For the past three months I’ve been coding (and for two years before that, planning) bloowish.com. Bloowish seeks to solve the problem my wife and I had when we were getting married: we had too many wish lists to keep up with, and too many sites to visit to make things available for our friends and family to purchase for us. Even after the wedding was over, I found myself clinging to unmanageable and un-RSS-able wish lists on all the major web store sites. Once I started down the path of making this thing happen, I saw a few other folks had started with the same germ of an idea; the problem I found, time and again, was that design and production had suffered on these sites in the name of making a quick “web 2.0″ buck.

Bloowish is the site I personally wanted to find and use but never could. It mostly just gets out of the way and lets you get to the task at hand. I’ve built a bookmarklet that allows you to add items from any web store, and I’ve included RSS feeds for every account. In my own daily use, it’s been really fun and easy. The feedback from my users has been positive. And the best part is that not only is it free to join, but it’s wide open—meaning no “beta lottery” or waiting around for an invite. Simply head on over and get started.

All I ask is that you be willing to post some feedback either to feedback (at) bloowish.com or at our customer service tool provided by the awesome folks at Get Satisfaction. So, now that the cat’s out of the bag I hope you’ll all (all four of you) come on over, have a look, and stick around!

Oh, before I forget I’d be remiss not to mention our awesome logo designed by the folks at goopymart—creators of the Webkit Squirrelfish logo among others. They do great work, are lightning fast, and could even decode my terrible art direction. Thanks!

But I really think that Apple came along and took all the risk. Apple said, O.K., we’ll invest in making this hardware device and in making a store, and running that store, and making all these deals, and working with all you scumbags and assholes in the music business. We’ll put on our asbestos suit and deal with you people, right, to be able to, like, sit in the same room and breathe the same air that you criminals in the music industry, you retarded criminals, do, right?

Right.

There may be a problem with a film when a narrator constantly tells you the meaning of what you have just seen, gift-wrapping each scene with a moral.  There may be a problem with characters who shop with such conviction while the audience looks up from the trough of a credit crunch.  There may be a problem with stretching Sex and the City into a two hour and twenty minute film - it can feel like a never ending dinner party: however pleasant the courses, after a while you can hardly eat another one.  None of these problems seemed apparent to the women who sat around me in the cinema in Leicester Square, laughing and weeping in quick succession. After a while I began to reason like one of the characters: maybe the problem was me.

To seeing a movie that gets reviewed like that, I’d say no. Honestly, I’m just happy to read a review of any movie that isn’t just a padded-out press release. We don’t really seem able to say anything nuanced about film in the U.S. anymore; it’s either “best movie evar!!!1″ or “sucked!”. There’s no in-between.

But this pile of dick jokes wrapped in a thin veil of sisterhood deserves whatever horrors befall it.

So today in the office we’re listing out all the superheroes whose last names could also be (strange) surnames. Like Kip Spiderman (”Yeah, you know Kip Spiderman. He lives in our building? He made those frittatas you liked at Karen’s party?“). It’s absolute meme gold, I tell you.

Of course our first notion was the Toyota Prius. We took one home for a weekend and loved it, but thinking we could get a better deal if we haggled we returned it and said “not yet thanks” on Monday morning. Life got in the way, my job moved into a new office and my wife produced a play. Now that we’re looking again in earnest we can find nary a Prius under twenty-six grand. What used to be the sole domain of soy-sipping hipsters and tenured english Professors is now standard issue survival equipment, and surviving the summer can mean only one thing: real, no screwing around, car shopping.

This is one of many times since hitting my latter twenties that I’ve opened myself up to being marketed to in not so subtle ways. Perusing the web for cars that seem like good matches for us I’m bombarded with images that threaten to shake my beliefs about what I am: in nearly every shot of the Honda Fit in action a slender hipster is casually recumbent in the backseat, swilling a lookalike Starbuck’s latte and surfing on his MacBook. Similarly, the Kia Spectra5 seems to have been placed into production entirely to transport indie-rock bands to their well-attended gigs in Brooklyn. Even the Nissan Versa, sensible in almost every other aspect, assaults the viewer with Juno-style quips while images of its interior load. Room for big hair, indeed. After a while the cynicism sets in so deep that you even start to feel like your friends and Consumer Reports are lying to you about which car to buy. Later, the prospect of buying any car seems like madness and the concept of what constitutes “good” gas mileage becomes contorted and twisted, until all you want is some theoretical car that runs on moonbeams and good thoughts.

The first time I ever shopped for a car on my own, I test-drove a Plymouth so old it had lived through the first oil crisis. The marketing materials that accompanied that one were a newspaper ad and an address I thought I could find without too much trouble. I became aware three blocks in that the brakes were shot, and the shift linkage was gone. I drove a harrowing four miles down a rural interstate before turning around and making a deal right there on the spot. I was absolutely smitten to have found a car that was about as snotty and recalcitrant as I was at 20. Soon it had the requisite Apple sticker and a rebuilt transmission, and my future wife would even ride in it—but just once, enough times to convince her that it hated her and that the feeling was mutual.

But this time I’ve pledged to be more sagacious, resolute even, in our quest to get a car that fits all of our varied needs. We’ve created a composite of this car and it has three hundred airbags, 800 horsepower, a built-in Mac, talking nav that knows where to get really good Pho, and theoretical tie downs for the theoretical car seats our theoretical children may one day ride in. Oh, and alloy wheels. And an EPA estimated 85 miles to the gallon.

What I’m getting at is that I’m bad at this, and all the marketing doesn’t really help as much as I thought it might when I was younger. At 12, staring at the pictures in car magazines like most boys do at that age, I was convinced that car buying was not only easy but probably fun, too. The wise, current-day version of me knows what it’s like to have to tell a car salesman that I do not always, in fact, “wear the pants” in this marriage. The pants are shared, thank you very much, and I try to make it so that my turn happens when my wallet is missing so that we don’t end up with more Plymouths. 

Tonight as the credits rolled, my wife turned to me and asked two questions: 1) “Have you turned into an eight year old?” and 2) “Does this mean you’ll see Sex In The City with me?”

