The latest iteration of Portwiture debuted last evening with shiny new features, including a slideshow view, query settings, RSS feeds, more linkable URLs and a little more design polish.
For the uninitiated, Portwiture grabs photography from Flickr that matches the content of your most recent Twitter updates. The result is a serendipitous visual representation of your Twitter profile.
The previous version was crowned Mashup of the Day for February 25. I’m extremely happy to see this much interest in such a spontaneous visual experiment, and I thank everyone who has given it a whirl so far. I must also extend a special thanks to Erik Jung, Matt Lohkamp and Peter Wooley for their assistance.
You can keep up with the occasional bit of Portwiture info on Twitter.
Ignite Portland is an awesome event wherein presenters are given five minutes and 20 slides (automatically rotating every 15 seconds) to get a message across. This year they debuted a new aspect of the event, the “15 Seconds of Flame,” wherein video clips of the same duration as a presenter’s slide peppered the larger event.
I had a blast creating three submissions with Jordan Thompson of Valeo Visual, each demonstrating the process of caricaturing one of three well-known political figures. If you didn’t catch these short little segments at the event, check them out here:
The presenters all did an amazing job (Bram’s slides were some of the most attractive I’ve ever seen). You can catch the next Ignite on July 16.
Yesterday was my last day at US Digital, and the good will I felt from all of my co-workers there was wonderful. I arrived at my office to find it decorated in a matter only Dwight Schrute could have orchestrated:
Sitting on my desk (between the drab brown and gray balloons) was a box full of maple bars. Over the course of the day I would shake more hands and receive more kind words than I ever could have hoped for. Their graciousness has been overwhelming.
As I enter this new chapter in my continuing relationship with interaction design, I’d be remiss not to reflect on a few of the lessons I learned while working for this remarkable company.
Really get to know your co-workers. Regardless of how your personalities click or don’t click, talking with someone on a human level will increase your understanding of one-another and ultimately improve your communication skills.
Talk to other departments. In hindsight, I would have loved to work more closely with customer service to educate both of our departments as to how our web properties might impact work flow.
Standardize your department’s service requests. We all want to be everyone’s buddy, but if we attend to every knock on the door with equal priority, no truly urgent tasks will ever be completed. A set-in-stone way of submitting requests will not only improve your team’s productivity, but ultimately give your colleagues a more reliable turn-around time.
Ask questions. Seriously. A lot of questions. I’m still a little fuzzy on how encoders and inclinometers function, but I asked enough questions to empower myself and my team to market them in an aesthetically-pleasing and relevant way.
Always ask “why,” and don’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. This occasionally-irritating bit of inquisitiveness can save entire projects from developmental purgatory.
Get away from the glowing box every so often. I know from experience that a game of air hockey away from your desk can go a long way.
Present with conviction. Your opinions will come across much more accurately if you communicate in an articulate and compelling way.
Practice the fine art of compromise. Argumentation has it’s own virtues, but allowing yourself an amount of flexibility will result in budgetary and time constraints impacting you much less severely.
Be passionate in all that you do. Apathy is contagious, and enthusiasm is a choice. Every project benefits from minds actively engaged in the task at hand.
Keep your higher purpose in sight. What are your goals beyond this job? Find them out, and work toward them in your day-to-day tasks; you’ll see the difference in the quality of your output.
I’m sure those are only a handful of the lessons I’ll take with me, but it will have to do for the time-being. I want to thank everyone I worked with at US Digital for the opportunity, and especially my design cohorts Peter Wooley and Erik Jung. You are so immensely talented—it was an honor to have worked with you.
Continuing this month’s theme of making the most out of 16 square pixels, I got to collaborate with my good friend and colleague Peter Wooley on the next version of the excellent Gmail Favicon Alerts script for Greasemonkey.
Many Gmail users will keep the application open in a tab while browsing to expedite the process of obsessively checking one’s inbox. But wouldn’t it be great if you could be privy to the arrival of new mail or chat notifications at any point in your browsing experience, regardless of your current tab?
That’s where this script comes in. I’ll let Peter explain:
A Blue icon lets you know you have unread mail. New to version 3, the number of unread messages is indicated in the icon beyond 10!
A Red icon means you’ve read all your mail (or, at least, clicked on them all).
A Speech Bubble icon means someone has sent you a chat message.
