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In March 2026 I started building software for my racing rig with coding agents, and I haven't stopped. Seven months later it's 29 repositories and 2,259 commits on 128 days, one person and one model. It's the clearest record I have of how fast an idea of mine becomes something I use.

A telemetry plugin that became a platform. The first commit, on March 5, was a plugin that reads the car in real time. By May it was a motorsport information system: a live HUD over the game, race recording with a telemetry sidecar, a coach that comments on my driving as it happens, lights in the room that follow the flags, and a web dashboard that reads my racing history and tells me whether tonight is a good night to race.

Four platforms in four days. From April 23 to 26 I added native apps for iOS, macOS, Windows and Apple TV, split the one repository into seven, and moved every calculation behind one API so every screen shows the same numbers. A shared agents folder in every repository carries the instructions, so an agent working in any one of them knows the rest.

Tracks from real roads. In June I built a pipeline that turns OpenStreetMap roads and USGS elevation into tracks I can drive in Assetto Corsa: streets in Commerce City, the Lake Murray loop in San Diego, a rally stage in Rangely. I rebuilt the hard part three times. The rule that came out of it: a track only counts once I've driven it. A ledger keeps my words about what felt wrong, measures it, and closes the entry only after a drive.

Taking the cloud out. In September I brought it all back onto one machine on purpose. The racing service added its own track map, fuel and incident tools, and changed how outside apps sign in, so a hosted version depending on that sign-in was the wrong bet. Racing Desk runs for one driver on one rig: the calculations kept with their tests, the accounts, sync and database gone.

Liveries. The cars wear my own paint, the same shattered glass as the field behind this site, made with agents driving Illustrator through scripts.

In the fall of 2020 Cisco Meraki hired four contractors to try an experiment: one React design system for the Meraki Dashboard, built in the open inside the company, that product teams would choose over rolling their own. I was one of the four. I'm the only one of the four still on it; the experiment became my job.

It's called Magnetic. It's the component library, the design tokens and themes, the charts, the accessibility work and the release train behind Cisco's network administration products. It ships monthly. I give the release talk to a couple hundred engineers.

The work in between is the work: a 2022 proposal to replace the third-party Select we'd started with, a 2023 Storybook project, a 2024 series teaching React to people who didn't think they were React people, spacing-token audits, a second theme for Cisco's company-wide design language, and the long tail of a library that a lot of teams depend on and nobody wants to be surprised by.

In 2025 I became the engineering manager for Magnetic. In 2026 I took on the other two teams under the same umbrella: the one that modernizes the existing Dashboard with it, and the one that owns the JavaScript platform underneath. Three teams, one output: the experience every Cisco administrator sees.

In March 2026 we turned entirely to agentic development, and the design system became the first thing I opened to coding agents, so they read it and use it the way our developers do. That story continues in Agents.

What's not measured yet, honestly: time saved per team, and how many teams extend the library on their own. I'm working on both.

Rule is one of Denver's premier art galleries, representing some of the most talked-about names in both Denver and Marfa, Texas.

Leveraging a sleek, minimalist feel, this website was a joy to work on, letting white space breathe, and giving the artwork space to speak for itself.

This site uses Advanced Custom Fields for custom post types, Timber for templating, and a statically-built React app for browsing art.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the gallery cannot be open to the public. We quickly put together a WooCommerce site to get cash flowing to the artsists in need again.

View the Shop

Community Funded came to me with one need: the first version of their product that got them to where they were was built on old technology, and was now limiting their growth potential. Could I help steer them toward the right choices to make for version 2?

And could I help them build it?

After meeting with their founders, and finding that I could have a strong passion for their business, I enthusiastically agreed to help. V1 was heavily based on WordPress, something I have a unique amount of experience building and building for; React + Next.js were my suggestions for the front-end technologies, and three years later, we launched to live clients in the first quarter of 2020. I have worked hand-in-hand with the CTO, Chief Creative Officer, and VP of Product to craft not just a cohesive visual design system, but the codebase and UX patterns necessary to pull it off, in a real product, right now.

We used an iterative, design sprint-based approach that included customers, clients, success managers, board members, and executives. This all-inclusive approach led to the product improving by leaps and bounds in short amounts of time, with ideas we knew were already vetted with users.

I began my work with CF by asking questions, and iterating on Next.js-based prototypes complete with animation, beautfiul custom components, and an extensible architecture that worked as a bridge between quick prototyping and prodution-ready code.

Using a modified Agile methodology, with an ad-hoc mixture of scrum, dailies, plannings sessions and spikes, we delivered a beautiful experience to delighted users, who often found that the extensive training needed to onboard for the first version of the prdouct, was now simply unnecesary.

Rally Software was a company providing Jira-like Agile tools, which got purchased by CA in 2015. As part of a broader initiative to modernize CA's software offerings, Project Catchfly was spun up as a startup within the large corporation.

Within the first two days on Project Catchfly, I had outlined the problem the team was trying to solve – something they had tried to use Lean Startup methodology to define – and had provided the first real mockup of their app they'd ever seen.

We quickly iterated through approaches to find the right solution. We held design sprint sessions, big-room planning sessons, and worked with a team in North Carolina building the mobile version of the app.

I spent a lot of time taking Material UI (a Material Design component library implemented in React), and customizing it for our needs. This was also my first introduction to TypeScript.

When the business needed me to step out of the codebase and into Sketch in order to iterate even faster on projections 1.5 years into the future, I re-built our component system as graphical assets in Sketch.

When Project Catchfly was cancelled 9 months afer I started, I quickly pivoted to providing prototyping for the Agile Central (Rally) design team. Within a week, I had a custom component library rendering a Kanban board, that the designers were taking screenshots of to send to their developers as the final design.

United Launch Alliance Atlas V, Photo via NASA

Launching Rockets

My father’s a guy who builds rockets. And I don’t mean that he builds the model rockets you see at the park that get blown onto neighbor’s roofs by a slight wind, I mean that he builds the giant Atlas V rockets that launch actual shit into actual outer space.

So when I was kid, there were key points I can remember when we’d all head down to the pizza place closest to my dad’s plant to watch his and his coworkers’ work launch satellites into space. It’s a unique experience to witness your father witnessing his own work do something so mind blowing.

Launching Websites

So while my father builds the rockets that launch satellites into space, I manage to do some (much less complicated, and much less tension-inducing) building and launching of my own: I work for the company that builds WordPress.com, the platform I’m blogging on right now, and we just launched some pretty cool stuff that we’ve been working on for quite a while.

I’m very happy to share that as of today, Automattic has released the source code for Calypso, our JavaScript- and API-powered interface that runs on WordPress.com. This has taken a huge effort on our part for the better part of two years, and I couldn’t be prouder. This comes with a shiny-new interface that we also used to build a Mac app.

So, is your website a satellite being shot into orbit? Not quite, but it wouldn’t be far off to think of WordPress.com as an Atlas V rocket to get your site on the web, anyway. 🙂

In September 2005, I was 26 years old. A decade ago.

I called Scott Upton on the phone and asked if he was happy at his job and if they were hiring. A week later I’d had my interviews, handed in my resignation for a second time at Spiremedia and began a new chapter in my career: I was about to spend 4 years at a company in Boulder called Wall Street on Demand.

Bull Markets and Bear Markets and Financial Collapses, Oh My

Wall Street on Demand specialized in taking hundreds of live-streaming stock market data feeds and turning them into beautiful interfaces for making financial decisions. We designed and built investment research interfaces for everyone from the E-Trade home investor managing their retirement account to the Merrill Lynch institutional investor trading hundreds of millions of dollars at a time.

These were not small local clients whose deadlines could slip when the process didn’t go according to plan, with business plans I’d seen a hundred times before. These were clients like investment banks and cable TV news networks who demanded financial visualization expertise from our staff on a daily basis.

If I put a percentage instead of a dollar amount in a table cell showing Earnings Per Share, it would be called out long before my work made it to the client’s inbox. The amount of training to be done with new hires was incredibly high before we were allowed to run our own projects without a CD at the helm, something as a Senior Designer I was expected to do fairly soon.

Ponds and Fish

Jeff and Aaron

Competition is not the best way to get ahead

We had posters on the walls extolling the virtues of collaboration. The design team at Wall Street was not competitive: as a team of teams, we had a lot of design leadership and structure facilitating our collaboration at every level. The structure looked like this:

1. Company Creative Director – Chris Allegra was at the top.
2. Team Creative Director – My team lead was Kent Hollrah. We had about 6 other CDs at this level when I joined.
3. Senior Designers – Many on each team
4. Designers – Many on each team

Before my tenure was up, we’d add a couple new titles, Associate Creative Director and Junior Designer. It was a unique system that had the added benefit of Chris, the company Creative Director, essentially working at the C-level with James, the CEO and Catherine, the COO: all three of them were related.

This was more or less a design-focused, family-run business with Goldman Sachs as the Board of Directors.

Chris had domain expertise in interaction design and financial design. He’d been educated at Johns Hopkins for creative writing and this education gave him a passion for concise, effective communication. He’d later go on to do post-grad work at UCLA for data visualization and he was a god-damned whirlwind to work with. It was exhausting to try and keep up.

This was by far the most design-led organization of which I’ve ever been a part. There was a truly talented design brain with actual power in the executive suite who demanded at the highest level that our own organization be true to a specific design philosophy.

Yield Curves and Learning Curves

I filled book after book with notes. This began my usage of grid-lined Moleskines: perfect for drawing charts.

There was a lot to learn. There was new, insane shit showing up in front of my eyes every day. Page designs containing ideas more complicated than I had ever imagined myself designing were casually discussed over cubicle walls, all around me. It felt like being in college again – except everyone was obsessed with the stock market for some reason.

I’d had a similar feeling before in my life: junior high school with my friends, coding Pascal and BASIC. I’d had it at Spire when I was 20 years old, coding Flash animations for websites whose domain names cost 10 times my salary. It was the feeling of being a little fish in a big pond, and it was good for me. “I will never know everything there is to know here" was something I thought to myself on a daily basis. I engaged in learning without fear, and applied that knowledge immediately.

The design staff carved out many physically-communal design spaces. We started out having our design meetings in a room labeled Aspen, named after the trees that swayed right outside its window. When we leased more space across the street, Chris oversaw the entire design and construction of the new office, building it specifically for designers and developers to collaborate.

We had two rooms separated by a substantial but removable accordion wall made entirely out of whiteboard. These rooms were named after Charles and Ray Eames and were reconfigurable as we needed.

We’d gather every Friday morning, bright and early. Coffee in hand, we’d file into whichever space we were using at the time and we would nerd out as designers together. We’d discuss three things:

1. We’d discuss the work we were doing. We’d show what was near or just-launched. This work often wasn’t being displayed for critique but for us to ask questions and to learn from the decisions they’d made. Gathering feedback from the team on how to update the project wasn’t usually the point. Pointed critiques were sought on a 1-to-1 basis during the workday.
2. We’d discuss design in general. We’d save up URLs to send to who was running the meeting each week, and view those pages as a group. If we saw a new visualization we liked, or an interesting layout or graphical treatment, we’d put these up on the screen and critique the hell out of them. Other people’s work was up for grabs, critique-wise. What would we change about this? What worked for our clients, and what wouldn’t? Where would you take this to push it further? This way, we’d all critique something together, with no one in the room defending the decisions or backing up their work with client quotes. It was all about working together as a group and creating rapport as well as building our own critique skills so that we could look at our own work with a fresh set of eyes if we needed.
3. We’d discuss and iterate on our own internal processes. What about the design process wasn’t working for you? What was? How did you manipulate the normal flow in order to reach that really excellent level of work you just did?  New ideas were brought up and digested. If there was promise, we’d try out new official policies, organically growing them and leaving them by the wayside as needed.

