David Herrold

Headed to BarCampNOLA

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Marketing, Networking, Technology, Web design

Looks like I’m headed to New Orleans for BarCampNOLA in a couple of weeks. I missed BarCampHouston & BarCampTexas recently due to scheduling conflicts and my general chaotic schedule at work.

Since NOLA is a fun place in general, I’ve convinced the missus to join me. I have a feeling she will be doing more shopping than BarCamping, but I’m just glad she’s coming along regardless.

It looks like the campers will be helping a local business with the power of technology. I assume this will involve legions of man-servant robots and rocket-powered jetpacks. More likely it will involve a handful of programmers and a few laptops. I suspect Twitter will be involved somehow too.

The most popular Steve I know will also be attending (I think).

Looking forward to some beignets and a cup of chicory coffee…and finding a room in the French Quarter for under $250 a night. Yikes.

- Dave

Tags: barcamp, barcampnola, french quarter, Networking, social media, Technology, Web design

Startup weekend 2008

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Marketing, Software, Technology, Web design

What is Startup weekend you might ask? Well according to the website Startup weekend is:

“an intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, ect.) together to create a company from concept to launch!”

We Houstonians have the opportunity to bring Startup Weekend to Texas by voting on the Startup weekend website. Austin and Dallas are both listed as potential cities for the next event (I voted for Austin because I think it might be a little more fun than Dallas).

Vote here | Read more about Startup Weekend | Subscribe to Startup weekend RSS

Tags: Design, Software, start up weekend, startup weekend, technology conferences, Web design, web development

Leopard help menu purrs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Software

I just discovered how amazingly intuitive the new help menu is on the Leopard operating system.  I tested it out on FireFox, Mail, and iCal and it works like a charm.  You simply begin typing into the help search box and if the answer to your issue is located in another menu, it will open that menu and place a big blue pointer that moves ever-so-slightly to get your attention (just in case you missed the big blue arrow).

Very slick.

Tags: Apple, help, leopard, mac

FireFox user agent switcher

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Productivity, Software, Usability

I’ve been working on our mobile site a lot lately and found this great FireFox plugin that has helped me a great deal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how newspaper sites present their mobile-friendly WAP sites. WAP usability and interface designs are wildly different in comparison to their full-featured main websites.

The tricky thing about investigating mobile sites is that many of them sniff out your user agent and redirect you to the mobile site only if they detect you are using a mobile browser. Several actually filter in the other direction as well.

Try this little test and you will see exactly what I mean. Try going to mobile.nytimes.com (new window) in your browser right now. If you are using a normal browser (IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, etc) you will be redirected to the New York Times’ main site. This redirect forces you to use an actual wireless device to surf the New York Times’ mobile version.

This, my friends, is a tad annoying when trying to investigate mobile sites.

To get around this I installed a great FireFox addon by Chris Pederick that enables me to set my user agent to any browser I’d like (including mobile browsers like the Blackberry, Iphone, Treo, etc). I found a few user agents for mobile browsers here to configure the addon and I was good to go.

Now I can simply tell FireFox to act like an iPhone and it will render those automatically redirecting sites without any trouble. Fantasitc.

I told a co-worker about this cool addon to FireFox and he responded “Oh yeah, Safari has a user agent switcher built in. Check it out.”

He’s absolutely right.  Looks like Safari includes the ability to render pages as an iPhone if you want. Pretty cool, although I still use the FireFox addon to spoof Blackberries, Treos, and any other mobile browser I can find. Here are the links you’ll need to make this happen:

FireFox user agent switcher addon
Resource for user agents (not just mobile)

Hope you found this useful.

Tags: add-ons, FireFox, Mobile, user agent

Mac owners snobby? Of course not, please pass the brie darling.

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Humor

I found this interesting:

Based on a survey of 7,500 MacWorld attendees it looks like Mac fans tend to be immodest, open minded liberals who are assured of their superiority. To put it bluntly.

I don’t recall taking on an air of superiority when I purchased my Mac. In fact, I was completely lost for a couple months after I “made the switch,” wondering how to adjust preferences, change setting and become more comfortable with the new OS.

Actually, while I was writing a letter to Hillary Clinton regarding my MENSA membership and willingness to proofread all of her speeches while hanging out at a wine bar eating brie – I never once thought I was snobby or liberal.

Full article (via Geeks are Sexy)

Tags: Apple, Humor, mac, surveys

I (heart) Skitch

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Design, Software

I installed Skitch this evening and I think I am in love. Seriously.

I haven’t been this impressed with a piece of software since I first played with FireFox.

Skitch is an amazingly intuitive screen capture and image editing application for the Mac. But there’s a twist. Skitch integrates with FTP, SFTP, Flickr, .Mac as well as the iSight camera. You can also post images to the social Skitch website in your Skitch account (here’s a link to my page). You can then easily embed the Skitch image from your Skitch page with the click of a button. Very impressive.

Mac-based bloggers (and there are a lot of them out there) are going to eat this up with spoons.

This could spell the death of Command + Shift + 3 for screen capture on a Mac. I’m sure I’m not the first person to pour a little malt liquor on the grave of that 3-button-plus-mouse-click pain-in-the-ass. But I’m one of the happiest.

