Browsing through blogs today I came across an advertisement for Moxi, a DVR system. It’s message was simple, understated, and made me want to know more. 

I like the above advertisement, it’s so simple. The first line provides me a background and understanding of what the advertising message is about. There are a lot of consumers who still couldn’t tell you what a “DVR” is… but a “TiVo” we all know TiVo. Once we have established what we are talking about, we build on that knowledge and present something better, with a link to learn more about this new product. 

I clicked… I want to know what a Moxi is, and why it’s better than a TiVo. Play on those product associations in your own industry and you will reach a lot more consumers. 

Back in late November TechCrunch ran a story on the continuation of the newspaper industry “death spiral” noting that industry advertising had been down for 10 straight quarters with over a $5 billion shrink occuring in the first 3 quarters of 2008. 

Whilst the numbers for the 4Q08 haven’t been released yet by the NAA it is fairly safe to assume they are not going to paint a pretty picture. 

In Asia however, it is a slightly different story, with print advertising continuing to grow quarter on quarter up until now. 1Q09 is expected to be flat but whether or not this will mark a turning point in the growth of print media in this region has yet to be seen. It is often considered that Asian news and media companies are a good 4 to 5 years behind the trends displayed in the US and Europe, which is certainly true in an online sense. 

3 months ago I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see print advertising in Asia rebound, but with the deepening economic crisis globally it will be extremely hard for marketers to continue to invest in essentially unmeasurable print campaigns. This marks an opportunity for early adopters in the Asian region to take an initiative and through education of marketers use this as an opportunity to seize additional revenue and market share online. 

Only time will tell, but my recommendation to my Asian clients is to start thinking about strategies to educate your marketing clients and convince them to look at investing a larger percentage of their budgets this year into online properties.

What do you do when confronted with a technical problem that simply can’t be true? If someone came to you and told you they couldn’t send email outside a 500 mile radius

This one should bring a smile to face of any technical administrator. The joys of technology.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

As is always the case with RedHat and CentOS, a number of packages in the usual yum repositories lack heavily behind the advancements made by their authors and teams. One such package is ImageMagick, which as of writing is back at 6.2.8 as opposed to 6.4.8. 

This for the most part isn’t an issue unless there is a specific upgrade, bug fix or enhancement you are looking to implement from within the ImageMagick library. In my case it was the use of the caret(^) character for specifying minimum geometric resize values. 

Unfortunately none of the yum repositories we regularly use have an updated package for 6.3.x or 6.4.x which left us in a bit of bind. We could either code our way around the issue (expensive, frustrating and time consuming) or seek another upgrade path. 

As no stranger to compiling packages from source I grabbed the latest tar.gz from the ImageMagick download page and proceeded to decompress it and compile. I then removed the yum installed package. Unfortunately at the end of this process, whilst the installation had succeeded I received strange error messages from the convert command line utility:

convert: no decode delegate for this image format `Book_icon.png' @ magick/constitute.c/ReadImage/526.
convert: missing an image filename `image.jpg' @ wand/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/2710.

It turns out this is an easy enough problem to diagnose and resolve. The use of the following command provides an overview of the formats currently supported by our ImageMagick installation.

identify -list format

Well damn, no jpg support, no png, infact lots of things are missing. I guess we are missing some other rather important libraries prior to compilation. After installing the appropriate devel libraries via yum, we can configure again, make clean and install. Phew, thank god it works this time. 

yum remove ImageMagick
yum install tcl-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel ghostscript-devel bzip2-devel freetype-devel libtiff-devel
wget url to ImageMagick download  
tar zxvf ImageMagick-6.4.8-3.tar.gz
configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-bzlib=yes --with-fontconfig=yes --with-freetype=yes --with-gslib=yes --with-gvc=yes --with-jpeg=yes --with-jp2=yes --with-png=yes --with-tiff=yes
make clean
make
make install 

Too easy. Unfortunately you won’t get updates to your ImageMagick pushed from yum anymore, so keep the additional administration costs in mind, but for those requiring the latest versions this is the quick way to get setup and running.

In true form I haven’t posted in over a month, the past weeks have been non-stop and even when I wanted to blog I lacked either the time or energy to sit down and think about it. Christmas and New Year has been a welcome break from work, even if only for a few hours here and there. 

2009 is set to be an interesting year given the financial crisis and the inauguration of Barack Obama in the coming weeks. 

I think 2009 will be a good year for technology companies, especially those working in web services, as companies withdraw from print advertising and seek more measurable options they will increasingly turn to the web to reach their audiences. This is not going to help the print industry, given an accelerated decline in advertising, unless there is more effort put into discovering new revenue streams and changing their business models. This was a key discussion during Asian Publishers Conference in August ‘08 and certainly rings true now. 

Only time will tell.

A news report from Channel NewsAsia mentioned today that airline Qantas has suffered yet another drama with their fleet. 

