Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

I’m beginning week two with the new Intel iMac. There are some really great things and some annoying things that come with being completely new and different from life on the PowerPC.

This thing is way fast. That’s the thing I’m really enjoying with it. I have yet to feel like I’m pushing it at all toward the limits. The new iLife stuff is awesome. I’ve already enjoyed iPhoto and iMovie a ton. I plan on using iMovie for a big project soon, so that should be fun. Apps that were kind of sluggish, especially in the UI realm, are now very snappy. Launching apps takes no time at all.

Rosetta works totally as advertised. Microsoft Office runs smooth and fast. No waiting. Photoshop works fine, but is slower than it was on my dual G5.

In general it feels faster and works smoother on everything I’ve tried.

Except…

There are a few things that don’t run well, or don’t run at all. Java applications that were compiled for PowerPC, such as Azureus, don’t launch. I presume that future apps will run fine once they get them …

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Anna’s totally hooked. I pitch in from time to time, but Anna loves the things. We’re going to have to get a newspaper subscription when she leaves the coffee shop (where she tears out the puzzle from used papers).

Anna has always wanted a more robust portfolio site, as the one I originally did for her was, admittedly, pretty wimpy. She wanted something more scalable, and possible for people to see thumbnails of her works. The new one that I built for her was done very quickly and easily in a day’s work. It’s a subset of her current site, and just uses a new section in Textpattern. I took this one step further than i originally planned using a javascript tool called Lightbox JS. Now, not only can you see the thumbnails and a larger image of a piece of work, but click on the larger image, and you get an even larger image in a classy little box. Try it with the thumbnail image at the top of this post, it’s fun. Update: This doesn’t work anymore with the picture in this post, because I haven’t figured out how to get Lightbox to not conflict with my cool headline fonts. It still works on Anna’s portfolio site though.

Geekery aside, she likes the new …

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I realize it’s been a week since I blogged anything. I got a bit sick this week and have been generally busy or uninspired. Well, that and I picked up Mario Kart DS, so that’s taken up a bit of time too.

Don’t worry. I’ll be back, blogging with a vengance.

I’ve been enjoying last.fm lately. It’s a music service that listens to what music you play and makes recommendations based on that music. Based on those recommendations, you can find new music and listen to it streaming right to your computer. It’s great if you work at lot at your computer and enjoy music while working. You could tell it – hey today I want to listen to music that’s like Pedro the Lion. Then it sets up a little radio station based on music that’s kinda like that. There are other neato things it can do, such as getting all social with it – recommending music for your friends, seeing what music your buddy is playing, tagging, and so on.

Call it Web two-point-oh, call it new media, call it whatever you want. I call it pretty spiffy.

Why does my dog feel a need to come over near me to lick his own private parts. Any other dog owners out there who can shed some light on this?

I started using a new app called DropSend and man I like it. DropSend gives you the power to send huge files to people via the internet. It’s like emailing a 100MB (or even a 1GB) file.

I only wish this had been available when I was telecommuting from Alaska. There were times I had to upload a giant file to an FTP server only to try to explain to people how to download it, or better yet, I would create a web page just for that file with instructions on how to download the file.

DropSend is just as easy as drag and drop. You tell it to whom you’re sending the file, enter in a message to the recipient, and it uploads a file to the DropSend server. Then DropSend sends an email to said recipient with a download link and instructions. So far it’s been as easy as dropping a dead chicken. Try it out!

Check it out, Vance Reeser’s music video, Deep Six, is in the Flash TV podcast in iTunes. Check out his post about it here along with instructions on how to download it.

So, you’re hunting around in Amazon, and let’s say that you want to send your friend a link to some product you found. You could copy the big long URL that you find in your location bar This URL contains more information than you actually need to send to your friend. It says what section you were in, what search you just performed, what method of sorting you had selected, etc.

So the URL that Amazon gives you is this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JNC2/qid=1137037228/
sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-9153323-9935207?n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance

All you really need is this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JNC2/

All that stuff up until product, that just says we’re lookin at a product at Amazon. And then that string of numbers and letters is the ID of the Amazon item.

Change those letters and numbers to B00005JNBQ, and hit enter. Voila, it’s Napoleon Dynamite. Give it B00005JN4W, and it’s The Incredibles.

So, next time you email a link, make it simple and lop off all the stuff past that first string of numbers.