Archive for the 'tech' Category

Fever° From Shaun Inman

Shaun Inman launched Fever today, a re-​imagined feed reader. The big dif­fer­ence between Fever and other prod­ucts like Google Reader, is that it is designed to help float impor­tant or trend­ing links and dis­cus­sions to the top. So rather than read­ing through hun­dreds of posts to find what’s hot, Fever ana­lyzes all of your feeds, and looks for re-​linking and repeat references.

I haven’t yet sprung for a license, (mostly because there isn’t any offline caching so that I can read on the subway). But, there is a lovely look­ing iPhone-​optimized site, and it looks as thought­fully and lov­ingly designed as his web ana­lyt­ics prod­uct, Mint.

Be sure to watch the video demo, and note that Fever is not a hosted service—you have to install it on your own server.

June 17, 2009 » Tags: , . » 2 Comments

Introducing Typekit

Jeff Veen announced Type­kit today, a hosted solu­tion for embed­ding fonts on the web:

We’ve been work­ing with foundries to develop a con­sis­tent web-​only font link­ing license. We’ve built a tech­nol­ogy plat­form that lets us to host both free and com­mer­cial fonts in a way that is incred­i­bly fast, smoothes out dif­fer­ences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of pro­tec­tion that type design­ers need with­out resort­ing to annoy­ing and inef­fec­tive DRM.

Soon enough, @font-face CSS at-​rule sup­port will come to all major browsers, so use of non-​traditional web fonts will increase. If this catches on, the web in 2010 might look a lot dif­fer­ent than it does now—I wonder who will be the first major online con­tent provider to use it?

May 28, 2009 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Obamicon.Me

Make your own Obamicon:

Your image in a style inspired by Shep­ard Fairey’s iconic poster. Regard­less of your can­di­date of choice in the 2008 elec­tion, here’s your chance to sound-​off.

From the folks at Paste, via Sean.

January 15, 2009 » Tags: , , . » 1 Comment

How Hackers Show it’s Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Apologies that this blog looks a little New York Times-y lately, but I had to share this – O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas wrote a very inter­est­ing post on some of the inter­est­ing stuff we’re doing:

…there‘s some­thing going on at the Times that prob­a­bly won‘t make it to Sil­i­con Alley Insider, much less the main­stream busi­ness press, and it‘s some­thing that‘s start­ing to make me think the Times just might suc­ceed in adapt­ing to the chang­ing rules of the media and pub­lish­ing game…

So what’s the Times doing that’s so impor­tant? They’re hacking.

Savikas goes on to list a lot of exam­ples, but the best one that I can pro­vide is the coming release of our APIs, which will enable people on the out­side to play, tinker, and mashup NY Times con­tent. There are only a few APIs cur­rently public, but there will be a flood of releases in the coming months.

[via Jeremy]

UPDATE: Oh man, a bit after I pub­lished this today, we launched our Visu­al­iza­tion Lab – a part­ner­ship that uses IBM’s Many Eyes tech­nol­ogy. More Info Here »

October 27, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Ready for David Pogue

Shadows

Me, standing in, as lighting is set for a David Pogue shoot.

Today, myself and a few col­leagues helped Zach Wise set up and shoot some green screen video of New York Times Tech­nol­ogy Colum­nist and near-​Broadway per­former David Pogue. The video will be inte­grated into a mul­ti­me­dia piece that Zach and I are work­ing on, which should be done before Thanksgiving.

This is the first real video shoot that I’ve worked on, (having in the past done a lot of voice-​over work with sound engi­neers). What’s scary is that we did this largely by our­selves – Zach found a studio at the nearby CUNY Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, we hung the green fabric, and we set up the light­ing with a little help from their engineer.

David Pogue came in a short while later, I grabbed a boom mic, and we were off to the races. It was a lot of fun, and Pogue nailed the takes – I have no idea how he did it with­out a teleprompter, but he had us all laugh­ing sev­eral times. And he was very patient and friendly through­out the shoot, even when we had to embar­rass­ingly scram­ble back to the office for more P2 cards.

So, that was the hard part – now we have to design and build this thing.

October 16, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

nytimes.com Outage

Graham

Reaction from Twitter user Graham Mudd, on the nytimes.com outage this afternoon.

Nytimes.com has been down for about an hour, and thank­fully it wasn’t my turn to watch it. I haven’t heard of any expla­na­tion yet, but it could be any­thing from prob­lems with DNS or our CDN. Who knows? I’m just a designer here.

It seems like just yes­ter­day, when every­one was com­plain­ing about recent down­time trou­bles at Twit­ter and Amazon, includ­ing us.

