Kyle Fox: Notes

Espresso, Intelligentsia

Intelligentsia is a coffee bar in Venice, California, where espresso is “taken very seriously.” It makes me happy that people and places like this exist. In the video below, one of their baristas explains how to craft a perfect cup of espresso. The video is the first in an ongoing series by Dpt4D, who aim to “documents [their] search for the ultimate tastemakers.” I’m not sure what that means, but it’s definitely intriguing.

Espresso, Intelligentsia from Department of the 4th Dimension on Vimeo.

Here’s the video on Vimeo. You might also want to follow @intelligentsia on the Twitter. Their Black Cat Espresso is very tasty.

Everything reduced to essentials

Contemporist (my new favorite blog) posted photos of an amazing house designed by A-cero Architects:

“The balance on which rest the three principles defining this construction, beauty, firmness and utility give us the key to confront its forcefulness, which emerges as a great sculptural work. It is a plastic reality: the singularity of the house defines a researching purpose that places value on aesthetic originality and artistic excellence. It stands out for its geometric purity, material sophistication and compositional elegance.”

The courtyard looks like “a soft rug dotted with abundant planters and flowerbeds”.

I love everything about this house: the marble exterior, the library, the huge windows that protrude at sharp angles; but perhaps what’s most appealing about this building is how it manages to be strictly geometric — almost lego-like — without feeling sterile or predictable. Each angle offers it’s own perspective, from which you notice all sorts of different shapes: squares, prisms, triangles, as well as lines intersecting in different places and defining new forms. I could look at this house for hours.

Definitely make sure to check out the full post for more photos of this spectacular building. A-cero’s website is also worth a look.

Ski Free

I spent most of my high school computer class playing an awesome game called Ski Free. I didn’t realize everyone else was playing it, too. Apparently it’s wide spread enough to be featured in today’s xkcd comic:

And apparently this prompted someone to write a JavaScript clone of the original game. I love how everything, no mater how obscure, has a cult following on the good old Internet.

You can find out more about Ski Free on the The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page!

LOL at AOL

For those of you who missed it, AOL just announced a completely new brand:

Now, I’m no branding expert, but to me these logos look terrible. The images are simply horrid; it looks like they were found with Google Image Search, or possibly chopped out of a photo by an intern using Photoshop’s magic wand tool. The concept behind this new brand is that the wordmark can be superimposed over all sorts of images:

“The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal.

Hopefully, for AOL’s sake, the images above are simply a poorly executed proof-of-concept.

It turns out the company behind the new brand, Wolff Olins, has some pretty impressive previous work:

That Wacky Wacom

London 2012 Olympics logo disaster

(You really need to see the London 2012 logo in action to fully appreciate the monstrosity of this logo.)

I really have no idea how Wolff Olins managed to sell such terrible logos to these huge organizations. The various news releases are chock-full of branding & identity drivel, and only further my suspicion that ~~the majority of~~ some branding experts are only a few degrees of separation from the social media experts.

Jack Donaghy would be jittering with excitement.

Japanese Simplicity

“A central aesthetic principle in Japan is simplicity, but it is different from simplicity in the West. Let me explain the difference by comparing cooking knives. The knives made by the German company, Henckel, for example, are well crafted and easy to use because they are highly ergonomic. The thumb automatically finds its place when you grab the knife.”

“Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb).”

Via Notes to Self (photo credit)

Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript

An interesting article on SitePoint in which Dmitry Baranovskiy, creator of the Raphaël JavaScript library, talks about the “terrible code” behind Google Closure and describes Closure as “a JavaScript library written by Java developers who clearly don’t get JavaScript.”

I love the part where Dmitry compares JavaScript’s global scope to a public toilet:

“You can’t avoid going in there, but try to limit your contact with surfaces when you do.”

Even if you’re not interested in Google Closure specifically, this article still illustrates some general best-practices for writing good JavaScript.

Sexy bathroom fixtures

I don’t need any tubs, showerheads or bathroom fixtures, but when I do I’ll head to Davroc.

Especially cool is the Aquavision, a “luxury, waterproof and in-wall television” that comes with a floatable, waterproof remote control.

They have a pretty nice website, too.

100,000 Users And So Can You

An inspiring article by Spencer Fry, co-founder of Carbonmade. He discusses the history of their company and challenges they experienced transitioning from a client-project agency to a product company.