We all sat near each other in the office. We went on design- and art-oriented outings together, and we created a culture that really worked to get beautifully-finished work out the door.

Just Pull Up a Chair, I Guess

Eames chairs

The funny thing about all of this collaboration was that I resisted it at first. We had a global Creative Director running the entire Design & Development division and I had Kent, a Creative Director, directly managing my work. I’d never had this many bosses before. During the first few months, I was a little unhappy about how much direct contact I was having with Kent. It was the first time in a while where I was working directly beneath someone who checked in on my progress multiple times a day. He’d show up right behind me at my desk and pull up a chair:

Whatcha up to, Kev?

was his usual phrasing.

Go away, Kent.

was the usual response in my head. I didn’t say it. I’d stop reading the NY Times article that was probably on my screen, tab back over to Photoshop, and show him my work.

He’s ask me questions that would make me frustrated, because of course I wasn’t done with it yet. He’d ask me something I hadn’t gotten to or he’d challenge me on basic things like color usage:

Why’d you use yellow here? It’s not in the palette.

for instance.

I’m designing the warning panel you assigned me. I chose a yellow with similar attributes to the family of colors already on the page, so it works to add it.

and he’d go

Ok.

to which I would again in my head reply

Go away, Kent.

This didn’t last long, and I’m giving Kent a hard time about it. We got past it and I moved on to learn an incredible amount of data visualization and general financial knowledge directly from him.

The moment of truth was when work started getting really hard. I was driving home to Denver every night in a daze, feeling like I wasn’t keeping up. Kent’s own design work was taking up more and more of his time, and yet I was not owning much about my designs or my clients. Even though he didn’t change my work much any more, it all seemed to hinge on his opinion, and so I felt powerless. The day he shocked me out of my daze was when he sent me a heart-pounding email. It said simply:

Kevin,

I need to you to engage now.

– k

I had no idea what this meant. I went to Chris and asked him what on earth I was supposed to do with this. Chris told me:

If you ask me, it sounds like he’s saying it’s time for you to jump in. If you don’t know what that means, then it’s up to you to decide."

I was afraid at first. I was the only designer on a project for the very first time here, and I knew I didn’t know very much yet. All of the experienced designers were working on the cool stuff like stock charts for BusinessWeek and CNN. I was designing UIs for people to get email alerts. I wanted the big-name work, but was terrified when I was given something serious to handle on my own.

Designer-Driven Design

We had beautiful digital displays in our space, showing daily market data trends

I decided it was time to start using my design skills to actually get design accomplished. I started drawing diagrams of how I understood the system I was designing to work. I took these diagrams to the client and then to my company’s developers and we iterated on them until they made sense and everyone agreed. Then I started wireframing in HTML. We had clickable prototypes with no CSS before we had a design language, which followed on quickly. I scheduled meetings with people downstairs I’d never met but with whom I needed to create relationships because my client was requesting a brand-new way of handling incoming data feeds, which needed to be written from scratch. I worked closely with the client to determine their systemic and visual requirements. At the very end, some crucial final understanding of the client’s needs came from Kent’s involvement in days-long meetings.

By the time it launched, I’d written the final production HTML and had handed it to our developers who plugged in the data calls and re-arranged things to work with our nascent pre-ajax technology.

In the end, what got us ahead and to a good place was that the whole team came together and collaborated, not that I could do the design work perfectly in a silo on my own, which was what I thought my role as a designer had been up to this point.

At the end of that project I had a sense of pride I’d never felt before. Many teams worked together, and I learned to lean on my team lead at crucial moments, pushing through a UI I knew was up to speed with what the rest of the design staff was producing.

Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results

Detail of an internal award I won for work performed in 2006

I just described an intense project, and it was the first of many to come. Over the next 4 years, I’d learn that some resistance from the first-floor engineering teams was something of a common theme. As we grew and grew quicker and quicker, more inexperienced project managers were being hired to manage more and more work.

By 2009, people like me who’d been at the company a while and had shown leadership promise were moved into new positions. On the design team, this new position was called Associate Creative Director. It was our job to essentially work closely with our CD and start adapting their responsibilities into our workflow, namely managing the relationship alongside the Account Director and selling the client on new work at every turn.

This was new! And challenging! And I didn’t take much to it.

What I could do: execute high-quality UI and UX work on a weekly basis, in a novel and compelling way, driving the less-experienced designers on my team to do the same. As Associate Creative Director I really tried to know everything there was to know, just like it looked like the other CDs were doing when I started, and I began to lust after the wrong thing: prestige.

I started forgetting to collaborate. I’d react strongly in internal meetings where I felt developers didn’t care as much as I did about turning out a great product. I’d push clients toward what I thought the correct solution was, without really listening to what they were trying to accomplish. I’d bully other designers into trying to learn to code, despite their protestations that they just never really understood it. “Every designer should learn to code!" I’d say, dismissing their views entirely.

And so I burned myself the hell out. I burned everyone around me out on working with me. It’s true that when I left this job, my clients called emergency meetings in Boulder to plan the roadmap for how they were going to continue working with Wall Street in my absence, but I was fending off internal talk from above that I wasn’t quite working out in this position. What I needed though was something I couldn’t find at this company anymore: I needed to be a little fish again.

I needed to learn to collaborate with other designers again, without the ego attached as I rose the ranks and earned respect. I didn’t know it yet, but what I needed was to go work at Automattic, something I’d have the chance to do sooner than I’d know.

The night of July 7th, 2000, I couldn’t sleep. I’m prone to insomnia so this wasn’t new to me but as I was lying there in a fugue between desire to sleep and annoyance at being awake, I managed to start building up an idea that I just couldn’t let go. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in order to rest, I needed to get out of bed and build this idea on my 15-inch gray-translucent computer with a hockey puck for a mouse.

Quantified Self

I was thinking back over my day, going through how long it took me to get to work, what I ate while I was there, what things I had done during the day, and so on. While doing so, I envisioned some kind of layer beneath the surface of my life that recorded what I was doing at that moment into a document to be read later in a sort of Defending Your Life kind of way, and it occurred to me that HTML was a pretty neat way of capturing that. It’s an idea I’d find brilliantly visualized by the agency MK12 in Will Ferrell’s Stranger Than Fiction some years later:

Watch on YouTube

Anyway, so I took the main data points of my previous day and codified them into an XML/HTML-type language. As this was an art project, it was important to me that the code be highlighted and colored so that when you looked at it as a web page in a browser, it resembled what HTML might look like when edited in BBEdit:

With a rough draft complete, the idea was mercifully out of my head and I could finally sleep. I remember nothing about the next day.

View & Download

You can view the project on Codepen or download it from Github.

(Looking at it closer now, it’s no surprise to me that I love React/JSX so much. Also, a lighter version of it won some awards in a web contest in 2001, which I can ironically no longer link to).

This post is part 4 of a series. You can read Part 1, Part 1.5, Part 2 and Part 3 if you’d like.

Web 2.0

Then something funny happened that we weren’t expecting, but sort of hoping for: the web became a tool everyone used, all the time, for a ton of reasons.

New users were arriving online every day, and new services were popping up in droves to give them fun stuff to do there. Years after Wall Street left the “dot-coms" to die in the gutter, the former employees of these companies built new tools, with new ideas about what a web interface could accomplish.

Web users adapted and started to actually love the products they used online. Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Del.icio.us: we all have memories of what was new about these things when they first appeared that delighted us.

The web was a super-fun place to be, both as a user and designer.

2001 – 2010

I spent the intervening years doing the following:

• Being unemployed Lots of freelance
• I built a web page with only 5 kilobytes of code
• Building PHP and MySQL from source on Mac OS X
• Building custom Content Management Systems in PHP every time I launched a website for a client
• Getting a job where I helped Einstein sell bagels on the internet
• Securing just a few long-term freelance clients that would support me for years
• Getting a low-paying job for health insurance reasons, then quitting that job because I found myself editing .NET code in a shirt and tie
• Getting a job doing data visualization and financial design for investment banks
• Traveling to New York to work with clients on Wall Street
• Learning and forgetting Flash, ActionScript and Flex
• Building in CakePHP and taking offline a web app for people to record very personal data
• Spending 6 months designing a 15×10 GIF (among many other things) for the front page of the New York Times
• Getting a job where I designed screens for people with mental disabilities as well as for people whose job was to support those with mental disabilities
• Watching the idea of “mobile" evolve from WAP-based apps rendered on Handspring devices to the responsive web and iOS/Android apps we have today
• Getting a job at Automattic, working on the blogging system I’m using to publish this very post.

I can honestly say that during those 9-10 years, my work was used by millions of people, and that by 2010 my work reached that many people daily. I learned a lot during this time about how people use web applications, how they share content on the web, and how they talk to one another with the tools we build. I learned what my medium was being used for (fun fact: in 2002 I owned the domain “automaticmedium.com") above and beyond what I was personally using it for. And all this time, I blogged.

The Importance of Blogging in Earnest

I blogged when Napster was shut down, I blogged when the Twin Towers fell, I blogged when Apple launched the iPod.

I used a system built in PHP3 my friend Tai and I paid $500 for and then I ported that blog to a custom system I wrote in PHP 4 which I then wrote a custom importer for in 2007 that pulled it all into WordPress. Blogging was and is important to how I work.

Ego & Empathy

While designing and building the tools my clients asked me for, I was simultaneously either plugging away at a new CSS idea on my blog, or trying out a new language to build a web app. My craft and I grew up at the same time and I tried to stay involved in it above and beyond my client work for two simple reasons:

1. Ego: I needed a place to play. Client work was now very serious and very important and playing with new ideas often wasn’t the best choice for these projects. Not to say we didn’t pitch new ideas, they just often weren’t chosen for development. Knowing I should and could keep my code chops up by playing on my blog was important to me for increasing the quality of my work.
2. Empathy: I really wanted to have my own site with an audience and user base that I considered my own. This way, I could truly understand a client’s desire to do right by their users because I spent evenings and weekends making something for my own group of people I wanted to please.

These two concepts seem diametrically opposed: Ego and Empathy. I contend that to design a web application that people want to use on a daily basis you need both the ego to say:

“I can make something people will want to use that’s better than what exists"

and the empathy to listen to what your users actually say when you launch it. Additionally, your empathy for what you’d want on the screen you’re designing goes a long way toward making something your users may want to use.

Try All of the Things

How do you build this empathy? One of the ways besides maintaining a web app by yourself is to be a die-hard trier-and-user of any and all web apps. Really use them for really real things. See what making boards on Pinterest is all about. Follow art blogs on Tumblr and check it every day. Try Snapchat and get confused and close the app forever. Stuff like that.

You can start to understand what else the rest of the world is doing with their digital devices on a daily basis; you can see where your app fits into your users’ lives, not just how your users’ lives fit into your engagement cycle.

Empathize with what your users do on a daily basis with your tool by doing the same things with it and by doing the other things they do on a daily basis on the web, too. Pay fucking attention to what works and what doesn’t and why. You can start to synthesize this information with the designer’s ego telling you that you actually can produce a better product. What can result is remarkable: an app that people love using.

That’s always been my goal for my work on the web: to make something that people love having in their lives, something that feels like humans made it for other humans. They’ll come back over and over and give you their money for things you’re building that they want to use. You won’t have to beg for money from people who want to pay you for what you make.

Up next, part 5: Designer-Driven Design

This post is part 3 of a series. You can read Part 1, Part 1.5 and Part 2 if you’d like.

Y2K (Contd).