Adrienne

Despite Adrienne Shaffer’s tweet, we’re housebroken, I swear!

Hope­fully this is just a tem­po­rary blip. But, I had a good time read­ing people’s tweets.

6:27 pm UPDATE: The site is mostly up, but some func­tion­al­ity is not work­ing, such as Search.

August 5, 2008 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

wordpress.app

I’m writ­ing this from the new Word­press iPhone app. It’s a pretty light, straight-​forward inter­face. It allows saving posts locally on the iPhone before pub­lish­ing or saving drafts to the server, enabling offline drafting.

There is even rudi­men­tary photo sup­port – but you can’t really con­trol the place­ment or sizing of the image – it is merely appended to the end of the mes­sage. You don’t even see the image markup until it is pub­lished or saved as a draft on the server.

But even then, the lim­i­ta­tions of the iPhone become clear – there is no copy/paste, and the classes that deter­mine how Word­press dis­plays uploaded images is unnec­ces­sar­ily com­pli­cated. (They should sim­plify that.)

So, though this is a pretty nice app, I’m not sure how useful it will be with­out more for­mat­ting options and copy/paste. For instance, I can’t even pro­vide a link to it’s app store page. Also, why doesn’t the iPhone have char­ac­ters luke curly quotes and em/en dashes?

UPDATE (from my Mac): Here is the link to the app.

July 22, 2008 » Tags: , , , , . » 2 Comments

Thsrs – The Shorter Thesaurus

Thsrs seems like a good idea: when you’re having trou­ble express­ing your­self on Twit­ter in less that 140 char­ac­ters, query the only the­saurus that only gives you syn­onyms shorter than the word you’re look­ing up.

omfg, lolz.

July 9, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

Farewell Sean & Louise

IMG_2875.JPG

Cupcakes! – Photo by Villafranca.

This week, the nytimes.com Design group says farewell to two really tal­ented col­leagues – Sean Vil­lafranca and Louise Ma. Sean is leav­ing to become Design Direc­tor at time.com, and Louise is going to free­lance, full-​time.

I’m still new around these parts, but Sean and Louise made me feel at home. We’re going to miss you guys! (But, we are hiring…)

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Farewell Sean & Louise’

May 2, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 2 Comments

Twitter

Do you <3 Presley?

Twit­ter built a cute little thing for Valentine’s Day – type @nedward <3, and you can send a little valen­tine tweet to a Twit­ter friend. I don’t see any offi­cial blog post about it, but Twit­ter co-​founder Biz Stone tweeted about it.

Enjoy, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 14, 2008 » Tags: , , , , . » 0 Comments

Playing Around with the Google Chart API

I’ve been play­ing around with the new Google Chart API, released ear­lier today. The API enables easy cre­ation of charts, dynamically:

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-​format image in response to a URL. Sev­eral types of image can be gen­er­ated: line, bar, and pie charts for exam­ple. For each image type you can spec­ify attrib­utes such as size, colors, and labels.

My exam­ple is shown below. I can think of a lot more con­ve­nient meth­ods of cre­at­ing graphs, espe­cially when chartable data is usu­ally already in Excel or Num­bers spread­sheets. Still, pretty fun to play around with – check out what Brian Suda makes of it, on 24ways.

Chart

December 10, 2007 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

Free Wi-Fi in Midtown

CBS Lights Up Mid­town Man­hat­tan With Free Wi-​Fi

“The Wi-​Fi Hot­Zone, which is avail­able today in cer­tain areas, will be fully oper­a­tional on by month’s end with a foot­print of more than 20 city blocks from Times Square to Cen­tral Park South and from 6th Avenue to 8th Avenue.”

Holy iPhone grail! Who needs to wait for muni-Wi-Fi?

November 15, 2007 » Tags: , , , , , . » 0 Comments

TiVo HD and Copy Protection

Why do I pay money for this?I am an avid hockey fan, since I was a kid grow­ing up in Buf­falo. I love watch­ing the game, and I espe­cially love watch­ing my home­town team, the Sabres. For the past 2 years, I’ve forked over $150 to sub­scribe to the NHL Center Ice cable pack­age, so that I can watch every game of the season. With our TiVo, I can record each game, and watch it when­ever I have time.

That is, I did, until this season started. We recently upgraded our TiVo unit from an old Direc­TiVo, to the new Series 3 TiVo HD, which appar­ently imple­ments unnat­u­rally strict copy pro­tec­tion on pre­mium con­tent. Because the new unit uti­lizes Cable­Cards, TiVo has dif­fer­ent rules for these TiVos as com­pared to Series 2 units, accord­ing to their sup­port page:

Since the Series3 and TiVo HD are DCR devices, in addi­tion to the Macro­vi­sion rules for analog con­tent, they must also comply with the con­tent pro­tec­tion poli­cies for Dig­i­tal Cable content.