Nicks-iMac:~ nick$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
112 cd
53 svn
50 mate
40 sudo
35 ls
25 pwd
22 ./mysqladmin
17 port
14 ./mysql
13 curl 

Ah, now isn’t that better? Sleeeep. Sleeeeeeeep. I’m sure there’s at least one hard core Unix person out there saying “what the fuck does ‘mate’ do, and where’s all the entries for ‘vi’?” I will further separate the sleepy from the hardcore by announcing this is a Mac.

I change directories a lot, huh?

Accessibility is an important and worthy goal, but it is not at odds with good design. We should settle for nothing less than beautiful and accessible currency. This isn’t it. 

— John Gruber, April 3, 2008

Recently the U.S. Mint released new five dollar bills that have been redesigned in the same style as all the other denominations. Larger numerals have been added to the obverse sides of each bill, presumably to aid in identification by the sight impaired. The bills also contain further deterrents for would-be counterfeiters, like UV inks and special watermarks. But the money still looks the same. It looks like a multi-car pileup on the freeway of design by committee. And the worst part is most of the committee members never even lived in the same century. It seems as though American currency design has gone the way of most design here: an act of contrition to the flow of time, an act of desperation against petty (and not so petty) crime, and a half-hearted nod to those less fortunate than ourselves.

The goal of “beautiful currency” is probably meaningless to most people. Money is a means, a way to buy lunch and put gas in the tank. But more than any official document or printed decree, money is an ambassador. When the U.S. dollar was strong, millions of these little treaties on American ideals were in circulation in parts of the world where few knew anything about us, testifying for us—even if we could never measure up to all those hopelessly noble faces and mighty monuments of architectural achievement.

The five dollar bill I fidgeted with tonight in line at the grocery store looked like a ransom note from some amateurish kidnapper, stained with red Kool-Aid and ham-fisted attempts at foiling teenagers at Kinko’s late at night. The enormous Helvetica “5″ on its back seemed placed there if not totally by accident then at least without care. Held up to the light I saw the lovingly engraved portrait of Lincoln, the president who managed to give his life convincing half a nation that maybe owning humans like cattle was a terribly bad idea, bemusedly looking on at that purple numeral in reverse.

American money, in addition to being stinky, is ugly. And it’s getting worse. But look on the bright side: at least now its looks and its value are getting in synch. The worse our money gets in terms of its aesthetic value, the more it slips in international market value. Am I suggesting that somehow all the world is as shallow as we are? That somehow, entire Saudi families loved the look of the 1967 fifty-dollar bill so much that they stock-piled them in their palaces by the millions and swam around in them like Scrooge McDuck based solely on looks? In a word, no. But design, as Steve Jobs likes to say, is not how it looks; it’s how it works.

So ask yourself next time you’re at the pump putting eight of these new bills in your gas tank if design makes any difference to you. Would it make any difference if the money you used to do it were beautiful, with slogans that reminded you of a bygone part of our shared history that through perseverance and sound governance we could return to? Or would you rather have the key to a Holiday Inn, with a sticker on the back marked by hand in ball-point pen: do not copy?

After a recent submission, I received a well worded and polite response. It essentially said that we were very close to having a finished candidate, but some tweaks to color would be necessary to move on. I’m fine with this, at least publicly. Internally, however, it makes me want to scream. Even though the writer is a seasoned veteran of the newspaper industry with an above average grasp of the internet as a communications medium, it still makes me cringe. As a company we’ve been tasked with growing virtually every metric we have to measure ourselves by an abstract percentage. That number is in turn based on something only a newspaper would have the sense of humor to map its success against: the penetration and market size of the average locally owned TV station—the other dying medium, besides making records to sell. Management hasn’t been given any terribly clear direction about how this might be accomplished, but many of them seem to think more display ads will do the trick. This is what I hear approximately half the time: grow business, design with ad space in mind, make it conservative. The other half of the time I hear make it ‘web 2.0’, we need ajax, we want comments and tags on everything.

Someone is lying, or wrong, or both.

So when I get feedback on a design whose brief was “bleeding edge, ajax, show-and-hide” that says “these colors are too bright” I feel as though I’ve landed on the ape planet, and there’s a giant Photoshop toolbar jutting out of the surf at right angles. But I’ve realized now that it’s just because we’re trying to do two things at once. We somehow need to keep the average 54 year old female reader—who revolts and calls us on the phone when we move the sudoku puzzle—and convince the 18 year old that we are just as cool as Digg. I’m growing increasingly dubious as to whether this can be done.

I think these dual goals are fairly common in businesses like newspapers, where it’s increasingly obvious that current technology has rendered the stuff we were once good at pointless; there’s a feeling of wanting to hold on firmly to the vine in hand while you look for the next one, even though everyone is telling you it won’t hold you and your baggage. Another example is the frenzy to extend support for IE 6. The fear of making customers unhappy by not supporting their nine year old software—or losing them altogether without more to replace them—is palpable. This fear pushes companies into announcing, with all seriousness, an intention to post positive growth simultaneously along every measurement it has for itself. It makes them spend time and effort figuring out custom newspapers that only cover your specific eighteen block neighborhood. It makes them hate Craig Newmark. It makes them announce they are competing with Google.

When we set out to redesign this site almost a year ago our team did everything it possibly could to distance ourselves from newspapers. We chose a software back-end that, up until that time, had been largely untested for that specific purpose; we designed with wild, complimentary colors and urbane type faces; we envisioned a site where almost everything was user-centric, where you never saw anything that you didn’t ask for. In the process that ensued, whittling away became incising. What is left bears enough resemblance to be recognizable to us, but I’m not sure it’s what we promised our users. We’re a different group now, and even though current events keep some of us trapped in meetings for hours at a time there are still good ideas circulating here. Newspapers want you to believe that being successful in 2008 would require them to see into the future. This is a lie. It would merely require them to see into last week. The pieces are all here, and there are thousands of people who want to do the work. It’s just that for every one of them there’s a counterpart, working hard to make sure we keep serving two masters.

I don’t know, maybe he just hates green. (And he really is a nice guy. Shame about the green, though.)

