Jeff and I got back to our room and I use the words “passed out” here, although it was somewhere between passing out and going to bed – do you know the difference? Anyhow, the alarm came quickly and we got up, showered, and headed down to the complimentary continental breakfast. We’re staying at the Hampton – shitty wi-fi, fantastic continental, take your pick. One more good thing about the Hampton is it attracts a lot of the industry “rockstars.” Shit, Jeff and I were there, and we’re pretty important. I jest, but the highly talented Shaun Inman was there and I did get to pick up the size medium American Apparel Mint T-shirts he brought. Thank you Shaun – it was an awkward moment, but it was never dull – my name is George.

After all this we made our way to the conference, what follows are my notes from the different panels/presentations, enjoy.

Design is in the Details

Naz Hamid started with many quotes, “Less is more”, and “God is in the details/Design is in the Details” Showed examples of design in details in many fields, cooking, industrial design, etc… Overall I think his presentation was really entry level. I wanted to be blown away and I was just kind of left with a, “well yea…” taste in my mouth. Oh well, not a bad presentation by any means, but definitely light on theory.

The one real world practice I took away was his use of different comps for different components of the site – this is something I will definitely try.

Checklist and Guide

• Experiment – Playing around with things in a few PSD files. Use the source files of the client. Play with color. Logo in one comp, background in another, navigation in another – don’t commit. Then start mashing up.
• Choices – Making choices on client needs, your styles, typefaces, and colors. Pick the things that are simple, most logical choices.
• Stay Consistent – Make sure homepages and subpages reflect eachother. Avoid minutae with clients.
• Completeness – Finish the comp and get it done done.
• Step In, Step Out, Step Back: Balance – Walk away for awhile – take notes when you get back about what is striking you – first impressions.
• Be your own critic – Address the things you may feel the people signing off will have issues with – compromise just a bit, it will go a long way.
• Complexity is Simplicity
• Obsession is Healthy – Dedication to the design, we put in long hours.

Thoughts, Breakthroughs, & Revelations – Let a design sit in your head and think about it. Not Billable Time.

Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives

Derek Powazek comes across as very genuine. His presentation was pretty fun and he provided some great examples of the good and bad sides of crowdsourcing. Now following him on twitter – he seems like a seasoned pro of “growing communities.”

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S. Thompsen

Three lies people who don’t get crowdsourcing tell:

• Lie 1: Everyone on the net is an idiot – well they’re are some idiots, but some really smart people doing some really good stuff.
• Lie 2: Good stuff is too hard to find – traditionally has been human editors. It’s gone from traditional, to non-traditional, to moderators. Or it’s computers, text search, and Google. Now the interesting method is the hybrid model, Digg, flickr. Discussing leaderboards and how it encourages users to game the system. Show a random swath of “good results” to avoid the bad results of the game caused by leaderboards.Wisdom of Crowd – Selfish interests that increase the overall good. Says that if we all guessed numbers of beans in a jar, 99% of us would be wrong, but averaged out, we would be 99% right. Simple answers are the correct place for using the wisdom of crowds. Also needs to have diversity of viewpoints. Design for selfishness.Learning from Assignment Zero – Started by Jeff How – “Here everyone, write stories.” Nothing worked because nobody wrote anything. But increase the selfish motivation.

“Using crowdsourcings as a cost-saving measure doesn’t work. Communities must be cultivated, respected, and managed if they are to create economic value.” – Jeff Howe, who coined the term, “Crowdsourcing.”

• Lie 3: You can’t make any money. Threadless example – be the trusted middle man. How do they do it?
  • Contests – Ego, Winning, and Money
  • Fun thing on buyer end – The golden tag on a tshirt, Alumni Club.

Cautionary Tales:

• Yahoo Games Wii Sites: They pulled in flickr feeds tagged, “wii.” Flickr users rebelled and put in tons of “yahoo sucks” type images.
• GM Tahoe Apprentice Campaign: “Hey who wants to help us make a commercial for our SUV.” To make the commercial, all you could do was use their video and pictures and change the text. Chaos insued. “The Earth is now your Bitch”, “MURDER YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY.” They put the participants in a very narrow box. GM was greedy with their content – you couldn’t export it anywhere else, it could only work on the site. But it actually worked – drove more traffic to gm.com than google and yahoo combined.