Last time, I mentioned that we had 2-3 designers simultaneously pitching ideas to clients. What I omitted then but would like to clarify now is that each designer determined for themselves absolutely everything they pitched:

Open on Spotify

• Navigation structure and labels
• Content blocks and layout
• Interactive tools & functionality
• Branding & logo work
• Visual design system execution

What this meant was that often a client would see different versions of all of the above in the same meeting. They couldn’t focus purely on the competing designs’ visual directions because they’d also be picking a navigation structure and maybe even a logo at the same time.

This was a pretty terrible process. Factor in that Project Managers also didn’t exist and unsurprisingly lots of confusion resulted all around. Designers would pitch competing and usually slightly misinterpreted ideas the client floated in earlier discussions. We’d catch a glimpse of the other designer’s work and decide to incorporate some of their concepts, creating a miasma of ideas presented all at once, similarly sourced but slightly tweaked.

Then Jen showed up.

Office Cell Phones and Pinball Machines

The subject of the all-employee email read

“Has anyone seen the office cell phone?"

These were incredibly rare devices and when our new office manager Jen Mylo (née Wells) needed to find it, there was something about her wording that immediately made me envision our plastic brick of a cell phone sitting on a bar stool, smoking a cigarette, talking shit about the employees that lugged it around the city. It cracked me up.

I immediately replied-all and said “I saw it a bar last night; it doesn’t want to see you." My intention was to be funny and set a new employee at ease, that we had fun at this company. What actually happened was that she thought I hated her, which I learned a few days later when we were both part of a small group tasked with picking out a new office pinball machine.

I think I was the only one with a car at the time so I offered to drive. It was on this formative drive to Lakewood when I learned:

1. Just how professional, detail-oriented and experienced Jen was and
2. Just how bad I’d made her feel by being unprofessional over email.

I’m incredibly lucky that we cleared up the misunderstanding that day, chose a sweet new pinball machine for the office, and made friends for life (so far).

Roping the Dude Ranch Operator Back to the Web

When she spoke to Spiremedia co-workers about her life and work experiences, she was quick to mention her time on a dude ranch in Arizona, as an activist for Greenpeace, as the supervisor of a food co-op and many, many others. What she’d purposely be quiet about, and left off her resume entirely, was her time working on the web as an Information Architect. She was at the moment living and working in Denver along with her boyfriend, and wasn’t sure if she was staying long, so doing serious web work here wasn’t really on her list of priorities. “I really don’t want them to know I know how to do this" she’d quietly mention.

Of course “they" did find out about this unexpected IA on staff and quickly put her to work on our clients. By this time we had a team of 8-10 designers pitching sometimes totally off-the-wall ideas to clients and generally running the asylum. There was one incident where I went on vacation and left another designer in charge of my client work, only to return to a totally functionally-altered concept. Jen changed all that.

With the addition of Jen to our design team (as well as three experienced project managers: a lot changed for us at once), the process started to resemble something sane:

1. These newly-added PMs would work closely with Jen and the client to determine what the site actually needed at a functional and content level
2. Jen would propose and refine a site architecture and content deck. She would then wireframe this architecture and content layout, staying as design agnostic as possible. I still wish I understood how to do card-sorting as well as she did then.
3. These documents would stand as blueprints for the designers to start molding into a visual model. Any specific design decisions in the wireframes were up for interpretation (size and placement of content, visual relationships, etc) and a serious effort went into the visual impact of the site.
4. Once this work was complete, our developers now had both abstract definitions and concrete examples from which to synthesize the working site.

Clients no longer had competing, complete design philosophies to pick from all at once: each visual design was now proposed with the same labels, the same content, and the same architecture as the others in the meeting, and it had all been already determined. By working with Jen first, client expectations were set for what to get from the visual design staff and our expectations were set for what the client actually needed.

She enabled success on both ends of the spectrum by advocating for the users to the client early in the process, and then she’d pivot and advocate for the client and users to the designers when we came in later.

I now had two mentors helping me establish two keystones of my design philosophy:

• Scott Upton solidified the value of designing for the web by using the fabric of the web itself: HTML and the browser. He taught me that using your interface as your design it is the only way to know it works.
• Jen Mylo locked in the absolute necessity of hearing what your client and their users are saying, filtering it through the way your experience has shown you that people actually use the web, and turning that around as smart recommendations and decisions upon which to base your visual design.

I’ve plotted just about my entire career path between these two ideological pillars of how to build for the web. I’ll explain in Part 4 what I’ve done in the last 15 years with this foundation.

This post is part 2 of a series. You can read Part 1, Part 1.5 and Part 3 if you’d like.

1999

As I stood in the cramped first-floor hall of the 300 building at the Art Institute of Colorado, my heavy bag of supplies dug painfully into my shoulder. I was with a friend and we were looking for jobs on the board, a task I undertook when I found myself in each of the three buildings we had on campus in Capitol Hill for the first time that week. As soon as we walked up, one posting in particular jumped out at me and I forgot all about the huge bag on my shoulder. It said in stark Franklin Gothic Condensed type:

SPIREMEDIA IS HIRING A RECEPTIONIST

which I’m sure doesn’t sound to you like that big of a deal, but to me it was like that paper was etched in gold. I’d been doing web design hourly for a small shop owned by a man who – in a daze of inspired light and beauty – named his company The Internet Design Firm. During my first week at this job I AltaVista’d (we didn’t Google back then) “Denver web design companies" to see what was happening in town, and to find work that could inspire me in times of need.

Spiremedia was an agency I found during this search whose portfolio suddenly redefined for me what a web site could look like, what the web could be. I had already spent a lot of time on their site, poring over the portfolio looking at the decisions the designers made on each piece, trying to determine what I could learn from them.

“What about this work is applicable to my own? What can I discard? What can I change about what I take, to make it my own, my clients’ own? How did they code that?"

It wasn’t just their client work, either: their own site was an excellent example of the thinking that went into everything they designed. I never dreamed I’d actually end up working there. I was a student who had done a total of 10 months of contract work in the industry, not one of the professionals these people clearly were hiring. I’d click “view source" in my browser, copy out some of their clever HTML code, and learn from their ideas.

And so but here was this flyer stapled to the wall, telling me they were hiring a receptionist. The privilege of my education leapfrogged me past wanting to apply for the job for which they were actually hiring, so my email’s subject line said “I don’t want to be your receptionist" and the body included a link to my portfolio telling them I’d admired their work for a while, and that I wasn’t a very good receptionist but I was wondering if they were hiring designers. I couldn’t have been happier when the reply came that they wanted an interview, but I had no idea what to expect.

Spiremedia’s location in 1999. Imagine it without the hulking monstrosity behind it. Photo by Flickr user elmada

I couldn’t have guessed that it was going to be about 5,000 square feet of exactly what I’d been looking for since junior high, but this was not an office that my work experience had prepared me for. There was no sterile drywall bound by drop-ceilings and cheap carpet. There were no medical-grade waiting room chairs or neckties. No one was freaking out about the dogs wandering around and no one appeared to be over 30. Everyone wanted to be there.

Watch on Vimeo

A video created by Scott Upton with an original iBook and external video camera

Thick, wooden warehouse columns broke up the space into distinct areas. Existing long before many floors of offices had been built around them, they stood like stoic Redwoods throughout the office, ancient and real. I marveled at how many people must have done how many kinds of work in this building near these columns, and noticed this group of people covered them and the exposed brick in artwork and ethernet cables. The waiting area for clients was made up of a duo of (also wooden) old-timey school chairs which faced pinball and Asteroids machines. The music was loud and the person interviewing me had about 1,000 toys on his desk in the only private office I could see.

I was home again.

The Year 2000

Spiremedia Holiday Party, 1999.

Part of doing web design was (and continues to be) understanding what the medium is capable of. If we designed something crazy or just not-quite-possible, we’d get an approximation of our designs live on the web and this was a thing I’d get sort of sad about. I wanted my pages to look and work how I designed them, dammit.

What Sucked About The Web

I alluded in Part 1 to a tendency of entirely visually-focused graphic designers to make fun of the web in 1999. At the risk of sounding incredibly “get off my lawn" about it, here’s an incomplete list of things we didn’t have as web designers when I started out:

• Fonts. We could set our page’s text in any font we wanted as long as it was Verdana, Arial, Trebuchet, Georgia or Times as these fonts were available on most platforms. Using one of them ensured your pages looked similar to the highest amount of potential users. Want a different font? Time to make a bunch of header graphics!
• Fast Internet. Most of us still had 56k modems at home but at work we used expensive lines that still were geologically slow by current standards to build and launch sites that hoped to gain mass adoption. We were building tools that aimed to be useful in a technical universe that hadn’t quite arrived yet.
• Colors. “Colors are darker on Windows" was a common refrain heard around the office. Clients never saw the colors we saw on our Macs because have you ever tried to color-calibrate your client’s Windows NT-running-computer’s monitor? Of course you haven’t because it’s impossible. We always assumed the colors we chose were mere suggestions for how the end-user’s computer would render them.
• YouTube. Seriously, think for a second about the web before YouTube or much video of any kind. See also: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Spotify, StackExchange. We did have the real Napster, though.
• Standards. Jeffrey Zeldman is my hero for starting the Web Standards Project and getting the dialog between browser vendors started. A standard way to write HTML and Javascript for all browsers simply wasn’t present at first.  Zooming out a bit from the idea of technical web standards, we also didn’t have much in the way of usability research or prior art. Each client was an opportunity to try something new so something as basic as a site’s navigation was up for grabs.

What Was Awesome About the Web

Without a clear mode of operation to follow, we got to make things up. We tried to figure out what this new “web interface" idea should really look and feel like, given the limitations of the browser. We couldn’t do the UI heavy lifting you had on the desktop, and the whole idea of pages broke the application metaphor anyway.

We improvised and we changed course quickly because that was and continues to be the benefit of designing for our platform:

• We weren’t desktop software designers because they had low-level control over their UI and could respond instantly to user input. Flash was the closest we could get but it felt like cheating to use it.
• We weren’t graphic designers because we had web text to deal with, and navigation, and clicking, and scrolling. People had to use what we designed, not just look at it.
• We weren’t multimedia designers because we used a document markup language to code our screens and we had to factor in a page load between each click.
• We weren’t developers because they used ColdFusion and SQL and PHP and other acronyms I didn’t understand.

Linking Leagues and Asking Why

My first two clients were businesses commonly referred to as dot-coms to denote their internet-only status. My official title was Production Artist and my job was loosely defined as helping designers put their work on the web. My first two projects ended up being simply design projects that I used code to produce, which has impacted my entire career to-date.

LeagueLink was a startup aiming to enable recreational sporting leagues to self-organize tournaments and practice schedules. It combined elements of e-commerce (for gathering league dues), messaging (for inter-team communication), and content management (publishing league and team news). The only Javascript this app used was for image-based navigation rollovers. Ajax would be just a cleaning supply for another 5 or 6 years. Click: page load. Click: page load.

Why.com (forever embedded in my brain by its clever logo leveraging a question mark for the dot: Why?com) was assigned to me at the same time. This was a search engine that included a social aspect: other users were able to rank, rate, and recommend search results for given terms. Apple launched a service called iReview not long after, effectively killing the company. Two things stand out during my time working on why.com: it was the first time anyone in our office had heard of Google, which powered our search results (we thought it was a weird choice), and it was this project that provided me with my first business trip.