I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will. (via)

My feelings about the Clinton presidency are well known: I loved Bill, and would follow him into a hail of gunfire and stinging shrapnel if it meant America could be like it was in 1997 again. But alas, it can’t; his wife is a lousy candidate and she’s mean spirited and lies with a frequency unmatched by anyone other than the Bush administration itself, the enemy whose deeds we’re trying to undo in the first place.

And I’m not even that much of a stickler for hard and fast truth in politics. I understand that it is a form of theatre in many ways, and that bettering oneself through a few harmless revisions of history is just part of the show. But then I look at Obama and I think, ‘why doesn’t he do that, if it’s so much a part of the show?’ The answer may be that he’s younger and less well-versed in party politics (”look, he doesn’t even know he has to lie yet! How cute!”), or it could be that he’s just better at lying, and less thuggish when he does it. But deep down I believe the reason he feels better to watch on TV and to get an update on Twitter from is just because he knows what it’s like to be decent and good, two adjectives that haven’t applied to the Clinton campaign since day one.

See, iPhoto stores separate copies of every action you perform on a photo. Rotate a shot? New version. Color correction? Ditto. What this means is that a drive will not only become littered with your original photos but their alternate versions as well. This would merely be a slight aggravation if it could be changed by ticking a check box somewhere. As you might have guessed, Apple chose not to provide such a preference. With that in mind, as well as the multitude of tools and options Aperture has over iPhoto, I made the jump this weekend. On the face of it, the process should have been easy; Aperture can natively import iPhoto libraries, after all. meaning there’s nothing too mysterious about getting the photos from one place to another. I was able to do that without any trouble. The snag came after the import, when I realized my new Aperture library was littered with all those alternate copies of many of my photos. Without a very good grasp on just what a “stack” is in Aperture, I was left without a way to quickly weed out the extra versions.

After a few hours of struggle, fiddling around with Smart Albums and importing and exporting things in various groups, I was rid of the duplicates. And the truth is I’m still not quite sure what I did. Whatever it was, between exporting a lot of junk and selectively re-importing it, I saved myself a gig or so of space. And I have to say Aperture is really nice. Somehow Aperture’s re-touchings seem more subtle than Photoshop’s; maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been using Photoshop for so long that I can spot its use from a hundred yards away. I’m especially fond of Aperture’s gamma vignette tool, which is practically undetectable as a post processing trick.

All in all, I’d give my migration a 6 on the pain scale, with 1 being the Migration Assistant on recent Macs (yay!) and 10 being moving from XP to Vista (not yay!). Any Aperture tips or gripes out there?

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Here’s the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

(Via)

I urge you to visit his website to learn a bit more about why Obama is the only clear choice for us right now, and to watch Lawrence Lessig’s elucidating talk on why he’s choosing Obama over Hillary Clinton. Now, go vote!

Another reason for the downturn is the feeling among many consumers that four dollars spent on a latte may be better spent on a gallon of gas, or that enough of those lattes could add up to a chunk of a mortgage payment in these tough economic times. Still others say Starbucks has lost the “coffeehouse” charm it once had, and feels more like McDonalds (who, along with Dunkin Donuts has launched its own line of fancy coffee drinks). The simplest answer to Starbucks’ woes is that they have glutted the market: their product is no longer different and their ability to respond to customer needs has been compromised.

Apple, on the other hand, just posted its best quarter ever. Buried in the good news is the fact that Apple is showing just 5% growth in iPod sales year-over-year, despite a 17% revenue jump. In other words, lots of people are buying a second or third iPod, but not as many people are buying their first. The iPod Touch–while unique–is pricey, and hasn’t compelled many first time users to jump on board. The “gateway” iPods like the Shuffle are in need of a serious refresh in order to speed up sales.

But more than anything, Apple needs to find a way to avoid the glut that Starbucks is facing. If we use the growth of Starbucks as a yardstick, plotted on an eight year trend with 2007 being the final year, it would be fair to say that Apple is in the middle of a huge growth spurt. Part of what it needs to do now is find some sustainability for itself. The iPhone, MacBook and MacBook Pro are all excellent products whose lifecycles will see Apple well into the next decade; the iPod Touch and MacBook Air, however, are not the stuff that futures are built on. They are the “drinkable chocolate” and “blended creme frappé” in Apple’s lineup, the sorts of things meant to glow in the window and attract passersby who may never return, no matter how cool they are. Updates to the iPod line will help, including a revamping of the higher capacity iPod Classic. But prices of solid state drives may make them impractical for use in the product.

Over the last two years Apple has been essentially unchallenged in its (re)rise to prominence. A small slow down in one segment is not the end of the world, and it may just be the chance Apple needs to set the world on its ear again. Sales of iPhones and iMacs are brisk, and more and more people discover life on the Mac side every day. Whatever the second quarter may bring, everyone is excited to see what’s next from the house of Steve.

The truth is that I hate my commute, except for the part when I cross the bridge and the part when I pull into the drive way. The truth is that I stay pretty tired, but it’s okay cause our bed is pretty comfortable. The truth is that I desperately need to get into the gym, and write more posts, and take more photos with a real camera and fewer with a phone. The truth is that Juno was much better than National Treasure Part 2, or whatever is was officially called.

The truth is they might sell the company I work for, and I’m not having much luck caring or even understanding what that might mean—the truth must be that consolidation is Good™.

The truth is I bought a two pound bag of jerky, and have convinced even my wife that it’s awesome stuff. The truth is my XBox finally caught the red ring of death, and we might get a Wii assuming I can find one. The truth is it feels good to tell the truth, even a small one.

2.) When my wife calls me three times in a row in a twenty minute period to converse about essentially nothing, just so that she can say “I love you” at the end.

3.) When my in-laws give me a birthday card signed “may the force be with you” to accompany a Star Wars DVD boxed set.

4.) When people look at me–straight-faced–and call Internet Explorer version 6 a “web browser” in an non-ironic way when in fact IE6 is really just a trap, sent here by evil demons from another dimension; the same demons who want me to spend the rest of my life breaking perfectly good code instead of reveling in the first two things on this list.

I wonder if every line of work has an “IE6″? I’m sure it does. But this one, as they say in the marines, is mine. Yet again I’ve spent an evening wrestling my own hands to the desk where they can’t fly through my computer screen, thinking the same thoughts about just what would make a group of humans make a piece of technology–in general such a liberating and beautiful thing–so awful. It’s like being given an endless bankroll and a clock with no hands with which to make a piece of art and making You, Me and Dupree instead. I just don’t get it.

