Last night I slept for 6 hours 51 minutes, 7 minutes under my monthly average. Decent quality for most of it, looking at the graph. Tap another app: today I’ve consumed 16 oz of coffee (4 calories, since I drink my coffee black.) Better log another cup – those seven minutes are taking a toll.

If I felt like it, I could post graphs of these patterns to Facebook, to bore my Friends with the minutia of my statistical existence.

Or I could think about why I monitor these things in the first place.

There’s a terrific New York Times article from about a year ago called “The Data-Driven Life” on this self-measurement phenomenon. At the time, I thought the tracker lifestyle was pretty bizarre. A few apps later and a quote from the story rings true:

I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.

I’m not a true believer yet – and I doubt I’ll ever be a person who creates a statistical analysis of how daily butter intake changes my arithmetic speed. But I started tracking to wean myself off of caffeine, and it’s worked. Unchecked, I consume it like a fiend. Logging every diet soda keeps me from overindulging. Then I wanted to see if my sleep improved on days I drank less caffeine (it does!). The daily graphs have taught me how I sleep and how often I sleep — and how to improve them.

Now if I can only remember to track my hours at work…

Back in the days of our CEES iPrep app, Apple made it kind of a pain to distribute works outside of the App Store. Businesses that wanted to create internal tools had use ad-hoc builds — a process that’s pretty difficult for even tech-savvy clients.

Someone at Apple woke up and realized that internal business apps needed their own tools. Enter the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
Continue Reading →

Curtis asked me to write about the “big crunch/big bang” of digital content distribution.  I think this is a wonderful topic, but not something I can address at the moment. I would like to do a fair bit of research and reflection before tackling the subject. In the meantime, here is something completely unrelated. A couple of weeks ago I swear I saw a post in the NASA twitter feed that contained a nasa.gov branded shortened URL. I have combed the hundreds of posts from that time period but can’t seem to find it; perhaps I imagined it. Maybe I am crazy… like a fox.

Continue Reading →

A friend put me on to an HTML5 <canvas> tag demo that looks like Doom and doesn’t use anything even resembling flash: http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/.

Clearly you’ll need an HTML5-ready browser if you want to play (with) it.  It’s interesting enough, especially if you’re from the generation that grew up with Doom (and Marathon, for those of you who were Mac users before it was cool).  As my friend noted, it even includes “5D space.”

What really precipitated from this sharing between gamers-cum-developers was a discussion about Adobe and their future. The gist of our tête-à-tête was the increasing capabilities of simple HTML, and the subsequent lessening of importance for Flash, as the standard grows.

Continue Reading →

Román Cortés’ 3D Coke Can… entirely done in CSS

I’ve been following Román Cortés’ blog for some time now, as much for some reading en español as for the artistic and development-related content. I think the first post of his I saw was a reblogged copy of his CSS Homer, which shows Homer Simpson’s iconic face created entirely with textual and CSS elements. A nifty trick.

Recently, Román has continued his CSS explorations with some really fascinating, if not particularly practical, tricks and even forays into CSS2.

Continue Reading →

Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered. Continue Reading →

Designing for the web comes with a unique set of challenges and thus has its own ‘charm’. User interactivity, browser compatibility, connection speed, color calibration, flash, html, css… these are all factors that have to be accounted for when building a web page. (Each of these may become their own topic of discussion in time.) The sheer number of variables to control can make the process extremely tedious.

The technology underlying these variables is extremely new and is constantly changing. It’s a little bit of a ‘wild west’ environment. So, understandably, many of the people who commission web work are still a bit new to the whole thing and, therefore, it falls on designers and developers to educate and guide them through the process. Overall, it’s a rewarding experience. But you do sometimes have to overcome certain preconceptions that people carry over from their days in traditional media.

Continue Reading →

How do you organize 15 years of documentation ranging from mundane how-to procedures for printing color documents to sensitive project information and vital work flow documentation, that need to be accessible to everyone in your exceedingly mobile and collaborative work environment?

You create a WiKi, and that’s exactly what we at Manning Productions have been working on in our spare time over the course of the past few months.

A Whaty? A Wiki

As defined by Wikipedia the unequivocal leader in wiki-mentation, a wiki is…

“…a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content… Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites… The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.”

I don’t know if I can explain it any better myself, but in other words, a Wiki is an online collection of information that is easily updated and referenced by everyone in your work-group.  It is not platform dependent, meaning Windows, and Apple computer users have equal access, and it can be password protected to secure vital information, allowing access to only those with a valid password a login.

Why Wiki? Because We Share.

We have always had shared storage at Manning, but for some office organization and procedural documents we wanted the ability to have one single set of files, stored within one location that any Manning employee could update and have access to at any given time, in or out of the office. That way we aren’t looking through several folders and 20 versions of a document for information. It’s a one-stop shop for info that we all need access to. Plus, its less cumbersome to track down and update procedural information, meaning people are more likely to make those corrections on a regular basis. So, for example, if we get a new phone system we can change the directions for using that phone system on the Wiki easily.

So as our Thanksgiving holiday approaches this year we give thanks to our Wiki!

Earlier this week while everyone was still focused on Hurricane Gustav, news broke that sent the blogosphere into pandemonium. Fortunately, I’m not talking about the election. Google released the beta version of its new web browser Chrome.

Besides being beautiful and fast, in theory it should prevent applications in one tab from crashing another. But this brings me to a different discussion. Why are all Web browser icons circular in shape? Look at Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer and now Chrome. What’s that all about? And doesn’t the Chrome logo look like the game Simon?

Here’s a little tip that can save you some time and money. I received a request today from a client of ours to add a small PDF icon to a downloadable PDF on their website. “No problem,” I thought at first, but then it occurred to me, “What would happen if there were more than one PDF on the site? Wouldn’t it be weird if this is the only PDF with an icon?”

So after a quick Google search for “Automatic icons with css” I followed the top hit, Automatic Link Icons v2.0, a blog post with a set of step by step directions to do exactly what I was looking for; adding this icon to every PDF file in the site without having to go back through and recode hundreds of links. The most amazing part? This works without changing any HTML code within the site. So I figured I’d give it a shot. All you need to do is add a simple style to your style sheet, upload the icon of your choice and Voila! You’re done!

First I’ll show you the code, then explain how it works.

a[href$='.pdf'] {
display:inline-block;
padding:2px 15px 2px 0px;
line-height:18px;
min-height:18px;
overflow:visible;
background:transparent url(images/icons/pdf.gif) center right no-repeat;
}

For anyone familiar with CSS, you’ll notice this looks pretty standard. However the first line, the selector, that’s where the magic happens.

a[href$='.pdf'] {

This is actually a conditional statement that will find all the links in your site ending with a .pdf file extension. That’s the beauty of it. Now that we have only .pdf files selected we have the ability to style those using CSS anyway we see fit. This is allows us to seek out and find every instance of a PDF file within the site like the find and replace function in Microsoft Word. Imagine all the brain cells saved by not spending hours upon hours relabeling every link to a pdf class=”pdf”. This is the perfect retro-fit!

And it is not limited to PDF files either. You can add icons to: mailto’s test@email.com, RSS Feeds, even Zip Files. Your options are only limited to your imagination and your CSS coding techniques!