I didn’t realize it at the time but Scott Upton, my lead on the aforementioned projects, was also the designer whose work I’d most admired in the company’s portfolio from afar. I still haven’t had a creative director quite like him for three reasons:

1. He was doing the work himself, and his structural decisions cascaded down to the specific screens I was working on. Any style I’d developed in school or on my own was out the window, it was time to explore someone else’s partially-defined design system and extend it.
2. There were no Photoshop files, as he was building a clickable prototype, a shadow-version of the functional web app being built by the client. The code wasn’t for production but it made the creation of new screens so much faster and more compelling than doing flat Photoshop work. We could use our site as we designed it, and could tell when an idea wasn’t working long before users or the client saw it.
3. He was patient and always advocated for the user’s best experience. I envied his ability to sketch in front of a client to get buy-in on a better idea than what they were floating back to us. Cleanly-drawn lines and clear ideas won out – most of the time.

For the first 6 months of my professional career, code and design were one and the same. There wasn’t a developer alive who’d touch Flash at that time and having our hands in the code of a site, no matter the language, gave us a control over the end-result that no amount of wire-framing or Photoshop mockups could give us. The client would usually see screenshots of our work, but that work’s production had a web-native methodology baked into it; we knew the screens we designed could be executed in code because we were already doing it.

This post is part 1.5 of a series. You can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 if you’d like.

Some common stressful situations that could have ruined your day circa 1999:

“There’s a typo on the final production graphics that millions of people are looking at right now."

• Print Designer: “Well, fuck."
• Web Designer: “Here’s a new version, I’m overwriting the old one over FTP immediately."

“Users hate the new placement of the button for the feature we shipped last week. No one can figure out where to find it and they’re throwing bricks through our windows."

• Desktop Software Designer: “We can hide under our desks until the next release literally ships to physical stores 12 months from now. People will have to drive a car to buy it."
• Web Designer: “I just moved it back. Let’s figure out a way not to have that happen again. But if it does, we can still just move it back."

“The colors aren’t right. The red is too purple."

• Print Designer: “It looked fine on my screen. I must have put the wrong QuarkXpress file on the Zip disk."
• Web Designer: “Yeah, that’s gonna happen. There’s no way to enforce color consistency across platforms right now, so that’s what the colors look like on your monitor. Unless you use this incredibly constrictive web-safe color palette, that’s just the way things are. It sucks but there’s not much I can do."

“No one is clicking the BUY NOW button!"

• Print Designer: “Talk to the web people."
• Web Designer: “Well, fuck."

This post is part 1 of a series. You can read Part 1.5, Part 2 and Part 3 if you’d like.

1979 – 1991

Me at Sea World before we knew it was evil

I was an “Arty Kid." I have no idea whether this is because my genes conspired to make art a thing I could do or if I simply had enough people tell me I had artisitc ability so I internalized it as best I could, but either way my childhood included an awful lot of drawing. The neighborhood recreation center was where my brother played basketball games, but I remember it as where I attended my first art class at 7 years old.

Art taught me how to create a space in my brain to play with a visual idea, and how to make that idea happen on paper. It also taught me how to learn from a failed experiment and try again on a new piece of paper. I often used my worksheets for this instead doing of the boring work that I already understood on the front, to many of my early schoolteachers’ chagrin.

I was also a “Computery Kid" but I don’t remember anyone telling me I was a Computery Kid because computers weren’t readily available until I was about 7. Once I started using them, I never wanted to stop and I was comfortable enough with computers that by the 3rd grade, when our classroom received an Apple ][ that none of the adults knew how to hook up, I could look at the wires and see where each one fit. By just trying them out I got it working, and I think that was probably the first time I was called computery.

When the Macintosh came out, my first exposure to graphic design was alongide my cousins as we used MacPaint to print out 10-page-long banners connected with that special dot-matrixy paper. As we spent hours designing Happy Birthday banners, I’m sure we used tons of my uncle’s paper but he never seemed to mind. I loved computers when I was a kid: they were clearly tools for making art.

1991 – 1994

For junior high (grades 7–9), I attended a computer-math-science magnet school that bussed kids in from all over San Diego. Each year, along with our intensive math and science classes, we also attended programming classes. I took my first coding class at a public school when I was 12 years old in the early 90s, something I could never have appreciated the rarity of back then, but now I know that access to educational programs like this is an opportunity not afforded to many young kids.

Bell Junior High School, San Diego, California, 1993. Taking Instagrams before it was cool.

We didn’t have enough machines in the labs for each student, so we were paired up and wrote our code as a team for each project. The first team project in 7th grade was to create a frame-by-frame animation in BASIC by coding each individual frame’s pixel’s placement on an 80×80 grid, wiping the grid, and drawing the next frame. My partner Quentin and I coded a windmill that had two frames so that when it looped, it looked like the windmill’s blades were spinning. I like to think we were making 8-bit animated GIFs before browsers were invented.

While it’s true that this was my first exposure to coding, it was conveniently also a visual task: I was making art with computers. For all I knew, all of programming was about putting cool stuff on a screen for people to see.

Help screen for creating a button with HyperCard

In the 8th grade, we learned about scanners and my partner Kenny and I used HyperCard to make an interactive Myst-like game, introducing me to my first onMouseUp event, a concept I had no idea I’d implement over and over again during my adult years.

Freshman year was where things got harder: our code was now to take a user’s input, use functions to perform math on that data and return the result to the screen. As we coded Pascal-powered forms to tell us how many cords of firewood we’d get from a theoretical tree, I again focused on the way data looked as it was displayed on the screen. My partner Lauren had a much stronger grasp on the math and data-processing side of the language and without her as a partner I doubt any of my projects would have gotten completed.

What I learned that semester, at Lauren’s expense, was that when the code had to start doing things that strayed too far away from a visual result, there were other people in the world who took to those kinds of hard jobs better than myself. My skills came into play when something needed to happen on the screen. As I later learned ActionScript and JavaScript, I had clear recollections of Lauren’s patient tutoring on how to use closing curly brackets.

What I was beginning to experience in school was an environment I’d essentially continue to search for my entire career: a smart, diverse group of collboratively-focused and really smart people working together to make digital art.

1994 – 1997

As my time at Alexander Graham Bell Junior High came to a close, the gap between my art and use of computers started to widen. Now attending a much more tradtional high school in Colorado, my access to technology in creative capacity was very limited for my sophomore and junior years. The ironically much better-equipped computer labs at my new school appeared to be used entirely for things like Excel spreadsheets and Word documents: the kinds of things that made me want to bang my head against the keyboard and start drawing on the margins of the page again.

My move to a suburban school in Colorado also came with a huge cultural shift for me. Saying I didn’t fit into my new school is an understatement as there were particular groups who actively and at some points violently rejected weird people like me. I turned to artistic pursuits to make it through this time and reconnected with the self-expression and healing that art could provide.

Making drawings, writing angsty poetry and playing my guitar filled my afternoons and weekends. This technical and cultural dark age was crucial to me finding the self-validation that art could provide and it gave me the time to get better at it. As long as I was expressing my emotions with art that improved in quality over time, I could deal with anything the lacrosse players wanted to call me in the hallway.

As senior year came into view, things started looking up. I had found a large group of outcast and cynical people at school like me and it was with this re-found confidence that I joined the school newspaper staff as an elective and found myself once again staring at a computer that expected me to make something with it. My first year on newspaper staff as graphic artist and music columnist also marks the first time a high school newspaper was 100% digitally-produced in Colorado. Every other high school here was still mocking up their pages with printouts and glue and tape, sending camera-ready art to the printer instead of digital files.

Macintosh Performa 5200 LC, only available to education markets. My music column was called Cognitive Dissonance, I shit you not.

While the writers on staff used the 9-inch black and white Macintosh Classics along the edge of the room, I was allowed to use a much larger PowerMac 5200 LC that had a scanner attached to it and Photoshop 3.0 installed.

I felt home again.

I made graphics for the newspaper during school hours, but after class I’d hang out, scan my drawings and edit them in Photoshop. I’d go on the weekends and take photos downtown, then I’d scan the prints so that I could blend them into weird images to print and hang in my locker. I still wasn’t sure what the words “graphic design" meant but when my newspaper teacher suggested I do an independent study on it for the second semester, I jumped at the chance. Overseen by both the newspaper teacher and the director of the art department, I was allowed to investigate what graphic design was, produce pieces that no one had assigned to me, and get ready for college: a graphic design program at art school.

I simply cannot overstate the importance of a few key teachers in my life as well as the technology available at school and in my extended family’s homes during my childhood. I can’t imagine who or where I’d be without them.

1997 – 1999

I worked through college doing digital pre-press 3 blocks away from campus, spending my working hours pre-flighting and printing many of my fellow students’ work. I’d punch out and stay after countless evening shifts to continue printing and mounting my own work, supplies for which were available to me at a steep discount from my employer. I was spending 10-12 hours a day thinking about and producing design work.

I spent so many hours staring at this thing, hoping it would do what it was supposed to do

But something about the print world didn’t feel quite right. The amount of work that went into taking a QuarkXpress file from someone’s Zip disk and getting it to print correctly from our digital printers was obscene. There were crucial details that could be easily overlooked by the customer, rendering their prints completely useless. As school got closer and closer to completion, classes started leaning heavily on the student’s ability to go and get offset prints produced: an expensive task that I had zero interest in learning how to do.

The web was an obvious alternative as I could start going behind the scenes on the computer-side again. Instead of using someone else’s interface to create art, I was back to writing the code for a UI itself, a task I’d been introduced to with HyperCard stacks 6 years earlier.

The web was also a weird choice for a designer to make at that time. I’d be giving up fine typography control, throwing any semblance of faithful color reproduction out the window, and embracing lower resolution over higher. And I did this willfully and aggressively because I could make something, and I could make it fast, and people could see it anywhere in the world in seconds. Why on earth would I care about printing things?

As my formal design education was nearing its end, I landed my first salaried web design job in 1999 without a resume at a company that wasn’t hiring a designer. I simply emailed them a link to a portfolio I designed and built in Flash. Within a week I had an interview and I started work less than a week after that. I could now call myself a professional designer.

Up Next: Why I’m a Designer Part 2: View Source

I keep hearing people say things like this, including myself lately:

“We do our best work when we’re physically connected," says Roy Hirshland, CEO of T3 Advisors, a commercial real estate advisor. Dialing in on Skype will work in a pinch, but it’s not a substitute, he says. “When you’re in the same room, you can see facial expressions, you can feel energy in a room."

The idea is based on Media Richness Theory, which posits that some tasks require face-to-face interaction. Skype doesn’t fit the bill. “Skype is a great, free way to communicate with sound and picture, but with glitchy connections, awkward camera angles, the limitations of webcams and cheap microphones, etc.," says Dr. Matthew Lombard, a professor at Temple University and president of the International Society for Presence Research. “It’s far from the same experience as talking to someone in person. Face-Time and other tablet and phone methods have the advantage of mobility, but they suffer in terms of the vividness of the experience."

This is a quote from this article about telecommuting, a word I never even use despite being apparently one of the only 2.6% of people in the US who consider themselves full-time at-home workers.

I think it’s true to an extent, and the cutoff of whether it’s true for you is literally how much of your life has been lived online so far. How could someone who didn’t even have desktop computers as a reality when they were growing up imagine people only using them to have the same experiences they’re so used to being defined as in-person only? Of course these people don’t believe internet experiences are real enough, because they simply can’t conceive of it.

If you’re reading my blog though, I bet you’ve been interacting online with people from such a young age that you don’t even realize the extent to which you’re getting valuable human contact online that you’re dismissing as self-centered or useless simply because you’re staring at your phone or tablet to receive it.

