David Herrold

Jackson Pollack spatters the web

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design

Jackson Pollack’s website has is a nifty Flash-based paint spattering program.  It looks very simple, but really captures the dripping lines of paint quite well.  The site’s been around for a while, but I was just reminded of it by the good folks at Computerlove.

Link (via Computerlove)

More about Jackson Pollack on Wikipedia.

Tags: Design, flash, jackson pollack, painting

Location-based preferences for Macs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Software, Usability

Dear Steve Jobs,

It would be really cool if I could make certain preferences location-based on my Mac just like my network settings. You see, Mr. Jobs, I use my laptop in two distinctly different ways.

• At home I use an external monitor to give myself a little more space to work.
• At work I do not use an external monitor.

I enjoy using Leopard’s Spaces to give me a bit more room to breath at work with several applications running at the same time. However, when I am at home, I don’t need to use Spaces because I have more screen space to work with.

I find myself changing my Spaces settings nearly every day when I get home. I put my email, iTunes, Adium, etc in my laptop’s screen and use my external window for FireFox, Coda, Photoshop, etc.

It would be fantastic for my Mac to “know” it was home, just like it does with my network settings, and change my Spaces to my preferred setting while at home. For that matter, it would be great if all my applications had location-based preferences.

iTunes at home uses Airtunes and some external speakers. iTunes at work uses the built-in speakers.

Mr. Jobs, you could make the world a better place and save thousands of man-hours by allowing preferences to be location based. Thank you, and good night.

Tags: Apple, mac, network settings, preferences, Spaces

LinkedIn redesign

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Social Networking, Software, Usability

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

LinkedIn launched a redesign of their site tonight that looks pretty good.  I hit their site while they were launching and it looked like they were having CSS issues.  Turns out they were launching a redesign.

Upon first inspection, the sites looks more user friendly, but that’s more of an instinctual opinion than anything.  It just feels easier to use.

I plan on playing around with it in the near future and posting my comments here.

What do you think?

Tags: linkedin, redesign, Social Networking

Mobile sites: a few of my favorites

Posted by Dave | Filed under Mobile, Technology, Usability, Web design

Mobile LinkedIn is fantastic.

I just noticed today that LinkedIn (my work-related social networking site of choice) has launched an amazing mobile site. It feels nearly as robust as their full-featured site for searching and sending invitations.

I’m always shocked at how some mobile sites can tailor their user experience to give the perception of full functionality (even if that’s not the case).

Google and Yahoo offer many of their mobile applications & searches (calendar, maps, docs, email, etc). Mobile Google Maps has been the most impressive of the lot, in my opinion.

Bank of America allows you to check balances, pay bills, transfer money, etc. with your mobile browser.

Netflix allows you to search for movies and add them to your queue. This seems exceptionally handy if you are chatting with friends and someone mentions a movie you should see. You can immediately add it to your queue while you’re thinking of it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t pimp our very own mobile.chron.com in this blog post. I think we do a decent job of presenting diverse content (weather, news, sports, obituaries, etc) content in a very small space.

Mobile news sites such as the New York Times, CNN, Chicago Tribune, etc. offer some great mobile news user interfaces.

One of my favorite search tools is called Wapepedia. It is a simple mobile interface for Wikipedia.

You can find a lot more great mobile sites at cantoni.mobi.

Do you have any favorite mobile sites you find yourself using on a regular basis?

Tags: Blackberry, iPhone, linkedin, Mobile, Treo, WAP, wireless

Data collection and manipulation for the masses

Posted by Dave | Filed under Development, Software, Usability

I am increasingly impressed with the data collection and manipulation tools that are becoming available on the web for non-programmers. I first noticed Yahoo Pipes about a year ago and just noticed Dapper recently.

Yahoo Pipes allows normal people* to mash up data into combined feeds to create interesting results. Dapper provides the tools to grab virtually any data (regardless if RSS feeds are available or not) and create a feed.

I see unbelievable potential in tool like these becoming popular in the future. They are not really simple enough to bridge the gap into the mainstream population…yet. But the potential is there.

Eventually they will become more widely-used as their user interfaces evolve and more sophisticated under-the-hood as their data manipulation software adapts to virtually any scenario.

Will your grandmother** use it to combine weather reports with he price of cantaloupes at the local market to find regional produce bargains? Probably not.

Will your mother and father use it to find interesting travel deals by combining weather, event calendar, travel and exchange-rate data for an economical and interesting trip to Europe? Maybe…maybe not.

Could you use it to search all the local bargain websites (Craigslist, local newspapers, eBay, etc.) to find the cheapest DVD players within a 10 mile radius. Yep, pretty easily.

If I were a business owner I would create search-agents like this to find nearby products I use in my widget business. I would scrape local and national websites for product data integral to my business. I would also use it to find local widget buyers in the exact same way. It seems like a perfect match for small business owners, but probably not easy enough for the general public to begin using right away. For the most part, the public doesn’t use words like “data” unless they are referring to the STNG android (and even then it’s only nerds).

Within a few years we’ll see many more of these sites go mainstream as users become more and more technically savvy and eager to manage and filter the massive amount of data surrounding them everyday and find exactly what they are looking for.

Could you use tools like this in your everyday digital life or is it more hassle than it’s worth?

* Normal people do not know (or care) about the following acronyms: SQL, FTP, PHP, HTML, RSS, CSS, ETC.
** Your grandmother is probably more concerned with feeding you, than reading your feeds.

Mobile presentation for BarCampNOLA

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Mobile, Usability

I put together a mobile presentation for BarCamp NOLA this weekend. Since I’ve been working on our mobile platform recently I’ve been taking some notes and reading about the industry’s best practices with WAP and mobile technology in general.

Let me know what you think.

- Dave

Tags: Blackberry, iPhone, Mobile, Treo, WAP, wireless

VMWare Fusion upgrade

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Software

I was thinking to myself just the other day “wouldn’t it be great if VMWare were smart enough to keep some key combinations standard across the virtual machine chasm.”

Well, they did it in the latest build of VMWare Fusion.  If you own VMW and got that little “new version available for download” alert window when you started the app, it’s well worth the download just for that fix alone.

Now I can actually copy paste from Mac to Windows by just using the command key + C and the command key + V.  No need to monkey around with that silly Control key when you are in the Windows virtual machine.

You know, it’s the little things in life, really.

-Dave

Tags: Apple, virtual machine, vmware fusion