For now, though, I have the other two things. They’re enough. I didn’t code a single table today. Buddha and my wife are winning.

Fall Veggie Soup

• 2 large sweet potatoes, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1 large onion, rough cut into one inch pieces
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• 32 ounces of chicken stock
• 3 par boiled chicken breasts (smallish ones)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• A palmful of each of the following: cumin, paprika
• Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

Prep

Heat butter and canola oil in a dutch oven or deep stock pot. Add garlic and sauté for a minute or so. Add onion and sauté a little longer, until onion is mostly translucent. Add sweet potatoes to mixture, stirring often. Add cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper and continue to stir just until pan begins to dry out slightly. Add chicken stock and scrape pan bottom. Cover and simmer while shredding chicken, for about 20 minutes or until sweet potatoes are tender. Add chicken and cook an additional five minutes to give flavor to chicken. Serve in large bowls, optionally topping with any nutty cheese.The best part of this recipe is the broth, which has this complex flavor of onion and garlic with the sweetness from the paprika. Great stuff on a rainy fall night.

This hasn’t been a bad apartment, aside from the heat that went on the fritz last winter and all the bats this summer. At least the neighbors were quiet, even the Ukrainian strippers.

Sometime tomorrow it will sink in that my wife and I are the proud owners of a pile of wood and brick and cement that we bought to put our stuff in. It’s a little absurd, really; I mean, who would have ever thought that I would buy a house, much less one that essentially is in the middle of nowhere. When I think of all the times that I sat in a restaurant here and mourned the death of our anonymity, longing for the days in DC when everyone didn’t know all of your shit, it seems even more odd.

But it’s perfect in a way, really. I’m not normal, so signing on to do a three hour commute for at least another three years kind of fits. Besides, who wants to pay DC rent? And anyone who’s seen my wife–or talked to her about her work, and heard just how brilliant she is–has even more evidence about why I might forgo a better job in a more stimulating town and sign on for a heaping helping of Beigeville. For this, I’ll take the constant waving at everyone we see; the inability to make it out of the coffee shop in under an hour. The trade off is that I have great friends in two cities, and a wealth of people to help us move all our stuff in that aforementioned pile of wood and brick and cement.

Owning a home is just another club to join, like the married club or the having kids club. After years of actively not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me, I think I’m weakening in my old age. As long as I can stay a member of the PBR and sheetcake club, this should be pretty easy.

Right now, I’m not managing anyone or anything. I write isolated (for now) code that one other designer–despite a good nature and eagerness to learn–invariably ruins when trying to use it. I find myself in meeting after meeting being asked to pantomime some measure of authority or involvement, only to be shown time and again that my only real function is as a pair of hands and a walking CSS reference.

Sometimes this makes me want to start a tomato farm or a pizza parlor. Coupled with my commute it’s all I can do to drag my carcass to the car every morning. It certainly doesn’t imbue me with much enthusiasm about my work, except for being home with my wife cooking and playing XBox 360.

So today I made a mix for my wife. The best code I’ve written in months is part of the package. Here’s to the things that keep us going.

I remember when I was little my sister took me to see Amadeus, a film I was probably too young to see or appreciate at the time. The final scenes of Mozart’s death, with “Sequentia: Rex Tremendae” underneath them, are indelibly marked onto my brain even now. Though it should have been far over my head I remember watching the entire movie intently, long after the row behind us (and my sister) had fallen asleep.

I’ve been doing a lot of music shopping lately, buying up tons of records most nights and stuffing them onto my iPod for my morning drive. Every six months or so I remember that life is pretty worthless without music and I do this. I’ve managed to find some good and worthwhile things to listen to, but none so incredible as a recording of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The provenance of the piece alone is amazing and eerie, but my favorite part is this from the Wikipedia entry:

The autograph of the Requiem was placed on display at the World’s Fair in 1958 in Brussels. At some point during the fair, someone was able to gain access to the manuscript, tearing off the bottom right-hand corner of the second to last page (folio 99r/45r), containing the words “Quam olim d: C:” (an instruction that the “Quam olim” fugue of the Domine Jesu was to be repeated “da capo”, at the end of the Hostias). To this day the perpetrator has not been identified and the fragment has not been recovered.

Ever since I read this passage I’ve been imaging a screenplay depicting the events leading up to the display of the score and the theft of the fragment of the page. Most fascinating of all may be the last part:

If the most common authorship theory is true, then “Quam olim d: C:” might very well be the last words Mozart wrote before he died. It is probable that whoever stole the fragment believed that to be the case.

But instead of focusing on the budding feature film director iMovie ‘08 is primarily concerned with helping you throw a movie together in “half an hour.” This means no timeline or multiple audio sources—in other words most of the things that made it so popular in the first place are gone. Apple does bill this as a complete recode of the old app, but it’s odd to shift the focus of an app so dramatically and maintain the name and versioning of all the previous incarnations. But really, I don’t care.

I’ve never made a movie in iMovie that I thought was all that great. Something happens to you after you see a Stanley Kubrick movie that makes it really difficult not to sweat the small stuff when you make a movie. When I shot those vlog posts a few weeks back I finally had to give up and give the camera to my wife to shoot me with, since I spent forty five minutes fidgeting around for good camera angles and lighting. Even when all the footage was in the can I had a terrible time editing myself, and a worse time color correcting each clip and making it ready to mix down. At one point I had actually dug up my old copy of Final Cut Pro and started editing there.

Yes, I was editing MiniDV footage from the three year old hand held camera with a $1300 editing system. Perhaps you see the level of perfectionism I’m dealing with here.

I guess my problem is that I’ve never been certain what the real goal of this much power on a consumer computer really is supposed to be. I understand the dream of the software: Apple’s demo movies always look so slick, like music videos would if anyone showed them anymore—all slash cut edits and triumphant choruses from Fallout Boy songs and daring 180’s off of powdery moguls. But every iMovie I’ve ever seen looks mostly the same, in the way that all those “iCompositions” that cropped up after GarageBand came out sounded mostly the same. Don’t get me wrong, I like that these things exist. I just never feel as if I’m using them as they were intended. I also have a good face for radio, much better suited to audio than video.