Real things happen online. Really real things between really real people. You totally need in-person time to make new experiences that simply can’t happen online (and yes, I do believe there are some obviously, just not quite at the level discussed above), but dismissing online-only experiences as somehow less valuable or less productive or less human is something that can only be done by someone who can’t have those experiences to that level because their own growth and development as a human didn’t include this kind of communication transfer as a way of interacting with humanity. Computers are “other" and humans are “real" and for some people, this can never be made untrue.

Post I made internally at Automattic the other day:

One of the oft-overlooked aspects of doing creative-type work (this includes developers and basically everyone at Automattic) is that we basically never stop. Working, that is.

I’ve found that even when cruising mentally at a solid “I’m-at-the-mall-with-my-parents-and-my-kids" kind of socially-focused interaction, I’m still at a very low level scanning signs for Comic Sans and shitty kerning. I’ll still notice every Ferrari on the road while also engrossed in a This American Life podcast or I’ll get mad when I see Microsoft advertising on a bus. I can’t help these things; they define who I am as a human being*.

At any rate, at previous jobs where the revenue model was ostensibly to bill clients for every hour we spent working (and in the more despicable cases, many we didn’t), as a creative professional I found it difficult to quantify my work in that way. Who got billed for that hour I spent talking with one of my best friends about Node.js? How many hours have we all spent thinking about jQuery in the shower?**

Lots of people work in office conditions where websites with personalized, social content dashboards like Tumblr, Twitter or Pinterest are blocked for being productivity-killers, but here at Automattic, I use our own WordPress.com Reader every day to catch up on what’s going on around our company as well as the world. This is a profound difference that’s hard to communicate to outsiders.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve felt comfortable at Automattic spending time thinking about how I do my work and what my work habits mean about who I am as a person, and I’ve started to see trends that started early on in my career that are culminating in a neat way with how we get our work done here.

It’s with keeping this in mind that I present to you a goal I’ve slowly realized over the past few months that I’ve been subconsciously striving toward since very early on in my career and only recently have had the pieces fit together in a way that I can articulate to other people how I get my work done:

I discovered I have been developing an often-messy and laborious but enjoyable and endlessly-evolving process of designing and coding web interface functionality directly in the browser, utilizing whatever technologies are appropriate. For Polldaddy, I have the extraordinary benefit of having the solid foundation laid by @eoigal, @allnoodles, @polldaddy and @donncha at my disposal. Over the years, I’ve slogged through ActionScript 1 & 2, fought with Flex and MXML, cobbled together random bits of DHTML (ha! remember that one?), learned and then threw out Script.aculo.us, slowly gotten competent at CSS, HTML, jQuery, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, and have tried and failed at innumerable more.

Since joining Automattic as the Polldaddy UI designer and having participated in as many Happiness Bars and WordCamps as I’ve had the benefit of being able to attend, I can breathlessly expound upon how incredibly inspired I’ve been by what WordPress is capable of in general, and what the API can provide me in particular w/r/t my neurotic process.

Now is especially exciting, we have so many robust tools built specifically to aid people like myself (classically-trained graphic designers who have been bastardizing code for their entire careers): LESS/SASS, Twitter Bootstrap, Child Themes, jQuery, jQTouch… the list goes on forever.

To not-so-gracefully arrive at my point: am I off the rails here (pun so incredibly intended), or does this sound familiar to anyone else? Would a discussion/presentation at A8CSD be interesting to anyone?

* Especially the anger that rises at those Microsoft Stores or any kind of lacrosse merchandise. It’s a long story filled with sighs

** Be honest… you’re only lying to yourself.

I worked at Automattic for six years, and two of them were spent on Calypso, an API- and JavaScript-powered UI for WordPress. Calypso runs the WordPress desktop app, the WordPress.com UI, influences the UX of the WordPress mobile app and is built using Node.js + React.

WordPress.com is the largest installation of WordPress in the world with 131 million unique monthly users in the US. We were seeking to modernize our users’ experience by taking WordPress, which clearly still exists in its unchanged form and is in active development, abstract the core technology to an API, and build new experiences on top.

We had historically eschewed email, working together through the internally-developed P2 WordPress theme and IRC. Prior to Calypso, we usually launched code pretty quickly through Subversion to the main production codebase, and teams often iterated in silos, attending to their own needs first and foremost. Calypso changed all of that, moving a large portion of the design and development discussion to Slack and Github, adding beneficial layers of peer-based code and design review on top of each Pull Request. The end result was a more cohesive product, for us in the code and for our users in the experience. Designers started working more closely together on specific issues across teams, developers and designers collaborated in quicker iterations to get to better solutions, and the standards we used to build the app progressed along with evolving React and ES6 best practices.

Despite this increased flow of communication and priority-dovetailing, there were still inconsistencies within Calypso’s design. In September 2014, I organized a workshop for four designers to:

• Look at the UX we’d achieved at breakneck speed over the past year and a half
• Find UI inconsistencies and gotchas
• Provide recommendations on how to bring the app into a more pure Atomic Design model

Since we were already using React, this made for a perfect time to adopt a more standards-driven UI design process, placing the idea of functional components at the heart of the design language. We reviewed every page, outlined the parts of it that differed from the UX of other parts of the app, and made general recommendations for how to bring the application more in-line with itself.

The result of these workshops were 6 lengthy internal blog posts outlining the changes that we felt should be made, and created much discussion. Some recommendations were implemented by other teams and some of them were decided against by the wider group of contributors.

There was a third group of recommendations which were generally agreed upon by everyone, but were not going to be worked on by anyone, so I took it upon myself to get them finished. I took specific problems that the team had seen crop up over and over again and created Pull Requests in Github to address them. I re-engineered the interfaces in question to use core Calypso React components, got my designs and code reviewed by my peers, and launched them into production. This work is evident on WordPress.com in the following ways:

• Stats modules got simplified, including a cleaner way of clicking through into detailed information
• A cleaner Site Settings section
• Sharing Settings and Connected Applications use the same components to do the same interactions
• Standardized patterns covering Connect/Disconnect, Remove/Delete and Disable actions
• I created and edited core Calypso components as-needed to express improvements needed for implementation across the entire app

1. Start writing real blog post (none of this Tumblr shit)
2. Ooh, I should totally use a featured image.
3. Head off to Flickr to find an image I’ve taken that I can use.
4. There is no New York photoset. How do I not have a New York photoset?
5. Create New York photoset.
6. Realize these photosets and collections are a disaster.
7. Finally figure out a decent way to utilize both sets & collections effectively, including newly-minted New York photoset.
8. This takes 15 minutes.
9. View Flickr photos page, satisfied at information super harmony. Close window.
10. What’s this blog post?

1. Finish CSS issue X.
2. Rethink how the entire bit X is a part of works.
3. Change the entire bit X is a part of.
4. Introduce new display issue Y separate from issue X.
5. Dig through framework from top-down in order to figure out issue Y.
6. This takes a while, like 20 minutes.
7. Ok so more like 30 minutes.
8. Realize the issue can be fixed in the CSS file issue X was fixed in.
9. Also realize that the thing I did to fix issue X put the cursor immediately where I needed to be to fix issue Y.
10. Take glasses off and place head on desk.

My last post was pretty obtuse because I wasn't yet ready to blog about blogging, but the reality is, I now work for Automattic, the makers of WordPress.

The thing about blogging is that it really works best when you've got, you know, something to talk about. And blogging about how you have nothing to blog about is like just about the most boring thing I can think of, so I haven't been doing much of that lately. But now the platform on which my job rests is this platform of self-expression that has followed such a strange path from where it began to now. When can you say blogging started? When Blogger was invented? When someone built the first GeoCities page about their cat? It's really hard to pinpoint when blogging began, but it's easy to point to it today and call out how important and world-changing it's been.

At any rate, I really do hope to be blogging more here, on this domain that I've co-owned since 2000. I actually have been blogging quite a bit over at my band's blog, so you can go there and read some stuff about making music, if you want.

In the fall of 2006, I was part of a small team at Wall Street on Demand that pitched The New York Times on a replacement for their MarketWatch-powered (meaning competitor-powered) financial markets research portal. We continued to meet with the client periodically for about a year before work started in earnest.

While our pitch work had been valuable in demonstrating our abilities from a cold start, we needed to start all over again once things were officially underway. This included meetings on-site with news editors, graphics editors, and web designers. We learned the ins-and-outs of their archaic publishing system (since replaced with WordPress) so that we could better understand how their web content producers’ work flowed throughout the day and night.

We learned the intricacies of their standards for web design, content design, and print-based financial visualization, and weaved them together into a new set of rules. Since few of these disciplines had been integrated by the Times themselves, we had to work with them to forge a hybrid model of displaying financial information on the web that felt at home within their sprawling, ever-changing site.

As our main work would take over a complete CNAME subdomain of their site, our developers needed to build a new platform on our end that perfectly mimicked the look and feel of the actual nytimes.com. I worked hand-in-hand with the development team to build both HTML and Flash-based tools (hey it was 2008) for users to investigate market data. We also worked closely with the client’s developers to create ways in which our content could show up within the main news stories.

In 2006, when we first pitched the client, I had been with the company a year, and was still a relatively new member of the design team, taking much direction from the Creative Director. By late 2007, when we started work from scratch, I was an Associate Creative Director myself, and oversaw 60-70% of the design and front-end engineering work, managing a range of 2-3 designers at a time. Our Creative Director oversaw the broad scope of work but many day-to-day management tasks were handled by me.

This dude has ten reasons why leaked copies of MacOSX for Intel is not only a good thing, but something Apple had in mind when shipping their developer pre-release boxes:

Given Apple’s experiences with software piracy, particularly the rampant software piracy that spread developer builds of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger all over the Internet this past spring, Apple’s management from the top down knows full well that this developer preview will be in the hands of every kid with a cable modem within days of its release. Most of them will be able to install it on their own computers and run it and the full suite of iLife ’05 applications at full speed, and run most existing Mac software in translation.

As a result, Apple will give thousands, possibly millions, of people a taste of Mac OS X running full speed on their own PCs.

You have reached what I'm thinking will probably be Alternate.org's new design, powered by WordPress, instead of my terribly-coded pile of PHP. This means we'll have some new features, and it also hopefully means I might actually start, you know, like, posting stuff again. Not that there are many of you left to read it, but hey. Maybe we'll see a new dawn of Alternate ruling the world. Or probably not.

In any case, the design's not done in all parts of the site, and I'm sure there are templates lying around that look like hell that you can find if you click around long enough. I'm using Scalable Inman Flash Replacement for the headers, but I'm finding Safari 2 loads the regular headers in view first and then replaces everything, which takes an awful lot longer than it should. If this becomes annoying, I'll probably turn it off, but let me know what you think, anyway.

From last Friday evening until yesterday night, the server that housed this website (as well as my other sites) was "being moved" by the ISP who hosted it.

By "being moved," we thought that meant it'd be up early Saturday morning. Apparently what the ISP meant by "being moved" was that they were going to take it on a long road trip and that we shouldn't worry about it, but that we'd hear from it eventually. For all we know, that server is drunk on tequila in a Mexican jail after a crazy night of strippers and donkeys.

Ok, so the analogy falls flat, but the point is, we have our old data at a new ISP, and should hopefully never hear from that old ISP or their mischievous little server again.

Yay, more press releases by Symantec being treated as news!
Apple's recent introduction of the Mac mini, a $500 computer sold without a display, keyboard or mouse, could actually increase the likelihood of more malicious software computer code targeting the Mac platform, Symantec said.

Sounds a lot like Symantec trying to capitalize on the sale of Mac minis to me. "Just buy a new Mac mini? Chances are you're an uneducated new Apple customer! Buy our shitty product that does next to nothing for you!"

