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Putting On The Fedora

2009-01-12T20:55:38Z

I’ve always been partial to some of the sillier and more colorful business / consulting phrases I’ve heard floating around agencies and conferences over the years. I get the feeling that their heyday may have ended before mine began, but a turn of phrase so remarkable as “opening the kimono” seems to have a long tail. Ooh, “The Long tail!” There’s another one!

So today, I’ve decided to create my own goofy business strategy phrase to hopefully join the lofty ranks of “one throat to choke” and “paving the goat path”.

I give you: “Putting on the fedora.”

But let me explain. This idea was inspired in equal parts by my work in technology product design and my life in and around Los Angeles (where fedoras have had a second heyday of their own as of late). The idea is based on two givens:

Not Justin Timberlake (photo by fuzzcat)

1) Justin Timberlake arguably rocks the fedora. I don’t like it any more than you do, but he does. (Further: No one else does.)

2) You probably wouldn’t want to be stood side-by-side with JT and have a jury of your peers compare the two of you.

If we accept the above as being relatively accurate, we can then safely extrapolate that it’s a good idea to not walk around pretending to be — or be like — Justin Timberlake, lest you suffer the cold, cruel truth of a direct comparison. So don’t put on a fedora, because you will not rock it.

And now to apply this concept to the trade: If you don’t want to be compared directly to Twitter, don’t make status your main game. Similarly, making business networking a significant part of your offering will likely cause comparisons to LinkedIn, which may be daunting to say the least.

This isn’t another article suggesting that you find a niche. Everyone knows that a blue ocean is the best place to find something new and exciting. This article is about not riding someone else’s niche — unless you’re truly prepared to compete.

I think what I may be suggesting is this: do it backwards. Have a steady footing based on more typical functionality before developing/promoting a niche sub-feature in a highly competitive area. You may lose your chance to make an initial impression as a trail-blazer, but you also reduce the risk of that initial impression falling short of “trail-blazer” and landing squarely on “me-too”. Maybe.

iPhone + iCal + SonicLiving.com = Awesome

2007-10-09T00:02:38Z

These three components combine to put a list of every concert or show that may interest you right in the palm of your iHand.

SonicLiving.com is a great events site not too dissimilar from Yahoo’s Upcoming. It’s not quite as slick and easy to use, but it does have a few features that Upcoming is still missing, most notably, the Wishlist. This feature ingests your entire iTunes library (mine is 160GB) and keeps a list of every artist you listen to. It then creates a calendar / hCal / RSS feed of every appearance by any of those artists within a certain distance of your home. This calendar is separate from your “I’m Interested” calendar which includes only the shows you click to add.

Simply set up your account at SonicLiving, scan your iTunes library, and subscribe to the calendar feed in iCal. The next time you sync up your iPhone, you’ll have all the goods. This is all fairly obvious stuff, what’s remarkable about it is the List View on the iPhone.

This view just happens to be incredibly conducive to scanning through a bunch of upcoming shows and planning out your evenings. Also remarkable is the set-it-and-forget-it nature of event subscriptions. This thing updates itself, and is limited only by how often you sync your phone. I have honestly been going out more since I got my iPhone. I guess owe it a drink.

Amazon Redesign On The Way

2007-09-22T00:42:10Z

It’s apparently not live yet, or at least it’s not visible to all users, but Amazon seems to be preparing to release a new version of the site.

I saw the new page briefly yesterday afternoon. After taking a few moments to appreciate the category menu and the realignment of the header, I clicked on the “We’ve been remodeling” link in the top-right corner. I was taken to a page describing the redesign, but with the old header and menu. Sure enough, when I went back to the homepage I was greeted by the old design.

The new look seems like a big improvement and I’ll be anxious to check it out when it goes live.

Sane Tagging in iPhoto 6

2007-08-24T06:53:01Z

The new iLife suite is about to hit the streets, and with it comes an iPhoto update. This is good news for those of us who are both photo junkies and organization freaks. iPhoto is obviously the de facto solution for organizing your photos on a mac, but it’s not without it’s quirks (I’m looking at you, keywords). I’ve developed my own method for pseudo-tagging images in iPhoto that I believe to be a much simpler alternative to Apple’s wacky packed-in solution. It’s so simple, in fact, that it never occurred to me to write it up. Several people I’ve shown it to have actually found it quite useful, so I agreed to write this post. Then I forgot. Then they released a new iPhoto. Oops.