Community is Grown, Not Built

1. Give people tools they want
2. Trust them to do good
3. Reward Good Contributions
4. Punish bad contributions
5. Expect the unexpected – Flickr Geotagging the word “Fuck” over iceland.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts

And this is where the crappy web connection killed my notes. I guess it isn’t so smart to post notes inside of WordPress while having an unstable connection. Either way – this panel was great.

First was Michael Lopp from Apple, he’s a product manager and seems to be a damn good one at that. He started off with some keynote issues, which was ironic, being from Apple. He proceeded to talk about Apple building everything like a present. From OSX being inside of their computers being inside of great packaging being sold at a great store being debuted by a great leader – yea, I could listen to someone from Apple talk about this stuff all day. He had some great anecdotes, which I wrote down – but alas they are deleted.

Are you comfortable being an asshole for the integrity of your design?

Then came John Gruber of the Daring Fireball fame. I read his blog pretty frequently and he’s always on point with thoughts on Apple. He continued to talk about the “blood, sweat, and fear” that goes into great design. In the end he stated that it’s ok to be an asshole as a designer – it means your more dedicated to your vision. Thank you John we all need that.

All in all this was a great presentation and I got to sit on the floor the whole time, which means it was a packed house.

A General Theory of Creative Relativity

You know how when you’re watching Die Hard and you just know that everything is going to be ok because badass John McClaine is on the job? You know, the bad guys are toast, he took a beating but won, and the girl who was in his life but couldn’t handle his badassnes when he wasn’t saving the world, comes back into his life? That’s like Jim Coudal – except he’s saving the world from shitty creative work.

“He’s a man’s designer.”

I would work for Jim Coudal, as Jeff said, “He’s a man’s designer.”

He framed his general theory as a spark between the known and the unknown, the variable or the constant – it was slow to start but then once he got going, he was on fire. I must say that his booking the band exercise was perfect for his concept.

At the end of his talk people had a Q/A round – this is where I decided how much of a badass Jim Coudal was. Again, I lost my notes, so I am going from memory. Small teams are better and meetings are bad news. That’s pretty much all I remember – sad.

Conclusion

First day wrapped up and it was unbelievable, each panel progressively better than the last. I must say with this year’s SXSW and the whole working for myself thing – I definitely feel a lot more happier in where I am at, it’s been a great year. I have also learned I need to take more pics at panels, doh!

Anyhow, when I actually got Spaces – it ended up being anti-climatic. It didn’t really work how I thought it would (in my many pre-Leopard, about Leopard dreams) and it seemed like it was a bit buggy. I have seen many people turning spaces off, frustrated with it’s apparent shortcomings – but I am not one to let initial excitement die so easily – so I rolled with the punches for awhile. Fast forward three months and I am now moving from space to space like a Puppeteer on a powder day (sci-fi/drug connection makes reading all the better).

Organize Your Actions

For those who are using a computer for more than just checking email and surfing the web – Spaces can help boost productivity. My first inclination wasn’t right at all – I put random stuff in random spaces and was like, “cool, now what.” Since then – I have organized all of my actions on a computer into four main categories for four spaces (they may be different for everyone):

Browsing Information – Since I switched to NetNewsWire and Safari (versus good ol’ buggy Firefox) I have been able to cut out my mid-design random RSS feed checks. I used to build sites in Firefox and click “Live Bookmark” every few minutes. Now when I want to browse I have to actively switch to another space.

Communicating and Scheduling – Lumping Twitter (Snitter), iChat, Mail, iCal, and Things together allows me to communicate with people to schedule timelines and meetings.

Multimedia Management - I really like to use Handbrake for backups, yea. Oh and iTunes. Oh and covers from Amazon.com. And Netflix is nice too. Everything related to my hording of films, shows, and music goes here.

Web Design – When I am working on web design – it’s very important to be able to hyper focus or get in the zzzzone (yea, I can’t believe I am that cliché either). I keep Photoshop, Coda (of which I also recently switched), and Firefox all within the same Space as well.

There you have it – all of my related activities between the four Spaces. I would suggest playing around with it and finding the layouts you like and then sticking to them. If you stumble upon one that works particularly good – then you can go into system preferences and make sure the particular setup you like will always be the same when you start apps.