I could go into why Macs aren't a true target of virus-writing and hacking, largely due to the fact that a Mac owner buys a Mac because he likes it and probably doesn't want to write malicious code to attack another Mac user. Or that the only real vulnerabilities we've seen lately (by lately I mean about a year ago) are 1) not actually used "in the wild" and are in reality theoretical vulnerabilities and 2) obscure holes that STILL required you to enter your admin name and password before they could run.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt: The Current State of Computing™

I'd just like to go ahead and extend a few thank-yous to Macromedia right about now:

1. Thanks for making me delete the cached ActionScript 2 classes directory every time I export a SWF using AS2! I think it's really cool that you won't let me set a preference to automatically use the newest version of a class if the FLA resides on a server! Deleting that directory every time I export is a treat!

2. Oh, and your bug-checking tools can't be beat! I mean, not telling me a MovieClip doesn't exist when I try to use it in ActionScript but instead just doing nothing at all is tops! I mean, what MORON would type "UIScrollBar" instead of "UIScrollbar?"

3. Also, the fact that the Flex server is $12,000.00 and that FlexBuilder doesn't work on Macintosh, I mean, this stuff is really ground-breaking. Let alone the fact that you can't download developer versions of this stuff. I didn't need that $8.99 and those 3 days in order to get a CD from you, anyway.

Hats off to Macromedia for being another awesome closed-source developer of software development tools!

Delicious Monster has posted a new site for Library, the media catalog application that allows you to scan the bar code of your books, music, DVDs etc using your iSight and instantly have a digital catalog of everything you own media-wise. Not that it's worth much if your computer itself burns up or gets stolen, but it could be nice to scroll through the iTunes-ish interface late at night in order to keep the wolves of insecurity at bay. Or something.

• Mail 2.0
• Mail 2.0 Certificate

Since I need my computers for, like, work, I don't have the balls to run the Tiger betas, so these screenshots are nice to see. Anyone using it out there in internet-land?

The text of the AppleInsider report is as follows:

Southern California's Air Trafic Control system had a glitch in it that stranded 800 planes in the air without contact to Air Traffic Control. Did I mention the system is based on Windows?
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.
Awesome. Why do people use Windows again?

Details have been released about several vulnerabilities in Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird. These can potentially be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, access and modify sensitive information, and compromise a user's system.

The link in question. . .

*Moves back over to IE on his WinBlows machine.*
I kid, I kid.

Seriously though, this doesn't even affect the latest version of the programs, and the exploit is miniscule compared to those in IE. So, yeah, not a big deal. I've been using Firefox since it was still .5, I forget what it was called back then, Firebird maybe?

The only thing that concerns me here is that any time there's even a minor security exploit in Firefox, Microsoft will mention it in a Press Release and it will make IE look like it's on equal ground with Firefox where security is concerned. Psh.

By the way, I have posting privlidges now <3 Kev.

StickyWindows:
Sticky Windows is an utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) which extends the tab browsing experience to the Desktop. Sticky Windows transforms your windows into tabs when you drag a window towards the edge of your screen. Providing you with a completely clutter-free workspace. By clicking on the tab the user can show and hide the window.

OS 9-style tabbed windows with any application, with any edge of your screen. Very nifty. Don't bother watching the Flash demo though; it's maddeningly slow.

If you're really into tabbed folders, then check it out. But I have a few issues with it so far:

1. The windows don't slide up and down from their tab location, they (very, very slowly) fade in and out from wherever they were before you docked them
2. If you dock a Finder window, clicking the Finder dock icon won't create a new window for you, as it appears to think you already have one open
3. You can't drag files onto it, have it spring-load and open and drop the file there. This is about all tabbed windows are good for (in the Finder, anyway)

I know no one here cares about Morrissey, but I thought i'd link to something I found today about a phenomenon I'd heard about awhile ago but had forgotten: a Latino obsession with Morrissey.

The most striking similarity, though, is Morrissey’s signature beckoning and embrace of the uncertainty of life and love, something that at first glance might seem the opposite of macho Mexican music. But check it out: for all the machismo and virulent existentialism that Mexican music espouses, there is another side—a morbid fascination with getting your heart and dreams broken by others, usually in death. In fact, Morrissey’s most famous confession of unrequited love, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," ("And if a double-decker bus/Crashes into us/To die by your side/Would be a heavenly way to die") emulates almost sentiment for sentiment Cuco Sanchez’s torch song "Cama de Piedra" ("The day that they kill me/May it be with five bullets/And be close to you").

Via WhatDoIKnow.

My new favorite web agency. If they're even for real, that is:

Our creative team will come up with ideas you never even thought of. How could you? You don't have the talent we do. Don't take it personally. That's our job. That's what we do. We do stuff.

Most companies like ours just provide regular solutions. Not us. We provide solutions that are revolutionary and groundbreaking. Our solutions are newer than anyone else's, and they sound better because we give them cool titles like "Global Awareness Paradigms," and "Market Consciousness Philosophies," and "Creative Product Re-development Support."

When we deliver your new business strategies to you, they'll be in really snazzy binders that look nice sitting on big, round meeting tables, so you'll know you got your money's worth. When your project has been completed, we'll give you several follow-up phone calls to give the appearance that we even remember who you are or what we sold you.

Classic.

Holy hell.
Featuring AirTunes for playing your iTunes music wirelessly on your home stereo or powered speakers, AirPort Express brings not only the Internet but your music to wherever in your home you like to enjoy them most — whether you use a Mac or Windows PC. Unmatched in its ease of use, it delivers data rates up to 54 megabits per second, fits in the palm of your hand so you can take it wherever you go — and it costs just $129.

Some interesting things:

This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, and I can't wait until John Gruber responds, although it's so cliché that he probably won't.

Preview of the new mature-style Zelda game due out next year.

Totally boss Gran Turismo 4 video

Not related to cool video or Macs: 5 of the 6 latest comp presentations here at Spiremedia have resulted in the client picking my design, including local furniture store The Furniture Room (which is cooler than it sounds, and that links to the current site, which obviously, is not my design). So yay for me.

3D graphics on a PC have long been stuck with a "for games only" reputation. Of course, you could rightfully argue that 3D performance has been the driving force behind most recent PC performance increases; usually, the "application" that needed all the horsepower your PC could muster wasn't an application at all, but a high-powered 3D game. But now the shroud of illegitimacy is about to be lifted, as Microsoft prepares to rely on 3D performance to power its Longhorn operating system.

Wow. Pretty ground-breaking, out-of-the-box thinking going on at Microsoft.

Haha.. oops. I guess that link should have pointed here. Sigh. It's getting boring talking about this kind of thing. Or it's actually been boring for well, I guess about 9 years now.

From what I've been reading, comment spam on MT blogs is a big problem. Not that you'd know it here, because we rule, but since MT blogs are mostly the same in the way their comment pages work, spammers are using the anonymous comment system prevalent in the blogging world to increase their Google rankings. The link above points to SixApart's blog, the company that makes Movable Type as well as TypePad. I think I have an idea for a solution.

One of the proposed (and subsequently squashed) solutions offered up by SixApart is perhaps that each commenter have to register with each site in order to comment. This sucks, and everyone knows it. But what if you could sign on once and be able to comment everywhere? This is called identity federation, and it could work.

What's identity federation, you ask? Well, as Ping Identity Corp is a major client of mine, I'll tell you. In essence, the simplest form of identity federation is the ability to single sign-on to multiple, cross-domain web applications. Create an account on one system, link it to an account on another and voila: once you're signed into one, you're immediately signed into the other. I'm not really qualified to go into the hows and whys of this, but suffice it to say that SourceID is at the heart of it all, adheres to the Liberty standard and is implemented in Java and .NET. A PHP5 version should happen soon, I assume. In essence, each application has to be registered with an identity federation that includes all the applications in a 'trusted circle' of sorts.

So what do single sign-on and identity federation have to do with blogs, you ask? Well, I'll tell you that, too. Say SixApart runs a centralized identity repository. And say PHP or perl someday in the near future include a way to check credentials against this repository the way SourceID.Java and SourceID.NET do. And say Movable Type's (or your) database system allows for instant identity provisioning (creation and destruction of temporary identities on a given system). You sign in once to SixApart's application (which in this case would pretty much just exist to authenticate you), and immediately you're authenticated to any system that would run the (open-source) SourceID protocol and are registered with the central federation. This could be built into home-rolled systems as well as MT or TypePad.

And then let's say that some of the prominent players in the field (say, AOL, Yahoo, Google, and other large companies developing blog apps) get in on the thing and share the identity repository across multiple domains and servers; sharing the load required to run such a distributed application.

You'd have an almost user-transparent, reliable, redundant, open-source, highly-customizable way to authenticate commenting and discussion among weblogs. And given the nature of the internet, you'd probably end up with a whole lot more as well.

Wandering around Apple's website recently, I stumbled upons Xsan, their in-development foray into Storage Area Networks. This product and microsite are both a wild departure for Apple for a number of reasons. 1. They're telling us about something way in advance. We can't get next-gen G5 release dates, but we know about Xsan before it's available. 2. It's enterprise-level stuff. You have to be a badass with networks and storage and servers to get it. Except maybe now with Apple's GUI tools it'll be a little easier, but still not easy.

I've done work for SAN companies before, and the networks are just expansive and vast in their capabilities but also in price. $999 ain't bad for software to manage one. One of my prior clients sells usability-deficient stuff for probably much, much more. If Apple can seriously reduce the cost of SAN management, it'll be a boon to their enterprise market. Unsurprisingly enough, it only works on Xserve RAIDs and Xserves.

I'm not trying to be negative here, but what happens if Xsan goes the way of NetInfo, WebObjects, MacOS X Server 1.2, A/UX, and all of Apple's other enterprise-level products that went virtually unknown and some of which that died? Are enterprises even considering Macs or Xserves for mission-critical applications? I do little work in this field now and I'm not sure Apple's in the IT mind yet as a solution to take seriously. I just wonder how difficult it'll be to start competing with EMC, StorageTek, Sun, HP and other companies heavily embedded within the enterprise storage market.

One thing's for certain, though. Apple doesn't just make pretty iMacs anymore: Xsan includes high availability features to eliminate potential single points of failure, so you can use high performance storage networking for enterprise consolidation and network-attached storage (NAS) replacement projects. Xsan uses one system connected to the SAN, called a metadata controller, to manage access to shared storage. If this machine fails for any reason, Xsan picks another computer on the SAN to take over this role. Cascading metadata controller failover ensures that you can access your data as long as any one system on your SAN is active. In the event of a loose cable, Xsan uses multipathing to automatically route traffic to the system through a second cable on dual-port Apple Fibre Channel HBA. And during critical operations, you can clear a path on your SAN for any system using Xsan bandwidth reservation.

As reported over a year ago, Steve Burns, ex-host of the long-running hit kids show Blue's Clues, realized that singing about mail time and talking to animated salt and pepper shakers wasn't really a long-term goal of his, struck out to become a rock 'n roll star. That was in 2002.

His album Songs for Dustmites was recently released, and despite my best efforts to pick it up on the iTMS, I had to actually walk into a Tower Records (shiver) to actually pick up the actual album that contained an actual CD. I know, awkward.

Anyway, it's really damn good. Check out the audio samples (in Flash) on that site and you'll most likely agree. Yes, it's Flaming Lips-ish but this is more than likely attributed to Steven Drozd's help on more than a few of the songs, and yes, the ones attributed to him helping are most often the better tracks, but not a single one disappoints.

Does it rock hard? Not really. It's very airy and experimental, but is a joy to listen to.

