How Pixar almost lost Toy Story 2 to a bad backup
May 16, 2012Pixar’s Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman recount how the files for Toy Story 2 were almost lost due to an accidental Linux command and bad backup.
The Making of the Leica M9-P »Edition Hermès« – Série Limitée Jean-Louis Dumas
If you’re a fan of handmade goodies, you might want to check out this video about the making of the Leica M9-P »Edition Hermès« – Série Limitée Jean-Louis Dumas. Also, if you’re a fan of Leica, you might want to check out the Leica’s M Monochrom Camera, which only shoots in black and white and will set you back about $8000.
RELATED: 1923 Leica O-Series camera sells for $2.79 million
May 14, 2012The frequent fliers who flew too much
Article from the Los Angeles Times, about people who bought the AAirpass, which are tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines.
May 7, 2012In the 2009 film ”Up in the Air, the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.
Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.
Qlocktwo W
If you were ever on the lookout for a handsome yet geeky watch, this my friend, is what you’ve been searching for. Available in English, German and French. While you’re there, checkout the Qlocktwo Touch as well.
The Nerd Handbook
I stumbled across this article recently and even though its a bit dated (almost five years), its very relevant to how “nerds” live and work.
May 2, 2012First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong.
Blackberry 10
RIM just announced its new platform based on QNX called the Blackberry 10 and it looks like RIM is focusing a lot on touch and gestures. To be honest though, from the short video in that article, it looks like the combination of typing and swiping on that keyboard would slow you down considerably as you have to search and select words while typing. Also, it looks like RIM made their design decisions based heavily on inspiration from the Windows Mobile and Android.
May 2, 2012Caine’s Arcade
Caine’s arcade is the story of a 9 year old boy who made a cardboard arcade in his dad’s used auto parts store but never managed to get enough customers to show off his skills. Thats until Nirvan Mullick stopped by and decided to send an entire flashmob to Caine’s arcade.
Apr 16, 2012Book review: Delivering Happiness
I just finished reading “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose” by Tony Hsieh, who is the CEO of Zappos.com. Although Tony did write this book, there are a lot personal excerpts from others who have worked for Zappos over the years. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a lot from this book, but I was very interested in seeing what made Amazon acquire Zappos for in an all-stock deal worth $1.2 billion in 2009.
One of the first things you’ll notice about the book is that its a very easy read. Tony breaks down most of the vocabulary down to layman’s terms and since most of the book involves personal stories and experiences, there aren’t a lot of technical verbiage anyway to confuse users. As he mentions in the book, this book was designed to be read by fellow Zappos employees, vendors and customers.
The title of the book is very apt for this book, as it deals a lot with what Tony and his team have done to achieve true happiness in the workplace. He not only focused on how to achieve happiness with his employees in the company and also their vendors, but also with their customers by focusing a large part of their company strategy on customer support. If you’re someone looking for ideas to achieve true happiness and bliss, I strongly recommend you pick this book.
Subtle Patterns
If you’re looking for a nice background texture for your next web project, subtlepatterns.com has some nice texture backgrounds for you to use.
Apr 16, 2012Silly list scroll effects
I’ve seen some crazy cool things being done with CSS3, but the silly list of scroll effects takes the cake. Checkout the main.css file for some fancy CSS work.
Apr 15, 2012City Transit Line posters
I’ve always been a sucker for maps to city transit lines. I think its because it has the ability to show something so complex in the most minimalist of ways. This shop on etsy.com has a few nicely designed posters and t-shirts of city transit maps from around the world.
Google begins testing its augmented-reality glasses
Google seems to be on a roll lately with all these new futuristic ventures. Their latest being wearable glasses that feature a heads-up display. Video and more information on nytimes.com
Apr 4, 2012The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.
Google’s self-driving car
This is astonishing. Although it isn’t as cool as the flying cars we were promised, it comes darn close to how futuristic it is.
Mar 29, 2012The Verge: Everything you need to know about buying a camera
The Verge has a pretty good list of things to know about cameras before buying one. Even if you do already consider yourself a pretty good shutterbug, its a nice list to refresh your memory.
Jan 6, 2012Road Inc.
Road Inc is a must have app if you own an iPad. Its an app thats sort of like an interactive coffee table book that showcases classic cars. You download tours of individual cars which includes a 360 degree view and a brief history about the car. A definite must have for any car enthusiast with an iPad.
“Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion.”
Moving to the cloud for music
I’ve recently made the drastic change of using cloud services for my music. I started by deleting all my music off my computer and resorted to using Rdio and SoundCloud to listen to my music. Rdio makes listening to music unbelievably easy with its massive library and easy to use interface. I pay a flat monthly fee to access their entire music collection. Rdio also has an awesome mobile app that lets me create playlists and listen to them when offline or stream directly from the Rdio service. Rdio even has some excellent social features thats lets me know what my friends are listening to and it also lets us collaborate on playlists and share music we like.
SoundCloud is another service I find myself using more frequently as more music artists use this service to share and crowdsource their music. Mainstream artists like Madonna, Beyoncé and Rihanna are also using Soundcloud to share popular tracks and showcase new exclusive tracks to their fans before releasing it. SoundCloud also has a very unique player that lets you add comments to any part of the track.
Its a bit scary too think we’re becoming so dependent on cloud services, in this case, to listen to music. But the convenience it adds is completely worth it especially when you have apps like Rdio and SoundCloud. With apps like Netflix and Hulu, I don’t think it will be too far along before watching movies and tv shows exclusively online will be a standard.
Path updates to version 2
Path, a mobile journal app that lets you share your moments with your friends, has updated to version 2 and it is one of the most beautiful mobile apps I’ve laid eyes on. One great example of clever design in this app is the small button in the bottom left corner you tap to share a photo or your current location. Or the way they display the time a post was made as you scroll down the page. Heres to hoping other apps find inspiration in this one.
Dec 2, 2011Spotify-Facebook Fiasco
This is getting a lot of publicity right now. Spotify is an online service which lets you pay about $10/month to listen to all the music you want on your desktop or mobile device. They recently changed their sign-up policy so that you now need a Facebook account to sign up for a spotify account, and a lot of people are upset.
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/can_you_sign_up_for_spotify_without_facebook
And more comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3038815
It will be interesting to see if they revert this update since Mr. Zuckerberg seems to endorse Spotify.
Sep 27, 2011Bootstrap, from Twitter
A really nice toolkit from the folks at Twitter which has a lot of elements that you’d commonly use on a site. I especially like the popovers and the alerts.
Sep 21, 20119 Things Designers Can Learn from Target’s Checkout Form
Have you seen the new target.com? If you haven’t, I would recommend you visit the site and look around, they’ve done some marvelous work. This article points out some interesting things about the checkout form that comes with the new design. Not surprised to see this from a company that pays good attention to design.
Sep 16, 2011Awesome Fontstacks – Easy way to find free web fonts.
I’ve been using this for a few sites including this one. It walks you through different steps and helps you picking fonts that compliment each other for different elements of the site. Also generates the CSS for you to paste into your own CSS file.
Sep 15, 2011Frank Chimero on Designers vs Coding
Frank Chimero has an excellent write-up that answers the age-old question of whether designers should learn how to code.
Sep 1, 2011Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside.
Techcrunch Cribs
I recently discovered Techcrunch Cribs, where Jason Kincaid takes you on a tour of tech startup offices. Some of these include Dropbox, Posterous and Tumblr.
Jul 30, 2011“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
