A huge thank you to Derek Perez, who has taken over development of the jQuery PageSlide plug-in. He’s done a major overhaul and brought it up to version 1.1 with the following new features:
Very cool. GitHub now offering private installs of their software within a company’s own network. If I had a business that was large enough to warrant this type of setup, I’d be all over it. But, alas, my new projects are weenie small, so I’ll stick to the regular ol’ GitHub product in the foreseeable future.
This weekend, I started to play around with Jetpack from Mozilla Labs. If you haven’t already heard of Jetpack, it’s a Labs experiment that looks at making the creation of web browser extensions easier. As someone who’s previously tried to make a Firefox extension, I can say wholeheartedly that this was a much, much, much more pleasant experience.
The widget that I created–TinyFinder–looks for rev=canonical links in a webpage, and displays them in the statusbar of the browser window. Rev=canonical links are meta tags that are used when a website wants to suggest a preferred tiny url to use. For example, the Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/srobbin/3533142101/) can also be accessed by Flickr’s own tiny url (http://flic.kr/p/6odh48). Of course, you could always use one of many url shortening services, but Flickr’s custom URL suggests what you’ll see on the other side of the redirect: a photo/movie. Several services are starting to employ their own custom tiny urls: Dopplr, Threadless, Songza, and many more.
If the web page you are looking at does not provide its own tiny, custom URL, you can always click on the statusbar widget; one will be created for you and automagically copied to your clipboard.
I love music. Every since my parents let me pick out a few cassettes from our Columbia House ‘12 tapes for 1 cent’ mail-in order, I’ve been hooked. (I chose Thriller, Weird Al’s ‘In 3-D’, and the Flash Gordon soundtrack.) That’s why, when Aza approached me with a project he had been working on, I was so excited to join in. The concept: provide a way for people to legally listen to and share music, and do so in an incredibly user-friendly way. Flash ahead to the present: Songza has grown into a robust website that’s enjoyed by millions of people around the world. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, appreciative of the opportunities it has presented and thankful for the community that has supported us.
So why am I leaving? I’m working on a new project: a social network that allows people to send status updates to their friends, telling them what they’re doing…in 141 characters.
But seriously forks, I’m leaving so that I can return to freelance work with clients and to start a new project. The details of the new project are hush-hush for the moment, but I’ll be sure to announce them here when it’s ready to go.
Thank you to Humanized (Aza, Atul, Jono and Andrew–collectively and fondly known as The Humanoids) for all of the support that you’ve given me; to my friends and family for listening to me ramble on about Songza ad naseum; to my friends in New York who’ve welcomed me with open arms and taught me to completely obliterate my liver; and above all to the Songza community for making the past year and half of my life so wonderful.
I like how Twitter Search uses overlapping profile images to distinguish individual status updates from ones that are conversational. It’s a nice, little touch.
Leah Buley’s ‘Being a UX Team of One’ presentation at SXSW was really inspiring. Since having seen it, I’ve been making more hand-drawn sketches as a starting point for projects, and it’s been refreshing.
Balsamiq’s Mockups is a great tool for designers/developers who lack good drawing skills, but still want to pencil-out their ideas (*blushes*). Additionally, it provides all the convenient features of application–drag, drop and undo–for those who could otherwise take pen to paper.
I really like what Harper did to gussy up his laptops. Flipping through the Skinit.com website, I saw that they also do iPhone skins. If I were to make one, it’d look like this.
Steve Souders is one of the brightest people I know. And, on top of that, he has an uncanny ability to convey complex topics in an easy-to-understand manner. If you haven’t already ready his book, High Performance Web Sites, I suggest you do so. Here’s his latest article about the performance impact of using @import or <link> when including stylesheets.
Lately, I’ve been learning Python and applying it to the redesign of some older projects. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across NodeBox: “a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie” It’s been a fun app to play with, work on my Py-skills and create some interesting patterns.
I’ve made a few changes here at srobbin.com; most notably: the site has a new design. In addition, I’ve started to prune some of the older pages/posts that are no longer relevant.
If you have any difficulties with the presentation or 404s, please let me know. Thanks.
