Once again, our friend Mike Rhode has provided a 34 pages of fantastic sketchnotes from SEED3. If you're not familiar with Mike's sketchnotes, this is something I look forward to whenever I hear he's going to a conference. A unique window to the action if you will.
Since posting this picture of my son Brodey on Flickr many months ago, I have received a lot of emails asking how I did the post work. Many people think it's HDR, some say it's got the Dave Hill feel to it.
I will go through my recipe in detail. It's not a hard process. It's something I've refined to work for me and over time, it's become second nature. I have even used it on landscapes with great success. A lot of this works better with higher contrast images and good lighting (not that I'm great at lighting).
The New Mexico Human Rights Commission is fining a husband-wife team of Christian photographers $6000 dollars for refusing to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony. Read the full article if you want more background on this case. There are a couple of blog posts that touch on the subject at MarioBurgers and ThomasHawk. If you read the posts and comments, the opinions of the readers and authors seem to be split into two issues and three sides. Discrimination vs. Freedom of Choice from the angle of Christians, Gay Rights Activists and Business Owners. What immediately struck me is the rights (or lack of in this case) that a business owner has in refusing projects.
Released today, Aperture 2.1 introduces an open plug-in architecture that lets photographers use specialized third-party imaging software from right within Aperture. In fact, customers downloading the Aperture 2.1 update will receive the new Dodge & Burn plug-in. Developed by Apple, it adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Aperture 2 customers can download the free Aperture 2.1 Update by visiting the Aperture download site or by running the software update.
Apple is working closely with key developers to bring the most requested plug-ins to Aperture such as:
After a few days of sketching and PS mockups I think I finally have the new 20seven.org design close to being in a state that I'm comfortable enough to start working on the CSS for the big switch to Movable Type. However, I'm sure after I sleep on this tonight I'll probably wake up tomorrow with something I don't like. A design for yourself is always ten times harder to work on. I thought I'd throw it out there for thoughts.
[Update] I've bailed on MT4. I'll update in another post about why I've gone this route.
Happy Cog has been working with Wordpress to develop a new interface. Screenshots or downloads of the 2.5 sneak peak are available on the Wordpress site.
"The WordPress navigation has confounded even sophisticated users. With the new design, we’ve cut the number of navigation options in half, separating the primary functions (writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments) from secondary functions. This presents information at a more comfortable pace, revealing only the information that’s necessary."
From what I can see Jeffrey Zeldman and crew have done a fantastic job at cleaning up the clunky interface; one of my major beefs with it. Keep in mind that it is only release candidate one.
I stumbled upon Humanized.com which seems to be a exploration project into creating a blog-like aggregator. The about page describes it as "Why couldn't reading an aggregator be as simple as reading a blog?".
What makes this project interesting to me is the lack of a paginator. Instead, when you reach the bottom of the page with the scroll bar, a message is displayed that alerts you; "More pages are being loaded..." and instantly more data is appended to the page.
Now this is thinking outside of the box. You get more to read when you need it, without thinking. Should this be the future of pagination or a lack there of? Maybe. I'm still contemplating that myself but I'm intrigued by the idea.
There are a couple of reports hitting the wire that Flickr Video will debut next month (April). One at CNet - Flickr Video beta due in April | Outside the Lines and one at Tech Crunch - Video Coming To Flickr Soon. Really..
I think some of the greatest sites are the ones who can focus on a single offering and make it great, be it wine, video or photography. If Yahoo were to debut a video site, that would be one thing, but integrating it into Flickr I think might be a mistake.
I have seen cased where video can be a nice compliment to photography in instances when a photographer wants to show how he achieved a particular end result, give a short documentary on his work or document a entire shoot. Even the Strobist Flickr Meetups are great fun to watch. There are a lot of discussions in Flickr groups that link to YouTube or Vimeo for that particular purpose. However, having a place to store and showcase any video like the two aforementioned sites will only dilute the creativity that has become Flickr.
Flickr has proven itself to be a viable tool for photographers; some great ones at that. Will these photographers still find value in Flickr once Video is introduced? I guess only time will tell. I suppose it's really going to depend on how it's integrated and how good their content filters are. What I would hate to see is a repository of tween video, like those my kid is addicted to watching on YouTube. On the other hand, if integrated in such a way as to compliment the photography that's hosted, like the examples I've listed earlier, it might be a good transition.
Photography and cinematography are art-forms in their own respect and they share common principles. Let's hope Flickr (Yahoo) doesn't forget that and gives the respect and attention that each field deserves. I'd really hate it if Flickr became a quest for 15 minutes of fame.
Mike Rohde of Rohdesign has posted an excellent set of SXSW sketchnotes he made in his Moleskine. Thirty four pages of them to be exact. It's nice to see SXSW through Mikes eyes, or brain. Mike also did the same for the SEED Conference
First and foremost, I'm not a fan of the dock. I think it's very distracting and takes up too much real estate. I happened upon a tweet by Shaun Inman last week about Mail Unread Menu and how he's using it so he can hide his dock. I've tried to adopt this practice in the past but was never really keen on the results. That is until now.
I followed Shaun's tweet over to loganrockmore.com and downloaded Mail Unread Menu which allows you to see how many unread mails you have waiting for you on your menu bar, switch to mail.app from the icon and has some nice configuration options. I played around with it and noticed the Logan also has an identical tool -- NNW Unread Menu for Net News Wire users. Click. Download. Sweet. Since I am in a habit of looking at the dock to see how many new feeds I had, I can now look in the menu bar and not rely on the dock.
After a few hours of using Apple+Tab as an app switcher I was completely annoyed by the huge icons. Not able to find a way to make them smaller (speak up if you can), I downloaded Witch. Witch lets you customize the appearance and icon size of the app switcher which was just what I wanted.
Combining these three apps, I now have a nice dockless workspace and can max out my windows with the extra real estate I've gained.
Now for a completely distraction free experience, I added Isolator to the mix. Isolator will cover your desktop and all windows except for the application in focus. Mapped to a hotkey I can quickly turn it off. It's currently in beta for Leopard users but seems to be very stable for me.
Ingredients
Mail Unread Menu
NNW Unread Menu
Witch
Isolator
Hide your dock!
Note: All these apps are great apps so if you like them, consider donating to the developers.
Caveats
I had an issue with using Mail Unread Menu's switcher to jump to mail.app where it would fire off one of my FastScripts that was mapped to the keys Apple + 1. Logan tells me that command + 1 is the same key combo that Mail Unread Menu uses to switch to mail.app. I changed my FastScript key combo and all is good.
