Maverick Conceptions

SXSW Day 4

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:02:17 +0000

Day 4 woke up with a hangover

Didn’t make it to my first two panels… getting out of bed was too painful so I just took it slow.

Headed over the to conference to attend the 11 o’clock Gary Vaynerchuk speech. Although I can’t actually tell you what the speech was about, it was inspiring as all Gary’s stuff is. #RefreshGary

Next I stayed in the same room to watch the Evan Williams keynote simulcast. I am so glad I wasn’t in the live room because OMG how crap it was. I was glad noone was around so we could speak freely about how shit it was. This is not a reflection on Evan at all, but the interviewer Umair Haque seemed as though he was more interested in listening to himself talk. Anyway… Evan announced the upcoming @Anywhere platform. Looks pretty cool… integrates twitter conversation into web sites. #EvanWilliams

Next I headed to the trade show floor which was pretty crap and I bailed after 5 minutes.

Headed back to the hotel for a nice rest and clean up a bit.

At 6pm we headed over to Austin on Rails at Buffalo Billards. Dan got to hang out with “his peeps” while Mikey and I took advantage of the free drink coupons and scored ourselves some of the Black Otherinbox shirts (way nicer then the tan ones IMO).

After that we wandered down to the Gowalla party (<3 Gowalla) and ended up waiting in line for an hour and 15 minutes ONLY to get rained on and leave about 30 minutes after getting in. Did score a nice Gowalla tshirt and some gowalla stickers so all was not lost.

Headed back to the hotel at about 10 to get Dan and Mikey some warmer gear and we decided to just stick around locally and ended up at the Paradise bar.

Another day done… 1 more left. I will be sad when it is over, but I am looking forward to sleeping in my bed.

SXSW Day 3

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:48:05 +0000

Day three starts with a hang over. Wanted to get up for an 11 o’clock speech… didn’t make it. Micheal’s bomb shelter alarm did however wake me up like every 20 minutes (thanks Mikey!). So finally about 12:00 I roll out of bed… shower, pop a lot of Motrin and head down to eat a greasy breakfast with Dan in an attempt to straighten myself out.

Head over to the conference hall to catch the 2:00 speech called Your Design Process is Killing You. Got there and there was a line. Decided to sit outside and wait and watched people leaving in droves…. decided it wasn’t worth it. Spent some time working on some requirements for my new project.

Mikey picked the next speech and we headed to It’s Time to Save the World with Design Thinking. To be honest it wasn’t what I would have chosen, but I was pleasantly surprised. As opposed to a speech it was a core conversations so all the attendees contributed… which was a good and bad thing. Glad I went, was a new experience. #SaveTheWorld

Wandering the hallways I ran into my friend Mark Krysnky who gave me a tip on there might be some discussion about Buzz at the gmail speech, so we headed down there. Unfortunately A LOT of people heard that tip and the place was packed (seriously SXSW why use small rooms if you have big ones available?!?!). Ended up drinking some coffee and working on more requirements.

Headed back to the room and got my camera and snapped some pics from the Omni roof. (Will post later).

Headed to Chupacabra’s to grab some dinner and a margarita. Good…. not as good as the Iron Cactus, but still good. Mikey made some new friends and we headed over to the Mashable party to check the line. VERY VERY VERY long.

We decided instead to head over to the Blip.TV party. Long story short, we got lost, ended up following some guy to his room in a hotel. Sorry random guy!

Made it to the Blip.TV party. IMO it was a total bust, although I think Mikey liked it. Seemed very markety… people not talking about what they have done or created but more name dropping… just not my thing.

Got a message from Gary Vaynerchuck about his not so secret wine party and headed around the block to check it out. More my sort of people, lots of devs and personalities I recognized, good music, way better drinks. Dan, Mikey and I worked our way to the couch and Mikey made friends with our booth buddies who apparently are involved in making his favorite tacos or something. Dan got a text message that Gary moved the party (WTF?!!?), but we were lazy and decided to stay.

About 1 o’clock I decided to check out so that I could attend some speeches tomorrow (full day!) and there are a bunch of parties I want to his up.

Apparently with old age I can only really rock it every other night, so here I am… almost 3 am… took a hot bath, dropped some more motrin and am watching Deception on tv.

Life is good.

SXSW Day 2

Lynn Wallenstein — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:09:54 +0000

Day 2 is a Saturday. For some reason 90% of the things I want to do at SXSW (speeches and parties) fell on day 2. This is why as I write this on Sunday (day 3) I am very much in recovery.