So, I give you, several years later than would have been helpful, Escapist’s Guide To Sane Tagging In iPhoto.

The Problem

So far, iPhoto has featured a keyword scheme that could most kindly be described as… “unique”.

To begin with, you need to predefine all of the keywords you plan to use across your entire library inside the iPhoto Preferences panel. This adds complexity to the simplest task associated with keywords: applying one to an image.

The next oddity is that you need to open up a special Keywords pane in the main view in order to apply or query keywords.

The ability to add and remove keywords from your search is very cool, but in my opinion, not worth all the tomfoolery. This truly is a new way of using keywords, but not really a suitable was of using tags.

I guess they got the terminology right.

The Solution

Since iPhoto uses OS X’s standard search-as-you-type, it’s quick and easy to find anything in your library with a descriptive title and/or comments. Adding verbose comments to each image is probably not the best option, but you could certainly toss some quick and dirty, descriptive terms into that there comment field and treat them like tags! Right away you’ve just bought yourself the ability to work with tags without going into your preferences or pulling up the special keywords pane in the main view. This process should seem familiar to anyone used to working with tags online at sites like Flickr and YouTube.

I prefix each of my pseudo-tags with a colon to help set them apart and to increase search accuracy. Searching for “:button” will only return items I’ve “tagged”, and not items that happen to have the string “button” in the title or description. Some of you programming nerds out there might recognize this as a fairly common way to be able to treat a string as a symbol without actually defining a variable. Turns out, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

For my most common tags, I set up a handful of smart albums that self-populate with certain tags. For instance, my “Buttons” album has a rule that automatically grabs any images which have the string “:button” in their comments fields. It’s basically a saved query and gives the same result as typing “:button” into the search field. This way, though, I get a list of all my most common tags and one-click access to each. All of this, again, without any need to dive into the iPhoto Preferences or open the Keywords pane.

So, that’s it. Now that you don’t need it, there it is.

Now let’s all go download our iLife 08 updates and forget any of this ever happened.

VeohTV: Cooler Than Joost?

2007-08-24T05:17:09Z

I know, I know. Joost was the next big thing. The hype was there, the idea was there, and the guys behind it are obviously some of the sharper minds in the game. Clearly it’s too soon to write Joost off entirely, but I get the feeling that the first beta has left a lot of people a bit clammy.

VeohTV, on the other hand, has every opportunity to not just beat expectations, but to leave them bloodied and panting. It’s not that expectations were low, it’s that expectations were different, mainly because Veoh has brand recognition as a social video site. A decent one, but not a leader in the field, and not a wave-maker (despite the use of peer-to-peer technology for distributing higher quality content). Their only recent press has been regarding funding. This spring, Veoh raised $12.5M in series B funding and added Michael Eisner to the board. This set the stage for something big, but Veoh was decidedly hush-hush about it. Shortly thereafter, VeohTV was announced, as well as an additional round of series C funding in the amount of $26M.

Same Space, Different Approach

Joost looks like computer powered television. VeohTV looks like online video on your TV. While Joost has attempted to create a new paradigm, VeohTV has sought to improve upon the existing online video experience and possibly bring it to the living room. Joost made some bold decisions when it came to interface design. Shiny blobjects, prisms and refracted light, elements scattered across the four corners of the display and video playing behind menus a la a set-top receiver or DVR. The icons are all single color and very simple shapes, which probably improves visibility on lower resolution TVs. I never experienced this interface on a TV from the couch, but I think that’s probably where it shines.

VeohTV takes a more conventional approach, not shying away from windows, boxes, tabs and dropdown menus. These metaphors have worked well in computing and have increasingly made their way into the interfaces of home theater devices and consumer electronics. Still, I can’t help but think there’s a better metaphor out there somewhere. Kudos to Joost for making the effort, but with the majority of users getting their first taste on a computer screen and not a TV, VeohTV’s more conservative approach may make a better first impression.

The Content

What the hell am I gonna watch? Joost could promise that all the content in the world was on the way, but when beta users logged on, there was nothing to keep them engaged. Of the handful of not-ready-for-prime-time programs they were able to muster, only one interested me. They’ve improved the roster somewhat since then, but for early adopters, the damage had been done.