I find this quote particularly insightful:

While our good fortune continues, we are working at a fever pitch on our new version. It’s taking longer than expected, but we don’t subscribe to the “Release Early, Release Often” philosophy. Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000 pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-whistles updates just to follow a silly motto.

It really hit close to home because, as you might know, I’ve been working on fotojournal for a long time now. We certainly don’t have 158,000 users, but it’s nice to know we’re not crazy because we’ve chosen to take our time rather than release short bursts of incremental improvements.

Source: 100,000 Users And So Can You: A history of Carbonmade.

Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them.

“People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.

Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.”

Great insight from Derek Sivers. When I have a new idea I find it very hard to keep it to myself. I like seeing other people get excited by what I’m “going to do.” But doing so does take some fire out of my motivation to actually finish. It would be much more fun to say “look what I did“.

Starting now, I’m going to stop announcing my intentions and just follow through with them. Err, wait a second— okay, starting now.

Via contrast.ie, which offers further insight on the article.

Why are so many Americans opposed to public healthcare?

It baffles me. As this little excerpt illustrates:

“This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock, powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watch this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress, and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA bar back home on DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post of FreeRepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.”

I recently heard that medical expeses are the #1 cause of bankruptcy in America. I don’t have a citation for this, but if it’s true…just wow.

(via quaranto)

First subpixel typeface, ever.

It has x-height of 3 pixels, it is italic, inspired by old masters and most important – made by hand. You must not look too closely, because colors get visible. It’s work in progress.

Designed primarily for use in favicons, and comes in bold and bold-italic variants.

Even more amazing, the designer is using colour to achieve hinting and letterform legibility, with zero space between glyphs. Check out this extreme closeup:

(via Typophile)

WebGL: JavaScript bindings for OpenGL

WebGL is an effort to bring native, high-performance 3D graphics to web browsers by offering a JavaScript API to OpenGL ES, which draws onto the <canvas> element. Very cool.

Jeff Rosen happened to notice support for WebGL in the latest Webkit codebase and whipped up some demos.

Google, FireFox and Opera are also part of the WebGL Working Group and have plans to implement similar 3D graphics capabilities. Not sure what Microsoft’s plans to offer with Internet Explorer—we’ll probably get stuck with WebDirectX or something :(

Who knows how long it will be until there is widespread support for native 3D graphics in web browsers. But seeing this kind of cooperation and progress makes me pretty optimistic.

(via ajaxian)

Yahoo! has an analytics tool?

Just discovered Yahoo! Web Analytics. As you can imagine, it’s a website stats/reporting tool, similar to Google Analytics. However, as the Features page shows, YWA has some pretty cool stuff—merchandise reporting, visual visitor click paths and ad hoc sales-funnels—which Google Analytics does not.

One of the items in their News & Announcements links to an article claiming that Yahoo! Web Analytics Leaps Ahead of Google Analytics for Enterprise Use. I think it’s pretty cool that Yahoo! gives you the ability to export out your raw, unaggregated data (whereas Google Analytics apparently does not).

Google Analytics works great for me. But if you’re running a high-traffic e-commerce site, Yahoo! Web Analytics may offer you a bit more.

Was HTML5 worth it?

This latest version of my site (which obviously isn’t finished :) seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with HTML5. It’s quite satisfying to markup a blog post inside the <article> tag, and the site navigation in a <nav> tag, but beyond that I’m start to question the benefits of HTML5.

Other than browser compatibility—which can be remedied—there aren’t any technical issues with HTML5. I’m simply having a hard time determining what I’ve gained by using HTML5 instead of XHTML1.

I still need some time to sort out my thoughts about HTML5. In the meantime I suggest you read what other people are saying.

Raphaël: JavaScript Drawing Library

Raphaël is a very slick looking JavaScript library for drawing and animating vector graphics with JavaScript. The API is simple and well thought-out and it supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 6. I’m especially impressed by how well it performs—the animations are extremely smooth. And because each graphic object is also a DOM object, you can add interaction using normal JavaScript event handlers.

I’m quite excited by how quickly JavaScript graphics capabilities are advancing. I think over the next year we’re going to see a lot of cool stuff.

Here are a couple demos showing just how smooth the animations look:

(via ajaxian)