Fling Media

Tumblr & Product Evolution

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:02:00 GMT

I love Tumblr. It is a great service and just works well. But, lately I’ve been thinking of jumping ship. Why? because anytime I want to try something new I seem to run into a wall. When I try to get help, my pleas seem to go unheard.

This got me thinking about product evolutions. How do you evolve your product, especially in the early days, to recruit early-adopters and turn them into your product advocates? How do you turn users into your R&D team or marketing team?

What's Next?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:30:00 GMT

For the last few months I’ve been thinking about my future in the web, considering “what’s next for me?” and I’ve been becoming increasingly ~~dispassionate~~, ~~depressed~~, ~~despondent~~, ~~lethargic~~, ~~bored~~, ~~gloomy~~, ~~vexed~~, ~~anxious~~, ~~perplexed~~, ~~concerned~~ ...well lets just say I’m at a crossroads.

If the web was my religion, I feel as though I’ve lost my faith.

The Decline of the Blog?

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Today Greg Hoy Twitter’d:

“I am really noticing people are not posting to their blogs anymore. Like everywhere.”

I tend to agree. Its something I’ve been thinking about for the past year as Twitter and Twitter-like sites have increased in popularity. I’ve noticed as the activity in more presence-posting tools like Twitter increase that number of traditional regular blog posts tends to decrease. It seems that as people Twitter more, they blog less.

My Climate Clock Idea

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:32:00 GMT

For about a year now I’ve had this idea to create a single page website featuring a large clock, counting down the time we have left until some sort of catastrophic global event caused by climate change.

Basically a combination of the national debt clock, the doomsday clock and a death clock.

The goal would be show the effects of climate change in very real terms, helping build awareness of the effects climate change and hopefully urge people to take action. Since most people would prefer not to know their date of death, I figure even a rough estimation would be a powerful motivator.

The city of San Jose is planning to build a physical clock, but one problem, it would be in downtown San Jose. Not exactly the hub of cultural activity. I figure, why not have it be online for all in the world to see? After all, climate change is a burden we all have to bare.

Having put a lot of thought into the idea and having done a fair amount of research, I’ve found a number of problems in coming up with a formula. What is so disturbing to me is that the problems I’ve found are the same problems that any initiative to help increase awareness in climate change would likely face.

I don’t know how the world can come together to solve the climate change problem without better information and tools to understanding the problem and the potential effects. So today being Earth Day I figured why not share some of the problems I’ve come across in trying to build a Climate Clock.

Making Google Reader for Fluid

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Okay here is the setup: Google Reader is ugly, but it works great as an online RSS newsreader. So what if I used Fluid.app to create a standalone Mac app and replace my desktop newsreader.

Okay, that was easy. But it didn’t solve the problem that Google Reader is still really UGLY!

After some quick research I find Jon Hicks’ excellent gReader theme for Google Reader. But the recommended method of replacing the stylesheet using SafariStand won’t work with Fluid. Okay, no problem, Fluid supports Userscripts, so I just create a Javascript to call the stylesheet from my server.

Shazaam! The technology of Google Reader minus one craptacular design.

But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted Google Reader to look more like my preferred desktop newsreader Newsfire.

“Why,” you may ask, “do I not just use Newsfire?” I have for years. I love it. Both elegant and useful. But I want to read my news on multiple Mac’s or on my iPhone. Syncing just isn’t a feature of Newsfire. Plus I occasionally want to share my favorite articles or feeds with others.

So this weekend I began a very ill advised attempt to customize a version of the gReader theme to work with Fluid and feel a little bit more like a native Mac app. After days of hacking and reverse engineering Google’s code, I had to quit before I lost the rest of my hair and drove myself nuts.

The result of my efforts is an evolved version of gReader for Fluid that works pretty good. There are still plenty of visual and interface bugs, but the bulk of day-to-day newsreading seems to work without a hitch.

The problem is Google Reader is constantly changing the DOM depending on the action. You can’t just view source and find a style, the only way to track down a style is to view every element in X-Ray and figure out what is going on, then add your new style to override it. It is long, frustrating and tedious work.