The newest version of Gmail FavIcon Alerts brings both a visual and functional refresh. Many thanks to awarded-winning designer Tyler Sticka, who has redesigned the iconography from scratch. The updated icons are now visually balanced, evenly shaded and gorgeous. In addition, Tyler designed numeric indicators for displaying the number of unread items in your inbox. As we both avidly watch our inboxes, knowing how many messages are unread allows us to make a better decision on when to switch tabs. The indicator counts up to 10 unread messages and hides when more unread items exist. Much like the Chat alerts, you can choose to turn this feature off through the Greasemonkey User Script Command menu.
Used in combination with the PermaTabs and Faviconize Tab extensions, you can easily keeps tabs on your Inbox status with less screen real estate than usual.
It’s always a blast redesigning something you use every day, an experience which always yields fruitful lessons. My first instinct was to switch things up and use the more vivid red icon as “unread” and a desaturated gray when there were no new messages. I abandoned this solution for two reasons:
Having used Gmail Favicon Alerts for years, changing the colors completely threw off my learned behavior, impairing usability.
The gray icon was markedly uglier than other variations. After all, you do have to look at this thing all day.
In the end, changing the color scheme presents little immediate user benefit, whereas introducing an unread count bares plenty. As such, Peter and I are both extremely proud of this version.
Download and install Gmail Favicon Alerts from its Greasemonkey homepage. If you dig it, why not leave a comment or write a review?
Update (2/19): Gmail Favicon Alerts has been featured on Lifehacker! Maybe they’ll integrate it into the Better Gmail extension? (Crosses fingers)
Update (3/17): Updated the imagery and description to match the latest version. Thanks to user feedback, we’ve replaced the orange chat icon with a more appropriate chat-bubble icon a la Google Talk.
Update (4/8): Updated the description to match the latest version, which no longer caps at 10 unread items. Whee!
Google is a bit scary, not simply for how big they’ve become, but for how many of their products are simply the best solution available. There are a number of very worthy competitors that I’ve attempted to stick with through thick and thin, but slowly they’ve fallen from my bookmarks toolbar like some sort of Web 2.0 natural selection.
The latest casualty: Netvibes. I’ve been using the service for roughly 2 years, during which time I recommended the service to many. The single biggest caveat of the service is simple yet overwhelmingly irritating; it rarely remembers which items in a feed I have or haven’t read. When navigating dozens of feeds, this feature isn’t just useful; it’s essential!
As of Tuesday, I’ve switched on over to Google Reader. I had some problems with the UI, but many of those were solved by installing an excellent OSX-inspired theme. I’m also quite smitten with Reader’s snappy iPhone interface which is both easier to navigate and faster than Netvibes.
To make matters more alarming, Google Calendar and Contacts have finally invaded my iPhone. It’s all explained in this ginchy video:
I’ve heard a few users have had problems with syncing, but mine went off without a hitch. And with that, I’ve surrendered to Google even more of my personal information.
Why do we let this happen? I think there are a few key ingredients to Google’s success in owning our brainspace:
Reputation for simplicity. Google is synonymous with simple and easy search, and has delivered that so consistently that we expect the same easy-of-use from all their products.
Shared login. Even though we constantly absolve ourselves of more and more information, the obstacle of creating an account is only encountered once. Want to try out Google Reader? Just use your Gmail credentials.
One big platform. Google services look like each other and often talk with each other. As such, we trust Google like we do an operating system to organize our information and present it to us in as unified a way as possible. Signing up for Google Calendar is less like buying OS X as it is firing up iCal for the first time.
Exit signs are clearly marked. Google products typically come with multiple solutions for exporting your data, which makes them appear trustworthy. With the ability to pack up and hit the road any time you want, it feels more like lending your information than giving it up.
Conforming to our needs. Google does an amazing job at growing with meeting the needs of power users while catering to beginners. IMAP in Gmail allows someone like me to use my beloved Thunderbird and custom domains on my iPhone; typical users won’t even see the option, hidden deep in their settings menu.
Ultimately, all of these observations boil down to a simple, overarching theme: no obstacles. As I said in my Google favicon post, the company excels at making every process, whether it be finding an email, making an appointment or searching out an image online, as painless as humanly possible (hence the lack of shiny, pretty things to distract you).
So listen up, competing services (I’m lookin’ at you, Netvibes and Zenbe): I want to like you. Please alleviate obstacles. And while you’re at it, make it look pretty, too. Thanks.
“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” - Paul Rand
The latest iteration of Portwiture debuted last evening with shiny new features, including a slideshow view, query settings, RSS feeds, more linkable URLs and a little more design polish.