The Rules to Spaces Success

Obviously these rules are related to my own experience – I think most people, who use and like Spaces, do so in the way mentioned above. The broader goal is to get those who have tried Spaces and didn’t like it right away to give it a second chance.

1. Don’t have conflicting Applications in the same Space. For instance – if you’re trying to design something with iChat blinking at you every 30 seconds, it doesn’t belong. Try to find complimentary applications – such as Mail and iCal.
2. You don’t need to switch between Spaces very frequently (ideally), but if you do need to use “Command+Tab.” For the seasoned computer user, this is a no brainer, but I guarantee at least one person will read this and go, “I never knew you could do that.” Everyone had that day.
3. Don’t be afraid to fill out the screen in a grid that works for you.
4. Have fun!!! (I just love writing that at the end of lists, let’s keep it peppy, please.)

Conclusion

Spaces will eternally be a mystery for some people – for others it will be a godsend they can’t live without – I think it will be most useful to the multi-taskers who are doing five different things at once and have trouble working on just one thing. Personally, I was suffering from information overload and this seems to alleviate that a bit. My Spaces setup lives on a 20-inch iMac and a 20-inch Dell Flat Panel – the more real estate the better. Divide and conquer, go forth and do, yay.

Granted the Wii came out in November of 2006 and Twitter in March of 2006 – they really didn’t “blow up” until 2007. The Wii continues to have shortages and Twitter ballooned after SXSW 2007, where I first signed on. I had a conversation with Snook once and he talked about (and continues to blog about) staying away from hopping on any bandwagon as well as staying fair and balanced. This post will not be that way – I will gush and adore praise for my three favorite things of 2007.

The Nintendo Wii

When news of the Nintendo’s new console first started coming out, I must admit, I was a skeptic. Nintendo had become an afterthought in my mind when it comes to the latest and greatest consoles. Then I saw the Zelda: Twilight Princess video on YouTube. The whole shooting arrows, slashing with a sword, and fishing bits all in 360 degree motion sensing bliss is really what got me all hyped. The new controllers – which seemed like a novelty – actually could be contribute to adding another layer of substance to games.

I stopped buying the newest console after the first XBox – somewhere between starting a career and having a serious relationship, my gaming time fell off the map. I figured it would be a long time before I ever bought another console – but then my fiancee played Wii bowling at a friends house, and won. It went from, “videogames are boring 2000,” to “the Wii is sooo much fun, let’s get one!” Done.

Since then we’ve had a great time with family and friends bowling, playing tennis, and golfing – all of which come with the box. In fact, it wasn’t till six months after the Wii that we got any other games. One of which, Mario Party 8, is nothing to write to the motherland about. In the last five days I have gotten Madden ’08 and Woods ’08 as well as Zelda, which I had rented before. All in all the Wii does something no other console has done – bring games to the non-gamers. It’s why there are still Wii shortages and why when we pull it out at parties, non-gamers say, “I want that.”

Twitter

Twitter first came across my radar a few months before SXSW ’07, where it really gained traction. And honestly, I had the same thought as most people, “Why would I care and why would I use it?” For some reason the buzz about it (when I was at SXSW) outweighed my skepticism and my reluctance to sign up for another web service. twitter.com/georgehuff was born.

Six-Hundred and Fourteen twitters later I can finally say I have my head wrapped around the service and why it is not only greatly useful but also why it is highly innovative. Twitter lives in the world of one-to-many communication. While being slightly intrusive, depending on how many subscribers one has, it’s completely opt-in/opt-out. Are you subscribing to an acquaintence that seems to do nothing at all? Unsubscribe. I must say I partake in much less small talk when those who I am having a conversation with are also on Twitter. After all I already know What Are You Doing?

The iPhone

As I write this post – I am driving around Portland trying to figure out which of the Christmas items I need to exchange are available at which store. I opened up Google Maps, typed in Joe’s, and proceeded to call the closest Joe’s available till I found the Roxy Snowboard jacket (for my fiancee) in a size small. I then proceeded to call different Les Schwabs in the Portland-Vancouver area to find which could put on my snow tires the fastest. While it’s not difficult to imagine doing something like this in front of a computer – it is difficult to imagine doing it while sitting behind a steering wheel cursing at all the bad drivers.