So the fact that iMovie ‘08 is so drastically different should come as no shock. The goal was always to create a finished and shareable movie in the shortest possible time frame, and not necessarily to offer conventional non-linear editing tools for the achievement of that goal. In fact, if I know Apple, shattering that sacred paradigm was always in the cards. However, waiting so long to ship the “real” iMovie comes with some pain. No more pain than wanting Stanley Kubrick production values on a cable access budget, but pain nonetheless.

I found myself yesterday in a planning session with a large group of people. We were asked to, among other things, talk a little bit about the stuff we’re asked to do too often in our office lives. Unsurprisingly almost every group mentioned meetings. So the object of this post is to share some ideas for making meetings—something I stress really are important in development—something more useful than they may be for you right now.

I. Meeting types
Meetings are not one-size-fits-all. In so many offices, meetings are held because it “seems like the right thing to do”; you want to build consensus for a project, or take the pulse of several team members about their status while on a project and a meeting with everyone involved seems like the best way. Instead, consider a ten minute standup meeting—all parties standing and looking directly at the features, code or colors in question. Another type of meeting that happens constantly is a document review, where a team might get together to go over a timeline or other shared document. The kiss of death in these meetings is twofold: letting them run over about half an hour, and not giving all attendees an opportunity to see the document beforehand. I can’t think of anything more frustrating than watching someone edit a spreadsheet on an overhead projector that I have either never seen before, or that I only occupy a couple of rows in.

In short, keep meeting relevant and short. When only three people need to talk, three people should talk. Avoid concepts and words, and seek concrete actions that you can dole out to everyone at the table. It may seem childish, obvious, or elementary at first to hear yourself saying, “Bob, crank this widget”—but when everyone leaves the room feeling like they have something real to do, they feel much better.

II. Handouts
In our office we’ve gotten as far as doing meeting agendas, and they really help. Agendas at least make participants feel like there’s a map out of the madness, and if all else fails it’s something you can point to to get back on track. One thing we don’t do is a pre-meeting info share of some kind. The pre-meet can be a short email sent to everyone invited that says:

“Hi all-

We’ll be meeting about Project X Wednesday @ 11am. The agenda is attached to this email. At this meeting the project planner, Bob, will expect the following from the team:

• Sue: Wireframes uploaded to Basecamp
• Erik: An answer from Google about the foo API
• Matt: Status update on the data import scripts from WordPress to Joomla

This gives you guys two more full days to bash these things out. You can expect another task from the list at the end of the meeting.

See you then!

-Bob”

The pre-meet puts everyone on the same page. It takes the meeting from the land of the abstract concept to the land of the concrete task check-in. We have to assume that no one is going to do meeting specific preparation, so substitute the actual work for the meeting related busy work and then talk about that.

It might also be a good idea to send along your meeting agenda, as suggested in the example. If it isn’t ready yet, try to send it along no more or less than one day before the meeting. More than two days no one remembers, and twenty∏ minutes before you might as well not bother.

III. Meeting math
If all else fails, and you literally cannot get a hold on meetings consider this formula.

E(Employees) x Pr(Pay rate) x Ml(Meeting length)

If the cost of the meeting in contrast to the profit or cost of your project makes you want to jump out of a window , someone may end up managing meetings for you.

I have a friend who’s almost universally joshed for being the guy most likely to march into work early Monday morning and announce he hasn’t slept in days, because he’s been coding his way through some problem. For months I had no idea what he was talking about; I was able to turn work off if I wanted to once I walked through the door, so why couldn’t he? Slowly, given enough time pressure, almost any designer or developer can start doing the same thing. I realized this when I sat in front of my Mac Book Pro on Sunday and coded for fourteen straight hours—really only breaking for the bathroom and to eat. The reasons for this are myriad, and are the basis for an anecdote about deadlines and such.

Our company has a tendency to talk about things a lot. Given almost any project, we can find a way to have at least a dozen meetings just about how to get started. Once we’ve figured that out, we’ll have a dozen more to decide what the next steps are. The meetings we tend not to have are the ones about scope, requirements or audience. These things always seem to be someone else’s job. The head of the department I’m attached to has it far worse than me, however, as he gets pulled into essentially every meeting ever planned; it’s left to him to sit through them all offering advice and guidance where applicable, and making the hard choices about milestones and even some development issues. It’s fair to say that we have a ‘meeting culture’, and that we tend to manage by committee. This often leads to deadlines that are set by such committees.

What tends to happen when committees don’t know much about requirements or project scope is that boat docks get built in the desert; one hand is totally unaware of the difficulty (or triviality) of the tasks being performed by the other, unrealistic deadlines are set, and the end product is a mess. I found this out the hard way with my last product launch, which was governed by an arbitrary deadline that could only be met by means of several 90 hour work weeks in the dev room. The “extra time” needed to make things better after launch was almost exactly the amount of time the dev team asked for on the front end of the project. Score one for the immovable, immutable deadline. In the interest of fairness I do understand the business case for setting deadlines and/or milestones on major projects; in large organizations it’s often necessary to attach revenue to projects that haven’t happened just yet.

I guess the only advice I have for planning a project is this: understand that most of what you’ll be doing in the initial phases is really only a guess, and that you need to check your work frequently against your map to make sure you’re on track. You need to give your people the leeway to say “this map does not match this road”, and change the map. But I also understand why this is so hard to do. It’s very difficult, especially in an overcrowded and ever more cutthroat online market, to take the time to breathe through a milestone meeting where you hear things are slipping. It’s also difficult to trust that the project is worth the extra weeks of design and testing and coding and recoding; but if you show up for work everyday anyhow, then you must believe that at least a little, right?

Today when I sat in a meeting and heard all of those things happening—the deadline slipping, the map changing, the request for more time—I felt as though cooler heads had prevailed. I felt like the project managers were sticking their necks out for the dev team, and that my fourteen hour coding sprees might no longer be necessary. Even though I left the office tired of meetings I felt renewed to some degree, even if for a few minutes. Will we return to endless meetings and arbitrary deadlines? Of course we will, but for today we can pretend there is no phantom deadline. That’s worth a meeting or two for me.