Day 2 started out with dragging my ass out of bed at 8:30 and heading on over to the Hilton for Chris Messina’s Activity Streams speech. I am not going to cover any of the actual thoughts I have on any of the speeches in these posts as I feel that they each require their own blog entries (well the more interesting ones), so a short review… it was good, it was interesting and I left inspired (already have plans for use in a new project I am working on). #GettingStreamy

Presentation 2 was a panel by Happy Cog titled “We F*cked Up. Now What? Exploring Failure, Together “. Really really interesting. I felt a lot of empathy for the stories as I definitely related. Extremely entertaining and funny.#SXSWFailure

Next up was something a bit more technical. We headed off to the web framework battle between Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zope, Seaside and Symphony. No clear winner, but went over like 5 aspects of frameworks from barrier to entry, templating, scalability and database support. Was good to hear about some of the future Rails 3 stuff. #FrameWorkBattleRoyale

Following the lively debate, Dan and I headed over to watch the CSS Framework shootout. This was less fiesty then the web framework and they showed each other a lot of love. I was sad to see LESS not represented, especially with Compass being there. To be honest I don’t think i walked away with much that I didn’t know, however I am pretty familiar with frameworks. I did get a little background about the frameworks which was nice. It will be interesting to see how they evolve with HTML5 and the semantic web. #CSSFrameworks

Rounded up the day early (3 oclock speech) about HTML5 and CSS3. This was an interesting speech in the sense of it is right in my wheelhouse but it was presented very awkwardly. The speakers knew what they were talking about, but the idea of it being a show and tell, the only way this would have worked successfully, well it wasn’t not successful, it was just awkward, but it should have been more like a recorded presentation where the speakers just started and stopped the video so there was a lot less waiting time. BUT that being said, it was a great example of where we are headed and inspiring about the future of design. #CSS3DesignHTML5

Back to the hotel for some relaxation and dinner at the Omni.

Thanks to Dan and his boss Gary Vaynerchuck, we got VIP access to the live Diggnation. Really this isn’t my sort of thing, lots of fanboys and younger kids, but it was fun and totally worth the wait. I got to see Leo Laporte crowd surf. Nuff said.

Next we headed to the Happy Cog Karoke thing which was just to long a wait, ,so we hopped in a bicycle cap and headed over to Emo’s for a long island ice tea. We then walked around 6th and ended our evening meeting some of Mikey’s coworkers at Buffalo Billards.

Very drunk and very much in pain we headed back to the Omni at about 2am (which thanks to nature was actually 3).

SXSW Day 1

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:08:41 +0000

Day 1 started out with a flight out of BWI at 7:30 after 1 hour sleep. Everything went well at the airport (shocking). Dan and I got through security in record time. Nate Lee, my neighbor, was on the flight with us, however due to packed seating I didn’t really get to see him. We arrived in Austin (via Nashville) at about noon and met up with Mikey. Took a cab to the hotel and checked in. The Omni in Austin is awesome (pics later). We went to the convention center and got our badges and swag. So far so good.

Presentation 1, “Getting Excited About Typography”, was good. I was stuck sitting on the floor so I didn’t get to observe as much as I want so it probably was more impressive with the visuals. I am however now inspired to go home and try and make my own font. #GetYourGlyphon

Presentation 2, “Simple Steps to Great Web Design”, was better for the 10 minutes it went on, until we were evacuated from the building by an alarm. Slides

We took this evacuation notice as a message from god to get some rest and headed back to the hotel, grabbed showers and relaxed. Headed over to the Iron Cactus for some of their famous guac and had a couple margaritas. Headed back for an early night, hung out on the roof of the Omni for a bit and checked out the view (again, more pics later). Went to bed like 10 (yeah I know… but 1 hour sleep and Saturday parties looming).

So far so good.

Is Revolution in Web Design Possible?

Lynn Wallenstein — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:54:23 +0000

Nikon recently announced their new camera, the Nikon D3S. What does this have to do with web design you ask? Just bear with me.

So as an amateur photographer and Nikon fanatic I was browsing through the specs and I noticed something interesting. The camera has the ability to pull pictures with perfect clarity out of video with no loss of quality. This single concept floored me… this is going to change the entire way photography works. No longer is photography going to be about making sure to “capture the perfect moment” or “missing the shot”, you now will have every moment to comb through and pick and choose which ones you want to save/display/print. Think about the ramifications on wedding and child photography. Think about when you are trying to get 20 people to look at the camera and it seems impossible to get everyone to keep looking long enough to press the button. This feature will revolutionize the way photography works… the work flow, the process, the options, the methods – it is all going to change. Upgrades in cameras come by every day, more megapixel, higher ISO, better lenses, quicker cards… these are evolutionary changes. But this, this one new feature, this is a REVOLUTIONARY change. Nikon started at square 1 and rethought the entire process of how pictures are taken and has changed it from ground zero. Will it be better? It is too soon to say and depends a lot of additional tools and work flow to see if it is more of a hassle then good, but either way, the change itself is revolutionary.