What this means is that NHL Center Ice con­tent is copy pro­tected, and will be deleted within hours of the game’s com­ple­tion. Gone. Irretrievable.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘TiVo HD and Copy Protection’

October 25, 2007 » Tags: , , , , , . » 4 Comments

Gmail Adds IMAP Support

Via the Offi­cial Google Blog:

Gmail adds IMAP sup­port
“Are you guys ever going to do IMAP?” Well now I can say: Yes. Yes, we are doing IMAP. In fact, we are doing it for you for free on all devices and platforms.

This is great news, espe­cially for iPhone users, (instruc­tions here). Now, you can keep your mail account synched between mul­ti­ple com­put­ers and devices.

UPDATE: Derek makes a good point about some advanced mail set­tings on the iPhone – make sure to align your Drafts, Sent, and Trash folders.

October 24, 2007 » Tags: , , , , . » 0 Comments

2007 Web Design Survey

A List Apart releases the results of their 2007 Web Design Survey, and I’m feel­ing nicely aver­age for my profession.

Close to 33,000 web pro­fes­sion­als answered the survey’s 37 ques­tions, pro­vid­ing the first data ever col­lected on the busi­ness of web design and devel­op­ment as prac­ticed in the U.S. and worldwide.

ALA pro­vides a PDF with the survey’s find­ings, but they also pro­vide the raw date in Excel format, which you’re free to play around with, pivot, and chart.

October 16, 2007 » Tags: , , , , . » 0 Comments

Apple’s Web Apps Portal

Still no word on when or if Apple will offi­cially allow 3rd-party apps – but some of these are really cool, so long as you’ve got wi-​fi or AT&T EDGE. Here are my new favorites:

  • Weather.com // Way better than their old mobile site, with fore­casts, and maps.
  • Fan­dango // Set your loca­tion, and movie times are not far behind. This is also way better than their old Mobile site, (as well as MovieFone’s).
  • Tipr // It takes your check total and a spec­i­fied tip per­cent­age and gen­er­ates a total that is a palin­drome – so you can ensure that you’re not get­ting ripped off.

And, some oldies that haven’t yet made it into the directory:

October 11, 2007 » Tags: , , , , . » 0 Comments

Google Acquires Jaiku

I don’t know many Amer­i­cans that use Jaiku, a Twit­ter-like ser­vice that allows you to micro-​post your day from the web, or mobile phone. But, with the announced acqui­si­tion of the Finnish com­pany by Google, I bet more will take a look.

A Q&A on the deal is avail­able on the Jaiku site, but they are freez­ing new sign-​ups for now.

October 9, 2007 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

Free Wi-fi

The secret is outI’m not sure how I feel about the con­cept of free wi-​fi in coffee shops and bars – sure, we all like “free”, and I’m always care­ful to order refills and tip the baris­tas copi­ously. But, it can be impos­si­ble to get a table, because of wi-​fi squatters.

This after­noon, I’m sit­ting at Fall Cafe in our new neigh­bor­hood, and look­ing around at the other tables – each with a laptop – and I see a lot of empty cups – these people have been sit­ting here for hours. As you can see from the new sig­nage in the window (left), this cafe believes that free wi-​fi brings in cus­tomers. But I wonder if some people won’t become frus­trated with the squat­ters, and go else­where for their coffee?

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Free Wi-fi’

August 21, 2007 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

Pownce

Anybody got a Pownce invite? Pretty please?

UPDATE: All set, thanks Rich!

July 10, 2007 » Tags: . » 0 Comments

Movable Type 4 Beta

Well that was fun – I tried to upgrade to the new Mov­able Type 4 Beta, and it com­pletely hosed my MT data­base tables. Luck­ily for once, I backed up every­thing, prior to taking the leap – so we’re back up run­ning now.

It might be a good time to finally switch over to WordPress?

June 29, 2007 » Tags: . » 0 Comments

SXSW: Day 1

4 rest­less hours of sleep, and 1 Jet­blue direct flight from BOS to AUS, and I found myself in Austin. Checked into the hotel and met up with the EchoDitto folks, and other friends. There are like 4 Jasons, 2 Justins, a John (me) — so it gets confusing.