Related update: I’ve just been directed to the WikiPedia entry for “Scrum“, a project management system that seems to have some really nice ideas. Your mileage may vary.

So this is what happens: you get married, you buy a house, you have babies. We are stuck on the middle part.

We’ve seen 15 properties in just a few short weeks, and we’re tired. The two offers we’ve made (hey, we’re picky) have come in short. So far, the whole process seems inelegant and labor intensive–and there aren’t many houses around here worth seeing. Only one has really caught my eye–the 1936 Sears Craftsman pictured here–but alas, our offer was low for this one too.

So it’s a work in progress, this home buying business. We’ll get there, and soon all my Apple crap will have a place to live and I’ll have an office to do freelance (lots of freelance) from. Until then, anyone know of any great Craftsman houses going cheap on this side of the swamp?

• Speaker volume. It’s just not loud enough. Neither is the ringer really, and it may shed a little light on just how Apple thinks of the iPhone: as an iPod first and all the other things in descending order from there. I say this because using the phone while you have the earbuds on is a perfect experience in terms of sound levels. When the iPhone is in the car seat next to you and the AC is blasting and NPR is on, though, keep an eye out for calls.
• The interface is even better than you think. Using your fingers to navigate through screens of data feels perfectly natural. I’ve not had one single person, regardless of age or experience level, be stumped about how things work. I do need to explain the home button a little, but after that they’re off to the races. I’m still marvelling over the little details, like the recent calls screen; there’s so much in just that one small screen that’s communicated so effectively, and all without clutter or having to tap into other screens.
• I am going to drop this thing. It’s just a matter of time. The bead blasted finish is just not enough to hold onto.
• Prepare to be mobbed. Everyone is writing about this right now, but be prepared to give spontaneous iPhone demos at Starbuck’s and the grocery store and the bar, or anywhere else you try and take a phone call.
• The camera is really pretty good. Don’t go ditching your Canon DSLR just yet, but it’s more than enough for the occasional snap in terms of color and sharpness. No dedicated shutter button on the device (only a “soft button”) is a pain, though.
• I have no idea what the “right” way is to carry this thing. My old phone, a Samsung A900, would have cost around $129 had it not been a gift from my lovely wife. You can see for yourself how much an iPhone will set you back. My point of course is that carrying the iPhone around with is sort of a scary affair, and there are some places I would just not be interested in taking it–like the beach or something. Maybe folks with Treos or Blackberrys feel similar?

All in all, good stuff. Where’s the 1.1 update? I want more stuff to tinker with.

My wife and I may be moving into a new house. We’re approaching the whole thing with more than a little bit of caution, and trying to weigh all the possible angles with definite consideration; who wants to get stuck in a terrible house that looked nice from the curb but is obviously haunted by pirate ghosts? In any case part of this process is looking at our current monthly expenses, trimming what we can and dropping what we don’t need. It also means doing the “pre-qualification dance”. This means calling various private and/or government institutions and asking for things, which never works out very well for me. I spend a few hours every month fighting with Sprint or Time Warner, and my wife spends about the same amount of time just with out current rental agency on random mammal invaders. These calls are normally stressful, long and unproductive. But this week I’ve discovered an untapped vein of karma and good will.

A few days ago I need a three year old W2 form. I called the IRS for a reprint and after a brief hold I spoke with a very pleasant IRS employee (oxy moron, if there ever was one) who not only was glad to fax me a copy, but would call me back when I was near my office fax machine and send it to me. She called me back at the very minute she’d promised to, and even explained the transcript to me. Then, last night I had to call Netflix to admit to them that a DVD had gone missing, swallowed up by the monster that is a wedding and a honeymoon. The rep congratulated me on my wedding, cheerfully forgave me the loss of the DVD and even told me how to easily combine my account and Shannon’s while saving me eight dollars. I was on a roll, so I called Time Warner Cable to argue my bill, like every month.

The vein of karma sputtered and coughed, as I was treated to possibly the rudest phone rep in the history of customer service. Finally, in shock, I simply hung up the phone and got myself a beer. Had the well finally run dry? Were the bad old days here again? I called Time Warner again, hoping for someone other then Eva Braun.

Unbelievably the next rep I spoke to was not only polite, but was apologetic on the previous one’s behalf. She expressed what seemed like genuine sympathy (even irritation) for Time Warner’s tendency to double- and over-bill us, fixed it and took my payment without a service charge. Before I hung up I told her, “You’ve just demonstrated one of the major principles of customer service: I would have given this money to any rep, but giving it to the nice rep made it hurt less.” And it kept my karma flow intact. So, what else should I do with all this good will the universe is pointing at me? Maybe this is the week to try fugu.

First of all, the buying experience associated with buying an iPhone is exhilarating. The overwhelming media blitz for this thing makes buying one feel more like buying a Lexus than a wireless phone. As I stood in line with three other people buying them, we were gazed upon by other Apple Store patrons. It was frankly a little unnerving. Also, each phone is packaged deliberately differently than the iPods, and is even given to you to take home in a specially designed cardboard “bag” with black ribbon drawstrings. Carrying it through the mall I realized just how different it would be using the iPhone: anyone under the age of 30 was peering down at it surreptitiously as I passed.

I: Activation

Despite the horror stories circulating after the release on the 29th, my iPhone activation took about 5 minutes including the “paperwork” and sync. The iTunes-based setup worked without a hitch, and I noticed that mine had even shipped with a full battery. I dropped a few albums on it and got ready to poke around a bit.

II: First details

The device itself is stunning. The iPhone is more diminutive than even its PR suggests, and it’s thinner than my 30 GB iPod 5G. It feels good in the hand, it at times a little awkward to hold. The screen is razor sharp and exceptionally bright, and displayed photos with startling sharpness. In the first ten minutes out of the box I was speeding through the UI with ease, zooming photos with the “pinch” for the amusement of my wife.