Web 2.0 Cliche Style

So back to web design. We see changes in web design all the time. Just like in fashion, elements of design become popular, overused, cliche and outdated. Code gets optimized, standards get established, frameworks get published, aesthetics copied and styles even get coined with names such as “web 2.0″ … all these things are the evolution of web design. I say evolution because in the grand scheme, the way the users interact with the web page is still the same. They use their eyes to scan through text and media and make choices of which “branches” of the web site “tree” to explore. We concentrate on evolving the existing process, but never examining the process from the beginning.

So how can you be revolutionary with web design? Just like with anything else, revolution can be found by thinking outside the box. Easier said then done. Lets start with thinking what web design is. Standard web design is the methods of:

displaying information on a web page so that easy to navigate

conveys the important points quickly as well as allows the readers to access the detailed and complete information if they so desire

present the media in an attractive manner

make the information accessible to people using different software and devices

have the information load quickly and create a site that functions as the user expectsTo be revolutionary, we would have to step back from these ideas for a moment and think about, what is the goal we are trying to accomplish. We are trying to convey information to our users. Most web sites do this by throwing all the points of information up on the screen with some sort of navigation for the visitors to sift through to find something they want or need. Navigating a web site is like getting directions, and this method is like using a map. You establish where you are (the current URL), you determine it isn’t where you currently want to be (you view the current pages’s content) and you try to determine the best way to get to where you want to go (the navigation). Most sites, including this one, follow this very established method of web page usage. Now lets think of some other ways of how to get directions that don’t use a map. How about asking for directions. In web design this would be the search. Search is an overlooked in most web designs and thought of as the last resort a user would use to find something. In reality, as humans, search is the first thing we do whenever we have a question. We don’t keep indexes of our valuables in our houses with maps to all the items so we can easily retrieve them if lost, when we can’t find something we ask, or perform a search of our resources (our housemates in this example). So why not make a web site that focuses on search. Something that looks like Google, but just for your site. Just ask the user flat out “why are you here”. Maybe even try hiding everything else so that their complete attention can be placed on the search and provide them with a focused output so that we aren’t distracting them with information they aren’t there for. This is just an example of something that might be tried, maybe it is worse then what we are currently doing, the thing about revolution is it isn’t a safe change. It is an experiment.

As web designers we have the greatest opportunity to experiment with minimal risks. All it takes is a little time to test out experiments and with awesome tools like google analytics and feedback sites like getsatisfaction or uservoice, we can almost instantly get feedback on our experiments and either further evolve our idea or just backtrack to previous versions. We have the perfect opportunity to try and be revolutionary every day… whats stopping you?

A Buzz

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:45:59 +0000

Been checking out Google’s new Buzz. I think it has a long way to go, but reading the “plan” of what they want to do with it, I think it will be great once it gets there. I will reserve my complete judgment for a couple weeks until after they work out some of the UI bugs that make it very obnoxious. Feel free to follow me!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year…

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:20:04 +0000

Time for my yearly Christmas post listing the loot I got and thanking my friends and family for being awesome. Spent Christmas day in Maryland with my sister, brother in law, my nieces and mother and then drove to NJ for a Wallenstein/Skelly Christmas party. All in all a fantastic time, although 10 hours in the car in 2 days was rough!

So here is the goodies I scammed from my loved ones:

Lots of Amazon Gift Certificates!
Novation Launchpad Ableton Live Controller
Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch
Lensbaby Accessory Kit
Charger to charge batteries from USB
Bunch of cool shirts
Knitted Scarf, Mittens and Hat
Bottle of Irish Mist and glasses
Bunch of yummy treats

So thank you to all my family, all my friends, clients, collegues, aquaintances, neighbors and fellow humans that I share this planet with. 2009 has been a great year, looking forward to 2010.

Some New Projects and Categories

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:33:34 +0000

It has been a long while since I last posted … doesn’t it seem that every blog has a post like this? I blame 1) Holidays 2) Sickness and 3) Laziness… in that order of course. I thought I would just post a quick blog about a couple of cool projects I am working on if only just to get myself excited about them.