Meanwhile, in everything's-animated-except-the-host-land, there's a new host for Blue's Clues, and his name's Joe, apparently Steve's brother or something. I watched Steve's farewell episode but am a little hazy on exactly what reason was fed to the kids to accept his departure wherein he goes to college and Blue is even given a tour of the dorm. Incedentally, however, it was time for Blue's birthday again recently and Steve even made a phoned-in (literally) appearance.

Richard Forno's response to last week's latest Mac-bashing tripe. Who's Richard Forno, you ask? Just a security technologist, author, and the former Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions.

Lance also fails to recognize that Windows and Mac OS are different not just by vendor and market share, but by the fundamental way that they're designed, developed, tested, and supported. By integrating Internet Explorer, Media Player, and any number of other 'extras' (such as VB Script and ActiveX) into the operating system to lock out competitors, Microsoft knowingly inflicts many of its security vulnerabilities onto itself.  As a result, its desire to achieve marketplace dominance over all facets of a user's system has created a situation that's anything but trustworthy or conducive to stable, secure computing.  Mac users are free to use whatever browser, e-mail client, or media player they want, and the system accepts (and more importantly, remembers!) their choice.

...

If Lance is sleeping well believing that he's on an equal level with the Mac regarding system security, he can crow about not being overly embarrassed while working on the only mainstream operating system that, among other high-profile incidents over the years, facilitated remote system exploitation through a word processor's clip art function

One thing I noticed while reading the original "article" was this pervasive idea:
I was tired of the "We use Macs because they don't get attacked by viruses and hackers" refrain from Mac nuts. I generally counter with what is apparently a secret carefully hidden from Mac zealots: "That's because only a fraction of the world uses Macs. What's the point of attacking a niche market? No one will notice!"

What's the problem with this? He seems to think that because the entire mediocre business world relies on Windows and is ritualistically attacked by teenage hackers and worm-writers, that Windows is better to run. Like I care about the reason why no one writes virii for my OS. They don't exist, it hardly matters that (he thinks) it's because there are relatively few of us.

Ok, because my main tower has 3 hard drives and I didn't want to buy a controller, the third hard drive (the smallest and least-important) is running on the ATAPI bus, where the CDROM was. I say 'was' because apparently running a CDROM and an HD on that ATAPI bus is 'not supported' by Apple or their implementation of ATAPI. This means that when I have the third hard drive plugged in, I don't have the CD at my disposal.

Anyway, so I use the iBook's CD drive, and connect to the mounted disc over the network. Nothing brain-busting here.

However, what's incredible is that I just initiated an install over the network, and my wife closed the iBook, effectively putting it to sleep, taking away the CD for my use. I look at the installer and, unsurprisingy, it's hanging, not responding, and not installing anymore, just stopped at whatever percent, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, as it's being run from a machine that is now no longer itself running.

I turn the iBook back on and within seconds, it's running again and installing the very same point it left off. No re-mounting the disc, or starting the install over. Astounding.

While searching for KungTunes, an iTunes to web synchronizer, I came across Flexistentialist and was amazed by what I found when clicking the link from Google:

How awesome is that? Especially after doing log analyses yesterday and coming across referrer after referrer, whose sites don't have archives or searches, and the homepage was listed as the referring page. Many links to Alternate were from 1 day past the threshold. Also, many blogger and MT archive links simply did not work in Safari, as they utilized JavaScript and for some reason kept sending me back to the homepage. Oh well. The cool thing about OpenAlernate is that each post also exists as an index-able page, so most search results and referrers don't go to the homepage, but to each post's specific comments/permalink page.

Anyway, just wanted to share in the coolness.

I find it odd that Microsoft is basically bashing Mac OS X and yet at the same time copying it and taking until 2006 to do it.

Weaksauce.

In addition to the underlying WinFS technology, Microsoft is also adding a new file system concept called Libraries, which will organize like collections of data in Longhorn, regardless of where they are physically stored in the system. For example, a Photos & Movies Library would collect links to every digital photo and digital video on your system.

"I should not care about location when I save," says Microsoft VP Chris Jones. "Why can't I just click on my computer and it shows me my documents? It is a computer. It should know what a document is, what I have edited and annotated, what I have searched for before, and what other places I have looked for documents. It is not just documents on my computer I am looking for. It is documents I care about."

Now, is it just me or do "Libraries" sound like iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, New Finder, Playlists, etc...

Also, the usability/searchability comment is almost word for word what Steve already said a couple years ago.

I understand that both Blink 182 and The Cure are bands that make me a loser. I'm over it, you should be too.

Anyway, the latest Blink album, imaginatively titled "blink 182" includes a bizarre cameo. From Robert Smith:
Partially inspired by lifestyle changes--all three members became fathers recently--and side projects, this new untitled CD sports a spoken word piece, plus guest vocals by The Cure's Robert Smith on "All of This." "We don't have any joke songs or anything like that on the record," says bassist Hoppus. "On the other albums, we'd have 12 songs on them and two of them would be the joke songs."
Does this seem just a little odd to anyone else? And I gotta say, the album is pretty good, for pop-punk. Is it Ned's Atomic Dustbin? No. Is it over-produced? Yes. But the emotion is back, and the songs actually sound different from their other songs, unlike the last album which was basically a re-hashing of old riffs with new lyrics and slicker production.

Anyway, the Robert Smith cameo was one I was not expecting and it's a relatively welcome clash of two worlds for me. Hits kinda closer to home in couple ways. I wonder if David Proulx is still hanging around them these days...

As we have common friends, I read Douglas Bowman's weblog every few days. I have to say that I'm happy he's switched back to Mac. As a designer/developer-ish kinda guy, I'm not surprised. MacOS X combines everything you need for most tasks involved in that kind of work in a very nice and fun-to-use package. So in an attempt to offer you some more fair and balanced look at how people move to the Mac and how they feel once they're there (frustrations and all), check out that link. That's the kind of post/comment combo I'm happier to see these days (check out my comment here for what I mean.)

1. Invoke Exposé via a mouse gesture
2. Hit command-tab and
3. Select an appliction with it, that
4. Then, you'll end up with an Exposéd list of every document in that application. Click the window you want.

Sounds complicated, but it really isnt, since it uses mouse gestures (very easy to work into your workflow) and a keybaord shortcut already in use. If you really wanted to get fancy with it, you could use the arrow keys once you have one application's windows open to select a window, and spacebar to select it. Again, sounds complicated; isn't.

Is this exactly what Kottke's whining about? No, but it's the closest Mac-native implementation he's going to get. Don't hold your breath for Apple to dive into a window-centric behavior like the one he's describing. Exposé's 'Show all windows' feature and this use of it, is the only way for Apple to do it (built into the OS at least) due to their HIG, which states that the MacOS is document and application centric, not window-centric. You use an application to edit documents, not your operating system to edit your windows. I'm not doing a very good explanation of that concept. I'll see if I can try to find something a little more concise...

Apple actually cares about this sort of thing. Which is odd. Which is rare. Which is why they deserve gushing adulation now and then. They actually put the time and energy and labor into creating a gorgeous package most people will toss anyway, and why they include a first-time welcome experience, with subtle music, with flowing lush clean graphics, one that will never be repeated, just because.

This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil

These are the things that are nearly dead in our mass-consumer culture, things normally reserved for elitist niche markets and swanky boutiques and upscale yuppie Euro spas and maybe cool insider mags like I-D and Metropolis and dwell. They are most definitely not to be expected of mass-market gadget makers. This is why it matters. This is why it's important.

Aw. Look at that. His first Mac. Welcome to the real world, child.

Did you know that HyperCard is still sold by Apple? HyperCard! Christ. I was trying to explain it to my brother the other day; he'd never even heard of it. How about you? Did you go to a computer/math/science magnet junior high school too? Did you use HyperCard to create interactive games based on *cough*Dragonlance*cough* ? Sigh. Apparently now, HyperCard can use embedded QuickTime movies and can be exported to the web. And can have color. Them's the upgrades. I used this thing like maybe 11 years ago and that's all that's new. It's version 2.4.1. The page on Apple's 2003 website suggests hosting it on WebStar, an OS 9 webserver.

This all comes because John Sculley thinks HyperCard should have been used better by Apple. Gee. Ya don't say. It was great technology for the time, if they'd just given it network ability it may have lasted longer. Yet another thing Apple did right before anyone else. And then figured wasn't that important. Can you say Newton?

Via SVN (you don't need a link, you know where it is): Macromedia Central: a Sherlock-style app. Written. In. Flash. A desktop app. Written in Flash.

You can downlaod and install it via a Flash UI within the webpage which seems scary and cool to me at the same time. The app runs and...

Not as good as Sherlock. Its very impressive that it's Flash, but it has a few major shortfalls for me:

Unresponsive UI
Aliased text
UI is a little too much like a web-app for me to want to have on my desktop
I just don't dig mouse-overs on scrollbars. That feels wrong to me
It seems to make everything else running hang a little bit. Uncool.

Now, that's not to say it doesn't have its pros. Tha data transfer is faster than you'd expect. The Flash movement in the UI is nice, but I prefer Aqua's smooth transitions to Flash's clunky ones. Also, I don't use applications because of the fact that it's neat they're written the way that they are.

Of course I could also spend more than 10 minutse in it before passing judgement. Go see for yourself.

So in order to offset my last post with something to prove Alternate's not dying, I'm going to spackle you with my latest impressions of Panther.

No. I'm not a developer. Yes, it was procured with BitTorrent. Now hush.

First thing a lot of people want to know about is the Finder. I love it. The action menu mirrors the functionality of a right- or control-click, I've never really used it, but I could see a first-time user getting the hang of it. The customizable sidebar is a thousand times more easy to use that the regular ole Cocoa top-bar in Jaguar. In my build (7b44), you can set the folder a new Finder window will open. No more choosing between Home and Computer anymore! I have mine set to "Current Projects" which is managed by a PHP script I wrote. The new Open/Save dialog boxes go along with this, as they use a similar UI. Shortcuts on the left, browsing on the right in one of the three different metaphors. If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself not using the Open dialog much anymore because...

...Exposê makes the Finder instantly and insanely accessible. I use my Desktop again! Just slide the mouse down to the bottom-right corner and I have my Desktop available, with all my other windows' edges a wee bit visible and lower opacity clinging to the screens edges. Click the Finder icon in the dock and get a new Finder window by itself (which, again, opens up Current Projects), find the file I'm looking for, double-click it or drag it over to its respective app icon, and all my windows come sliding back, and my app is opening the file. I use the desktop show thingy much more than the much-touted all-window minimizer, which in my opinion, takes too long to find the window you're looking for, as there's no predictable place for your window to end up. Yes, it'll go to the same place every time given an almost-same number of windows but when you a. have a million windows to choose from and b. use a 1600x1200 resolution, each window is barely discernable from the next and you really only know which one you're selecting because of the mouseover that tells you the window's name. Like I said, I don't use it. When I use someone else's machine with Jaguar though, I find myself intuitively mousing over the bottom right to get the desktop, and when nothing happens, I get disappointed. I think that's a big point to make: mouse gestures were so easily implemented into my workflow that I end up really more dependent on them that I expected I ever would be.

Speed: I'm like 10 releases behind, and I see no reason to try to find the newest ones. This thing is fast. My aging 533 with 896mb of RAM was like a brand-new machine, easily equaling a 667 or 733 machine with Jaguar. I see speed increases easily in the 20-30% range, with Photoshop 7 being the most welcome. Save For Web comes up instantly, etc.

The general UI is cleaner than Jaguar and definitely feels more professional without all those stripes. The new tabs are very nice and the darker wells/fieldset-type backgrounds are very striking.