III: Wifi trials

Let’s start by admitting that EDGE is pathetic. Its download speeds approach dialup for most tasks, and are bearable really only for email. I’d hate to be forced to use the Google Maps app with anything other than pure wifi, which was my first struggle. I had a fair amount of difficulty getting the iPhone to see my Belkin 54G wireless router, and after three resets apiece I decided to walk down the street to see if iPhone could see my local coffee shop’s wifi. Inexplicably my router appeared as I rounded the stairs on our second floor, 30 feet from the router I’d previously been practically on top of. I’m still not certain what finally made the iPhone see my router, but it’s been seeing wireless networks all weekend now and joining them without complaint. Oh well. Being outside gave me a chance to sample call quality and the iPod feature.

IV: iPod and calls

As I bopped down to the coffee shop, I flipped through some albums in the iPod. Every aspect of the UI is gorgeous, even the plain vanilla (read: non-Cover Flow) list views. Menus float and glide as if real world objects, and there’s no detectable lag between finger gestures and the virtual controls. I settled on some Bjork to listen to, and seconds into the first track my wife called. The iPod seamlessly trimmed the volume down to zero, paused my music and asked me whether I wanted to take the call; being ever the UX developer I couldn’t resist a quick chuckle at the perfection that incoming call had triggered. In quick succession this tiny little gadget had made about five right decisions about my user experience. I accepted the call and was very pleased with the audio quality, especially over the included headset. I poked around the internet a bit over wifi, and was very pleased with Safari’s speed and responsiveness. Every mobile browser I’ve ever used has some quirks, but other than the lack of Flash support Safari doesn’t really have any. After a while you stop throwing websites at it expecting it to break or truncate your sites, a la Opera Mobile or the PSP browser. Soon, you’re just surfing and taking it for granted. Mission accomplished, Apple. Time for some email.

V: Email

When you sync iPhone for the first time, it attempts to copy your email accounts from Apple Mail. You’ll find that when you click (tap?) mail for the first time that it’s ready to go as long as there are working accounts on your Mac. Over wifi speed was excellent. There are a lot of complaints about the Mail app on iPhone, from the ordering of messages (new on top, and no you can’t change it) to the way it supports Gmail. None of those things bothered me as much as not being able to use the mail app in landscape mode like Safari. I’m hoping this works in future versions. Replying to mail is a breeze, and once you get used to the admittedly awkward keyboard you find you can tap out an email response with four or five complete (correctly spelled) sentences in about two minutes.

At the end of day one, I had sent an email browsed the web and even shot a picture or two. The camera is better than average, but still just a wireless phone camera lacking a few things–see number 1 here. I had yet to delve into some of the meatier apps like Google maps or the calendar. All that would happen on day two…

TO BE CONTINUED…

But seriously, the iPhone fund is open for donations. I think we could make this a really funny internet meme. Like, there’ll be a picture of me looking sort of aloof and it will say, “I can has iphone?” or “My iphone: let me show you it. My iphone.” Then udnerneath a link to paypal where you can send me your dollar. It’ll be great. My poor wife–whom I have driven thoroughly insane with this quest, and who deserves the largest apology–thanks you in advance.

And probably doesn’t think this is funny at all.

Getting married was easier than they tell you. Going on a honeymoon was significantly more difficult. But no matter the level of difficulty of all the background activities the important thing is that for 10 days we were surrounded by friends and family or on vacation, and everyday when I woke up I was face to face with the easiest and number one best decision I’ve ever made. Every American, especially the ones who think we live in the best country ever, needs to visit Canada at least once. Canada is clean, polite, and has its priorities in fucking order. Want to know how many times I read about Paris Hilton in the newspaper or saw her on TV not counting the times I flipped past CNN? Zero. Goose egg. Zilch. It was really nice. Being even a temporary participant in a society like that makes you realize just how much brainwashing we go through on a daily basis in the US, making us the irritable frat boys of the world. Oh well. I’m off the soap crate for now I guess, except to say that flying out of an airport where no one knows that the fuck the “TSA” is is a nice experience.

Security Person: Sir, what are you doing?
Me: (Taking complete contents of bag out–including laptop–and removing shoes and socks.) Getting ready to go through security. Duh.
Security Person: Oh. Well, we can just put your things through this powerful x-ray machine. It seems to work much better than having some asshole getting $6.15 an hour paw through your stuff and treat you like a terrorist just for trying to get to Washington Dulles Airport.
Me: (Weeping.)
Security Person: Sir? Here, let me help you.
Me: (More weeping.)

Later, after I put on a pair of shoes my wife bought for me I found myself stuck with a shoebox and plastic bag. Hopefully, I approached an attendant in the airport terminal and told her about buying the shoes, and not being able to fit the box into the trash. I told her I was hesitant to simply put it next to the trash lest someone think it was a bomb. She laughed kindly. “Oh no, that’s fine. This is Canada. Everything isn’t a bomb here. Are your shoes comfortable? They look very nice.”

Anyone who has suggestions of things to do while in Montreal or Quebec City who happens across the blogint he next eight days or so should feel welcomed to leave comments on this post. We’d really love to have a few more activities than we need while we’re there. Besides, after watching Sicko Canada seems like a nice place to live permanently.    

 Littlerobothead Video Blog from littlerobothead on Vimeo

UPDATE (1:56 PM EST) - Man, this Gizmodo thing blows. I’ve seen it work as it’s supposed to twice in an hour. Leopard is 64-bit clean, though. Sweet.

Our little robot from littlerobothead on Vimeo

I’ve seen the new iPhone commercials. The Church of Jobs is open for business once again.

First of all, few companies could generate this much hype to begin with. Whipping the gadget press into this much of a frenzy, six months before a product launches or even has FCC approval? Pure Apple. I dare say there are some others who could turn on the charm for their device—Nokia, maybe—but Apple is the only one who can restart the machine merely by showing you the product working. That’s it. No tricks. No celebrities dancing with it, or Oprah putting it under your chair. A static tight shot of the device. Doing stuff. And that’s the essence of it right there. Any idea that you want the public to eat up with a spoon needs to be, to some degree, self evident. It needs to elicit the response “I never knew I even needed this until now.” Apple has this ability by the truckload.