Google Maps is one of the many things on the iPhone that is done really well – and really, the device is simply a joy to use. It’s not perfect, it can’t do everything, but what it does do, it does better than any other phone available. With the opening up of the device for native apps – I expect to be writing about it again at the end of 2008.

Conclusion

And now you have my biased, one-sided, fanboyistic, love and adoration for three things in 2007 which I have truly enjoyed. It’s not often we get spoiled as consumers as we have this year. The Wii will change the way we think about games, Twitter will change the way we communicate, and the iPhone has provided us with the closest thing to the all-in-one holy grail of consumer electronic devices.

Most people will agree with the Wii and Twitter topping my list – the iPhone however, may draw ire from the iPhone haters. There are two huge reasons why it is probably the number one device of the year. The first being the fact it corralled a major telco to change their network and their policies to fit a phone – this is a step in the right direction and will hopefully lead to more of this sort of thing. Could you imagine if Comcast told you what kind of computer you could use? It would be ridiculous. The second reason why I picked it is the way it raised the bar for all phones being released. Nobody is putting a phone on the market right now without the iPhone in the back of their minds – this will lead to better design and usability amongst all phones, which is no doubt a good thing.

I had a few other items which have really been hot this year – but perhaps I am missing something?

Happy New Years.

Notable Mentions

• XBox 360
• 2008 Scion XB
• MacBook Pro
• Aluminum iMacs
• Facebook
• Virb

I have a feeling Apple will do the right thing and offer up some form of reparation. First off, we are the crazy ones willing to drop down $600 on a first gen device – probably the most likely to drop money down on the next first gen device from Apple – but now we feel burned. Without early adopters you don’t get normal economies of scale – without us – Apple may not be able to launch something as risky.

I sold my AAPL stock today because A) I felt burned (especially for how much I have sold the iPhone to curious onlookers) and B) This aggressive of a price cut means either the demand isn’t there -or- they have reached economies of scale (which in such a short time wouldn’t make sense, at least not $200 a phone).

I will probably be back – but not so blind to the Apple shine this time around.

** Update: Kind of saw this coming – but good to see it actually happen **

First off, congrats to Tease Marketing, for they(we) have officially refreshed their homepage to include a sign up for their new newsletter, “The Tease Effect.” Sign up, these ladies throw lavish parties and seem to know just about everyone. The newsletter is for upcoming events they sponsor.

1) NBC is pulling out of iTunes. This isn’t about anything but greed. Apple wants to keep the price of the shows the same, NBC wants to double it. We’ll see what happens, my bet is they will be back. Especially with new iPods in the works. Also to read, an open letter from he who runs ipodlounge.com.

2) iPhone to Flickr – Finally! We were talking about how nice this would be the other night. It still feels a little hacky and a native app would be much smoother, but hey I’ll take it.

3) Speaking of the iPhone and recent developments, take a look at this goodness, dock crazyness.

When Apple first started selling iPods, it took them over a year and a half to get to their one millionth iPod. They sold 270k iPhones in their first two days. Think about that. Obviously this trend won’t continue, but here’s another fact: Apple sold about ten million iPods last quarter as well. I’m going to make a guess that the majority of these iPod purchases are not new customers (and if they are, good deal), I think they are repeat customers.

So what does this mean for Apple? Repeat customers means brand loyalty and trust. For myself and many others, a computer is just a computer, that is unless it is a Mac. How crazy is it that I say these things? I used to love PC’s. And then they became a commodity. Case in point: today I unboxed a brand-new HP Desktop for my fiancee (purchased for her by her company) and it was really anti-climatic. Regardless of where my Mac/PC stance stands, as a geek, unboxing a new computer is always a treat. This time it just didn’t do it for me.

Extend this same philosophy with music players, which more people have experienced with Apple (compared to Macs). People buy an iPod for a good experience and Apple continues to deliver. People like using iTunes for managing their music. Does anyone remember the apps before iTunes, gawwwddd! Kind of like photo library apps before Picassa or iPhoto. The cycle goes: buy iPod, use iPod, love iPod, watch new iPod come out, figure out a way to upgrade, buy new iPod. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Watch this happen with the iPhone, watch this happen with increased Mac sales. And to be completely honest, I will be surprised if they can continue a ten million iPod a quarter sales. But who knows. Trust is everything in business. When customers trust that Apple will provide a happy experience, they will ALWAYS buy Apple products versus trying something new.