Photography

Back in June I picked up a Nikon D90 and started doing a bit of photography. I have been taking classes and attending meetups and feel confident now I have moved from noob to beginner. With that being said I am planning to roll out a new category in the blog for photography to post about the cool things I learn, and in tradition with everything I do, post up some “code” (in this case Lightroom presets) I am creating.

Blog Topics

I find myself going back and forth between branching into separate blogs and then consolidating. I have a couple of ideas for some new blogs and depending on if I can get some cowriters to work with me, they may end up being new categories or entire blogs unto themselves. Most of them deal with social media, but I am hoping not to rant on about the whole “why your company should use twitter” topic that has been repeated over and over, but do more case studies, critiques, etc.

Well like I said, this is a short one… still have a lot of work before the holidays!

Are you a social network dumbass?

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:01:18 +0000

If while using ….

Facebook

You befriend people who are friends of friends just cause someone said their name once.
You have befriended people who have “worked for you” in some fashion (waiters, clerks, bartenders), but never hung out with them outside of work.
You resend app invites for the 12th time to your friends cause ‘maybe this time they really will want to play mafia wars or farmville’
You have a profile picture is you from 20 years ago or of just your kid : yes, we all know you don’t like how you look.
You use comments like IM messages and have 40 comment conversations because everyone cares where you plan to meet up on Friday.
You post private information like phone numbers, addresses or medical information on someone’s wall

Twitter

You have multi layer retweet
You follow everyone who follows you
You tweet asking people to follow you
You regularly tweet pictures of the food you are eating
You have two twitter accounts (one personal and one for a project or company), you ask on each for your users to follow the other and then post the same content on both
You have deleted a tweet because you are embarrassed you wrote it.
You post the same tweet daily (check out my blog, buy my book, check out my software)
You tell people there is something super fabulous if they click on THIS LINK, with no details about what it is.
You call on lazyweb more then once a month.

THEN YOU ARE A SOCIAL NETWORK DUMBASS.

While this post was MOSTLY made in humor, I can actually say that I know people that do all of this. Obviously you can do whatever you want with Twitter or Facebbook, but do realize, the more you abuse your followers, the sooner they will leave.

Testing Data for Wordpress Themers

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:15:44 +0000

I am releasing my test data for Wordpress as an open source project.

What This Is

I love Wordpress. I love the Wordpress community… especially the themers. What I don’t love is downloading an awesome looking theme, only to upload it to my blog to watch it explode because the theme creator ignored testing all potential use cases of long wordpress posts, lists, links, embedded pictures, captions etc. What I can only assume is going on is that the designer makes two or three short posts and tests out there theme. While I am not going to knock the fact that many of these themes are free so I really can’t complain, it would be nice if the theme actually worked in a real life scenario. Setting up test data takes time, making sure you cover all use cases… building up a lot of data, testing out weird edge cases; hopefully this will help!

I am not completely done with it (I would say about 75%), but I figured I would stick it up and see where it goes. This is what the database is/will be made up of:

Link Categories

Long and Short Link Categories
Link categories with and without descriptions

Links

Links with Short and Long Names
Links with Normal, Long and No Descriptions
Links with and without XFN
Links belonging to 0, 1 and multiple categories
Links with with and without ratings
Private Links

Pages

Short and Long Posts
Short and Long Titles
Pages with Comments on and Off
Pages with Images Linked from other site
Pages with Images Links from Local
Pages with HTML formatting like links, bold, italic and headers, ordered lists, tables (See ‘Advanced Formatting’ Page)

Post Categories

Categories with and without descriptions
Categories with long descriptions
Children Categories

Tags

Tags with and without descriptions
Two Word Tags

Posts

25 Posts
Posts with 0, 1 and many categories
Posts in children categories only
Posts ranging in a data span of a year
Posts with 0, 1 and many tags
Posts with No, Short and Long Titles
Posts with Linked and Uploaded Images
Posts with HTML formatting like links, bold, italic and headers, ordered lists, tables (See ‘Advanced Formatting’ Page)
Posts with Images with multiple alignments

Comments

Posts with No Comments
Posts with 25 Comments
Posts with Threaded Comments
Posts with Private Comments
Posts with anonymous Comments.
Posts with comments with formatting

What This Isn’t

This is not just a collection of Lorem test. Lets me honest, everything looks good with Lorem text. I strived to make this a really inclusive example of all kinds of data by selecting blog posts from all different sources that contains embedded video, code samples, heavy use of lists, child categories, etc. That being said the data isn’t designed to make sense in that it isn’t tagged or categorized in any sort of logical fashion, however it is done so that you will have a varying tag cloud, posts with no and many categories, etc.

Feedback

As always, feedback is appreciated… code contributions/expansions welcome.