Thoughts on Web and Mobile Interactive Development and Life by Brian McMurray

Figuring Color at the ICA Boston

2012-02-21T00:00:00-05:00

On Valentine’s Day, my beautiful wife Abigail and I went to the opening of the new exhibit, “Figuring Color,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It is a wonderful new exhibit featuring the work of Kathy Butterly, Felix González-Torres, Roy McMakin, and Sue Williams.

It is a wonderful show and I highly recommend visiting it if the opportunity presents itself. (If you can’t make it, or just need a preview, check out the ICA’s slideshow of some of the pieces in the exhibit.)

I particularly enjoyed Kathy Butterly’s whimsical ceramics and Roy McMakin’s “Untitled (Sitting Wingback Chair),” which at first glance appears as a classic plush chair, but upon closer inspection, the back appears to be a plump human rear sitting on the floor.

It was also nice to see Felix González-Torres’ “Untitled (Lover Boys),” in a new setting. The last time I saw this piece was at the Art Institute of Chicago years ago on a high school fieldtrip. González-Torres died in 1996 due to AIDS related complications, which, while it has certainly fallen out of the media in recent years, is still a continuing problem.

A great friend (and co-worker, I am so lucky) of mine, Tim Cosgrove is currently training and fundraising for the AIDS/LifeCycle, a 7-day, 545-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He has been an inspiration to me in how he’s really put his whole heart (and body) into training for this ride, so please support him if you can. In addition, if you donate, he will bake you a pie. For real.

Hekyll: Impressive Presentations with Markdown

2012-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

I am a big fan of Jekyll, a static blog generator developed by one of those smart guys behind GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner. I love being able to write posts in Markdown and being able to version my entire site in a Git repository.

In the past year or so, I have been using Prezi.com to create a number of the presentations that I’ve given at various camps and conferences. Prezi is great, but it’s Flash-based and authoring within their tool is not the easiest process, and there’s no way to version a talk. A few of my recent talks have been with my friend and co-worker, Steven Merrill, and then he has gone on to improve the talks and give them at a few other events that I wasn’t able to attend. Once or twice, he forgot to ‘clone’ the presentation in Prezi before making changes, so we accidentally lost a copy of the presentation we originally gave and now only have the updated one. Not desirable.

New to the budding JavaScript-based presentation software is Impress.js, which is actually a really great analog for Prezi, done entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is awesome.

One day at work, Steven and I were discussing getting started on our presentation for our upcoming talk at Drupalcon Denver 2012, and we thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could write our presentation in Markdown and have an Impress.js-powered presentation? We could use Jekyll!” So, I took my lunch break and whipped out a prototype which I dubbed ”Hekyll” (pronounced heckle). And thus my new presentation engine side-project was born.

The idea for Hekyll is pretty simple: turn Markdown text files into a nice looking presentation. In the YAML front-matter for each slide (just like in each post in Jekyll), you can add attributes which can let you control all of the layout options provided by Impress.js, which includes position, scale and 3D rotations for your slides. Or, if you just need to get a presentation done quickly, there’s a “simple slideshow” configuration option for Hekyll that will just do simple cross-fades between your slides for you. But wait! There’s more! Hekyll comes with a decent set of default styles and also has a print page which will let you easily print each slide to a single page.

That’s it for now. I’ve been pondering a way to make easy themes for slides so that there can be a handful of presentation styles to get people started – it’s really just as simple as writing some CSS.

Wanna see Hekyll in action? Check out the documentation demo!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the project. Get invovled if you’d like, we’re maintaining the project on GitHub.

Adventures in Standing: My Standing Desk

2011-12-16T00:00:00-05:00

For about six months now, I have been regularly standing up while I work. There is a lot of compelling research out there that suggests that standing while working helps you burn many more calories per day and has many other health benefits.

All the New Things: My Personal Life

2011-11-29T00:00:00-05:00

This is the third and final installment in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.

It’s now a few days after my birthday, I’ll wrap up my reflections on the past year and some of the changes that I’ve seen.

My Personal Life

This year has been a fairly big year for me in my personal life. As I mentioned last time, I started working from home. To be closer to her office and so that I could have my own dedicated home office, my wife Abigail and I moved to a new apartment in Cambridge, MA.

In addition, this year I have started doing things I hadn’t really done before: fundraising for charities I want to support, and exercising. Both at the same time, actually.

All the New Things: Work

2011-11-17T00:00:00-05:00

This is the second in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.

It’s a few days before my birthday, which seems like a good time to reflect on the past year and some of the changes that I’ve seen. Over the next few days, I’ll write a few posts on some of the more significant changes I’ve noticed this year in my life.

Work

For just about a year and a half I have been working from home for a Treehouse Agency. For nearly the entire duration I’ve been working on just a single project, Zagat.com. It has been an outstanding project and a great first year with Treehouse. Recently I have finished up my term with Zagat, so the past week or so has been ripe with change as I start on new projects.

All the New Things: This Website

2011-11-16T00:00:00-05:00

This is the first in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.

This Website

It seems appropriate to start with talking about this site as one of the many new things I’ve done this year. This website is brand new as of just yesterday.

Developer-Enforced Design Flaws

2011-11-04T00:00:00-04:00

This morning, I happened upon “Wired’s Essential Apps for 2011” and quickly found myself frowning. I wasn’t frowning because of the Wired editors’ decisions about which apps are the best, it was because I was frustrated with a glaring design problem in their article and I suspect I know the reason it looks so bad:

Developers Built it That Way

The Stone Fence, a Great Drink for Autumn

2011-10-31T00:00:00-04:00

This past weekend, Abigail and I hosted a party to celebrate Abigail’s birthday. Apple cider is one of Abigail’s favorite Fall treats and she asked if there were any good mixed drinks that used cider as an ingredient.

A few minutes of searching brought me to an old drink called the Stone Fence, which I heartily recommend.

From what I have learned, the Stone Fence is a traditional drink from New England dating back to around the time of the American Revolution. It’s a fairly simple and straight-forward mixed drink and has a number of my favorite Autumn flavors.

Selecting text with JavaScript

2011-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

Today I was working on a small tool to take some text that a user selects and copy it into a textarea to store ‘notes.’

While I was researching how to do all of that, I figured out how to select arbitrary text on the page and highlight it, as though the user had dragged her cursor and selected it, using JavaScript.

The following snippet uses some jQuery to select an element, but it could just as easily be written without it.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var rng = document.createRange($('p').get(0));
  rng.selectNode($('p').get(0));
  window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();
  window.getSelection().addRange(rng);
</script>