Today I had a wonderful, long conversation with the yearbook teacher and webmaster for one of our schools. Mostly it was polite complaining about how the people in charge just don't "get it" about marketing, customer service, and technology. Well, and leadership, if you ask me.

In our conversations about wanting to buy a content management system for her school's website, she decided to show me the website that her class uses to design their yearbook. Yes, they design their entire yearbook within a web-based application. So long, InDesign, these kids are designing in 100% dee-licious Web 2.0.

The site is called Yearbook Avenue and is a service of Jostens (who probably published my yearbooks, too, way back in the day). Unfortunately there isn't a demo login you can get access to unless you give them a call. So instead I've taken a few screencaps:

Why for fuck's sake are they still teaching people to use FrontPage, Publisher, Word, and PageMaker for fucking websites???!! Three of those four are for fucking PRINT publications, not web!!! Why the hell did Microsoft feel the need to put that flipping "Save as web page" function in there?????!!!!

If Bill Gates didn't do so much for charities I'd want to fucking beat his head in for all the shitty software he's pushed upon the moronic masses.

Would someone out there PLEASE make an application for people to make websites that is easy and not at godamn fucking shitty as Microsoft???

I'm a major information design junkie. I love intricate timelines and maps and anything color coded. So when I first saw Geni I just about fell off my bed.

 

As always, I'm a little late on this one. Geni was launched back in January 2007 and is the new way of creating your family tree online. Yes, there are still Ancestry.com and GenCircles and a few dozen software packages, including my former favorite Family Tree Legends.

But there are two major differences in Geni that make it better: 1. the user interface is highly intuitive and looks great, and 2. you can 'invite' family members via e-mail so that they can add to the tree as well! I immediately added my parents and before you know it my mom had added 35 new people to the tree!

 

 

 

I can't express how beautifully made this website is. This is information design at its best. Years ago for a college graphic design project I created my own family tree book with cards for each family member, but my attempt was no where near as wonderful as Geni.

And if you've already got your family tree in a gedcom-format database (created through many geneology software apps), and don't want to manually add each person to Geni, not to worry because the folks at Geni are working on a GEDCOM import/export feature. I can't wait!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night, while strolling through my Digg RSS feed, I came across a link to ustream.tv. Intrigued, I went to the site and watched Chris Pirillo and friends (lots of friends) as they all talked geek to one another for hours via live streams of their own webcams. Yes, ustream.tv allows anyone with a webcam and a capable highspeed connection to stream themselves over the internet.

The site, to me, seemed like a mix of a number of ideas. The site design and the name (obviously) follow the lead of YouTube. One of the best features is the ability to embed a stream into another site. The guys (and gal) of Hak5 took full advantage of this feature by embedding a number of streams all on one page, a la Brady Bunch.

 

 

The integration of a live "broadcast" and a chat interface also reminded me of TalkShoe. The only difference being that with TalkShoe you have to download their software to join the chat and hear the audio broadcast. ustream.tv, however, is all web-based. If you ask me, TalkShoe must be wetting their pants over this. 

So, what does this mean other than a bunch of geeks will get to show each other that they can put shoes on their heads all at the same time? One thing I've already mentioned: TalkShoe is toast, at least for those web celebs who consider themselves pretty enough for the camera. Example? Here's Leo Laporte live streaming his conversation with the TWiT crew on the 2nd anniversary of their podcast.

 

I just found the best and easiest resource for stripping audio from YouTube videos. I hate having to download a piece of software for something I'll probably need to do only once. So instead I looked for a site that would do it for me, and voila I found one: www.vixy.net.

Just plug in the URL for the video page and in a minute or two you've got yourself a nice mp3.

One word of caution: the video I stripped was 3 mins 15 secs long, but the mp3 file shows 27 mins when I plugged it into my iTunes library. No matter to me, it still plays just fine and goes on to the next song when the 3 mins 15 sec is over.

And no, I wasn't stripping anything that I could have bought on CD or online. Well, maybe I could have bought it if I was in Romania.

Here's the song I was stripping. It's the wonderful 3-year-old Cleopatra Stratan singing "Ghita." That's Romanian, by the way. My new favorite language!

 
 

Here are the lyrics:

Romanian lyrics:

Hainita sta in cui
Afara soare nu-i
Nimic nu-i bun de cand
Ma gandesc la Ghita
Dar Ghita nu-i in sat
Eu m-am interesat
Imi pare ca-i plecat
Dupa granita...
Greu, tare mi-i de greu,
Vreau, da nu stiu ce vreau;
Stiu ca si tu ma placi
Spune, Ghita, ce tu taci?
Ori vina ori ti du
Ori spune da ori nu
Eu te rog nu ma-nerva
Ghita ce-i cu viata ta?

REF: Ghita, te-astept diseara la portita
Langa portita de la scoala
Vino da numa nu vini cum vii tu
De obicei cu mana goala
Cine te mai asteapta ca si mine
O seara intreaga numai pe tine.
Ghita, arata-mi tu o fata care
Sa te iubeasca asa de tare!

Ghita, te-astept diseara la portita
Langa portita de la scoala
Vino da numa nu vini cum vii tu
De obicei cu mana goala
Cine te mai asteapta ca si mine
O seara intreaga numai pe tine.
Ghita, arata-mi tu o fata care
Sa te iubeasca asa de tare!

