XHTML/CSS - Get a job

July 27, 2007 at 2:22 pm · Filed under Programming, RIA, Information Architecture, Visual Design, User Interface, User Experience

Terralever is currently hiring for several positions at our Tempe, Arizona office.  Here’s the job posting that was added to our career’s section today:

Terralever is on the lookout for a passionate, creative, standards compliant front end architect. We’re not going to bore you with the regular “must know CSS, XHTML, yada, yada”.The right candidate yearns for new learning experiences and has an exquisite passion and drive to be on the bleeding edge of technological revolutions. This candidate will have validation in life through amazing work and the W3C, a pixel-perfect attention to detail, an insatiable desire to be creative, and an ownership to their work that it’s the best. And a rockin’ iPod playlist doesn’t hurt.Terralever is located on Mill Avenue in the heart of downtown Tempe, offering our employees a hip, creative atmosphere. We have a team centric work environment which allows our staff to interact with all aspects of a project. We have amazing award-winning work for national brands, but we pride ourselves more for the extraordinary group of people that make it possible.If this sounds like you and a company you’d like to work for e-mail jobs@terralever.com with your resume and some sweet samples. 

The original posting is located on the careers section on the Terralever web site along with additional job postings for the roles of Senior Interactive Designer, Flash Production Artist, Senior Interactive (Flash) Developer, Interactive Project Manager, and .NET Web Applications Developer.We’re also always looking for best-of-breed candidates in search marketing (SEO and PPC) and viral marketing.

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iPhone: Please stop launching iPhoto!

July 16, 2007 at 5:54 pm · Filed under Hardware, Mobile, Applications, User Experience

If you have an iPhone you may have noticed that when you plug it into a Macintosh, iPhoto launches right along with iTunes. I don’t mind iTunes launching as it is there to synchronize my music, and I have it open all the time anyway, but why iPhoto?

The reason why it is opening iPhoto is that OS X sees the iPhone as also being a camera. As with other camera’s, its default action is to (you guessed it) wake up iPhoto. I don’t use my phone to take pictures much, and I certainly don’t need iPhoto to open every time I sit my phone on its cradle to get a bit of juice. So, I poked around to figure out how to make it stop.

After fruitless adventures in both iPhoto and the iPhone’s Preferences/Setting (although seemingly the right places to look) I got a good lead on how to change the behavior. The application that controls how the Mac responds to how to handle what happens when a camera is plugged in is the Image Capture application, not iPhoto (and that’s the one kicker here-if you make this change, iPhoto will not automatically open for any camera).

To change the behavior:

1. Open Image Capture (in your Applications directory)
2. Open the Preferences panel (Image Capture > Preferences…)
3. Change the drop down following “When a camera is connected, open:” to “No application”

That’s it.

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iPhone!

July 5, 2007 at 1:35 pm · Filed under User Interface, User Experience

There are a lot of iPhone rants, reviews, and revelations out there already, so I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about every little thing the iPhone does. Here’s my early experience and perspective thus far:

• Setup via. iTunes was a snap; I had no authorization lag whatsoever (within 2 minutes and the phone had authorized).
• Straight-up as a telephone and nothing else, I’d give it a B-. The form factor isn’t great for a phone. I find myself using my phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder a lot, and this phone doesn’t ‘feel’ natural when held in that way. To be fair, plenty of the phones I have owned have failed that test for me, including my RAZR. And, it isn’t built with the telephone as the front-and-center attraction. So, I concur with other reviews that ‘getting to the phone’ doesn’t seem as immediate as with the other cellphones on the market, where pressing a ‘down’ button pushes you right into the phone book. On the iPhone you do need to click one or two times more to get there. I’ll trade those two clicks for everything else the phone does. With my early usage, call quality hasn’t been an issue at all.
• Using the phone with the included ear bud/microphone was fine, although I’d really like it if you could get rid of one of the ear buds temporarily (by ‘unplugging’ one of the buds and its wire at the ‘Y’ connector). Speaker phone is great. I haven’t tried a Bluetooth headset (not a fan of these, but I might give it a try though just for the car).
• Simply stated, the Edge network sucks for connectivity when using Safari, Google Maps, YouTube… basically anything that is going top pull a reasonable amount of data from the web feels painfully 56k. Internet browsing suffers the worst. Disappointing. The device is so slick in how it functions, you just expect the it to download like a banshee.
• Connectivity when using wireless networks is decent in what I’ve seen so far. The WiFi at my home, which is B/G/Pre-N was easy to connect to. Speed-wise, it did make me look up the tech specs to see if the phone supported only B. The specs say it is B/G. Maybe the whiz-bang effect of how great the rest of the UX is amplifies connectivity’s shortcomings.
• All the iPod features are great; Cover Flow is meant for this form factor.
• Maybe there are great things in the works for the YouTube equation later, but in its current state, it’s not of interest to me.
• I found the touch screen to be fine for typing, but I can see how someone who text messages a lot would be able to move faster with a tactile keyboard. It is surprisingly accurate and highly responsive.
• The overall user experience is better than I’ve personally experienced on another phone, PDA or media player. Very fluid and intuitive to use. I like how there isn’t a ‘quit’ button for applications, but, instead, when you move away from, then back to, an application you pick up where you left off.