I. Create a hammer for a thousand nails

Palm used to have it. The Foleo I wrote about previously is a perfect example of something that we didn’t know we needed, realized. The difference is that the niche is so small, the branding so narrow, that it’s easy to talk yourself out of it. Palm used to have an undeniable product that was small and engaging. In the early days, even 3Com didn’t really have all the answers about what it was for. The marketing materials and box copy hinted at the obvious things, but most of the truly novel ways people used Palm Pilots had nothing to do with their creators and everything to do with an enthusiastic community. This is, to a degree, why non-cellphone technology products with narrowly defined uses don’t go over very well. We want to use our gadgets for things they were never intended for, because it makes us feel connected and involved in the experience even if we can’t code a line. The Foleo, to beat a dead horse, doesn’t allow for that unless you’re willing to mod your kernel to boot from flash memory and risk fragging your new lappy in the process. The iPhone, with the addition of a few indie developers, is the platform of choice for people who want to make their own solution to some problem Apple hasn’t even thought of yet.

II. People don’t really need heroes

The television ads for Windows 95, while expensive, didn’t really put asses in seats as they say on the carny circuit. Most of them, and most PC advertising thereafter, showed incredible feats of world saving prowess; saving your company a gazillion dollars, rescuing world economies, lashing once broken families together again over a broadband line and a webcam. There’s just one problem: people are scared they can’t operate that hero computer. How do I do those things, they wonder, staring in amazement at the latest Vista whizbang tech. I have no idea what I would do in front of that computer. With iPhone, Apple’s new ads suggest, you don’t have to be a hero. You just use a map to find calamari. There is more tech in this Lilliputian phone than your tiny mind can ever comprehend, the iPhone confidently whispers, but all you need to operate your little slice of it is your finger. Sure there’s a god mode on here somewhere, but that’s for your nephew the hacker. For you? We have email. No heroes. No manual. Delicious, calming email.

III. That undefinable quality

After using and loving anything with an Apple logo on it for almost 20 years, I freely admit that part of the charm is something I can’t define. Beyond a certain point, I don’t know why my iPod is better than some Creative Labs chunk of plastic. It’s the sum of the parts, the UI, the finish, the “privilege of ownership.” Whatever it is, people want it. It’s the same reason Target is outselling WalMart. It’s a quality that in many ways outstrips our ability to analyze it. Of course Target is cleaner, brighter, and nicer. But look at the carts: molded handles, big wheels with sealed bearings. Would this ever factor into the business plan of a company whose mission was to beat WalMart? Probably not. And yet here it is. That little change helps you know that not only are you not in Kansas anymore, but Kansas is a greasy spot on the highway compared to here. And going back to Kansas is something you’ll pay a premium not to have to do anymore.

Good products are, less good products do. I want the product that manages to wedge itself into my life in ways that I never thought of, that simply exists in my space with me. I don’t want a product that does lots of things, and explains them all to me in explicit detail in the manual and in three languages. Companies are learning this slowly, with guys like Apple, Dyson and Ikea leading them.

And I have to admit: this seems like a really nice sub-notebook for the very narrow demographic its intended for. It’s small, light, and has zero-startup time so you can rapidly check your email in line at the airport or in the back of a taxi and stow it away. However, I think it’s also susceptible to the “but where’s the” treatment from everyone else. I think a smart way to get around that stigma would be to do what Palm will likely do and aim this thing squarely at the same folks who buy Treos—corporate types with a huge need for constant email access.

But with all its neat features, even when aimed precisely at the domain where it might succeed, it reminds me of some other miracle convergence products that came and went with little fanfare—The 3Com Audrey, and to a lesser extent the PowerBook 2400.

When the Powerbook 2400 debuted in 1997, it was the ultimate subnote: fast, full(ish) sized keyboard, 10.4″ display. It was a huge hit in places like Japan where tiny laptops are still all the rage. In the states, however, where laptops of the day came with every option onboard or hot swappable the 2400 suffered and was cancelled a mere 8 months after its release. Something about trading in your peripherals for a tiny footprint, coupled with having to lug around a separate floppy drive and CD-ROM drive (and their attendant custom tether cable) was not so appealing. And I’m not saying that the Foleo is the same; but something about the brains of the computer being attached to your hip while all the display capability is in your briefcase seems a little schizophrenic to me.

The release of the Foleo is not the end of the story though, it’s the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Apple or some crazy Chinese manufacturer to release a tiny, flash based laptop that does everything a MacBook does but with zero startup time and a DVD drive. Slap a $799 price tag on it, take a $50 loss on each unit and you’re good to go. You’ve built a market on subnotes that only bloggers will buy that adds to your coolness factor, and pads your market cap nicely.

When I moved to Media Temple I did so in part because my account could include, for a paltry $5 extra per month, a Movable Type installation. For several years my sites ran on MT, and I cursed it constantly. Nothing was easy; almost any plugin (if you can call them that) required template edits by hand. Linking templates to files meant static content finding its way into my carefully redesigned pages. When my domains were hacked about three weeks ago, all of these factors compounded to make recovery almost impossible. All my domains, even the minor ones, had been severely compromised and would need endless handwork—even with backups—to work again because of the draconian way you do everything in MT.

Yesterday I started to read a little bit about WordPress, a CMS package that I had been brainwashed to think was “oversimplified” and “childish”. I, after all, was used to having to do sitewide rebuilds after changing errant punctuation with MT. I was a power user! But somewhere I saw a screenshot of nothing more than the WordPress login page. I understood then what I had been missing. WP was to MT what OS X is to Windows Vista. Endless simple customization, powerful editing, no rebuilds, a common-sense template engine. I’ve been all over the system and I’ve not seen a single table yet. WP is semantic, easy and rewarding. MT, on the other hand, was the only piece of software in 14 years of computer use that still made me bang my hands on my desk in frustration.

WordPress has made blogging an immersive experience again, not something I do rarely and with trepidation. Besides, I have to blog just to see the admin interface and all its Ajaxified goodness.

The set up—including creating a user and moving my MT database—took about half an hour thanks to Media Temple’s “One Click Apps”. I’m thinking that even on a non-managed machine this would be a trivial, forty-five minute thing. If you’re languishing in MT hell, or still use Blogger or another managed system I urge you to convert. If you’re half as glad as I am you’ll be dancing in the aisles.