Ghita, te-astept diseara la portita
Langa portita de la scoala
Vino da numa nu vini cum vii tu
De obicei cu mana goala
Cine te mai asteapta ca si mine
O seara intreaga numai pe tine.
Ghita, arata-mi tu o fata care
Sa te ïubeasca asa de tare!


Lyrics translated in English:

My coat is on the hook
The sun seems to be doomed
And nothing’s really good.
I often think of Ghita…
But Ghita’s not in town
I know, I’ve asked around
It seems that he is gone
To get provisions…

Hard, it has been very hard
Want, but don’t know what I want
Of me, I know you too are fond…
Tell me, Ghita what is up?
Or come, or please go
Or tell me what to do
So please, don’t make me mad
Ghita, what’s up in your life?

REF:

Ghita, I’ll wait for you my dear Ghita
Tonight, at our place, do come,
But when you come don’t come as you do…
Usually, empty handed, who else
Is gonna wait for you as I do?…
A whole night, just for you my Ghita?
Show me just one other girl who
Can love you as much as I do!

Ghita, I’ll wait for you my dear Ghita
Tonight, at our place, do come,
But when you come don’t come as you do…
Usually, empty handed, who else
Is gonna wait for you as I do?…
A whole night, just for you my Ghita?
Show me just one other girl who
Can love you as much as I do!

Now Nike has entered the Don Imus fray, hoping a new ad will spark continued conversation about race in America. The sports-apparel giant took out a full-page ad in the Sunday, April 14 edition of the New York Times, and is expected to run banner ads with the same message on a number of websites this week.

read more | digg story

This week Engadget had an article showing how a proposed new Mighty Mouse would work:

Apple’s touch sensitive mouse design axes scroll ball

 

What strikes me first thing is that they still want to try out this "invisible button" idea. These buttons can detect your finger "clicking" (minus the actual clicking sound, of course) even though you’re not really clicking anything at all.

But what Apple keeps forgetting, year after year, over and over, is that not only does the mouse need to detect the user’s actions, but the user needs to detect the mouse’s reactions. We want that tactile and auditory *click*. It let’s us know that yes, we did indeed push the button successfully.

The second thing that strikes me, and probably pisses me off more than anything, is the lack of a right mouse button. Actually, I lie. There is a right mouse button, albeit an invisible one that you have to lift your finger off the left button in order to "click."

Right now I’m on a Mac PowerBookG4. It’s wonderful. The NUMBER ONE best feature is the ability to scroll via sliding two fingers at the same time up and down the trackpad. It is by far one of the most natural-feeling usability features I’ve ever encountered.

But I have one major gripe, and this is where I get back to the similarities with the (not-so)Mighty Mouse. Not one Apple laptop has a right-button on it’s trackpad. It’s just one long button that does the same thing no matter if you click it on the far left side or the far right.

Am I the only one who thinks that a long, narrow button is by far more difficult to click than a button that is closer to a perfect square or circle? When I click it in the middle it just feels hard and wrong. Is there anyone else who agrees?

And when I want to bring up a context menu at my cursor I have to hold down the Ctrl key and click. (Well, first I have to take five seconds to think, "Is it the Ctrl button or the Command button?" I’m always forgetting and I’ve had this laptop over a year.) So basically when I’m in bed laying on my side with only one arm free to delete the old podcasts in my iTunes library I have to splay my hand like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat to reach the Ctrl button at the same time as clicking the trackpad button. Rediculous!

It’s like the buttonless keyboard on the iPhone. Sometimes I really think Steve Jobs is trying to be contrary for contrariness’ sake.

Seriously, Mr. Jobs. Get over your stupid pride, stop wasting your time on these idiotically complicated mouse features, and just give us a damn right button! We’re waiting!

My WYSIWYG post editor plugin for WordPress totally messed up the line breaks of my previous posts. Figures.

Bittbox.com has a great blog post listing the "25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer." Here are the ones that apply to moi.

• You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
• You consider meals interruptions.
• You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
• You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel.
• You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
• You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
• You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
• If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

So I'm looking to find an Atari 2600 adapter for my mom's old Atari that she's mailing me and of course what better place to look for old junk than Ebay? But what do we have here? An Ebay... with RSS feeds! Yippeee! Apparently I'm a few months late on this one, as they made this change permanent back in November. I do remember being very excited when I saw the "trial run" of RSS on Ebay before that. I guess I just haven't been on the site in a long while to notice. Anyway, now when I search for something on Ebay, in this case "atari adapter," at the waaaay bottom there's an RSS button that will give you the RSS feed for that search. Pop that into Google Reader and voila, automated checking of new auctions that fit those search terms. Now at first I thought, what's the difference between an RSS reader and just adding a link to your bookmarks? The difference is that the RSS feed knows when you've seen something before and can tell you when there's something new for you to look at. In other words, less time checking all blog pages individually to find that only a couple have new content posted. And now I have more time to check other sites I've never tried before, like Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Ads of the World. More on the wonders of RSS: "Why aren't you using RSS?" on blogcritics.org. Now, excuse me while I set up my Ebay RSS feed for size 4.5 shoes with a heel height of 3" and up.