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!

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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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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CNN cleans up its act

July 1, 2007 at 3:46 am · Filed under Information Architecture, Visual Design, User Interface, User Experience

I popped over to CNN.com tonight to catch up on the news a bit, and was refreshingly surprised to see that they’d launched the beta version they’ve been working on. It’s more than just paint on the old bones—they’ve done a major amount of work in rethinking how they present stories and allow the user to move through the large amounts of content they publish.

Visually, the simplified color scheme and reduced amount of ornamentation is appreciated; likely by advertisers more than anyone. Now they have the only thing in the streamlined page layouts that stick out like a sore thumb!

On the user experience end of the equation there’s too much to mention. Thankfully, CNN sums up the new features well; check out the tour of the relaunched site’s new features to get a quick overview of what’s new.

Already forgot what CNN used to look like? Here’s Gigablast’s cached version of the CNN.com dated June 8th.

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