RodeWorks

I’ve been looking at Adobe’s PDF more often these days for different projects.  The example below from BNET highlights a couple of useful features, with the cover page using a callout and embedded video as well as containing a library of other documents.  Its not that these types of things can’t be done in similar ways in Flash or even plain HTML.  But I find even for my own work that its just a lot easier and faster to implement them in the PDF format.  And its the type of thing that a reasonably savvy faculty member can master.

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Here’s an interesting new web application.  If I have it correct, their software searches and indexes information on MP3 and video files posted on public web sites.  I’m guessing it must be getting at least some of its data from the MP3 tags on the files.  And from their site you can search for a person, song, etc. and the site will find matches for you from their database.  You can then organize and play this files from the player they provide. 

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July 20, 1969, man’s first landing on the moon. They splashed down back on earth on July 24, my ninth birthday. I was a total space nut at the time (and still kind of am), with Apollo models hanging from my ceiling. The first time I remember watching color television was for the Apollo 11 launch. I was at summer camp and I think we went to someone’s house to watch — maybe it was the camp office. When I got home that day my mother said to me ” I can tell you were watching a color TV today.” When I asked how she knew she replied that she could see it in my eyes. For years I assumed that there was some type of resident glow remaining in my eyes from watching color TV.

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I’ve glanced through Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur twice in bookstores, but haven’t purchase it yet. The sub-title is How today’s Internet is killing our culture, with the basic argument that traditional news outlets, music publishers and other professional content producers are being driven out of business, with a crowd of biased, untrained amateurs to blame. In this interview with Moira Gunn on tech nation he finds great fault with the internet’s anonymous nature, where we never really know who is writing a new item or review, and therefore can’t be sure of its accuracy or lack of bias.

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I just finished reading Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web applications from the design firm 37signals. And I highly recommend it. Its short, sweet and to-the-point. Its nicely organized. And they support their ideas with quotes from  David Pogue, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, and many others. The book is a quick read (I read it while waiting for CS3 to install), and would be a great kick-off requirement for a new design team — maybe an designers mandatory book club meeting. And in observance of the book’s principles I’ll describe the approach with two of my own quotes:

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Today is my day to find things to annoy me about Adobe, I guess.  I recently saw a demo of Adobe’s on-line color tool, kuler.adobe.com, and thought it was pretty cool.  Basically its a site where people can upload and share their color collections.  And it struck me that this wold be really useful for a project team to keep standard color sets from various projects.  I often find myself looking for scraps of paper for the HEX color values for a web site, or even worse digging through the CSS to find the values.  Kuler has some integration with Illustrator too.  And I consider myself pretty color-challenged, so I can use all the help I can get.

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