenting becomes more interactive for readers of this site and others. By using Disqus I’m attempting to make this site more a conversation as opposed to the usual: I post something, you read, you think about posting a comment and then talk yourself out of it. That’s not to say it won’t still be that way, but I digress.
Older posts won’t be affected. If comments exist on an older post, and the discussion is still open, those comments will still use the standard Wordpress commenting system. New posts and those with no comments, where commenting is still open, will utilize Disqus.
If you hate the new system, let me know. It’s not going to hurt my feelings one bit. But if you dig it, I encourage you to sign-up for Disqus as well. You can friend me on Disqus by going to: disqus.com/people/cdharrison.
Now, let’s get this conversation started, shall we?
Download Day 2008. Pledge your involvement in helping Firefox 3 set a Guinness World Record for number of software downloads in a day. I’m in, are you?
I usually ignore meme’s unless I think they’d make for good content. I thank Jesse J. Anderson for tagging me. With every meme comes a set of rules:
- List your top ten favorite films (in no particular order).
- If you are tagged, you have to post and tag 3-5 people.
- Link back to the one who tagged you.
Before I begin, I should clarify things a bit. I love a lot of movies. Narrowing my favorites to just ten was a challenge in and of itself. This list represents movies that I love and would watch (and have watched) over and over again. And now, in no particular order, are my Top 10 Favorite Movies.
- Braveheart - I love the storyline here and the fact that it’s based (loosely) on fact. Everything from the action scenes to the music made this movie for me.
- Dead Poets Society - I love this movie and the whole idea of going against the grain, being different, etc. Robin Williams was great.
- Dogma - I love how this movie challenged the idea of Christianity/Catholicism in its current form.
- Matrix - The trilogy as a whole was an awesome story. The first movie was the best of the three, but I loved the entire trilogy + Animatrix.
- Gladiator - Russell Crowe was awesome in this movie. The storyline was great. The cinematatography was absolutely beautiful. The score was excellent.
- Clerks - I’d include almost every Kevin Smith flick on this list if there was room to spare. Clerks started it all.
- Star Wars V: Empire Strikes Back - I’d be remiss if I didn’t include at least one Star Wars movie on this list. Vader reveals he’s Luke’s father. We meet Yoda for the first time. It was a great frickin’ movie.
- Office Space - Required viewing for our office; any office, for that matter.
- Idiocracy - One of the best movies of our generation, I kid you not. It’s a flawed movie, no doubt, but brilliantly executed. I’m scared at the thought of how our society is going to be 500 years in the future, and I think Idiocracy nailed it on the head.
- Event Horizon - When I first saw Event Horizon, I expected it to be a traditional sci-fi movie… I never expected the horror element. That twist made me fall in love with the movie. When it was first released I saw it 6 times in the theatre.
Tag you’re it: Josh Wilkerson, Wyatt, and Patrick.
Fresh from the Adobe Labs comes betas for Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and Adobe Fireworks CS4. It should be noted that if you’ve been using CS3, there is a new unified interface that’ll be appearing in CS4 that may take some getting used to.
Also, if you tested the Photoshop CS3 beta when it was released, I can’t stress enough that you should not install this software on a machine that is mission critical for your business. This is beta software. It may have problems. It may cause difficulties if you decide to upgrade to CS4 when it’s released.
Caveat emptor.
Recently, a friend asked if I could come up with a simple form that would allow you to enter a value into a field, hit the submit button, and have it take the user to a URL with the value they entered in the field appended to the URL. I’m not great with JavaScript, but I figured it’d be a good learning exercise for me.
Scripting is an area I have never been comfortable in. I can work with existing code without any problems, but writing my own has always been a challenge for me.
Here’s what I came up with:
<form action="http://subdomain.example.com/" method="post" name="redirect">
<input type="text" value="" name="url" id="" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" name="submit"
onclick="this.form.action=document.redirect.action + document.redirect.url.value;" />
</form>
View Code on Snipplr
To use this, simply change the URL set in the form action to your own URL. Once the user hits submit, the form will post to http://subdomain.example.com/XXXX where ‘XXXX’ equals the value of the text field. Obviously, there’s no validation whatsoever. Also, the domain needs to have a slash after it or it’ll fail in IE. If a user enters a value that doesn’t pair up with a URL that resolves, it won’t work.