I have to say Mr. Hicks has done an amazing job! He is a much more patient man than I, going through over 4,000 lines of Google’s code to find the 1,100 or so that mattered. I only added about 400 lines of code to tweak the appearance for Fluid, most of which are brute force hacks to override styles. I tip my hat to you sir. Well done.

Over the course of the weekend, as things became harder and harder to tweak, I kept asking myself do I keep moving forward? should I keep hacking on it?

At some point in the middle of the night last night I realized it would be easier to just build an online newsreader from scratch, one that works great, but also looks great. One that supports user-defined stylesheets so if you don’t like the look of your newsreader you can customize to suit, like Mr. Hicks has. (You can read more about that epiphany here.)

But for those who want to use Google Reader in Fluid, here you go. All you need to do is create a Google Reader Site Specific Browser (SSB), travel to this page and click this link.

Install gReader for Fluid

This should install the Userscript to Fluid. Just select it from the Userscript menu and reload the browser, that’s it. (If you just want to run the normal version of gReader, click this link. If it doesn’t install it automagically, then just create a new Userscript in Fluid and cut and paste the above Javascript and Save.)

Or if you would like to call it locally, modify the styles or improve on what I was able to do, go ahead and download the source.

Download the source for gReader for Fluid.

Special thanks to Todd Ditchendorf for making Fluid, Jon Hicks for enduring to make gReader and David Watanabe for making Newsfire which I still think is the best newsreader out there (and is also now free BTW).

For feedback and general comments, go to http://flingmedia.com/contact/

I'm Leaving Blue Flavor

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:33:00 GMT

I think one of the exciting things about life is the chance to press the reset button and start over. I believe that any time is the right time to change your life. I’ve been married for twelve years to my lovely wife Cyndi, so that aspect of my personal life has always been a rock. My professional life has been …well an interesting journey to say the least, probably having hit the reset button a little too often.

Today, I embark on the next leg of my journey, leaving Blue Flavor, the incredible agency I co-founded in 2005, to reboot my consultancy, Fling Media.

Why leave such a successful agency and start over? Three reasons: to focus more on mobile, to build more products like Leaflets, but mostly to spend more time with my family.

Edge Cases are the Root of all Evil

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:10:00 GMT

In the restroom in of the La Patisserie in Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District, someone scrawled Bark Dust is the Root of All Evil. While that may certainly be true, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Edge Cases are the real Root of All Evil.

Ever trustworthy Wikipedia defines Edge Cases as thus:

An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.

But I think I’ll stick with “Root of All Evil.”

Why do Edge Cases get that special place of honor above the love of money, boredom or that special feeling after having a der Wienerschnitzel Chili Dog (you know what I’m talking about)?

Because Edge Cases kill inspiration. They extinguish the bubbling of creative juices with some minutia that will probably never matter anyway.

The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:20:00 GMT

Occasionally smart people say pretty smart things. The computing world likes to call these pearls of wisdom laws. They also like to name each law after the person who coined it. Take, for instance, the most well-known of all the computing world’s laws, Moore’s Law, which is named after Intel founder Gordan E. Moore.

In the web industry we have no such laws. While computer software and engineering is a science, web work isn’t. I view web work as an amalgamation of a variety of crafts and disciplines, like behavioral psychology, art and design, information sciences – and, since the end medium depends on technology, part computer science.

Given that last bit, it makes sense that some computing laws would apply to the world of the web. Since I have an awful time remembering them, I figured I’d write down the ones that have been helpful to me in my career in the web industry.

Mobile 2.0

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:23:00 GMT

Thinking 2.0

As web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that “Web 2.0” has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing.

The 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different.

With that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other.

Content Protectionism

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:13:00 GMT

Yesterday I heard a report on NPR about European TV Networks attempting to fight online piracy. The problem here is that TV shows from the states can take up to six months to make their way overseas. Some foreign networks depend on the American content for the bulk of their programming. Pirates are getting the shows subtitled and out on file sharing sites within minutes of the US broadcast, making for stiff competition for the traditional TV networks.

As one commentator in the report noted, this is obviously not a new problem. The music industry has been fighting piracy for over seven years. The difference here is we are talking about medium that the average person perceives as being free.

A perception shared by other mediums like the web and mobile. I think the issue of TV shows serves as an interesting parallel case study to other industries trying to make a buck online and the web in general.