Within a minute of downloading and installing VeohTV via Parallels, I was watching the season finale of Heroes in full screen on my second monitor. Thumbing through the rest of the channels, I saw a number of high-profile programs from most of the networks. With Eisner on the board and a lot of cash in their pockets, Veoh has had the tools to make the kinds of high-level distribution deals their competition may have found difficult or impossible. I now have a viable source of TV content that I didn’t have before.

The Extras

The Veoh Player was always pretty cool. In addition to giving you a decent playback experience, it helped you interact with your Veoh account by managing uploads and downloads, allowing you to manage your Veoh content from your desktop. This functionality have been folded into the VeohTV client, as well as some rudimentary torrent functionality and a kind of odd news / start page section. Although a lot has been crammed into this app, it looks like Veoh has kept their eyes on the prize and given priority to the discovery and playback of both premium and UGC content.

The Competition

I am a huge fan of Democracy and have been from the start. Their recent attempts at bridging the gap between mRSS reader and pseudo-IPTV have been noble, but perhaps lack flair. Of course, they haven’t had $28M and Michael Eisner in their corner. They are still a remarkable product and a viable player in the game.

Also tossing their hat in the ring is Babelgum, another windows-only, peer-to-peer solution for distributing TV programs. I’ll have to find some time to check them out, as I’ve only heard tell that their product is a good one. All reports indicate that the platform and client are more than adequate, but content is, predictably, lacking.

For today, it’s clear that VeohTV has the spotlight, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

VeohTV is currently in invite-only beta.

Request your invite here: http://www.veoh.com/veohTV/veohTvIntro.html.

There Are No New Ideas

2007-06-15T04:52:23Z

Everyone knows there are no new ideas, yet we never stop hearing criticisms of “unoriginal” designs or products. This site looks like that one, these two logos are too similar, [insert gripe here]. Where, then, is the sweet spot? Where is the canny valley between “inventive” and “uninspired” that makes us comfortable enough to adopt an idea, not mock it?

I’m fascinated by Jaiku. I thought that the web community would surely shun this obvious Twitter knock-off, and that it would spurn yet another hate-fest about how this site is too much like that site. The concept, all of the information design, and every part of the interface is borrowed from Twitter, even the annoying parts (24 pixel, label-less user avatars, anyone?). Despite the liberal peppering of borrowed features, Jaiku seems to have been embraced by the internet community. Is the market for 140 character semi-anonymous witticisms really so massive that it can sustain many identical Twitters?

New market / old market

One theory I’ve heard is that Twitter has indeed defined a new medium (140 character semi-anonymous witticisms), and that the marlet for this medium can sustain many engines. Indeed the email market seems to be able to handle more than a few email solutions and no one is calling Gmail a rip-off of Eudora. Perhaps the “twitter” market is just as broad and just as appealing. Perhaps Jaiku’s tiny improvements to the concept Twitter has only just debuted have made them a superior product.

Google, many have observed, is as adept at redefining existing markets as they are at creating new ones. We all thought Hotmail was fine and Mapquest was adequate (well, most of us), but Google saw room for improvement. Netflix reinvented movie rentals just a few years ago. Now TiVo, Amazon, and quite possibly Apple want to reinvent it again. Idea debuts, people grow complacent, enterprising company improves on it and makes a mint. Perhaps the pattern is just accelerating.

Internationalize or someone else will

Nick Gonzalez wrote an article over at Techcrunch, from which I borrowed the heading above. The article was about Frazr, a French language Twitter clone that had been rapidly gaining popularity. This is my favorite explanation of Jaiku’s success: their wide language support and international community. It seems that, while the US market may or may not crave a slew of Twitters, the international market has room to spare.

As Matt Marshall report[ed], the site is cloned right down to the welcome message: “Everyone wants to know: What are you doing? Tell them. On the Web, in a message, or phone”.

Looks like the moral here is that competition is something the American market not only sustains, but craves. Sure some loudmouthed design-types might complain that your type treatments are too close to the original A List Apart site, but the masses are open to your messages. Just get it heard.

Telling the Truth

2007-05-20T00:17:57Z

Today, Derek Powazek posted an article on his blog offering up The Real Story of JPG Magazine. It seems Derek and wife Heather Champ were recently muscled out of their roles at JPG Magazine and 8020 Publishing, both of which count the couple as founders.