One for me, one for my homies.

Tags: Blogging, image editor, screenshot, skitch

SXSW 2008

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Marketing, Technology, Usability, Web design

I’m officially registered along with Steve and Lina at the Chronicle.  I’m looking forward to meeting some great people and exchanging some great ideas at the conference.

Drop me a line if you plan on attending.  I think it’ll be a blast.

Tags: conference, interactive, SXSW, Technology, Usability, Web design

TV-B-Gone wreaks havok at CES

Posted by Dave | Filed under Hardware, Technology

The good folks at Gizmodo got their sweaty little hands on some TV-B-Gone zappers and started turning off TVs left and right at the Consumer Electronic Show this past week.

From Gizmodo:

And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop. (And Panasonic, you’re so lucky that 150-incher didn’t have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people’s jobs harder, and I don’t agree with that (Especially Motorola). We’re sorry.

Click here for the fantastic video of TVs mysteriously being turned off.

David Allen: Getting Things Done

Posted by Dave | Filed under Productivity

This is a great presentation by David Allen at the Google campus. He is speaking about his productivity method called “Getting Things Done.” It runs about 45 minutes, but it’s worth watching if you could use a productivity boost.

Tags: getting things done, Google, GTD, Productivity

SXSW Interactive 2008 panels

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Design, Marketing, Software, Technology, Usability, Web design

I was browsing the 2008 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive panels for some topics that sound interesting and I ran into a little problem.  It’s not the 3 hour drive to Austin.  It’s not the $400+ entry fee.  It’s not the dizzying array of ironic hipster t-shirts that I will likely encounter.

I found so many interesting panels that I will surely need to clone myself through some unearthly Lovecraftian manner to see everything I want to see.

I’m OK with that, as long as my clones wear pants (I’m not going through THAT embarrassment again).  Anyhow, it would be quite convenient if one of me could make a Taco Cabana run while the other me is listening to an interesting panel on building an audience for your social networking application.

Regardless of my cloned status, here are the panels I thought sounded interesting this year:

1. Business
10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment (Bryan Mason)
Unconventional Collaboration: Tips for Local and Remote Teams (Jason Fried)

2. Content
Accessible Rich Media (Sharron Rush)
Behind the Scenes at the Onion News Network (Sean Mills)
Roll Over Gutenberg, Tell McLuhan The News (George Kelly)

3. Design
A General Theory of Creative Relativity (Jim Coudal)
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts (Michael Lopp)
Design Control in a Digital World: Getting It and Losing It (Khoi Vinh)
Design Eye 2008 (Keith Robinson)
God (and Design) is in the Detail (Naz Hamid)
Logos: Why They’re Irrelevant and Can Actually Hurt Your Business (Bryan Zmijewski)
Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs (Jared M. Spool)
Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces (Nathan Shedroff)
Meet The Architects (Molly Wright Steenson)
Social Design Strategies (Emily Chang)
Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users (Kathy Sierra)
Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (Richard Rutter)

4. Marketing
Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing (Brian Oberkirch)
Totally Wired Teens: How Teens are Using Your Applications (Anastasia Goodstein)

5. Mobile / Wireless
Getting Unstuck II: From Desktop to Device (Liz Danzico)
How Many Clicks to the Center of…? (Conleth O’Connell)
Life after the i-Phone (Kate Ryan)
Mobile Phones: International Devices of Mystery (Michael Sharon)
Using Entertainment to Create Effective Mobile Advertising (Abam Zbar)

6. Next Generation
The Art of Speed (Tim Ferriss)
Hardware Mashups: Introducing the Long Tail of Gadgets (Peter Semmelhack)
Online Identity Crisis (Jason Levitt)
The Science of Designing Interactions (Andreas Weigend)

7. Programming
Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics Quickly (Shawn Henry)
Content Management System Roundup (George DeMet)
Creating Findable Rich Media Content (Jennifer Taylor)
Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together (Paul Hammond)
Everything I Know about Accessibility I Learned From Star Wars (Derek Featherstone) Filching Design (Lindsey Simon)
Getting There Faster By Using Open Code (Jack Moffitt)
Make Your Client-Side Code Ready for Internationalization (Jon Wiley)
Scalability Boot Camp (Jakob Heuser)
Secrets of JavaScript Libraries (John Resig)
Web Service APIs Your Mom Will Love (Ben Vinegar)

7. Social
Building Portable Social Networks (Jeremy Keith)
Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! (Annalee Newitz)
Social Networking and Your Brand (Jina Bolton)
The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network (Souris Hong-Porretta)
The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 (Henry Copeland)
Taking Over the World: the Flickr Way (Simon Batistoni)
True Stories from Social Media Sites (Rashmi Sinha)

Let me know if you’re planning on going to SXSW this year and maybe we can hang out with Lou Reed, the original rock-n-roll animal.  He’s this year’s keynote speaker for the music festival.

SXSW Interactive 2008
SXSW Interactive panels
SXSW main site

Tags: 2008, south by southwest interactive, SXSW