There will undoubtedly be people who hate this phone. There are plenty of people that won’t like anything that Apple (or Microsoft, for that matter) puts on a shelf simply because of the shipping address it comes from. Regardless, there is something that everyone should like about the iPhone—it will likely serve as a change agent. The user experience offered by cellphones, PDAs and SmartPhones has floundered around at a mediocre level for years. The iPhone puts a unique, well thought out, user-centered solution on the table for the mobile industry to contemplate.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention—I like it.

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Recommended Macintosh applications

July 4, 2007 at 5:26 pm · Filed under Applications

With so many of my Windows friends switching completely or picking up a Macintosh to dual boot, I often get asked for recommendations on applications for various tasks. Here’s a few favorites (I’ve omitted any bundled software including the iLife suite, all of which is great. You’ll notice I don’t recommend any software that would supplant an iLife application. They are that good.):

Internet/IM

• Web Browsing: I use both Safari which ships with OS X (love the RSS handling) as well as Firefox. I also installed the Safari 3 beta, and, once it is more stable, I think I probably will probably just need Safari.
• Instant Messaging: iChat AV’s text, voice, and video chat which again ships with OS X is awesome with other Apple owners. Unfortunately, I have friends and clients on multiple platforms and IM clients. Luckily a coworker turned me on to Adium.

Web Design & Development

• FTP Client: Transmit by Panic is easy to use and reliable.
• Information Architecture & Wireframing: OmniGraffle by the OmniGroup is incredibly easy to use and produces elegant documents for clients.
• HTML Authoring: Dreamweaver by Adobe (the version I’m on is the CS2 flavor) works for me.
• Text Editor (Multi-language/platform) / Authoring: TextMate by MacroMates
• Remote Desktop (to a PC): Microsoft kicked out Remote Desktop for the PC a few years ago. If you read the system requirements on the Mactopia page, it makes no mention of Intel-based Macs under the System Requirements. But, it works just fine on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
• Raster: Photoshop by Adobe is what I’ve always used on Macs and PCs
• Vector: Illustrator by Adobe… as above…

Office/Productivity

• Productivity Suite (Email/Word Processing and Number Crunching): Office 2004 for Mac by Microsoft. It works, but I get frustrated with Word’s performance (speed) and Enterouge doesn’t integrate with the tools on the Mac I DO like (such as Address Book and iCal), it tries to do it all. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, it isn’t a very good Exchange-based email client and misbehaves regularly. With all that said, the support for Exchange in Apple’s Mail application is far worse. .I’m eagerly awaiting what Exchange support is in Leopard (OS X 10.5) as well as the promise of Office for Mac 2008. I’ve said this on my blog a few times: Microsoft, if you’re out there listening, PLEASE let me Beta test Office for Mac 2008!
• Strong Alternative: The Windows OS in a Virtual Environment with Microsoft Office for the PC running: Parallels Desktop for Mac: I love this and have posted about it several times before. The latest version is great. My current setup is a Boot Camp partition with Vista on it as well as Microsoft Office 2007 (PC). I then use Parallels or run Vista in a VM, utilizing my Boot Camp partition. If you go this route, go with XP, not Vista if you plan to run virtualized more than native when using Windows. XP runs like a top whereas Vista demands more system resources and does get laggy.
• Presentation Software: Keynote by Apple (blows PowerPoint away). This doesn’t ship with the OS X, but is worth buying. It comes bundled with iWork, which also includes Pages, which hasn’t taken hold for me yet. Office users will likely find Pages too limited; it is getting close to the balance between ease of use and amount of features, it’s just not all the way there.

Random

• Make my Mac Run Cool: I’ve never owned a PowerBook or MacBook Pro (including my current laptop) which didn’t have the ability to double as a cooking surface. smcFanControl is a utility which monitors CPU temperature and fan RPM’s—and lets you do something about it. You can create new fan profiles that work better for you. A great application that I shouldn’t need. I’m very happy it exists, however.

There are a lot of other applications out there that I’ve installed, enjoyed, and then uninstalled because I simply didn’t need them. The few I mention above I regularly use.

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Silverlight flight (to Microsoft)

July 4, 2007 at 3:41 am · Filed under Games

Casey Rayl and I had the opportunity to make a quick run up to Redmond, Washington to visit Microsoft’s HQ. The opportunity was made available to us due to the cool work that a team at Terralever did building a game called Zero Gravity with Alpha Microsoft technology.

We met up with Laura Foy (Microsoft’s On10.net—but you may remember her from G4 TV) and Charles Torres (Microsoft’s Channel 9).

Everyone at Microsoft was great, and we had a really good time on our quick trip. The perfect weather didn’t hurt either (we came from Phoenix where it was North of 110 during our stint). We met up with Charles at the building that I worked at during my short time at Microsoft. I also was lucky enough to bump into a few friendly (and incredibly bright) Microsoft office mates including David Shadle, Hans Hugli, and Ernie Booth.

What’s to come of the visit? If everything pans out, a few minutes of geek fame on one, or both, of the Microsoft community sites.

UPDATE: On10 has posted the Laura Foy Silverlight game interview.

Until then, here’s a nice shot of Casey in front of a giant Silverlight banner on Campus, and an obligatory shot of the Space Needle.

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