The Truth

As the story goes, 8020 decided to re-invent JPG Magazine from the ground up, including the story of it’s origin. As any marketer will tell you, a good genesis story is essential in winning the hearts, minds, and subscriptions of new users. Derek and Heather had conceived of JPG while on a walk in Buena Vista Park two years earlier and saw no need to erase or embellish that fact. All parties involved refused to budge, and Derek and Heather decided to leave.

The Fallout

In addition to founding JPG, Derek and Heather are well known and well liked in the design, blogging and photographic communities. Heather is the Community Director at Flickr and Derek has written books on the same subject. Clearly, if they have a story to tell, it will be heard. As I write this, a search for “jpgmag” at Flickr reveals pages of nearly identical images: Dozens of angry users are weighing in by boycotting JPG Magazine, canceling their accounts, and posting the screen shots of the confirmation page. Derek insists that, as a founder and shareholder, he wants nothing but success for JPG. I wouldn’t wager a guess as to how much this curfuffle will actually affect JPG’s bottom line, but I think a point has been proven.

The Principal

I find it interesting that Derek and Heather didn’t take issue necessarily with the relative good or evil associated with reinventing the JPG genesis story. They were personally insulted by the re-imagining of their own history, and decided to take a stand. They felt that JPG had been a labor of love, and was something that they had gone through with their community. To abandon that part of the story would do a disservice to that labor and to that relationship. This may be a fitting parable for the constant inability of marketing types to understand what those of us personally invested in a project go through. Either way, kudos to Derek and Heather for taking a stand and trusting their community, and to their community for backing them up.

You Down With A-O-L?

2008-11-11T22:50:24Z

Naughty By Nature would be proud. Or ashamed. I must admit I’ve always had a hard time predicting their emotions. What was I saying? Oh, yeah…

Dana tipped me off about AOL’s new start page beta, and that it’s damn near a pixel-perfect replica of Yahoo.com.

Upon your first visit, AOL tells you that the design is in beta and that they’d like feedback (I’ve got some feedback for you). I’m sure I’m not the only person sick of the word ‘beta’ being used to get away with half-baked and premature releases, but this is a whole new kind of treachery. Maybe it’s only theft if the product is out of beta and fully released?

Since Dana posted her side-by-side on Flickr, the story’s already been picked up by BoingBoing and Business 2.0. This is clearly a big deal to some people. The question is: should it be?

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

How many times has someone lifted Dan Cedarholm’s Simplebits blog design and claimed it as their own? Or Shaun Inman’s? Rarely does a day pass when I don’t stumble across a designer lamenting the lack of scruples present in the design community. Could this really be the same situation? I doubt highly that AOL thought no one would notice. That leaves two options. They either: Thought they could get away with it, or; Have an arrangement with the owner of the Yahoo design.

Who Owns The Design?

I think it’s fair to assume that Yahoo doesn’t typically hire third party design firms to do their UI work. More likely, they do the work in house, possibly with the aid of third party usability consultants or even contract designers. However the design comes about, we can be fairly certain that Yahoo owns the rights to the layouts of their various web properties. Would they license it to AOL? I don’t see why in the world they would. Currently, they stand nearly alone in trying to modernize old-school start pages. The experience at Yahoo.com does not mimic the prevailing movement towards Web 2.0 Ajax start pages a la Netvibes, Google IG and PageFlakes. It is very clearly an update of their original start page, launched sometime in the late 1800’s, I believe.

Other People’s Property (and Research)

Any company could benefit from the extensive and successful user research Yahoo has performed over the years. Learning from the educated decisions they’ve made is a good way to leverage that research without performing it yourself. Even better, you could steal the sum total of those decisions and get feedback on the final product, maybe your version will be even better! Put a beta badge on it and you’re off the hook, right?

The web community, and the design community in particular, is full of snipers. I have every faith that, unless provided with a fantastic explanation, AOL’s name will be dragged through the proverbial mud by those who care about such things. I don’t have any reason to believe that the general public will care one way or another, unless intellectual property charges are brought against AOL, thereby making it an issue that could affect the portfolios and pocketbooks of consumers.