The only apps that don't work from Jaguar are the Apple-issued ones (iTunes, iMovie, iChat, Safari) and you have to use Panther-specific versions of those. Otherwise, application support is phenomenal. There were a few UI bugs in BBEdit but they seem to have been squashed, minus the ever-annoying and really stupid one where when I command-tab from BBEdit to Safari and hit Reload, my keyboard stops working. Other than that, this OS is a dream to use and will definitely be worth whatever it costs when it comes out, which, despite what your opinion may be, I will certainly pay. I've paid for every major MacOS upgrade since 8.0. So nyeh.

-- originally written by John Gruber
-- at daringfireball.net to just be an
-- empty text field
-- edited by kevin conboy at alternate.org
--to automatically take the top-most URL in safari
-- DOES NOT WORK WITH SAFARI'S TABS
-- I'm sure someone can get it to work with
-- GUI Scripting beta, though

tell application "System Events"
	set proclist to creator type of every process
	if proclist contains "sfri" then
		tell application "Safari"
			set safari_url to URL of document 1
		end tell
	else
		set safari_url to ""
	end if
end tell


tell application "BBEdit"
	set my_result to display dialog ¬
		"URL:" default answer safari_url ¬
		buttons {"Cancel", "With Headers", "Grab Source"}¬
default button 3
	set my_url to the text returned of my_result

	if button returned of my_result is "With Headers" then
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl -i " & my_url)
	else
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl " & my_url)
	end if

	make new text window with properties {contents:my_text,¬
name:my_url}
	select insertion point before character 1 of text window 1
end tell

Re: Photoshon 8 Screenshots

Dear Sir or Madam::

Please find attached a copy of the above-referenced article currently posted on the Alternate website. Adobe cannot and will not confirm or deny the accuracy of any rumor posted on your site. Nonetheless, the article contains confidential information, UI designs and other artwork owned by Adobe that were either directly misappropriated by you or were provided to you by a source in breach of a confidentiality agreement with Adobe. We have not granted you permission to publish these materials and in doing so you infringe upon our trade secret rights and copyrights.

Your publication of unsubstantiated rumors and Adobe intellectual property directly damages our business interests and puts us at a disadvantage vi+his our competitors.

Adobe requests that you immediately remove the above-referenced article from your website and not further disseminate or disclose such article or its contents to any other party. This includes dissemination or disclosure to other rumor sites. Adobe also requests that you not publish or otherwise disclose any other Adobe designs or artwork without its permission, and that you not publish other information about upcoming versions of Adobe products that you know or should know is confidential and proprietary to Adobe. Please confirm your compliance with the foregoing.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter. You may contact me with any questions or comments you have.

From our namespace cousins at Alternet.org: The Matrix's Neo is the Hero of My Generation.

There are some fundamnetal flaws in it, and some glazing over of deeper issues, but he does say one thing in particular that feels familiar:

That may be the big joke behind the Matrix. Even those who are trying to step out of the system step back into it when they buy the ticket. The movie has become another a product for sale. But to me, Neo can't be co-opted.

My generation has been through this in the past. We've seen culture and ideas we identify with sold back to us, like graffiti, hip-hop or skateboarding. Big-time industries only see the surface, and not the deeper reasons why they resonate with us. Corporations see the Matrix as cool martial arts, leather trench coats and shades - but we see an idea that finally defines that feeling that this society is fake. Even if the movie comes from Hollywood.

Thoughts? Is Neo someone with a vision, the inspiration from him taken directly from Shepard Fairey or Shawn Wolfe; he sees through the bullshit? Or is it really about kicking ass while wearing trenchcoats and sunglasses in the dark?

So ... iTunes 4 lets you listen to your friends music as long as they have a real IP and iTunes music sharing enabled. This is done via a protocol called daap. iTunes and daap of course, DO NOT allow you to copy the music you are listenging to, ONLY stream it.


Today, I stumbled upon the new version of iLeech, this handy little Application simply copies those files as you stream them with out the need for a stream ripper or archiver... meaning its the original quality, NOT the streamed quality.

You can use Google.com to find websites that list daap servers that are available and online.

Gotta love the 'net.

No one is going to be interested in this, I bet, but John over at Daring Fireball ruminates on one of Safari's implementation of tabs's only faults:no AppleScript support. This might be too geeky even for Alternate, but I thought it was interesting, only because I'm trying to write an AppleScript Studio app that allows me to post to Alternate via my desktop, and having access to Safari's tabs is a major part of it. I've considered switching to MovableType in order to use the myriad of XML-RPC apps that support it, but I'd really rather have all of Alternate be hand-rolled. Call it a pride thing.

Yeah, see, people who don't spend all day trying to fiddle with config files on Linux have things like "leisure time". In that time you can choose to do things besides attempt to build libfrobber-0.0.1alpha from source. One of those things is called "watching television", where someone sends pictures to a display box in your home. It's a lot like downloading pirated dvd's off the internet, but without having to recompile mplayer source to see it.

From this relatively uninteresting thread on Slashdot. That's funny stuff. If you don't get it, I really wish you could but won't spend the time to explain it because then I'd realize what a geek I truly am.

Macromedia links Flash apps to data.

My thoughts as I'm reading this: Sounds good, sounds good, sounds about right, hrm,, no direct MySQL support, sounds good, sounds good, ColdFusion? People still use that? Sounds good, sounds good... $999 price tag for Flash Remoting? Good luck, Macromedia.

Just as they always do, Macromedia comes really close to getting something.. then just leaves you feeling screwed. To use PHP/MySQL, you still have to go through the still-required extra steps of taking MySQL data into XML, and writing your own ActionScript parser just so you can get nifty vector animations along with your dynamic data in the same compiled binary file.

Macromedia's latest efforts would have you (if you feel like paying a ton of money instead) buy a ColdFusion license for at least $1299, or as much as $4999 (depending on the level of quality you need), buy a MSSQL Server license for at least $4999/processor, buy Windows 2000 server for $1199 to run the entire thing on....PLUS the $999 for Flash Remoting.

On the other hand (back to PHP), you could just write some XML-parsing code in ActionScript and some MySQL-XML translating code in PHP. Run it on Linux. Licensing fees? Nada. Massive development environment? Nope. Expensive production environment? Perhaps, but still not on-par with the Windows/ColdFusion world.

Or you could just use XHTML, forego the animation and buzzwords and get your files down to like 4k instead of 400k. Skip the XML step and get dyanamic data in its native form into your native code.

Why was I excited about Flash again? Oh, right. Because it takes 3x as long for me to produce so I get paid 3x the amount. Right.

Microsoft at has 9.5 million different versions of Windows.

By current count, Microsoft offers about a half-dozen different versions each of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows CE .Net. Microsoft also considers Windows 2000 still to be a "current" product. Including the 64-bit editions, Microsoft also offers about six different Windows 2000 versions, bringing the total to about 24.
I'm still waiting for Windows RG, the one that's supposed to work.

Also, previously forgotten until now, I was at the movie theater here, where pre-purchased tickets over the internet are redeemed at little stations placed in the lobby. When I went to use my credit card to have the machine print out my tickets, I was greeted with a nice little Windows CE logo combined with some insipid tagline on how great my life was going to be now that Windows CE was in it. Under which was an also-informative message that Windows CE had encountered a general protection fault error and needed maintenance. Of course, this meant I had to speak with an actual person, after waiting in line with actual people, which is never a pleasant experience.

Daring Fireball: Translation of Selected Portions of Last Week’s ‘QuarkXPress 6 Feature Overview’ Announcement from PR-Speak to English

The many improvements to the QuarkXPress Web features make it even easier for publishers to create Web designs and re-use print content on the Web. Print layouts can be converted to Web layouts in a matter of mouse clicks, or designers can create new Web designs using the familiar QuarkXPress tools and interface.

We are plowing full steam ahead under the delusion that our users want to use a print-oriented page-layout program for web design. By placing extra emphasis on these unwanted web features, we hope to distract your attention from a certain upstart page layout application, which is focused squarely and solely on page layout.

There is one PDA I can think of where you can install applications to memory cards with no consequences. Here's a hint: It starts with "N", ends with "n", and has "ewto" in the middle. What a surprise. Add it to the list of things Apple got right 10 years ago that no other vendor has managed since. Sing it, brother. Steven (the guy that brought you Transmit and Audion) waxes technological about the shortcomings of 'modern' PDAs. I really should just up and buy a Newton.

I have no idea how to even begin describing Konfabulator. It's a development platform, it's a handy toolkit, its possibiities are wide-open. Basically, you download the Konfabulator software, which then in turn runs 'widgets' that you can download through the software or via the web. It runs software that is written with a combination of XML, Javascript and Applescript. Wait a minute.. I kind of know those three... maybe you'll see a widget from me. I'm currently running a nifty little task tracker and a translucent weather display.

Welcome back. Things have changed a bit, as you might have noticed. The survey and search are gone for now, but they'll be back momentarily. There's a new feature over there on the right, the 'Latest Links' section. It's basically a regular expression that parses posts and provides you, the reader, with the 10 latest links posted. New codebase and a new design were a little overdue, as the 'blue mac' design was launched just about 2 years ago. Let us know what you think as long you like it.

Someone please shut this guy up. Like with a shotgun.

While sound and sight go hand-in-hand in most mediums, until recently web publishers practically forbade advertisers from using audio in standard web advertising. Not any more.

I can barely deal with the NewsToday chime when it loads in a background tab. I can't even imagine how awful ads with sound would be. Oh wait -- yes I can... Ater using Earthlink's portal for a few months when I was a subscriber, they added a Flash ad to the top of the main page. Every time you loaded it (which because it was a portal homepage was often) the animation started over again, including the sound. I quickly switched to my.yahoo.com.

From Yahoo:

Technically speaking, Moller's SkyCar is a "volantor," which is defined as "a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that is capable of flying in a quick, nimble, and agile manner." Volantors work much like the British Harrier Jump Jet. They use a directional thrust system that lets the vehicle take off and land vertically, hover in place, or shoot forward by redirecting the thrust of the engine. This gives the volantor the flexibility of a helicopter without losing the fast speed of a high-performance aircraft.

It is just me, or does this sound like a really bad idea? How many drunk-driving or stupidity-influenced DRIVING accidents are there each year? Now we think we can take to the skies, like any trained pilot? Doubtful. Just this last weekend, I saw a woman go into a tailspin at 65+ mph on I-25 for no reason. There was no one around her. It seemed she just wasn't paying attention, or her car malfunctioned for some reason... BOTH of which are valid points for why the dream of the guy on the IBM commercials ("I wanted flying cars. WHERE are my flying cars?") won't come true, I think.

From the mouth of Apple:

Apple currently has around 5% market share in personal computers. This means that out of one hundred computer users, five of them use Macs. While that may not sound like a lot, it is actually higher than both BMW’s and Mercedes-Benz’s share of the automotive market. And it equals 25 million customers around the world using Macs.

A pretty frank statement about the opening of two Apple stores this weekend, with a virtual tour of it. Nice. I can't wait for the CO one to open.

So.. those of you who slipped in and have taken a look at Deeperhue in the past week or so have found that the new design was up... Aw, but it's down now. Why? Because I did something so radical, so insane, that it just has to wait til the May 1 Reboot for you to see it.

*Note: It's actually not that big a deal, and this is in fact just a way to generate hype around my new sub-par portfolio site.

Okay, so I'm sure you've realized there's something going on here. I've got a clue for you: we've redesigned the site. I got a little bored this Sunday, so voila. New Alternate. Let us know what you think.

The links at the top won't work, because well, I wasn't THAT motivated. Give us a little time, and you'll have full-on rockin' site back together in no time (let's be honest: you really didn't use those sections, anyway, did you? I didn't think so).