70 degrees here, 55 or so at night. This fes­ti­val totally takes over the city. Met some cool people last night, and the first panel this morn­ing was cool — i started in “why XSLT is sexy”, but bailed for “emerging social and tech­nol­ogy trends”. Next up, “How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0″, with Andy Budd & Jeremy Keith… which I expect to be hilarious.

Only com­plaints are that the hotel is a bit of a walk, across the river. And, i’m sick… so i’m com­pletely groggy and don’t feel like talk­ing to any­body. but, i’ll get over it.

Another prob­lem is trying to explain my job, and what the Local­iza­tion indus­try is. It comes off sound­ing really lame, con­sid­er­ing every­body I talk to works small design shops…

So if you have any ideas how to punch it up a bit, let me know.

March 10, 2007 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

“Security”

Windows is dri­ving me insane at work — all of these little secu­rity fixes that get in the way of productivity.

Last Friday, I installed the latest Win­dows updates and rebooted at the end of the day. When I get to work and log in on Monday morn­ing, I get this secu­rity warn­ing every time I click on a zip file:

Annoying IE/ZIP popup security warning

Inter­net Explorer
This page has an unspec­i­fied poten­tial secu­rity risk. Would you like to continue?

Um, yes, permanently.

It only repros (so far) for ZIPs on net­work shares and mapped drives. I’ve got Win XP SP2 & IE7… any ideas?

August 15, 2006 » Tags: . » 1 Comment

Windows Live Writer (Beta)

I’m post­ing this from inside Win­dows Live Writer, a newly released “weblogging” application by Microsoft. It’s a slick little win­dows app, with sup­port for pub­lish­ing to Mov­able Type, Word­press, as well as Live Spaces, by default.

Paul Sta­ma­tiou has an extended review, but here are some of the features:

  • WYSI­WYG Authoring
  • Spell Check
  • Photo Publishing
  • Map Pub­lish­ing, (via Live Local)
  • Com­pat­i­bil­ity with Blog­ger, Live­Jour­nal, Type­Pad, Word­Press (and many others)

Also, like most good WYSI­WYG edi­tors, it allows you to toggle over to HTML code view – (taking a quick look at this post, I see that it writes pretty clean code).

Note: There is no sup­port yet for Tags, a new fea­ture in MT 3.3. (Cat­e­gories & Key­words are supported.)

More Infor­ma­tion & Download

UPDATE: Om has a nice review:

It is not often, I say good things about Microsoft prod­ucts, but with this free-​blogging tool, I have to say: write on! …the soft­ware actu­ally lets you use your blog styles for edit­ing, has abil­ity to add plu­g­ins, and has an SDK to extend the func­tion­al­ity of the pro­gram. You can also swap out  Microsoft Maps for say Google Maps.

August 14, 2006 » Tags: , . » 2 Comments

Adobe Flash Player 9

Product Man­ager Emmy Huang writes in the Adobe Devel­op­ment Center:

As we looked at our goals for Flash Player 9, how­ever, we real­ized that it would be too lim­it­ing to con­tinue to evolve the exist­ing engine. We wanted to create a water­shed moment in the his­tory of Flash Player, and to deliver it we needed to be able to inno­vate with­out constraint.

As a result, Action­Script 3.0 is essen­tially a full rewrite of the Action­Script engine. Action­Script 3.0 exe­cutes in a new, highly-​optimized vir­tual machine known as AVM2, which we built for effi­ciency and per­for­mance. Although AVM2 will be the pri­mary vir­tual machine for Action­Script exe­cu­tion going for­ward, Flash Player will con­tinue to sup­port the older AVM1 for back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity with exist­ing and legacy content.

How­ever, in order to take advan­tage of the new fea­tures, we’ll have to wait for the release of Flash Pro­fes­sional 9, (or play around with an alpha patch for Flash 8), accord­ing to the FAQ:

Design­ers and devel­op­ers inter­ested in using new Flash Player 9 fea­tures are wel­come to explore the public alpha of Adobe Flash Pro­fes­sional 9 Action­Script 3.0 avail­able on Adobe Labs.

It’s curi­ously timed… isn’t it unprece­dented for Macromedia/Adobe releas­ing Player 9 almost a year in advance of Flash Pro­fes­sional 9? And, I don’t think that we’ll see wide-​spread adop­tion until there is actu­ally some Flash 9 con­tent out there on the web. I’ll start paying atten­tion in 2007.

June 28, 2006 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

Diesel Sweeties

dump.gifI love Diesel Sweet­ies …

I prefer to name my com­put­ers and devices after imag­i­nary girls who would never go out with me.


June 14, 2006 » Tags: . » 2 Comments