The Argument From Convention

The “Start Page” is an idiom repeated countless times throughout the internet. There are many and they are widely used. Clearly, conventions surface. The aforementioned swath of Ajax start pages (nearly) all closely follow the same set of layout and interaction rules: three columns, drag and drop modules, an “Add modules” palette to the left, tabs across the top. Perhaps this will be written off as the public acceptance of a successful set of conventions. Or perhaps AOL’s final design will differ enough to make the point moot. If that is the case, we’ll have to ask if it was still in questionable taste for AOL to ask for valuable user feedback on a design that is not their own.

Welcome to hasLayout

2007-05-25T01:09:32Z

Welcome to the inaugural post to my new blog, hasLayout. Yeah, I know, I already had a blog about this same stuff, so why a new blog with a new name? For no other reason than this: Sometimes you just need a fresh start. Well, maybe not entirely fresh, since I have brought over most of the content from The Receptacle. Try to bear with me.

Ok, so what’s hasLayout?

Here, I intend to primarily discuss web product design and, on occasion, development. I’ll be sharing my experiences as well as information I find around the web. If you’re lucky, I’ll even share some of my much coveted opinions. Since I am a multi-faceted beast, and am so very fond of my own opinions, I’ll probably stray outside the sphere of web design on occasion. Expect those topics to include music, photography, and maybe even a little bit of politics. Not much, I swear. Plus, these fancy Wordpress categories should make all that cruft easy to ignore.

Yeah… I was actually asking about the weird name…

Oh! Sorry! Well, I can tell you what it’s not about. This:

With that out of the way… The term “hasLayout” first made the scene in an article entitled On Having Layout. In it, the author describes a property called “layout” that IE assigns (or does not assign) certain qualifying HTML elements, thus granting them physical dimensions. As it turns out, a huge number of IE CSS bugs are caused by IE not knowing when to grant an element “layout”. The author defines “layout” as follows:

“‘Layout’ is an IE/Win proprietary concept that determines how elements draw and bound their content, interact with and relate to other elements, and react on and transmit application/user events.

This quality can be irreversibly triggered by some CSS properties. Some HTML elements have ‘layout’ by default.

Microsoft developers decided that elements should be able to acquire a ‘property’ (in an object-oriented programming sense) they referred to as hasLayout, which is set to true when this rendering concept takes effect.”

For a more in-depth explanation of hasLayout, read the original article (trust me, it’s worth your time).

All right, thanks for the intro

No problem, thanks for the cookies! Wait, you forgot them? After all this? You owe me big time. hasLayoutCat is not amused.

Google Video Tests New Page Layout

2007-05-20T00:19:25Z

I can hear it already. Google Video is trying out a new page layout which happens to resemble YouTube. By that I mean the layout has been informed by what is becoming the accepted convention for video web sites. Since YouTube, due to sheer brute-force popularity, is the frontrunner in determining these conventions, quite a few people are calling from the mountaintops that Google is copying YouTube.

Google Video’s current layout is similar to Yahoo Video’s. Both have the feel of a very modern library archival article, as oppose to a social networking site’s content detail page. They feature the video heavily, with it’s fluid dimensions allowing it to flood the majority of the page. Description, owner, meta information, all play third fiddle because the page is not about the video’s story or it’s context, it’s about the video. The remaining page content is primarily comprised of some intelligently assembled lists of suggested or related videos to help move users around the site. Everything here is about the video.

The new layout does look quite a bit like what you might find at YouTube, Grouper, Ifilm, or Veoh. The video has much more conservative, fixed dimensions, allowing for a more consistant page layout. The meta information and description are given almost equal footing with the video, playing up the owner’s narrative as much as the video’s content. Finally, user comments are exposed on the page, giving a voice to the community. This is a page about a video as viewed through the eyes of it’s audience, not a card catalog.

This is pretty much the lowest common denomenator of layouts for video social sites these days. Just like there’s a pretty standard layout for printed dictionaries, restaraunt menus, and even blogs, a predominant video sharing site layout has arisen. Does this mean Google means to move their video offering more in the direction of video-centric social networking sites? Would that be a good thing or would they be removing one of the most pure sources of video aggregation remaining on the web in favor of Yet Another Video Networking Site?

To see the new layout in action for yourself, visit any video detail page (perhaps this one) and paste this into the address bar:

javascript:setCookie('np','old');window.location.reload();