Their stock is up $8.74 to $146 today, still not too late to buy.

But how is this possible? Well the other day I was skimming the web and found a how to by some resourceful guy who said, “Forget the whole rubbing alcohol solution, take that bama apart.” He posted a step by step guide to fix the mighty mouse by taking it apart.

Yes, it is a bit nerve racking to pry apart any kind of Apple goodness, but I was just so fed up at the short-termed-ness of the rubbing alcohol solution. My Mighty Mouse now feels like it did in the old days when I first got it. Now if only I wouldn’t have broken the middle click in frustration.

First off, the thing has a good weight. I picked it up, tethered to the display and all, and it felt like a sturdy piece of machinery. Upon touching the screen to unlock it I expected it to feel flimsy, like the screen of my current cellphone. Now I had read that it was a glass screen, but somehow I still had that premonition. The iPhone is solid. Built like a brick, tough as a brick.

The first thing I tried out was Safari, I had to go check out eleven3.com. It was snappy and my first go around in typing didn’t go so well. But I have to admit, I was shaking a bit with excitement. Yes, I just said that. Upon switching to landscape mode I was able to type with my thumbs just fine. It is a little weird, but I think you could fly on it once you got used to it. Can’t wait for the youtube vids of that.

The next thing I clicked was YouTube. I clicked on a five minute video and it took a bit of time to load over the wifi. I played it a little bit and then took off to google maps and looked up my house. It was snappy and the pinch to zoom in and out thing was so so cool.

Like I said, this was a sneak trip, so I knew I had to be quick. I quickly checked out the ipod aspect and then headed over to pick up my neoprene case and was out the door.

When I was playing with the iPhone, with all the other people around me doing the same thing, I noticed this: the iPhone got people really really excited. Why? Because everything about it is so accessible. Yes, it lacks a ton of features that other phones may have. But with all of the features it has, none of them feel obscure and difficult to understand. Everything on the iPhone is there for the taking, take it or leave it.

Personally, I could probably get away with never owning one, I don’t even have internet on my phone. But picking up that gadget for the first time and feeling like it delivered on all the hype, made my allegiance to Apple grow even stronger. They put out great products, period. I will be getting one when I return from Alaska in late July.

Oh and I caved and told Danielle what I had done. Nothing happened!

I’m throwing this post out as a last resort. Somebody throw me a life ring here. Some people post solutions to problems, I’m posting a question.

Does anyone know if the most recent update to IE6 supports the “progid:DXImageTransform…” filter to get PNGs to work properly? Another potential issue could be that I am running IE6 in Parallels on my Mac. Either way, IE6 doesn’t work with any PNGs. This includes an entire backlog of sites that I have done in the past.

I’ve tried multiple things and none of the usual tricks work. Burn M$ Burn. Anyone?

** Update **

That filter uses a directx component on a video card. Won’t work with virtualization software.

Thanks Jeff.

When 2/3 tech headlines are about one single product, I get a bit scared. Not that the iPhone won’t blow every other device out of the water, but it can’t make you walk on water (jesus phone anyone?). Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think that 75% of the hype surrounding this thing is 100% warranted, it does everything all of the other phones out there do, and it does it better.

Most of the hate I see out around the web are so niche and specific that I wonder if these people love to hate Apple like I love to love Apple. “It doesn’t do MS Exchange server, therefore it will be completely useless to the business world, therefore will flop.” “What does it do that my other device can’t do.”

To most of these people I want to say, does UI mean nothing to you? We’re on the verge of seeing one of the greatest UI’s ever released and people want to compare that to a blackberry, or some mobile windows platform? C’mon folks, let’s bring up the old mac versus pc debate and really ask ourselves if UI makes a difference. (Hint: it does)

But this post is really just an attempt by me to calm some of the hype. It’s a phone with a great UI. I can’t think of another phone I have ever seen where I would call a UI great. So in that department, it will be revolutionary.

Otherwise it will allow us to do the same things we always do, but be more free from the tethers of the computer.

Ok, I did a shit job of calming the hype. I’m excited as hell, I admit it.