The revered status Qantas has within the industry and it’s unblemished safety record seem to be a little threatened by it’s current string of failures.

• Today, A330 shuts down engine and aborts flight due to oil warning light
• Last week, two Qantas jumbos are damaged when they collided on the ground at a maintenance base
• In October, a computer glitch caused a Qantas plane to do a 200-metre mid-air nosedive, injuring more than 70 people, with some suffering broken bones.
• In August, a Qantas Boeing 747-300 from Melbourne was grounded in New Zealand after a engine shut down on approach to Auckland. 
• In August, a hydraulic leak forced a Boeing 767 to return to Sydney for an emergency landing. 
• In July, an Adelaide-Melbourne flight returned to Adelaide when a wheel bay door failed to close.
• In July, a Qantas Boeing 747-400 made an emergency landing in Manila after a mid-air blast caused by an exploding oxygen bottle punched a hole in the fuselage.

The above is just a snapshot of issues suffered by the airline from July 2008 until now.

In the past 4 years I have rarely flown Qantas domestically and never for international travel, opting for Singapore Airlines/Star Alliance instead. Who do you fly?

I don’t know how many people follow the work from the The Barbarian Group, but they produce some pretty amazing things, including Magnetosphere, a visualizer for iTunes which has been rebuild and shipped as one of the new visualizers in the latest versions of iTunes. 

Not surprisingly these extremely cool people have built some other extremely cool things, including a little OS X app called Plainview. 

Plainview fills a very specific need allowing web based developers and designers to showcase, present and demo their work within the medium it is designed to be used. The best description comes from the Barbarian site:

We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites. Both of these options had their pros and cons – full-screen looks sweet, but you lose the interactivity of the site, everything has to be canned. And showing things in a browser lets you show the site’s interactivity, but, again, that ugly chrome.

So now we have a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.

You can find more information and download a copy from here. 

So if you happen to be on a Mac go and grab a copy of Plainview and give it a go, it might just make that next client meeting a lot easier.

I totally agree with whoever posted this over at reddit: 

If you’re a web designer working alongside print designers with little to no web design/dev knowledge, how is your experience?

and in response:

Teeth-grindingly annoying.

Print-turned-web designers:

• Learn the medium you’re working in. A five minute video of even the best print advert makes for a lousy TV advert. Likewise, techniques and habits refined by years of print design are often sub-optimal or flatly counter-productive when applied to the web.
• For the love of god, give up on pixel-perfect positioning and learn to appreciate flow layout. Sure, it makes design harder… but if you think designing flow layouts is hard, think about us poor schmucks who have toimplement the damn things. And if you think flow layouts are ugly, let’s see how good your precious pixel-perfect design works when I do something freakishly unusual like resize my browser window.
• Print pages are Things To Look At. Web sites are Things To Use. Prioritising aesthetics over usability or functionality is like putting a car steering wheel in the middle of the dashboard “because it looks nicer there”. You think it’s pretty and a real design coup, but everyone else is laughing at your idiocy (… or swearing at it if the design ever gets into production). Incidentally, I swear if I get one more design through with a “button” image but no pressed button image (or “link” style but no “active/hover/visited” link style) I will personally bite off your head and defecate into your body-cavity. You have been warned.
• Conventions are not boring – conventions are your friend. Putting light-switches near doors is a convention. Sure, putting them square in the middle of the ceiling is innovative, but then so is cheesegrating your knees (hey – do you know anyone who’s done it?). Innovative means “nobody else is doing it”. Accept the possibility that nobody else is doing it because it’s a fucking stupid idea.
• I don’t want to “explore the interface”. I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how “fun” this is.

Pant, pant, pant, pant… pant… ahem.

Amusing to say the least and I am sure the print designers will have plenty to say in return. 

Thanks to Thomas Koch from whom I found this little gem.

In my browsing yesterday I came across two little gems for OS X. 

Anti-RSI

This little wonder of an application visually reminds you to take breaks throughout the course of the work day to avoid repetitive strain injury. This is a must for developers or any one who spends long hours each day sitting in front of a monitor. 

Complete with customisable time periods and micro-breaks this small app should assist you in taking breaks and avoiding injury or burnout. 

Download from: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/

Isolator

The small application has a simple purpose, to help you concentrate. When you are working in an application and don’t want to be distracted by all the other clutter and noise on your computer turn on Isolator from the menu bar and watch your desktop and other applications disappear. 

This app is great for removing distractions without having to turn off other applications. There is no longer a need to close your email client, it will just disappear when you turn on Isolator. 

Download from: http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/

Matt Bowen of 37signals has a short, and extremely interesting post on the Signal vs Noise blog regarding the hiring of self-managing employees. 

I think this is a most important distinction to make when you are looking at potentially hiring new staff. Over the past 12 months at Quiqcorp we have had a number of new staff join our team and the ones who are capable of managing their own time and working consistently without constant guidance have performed much better in their roles and continue to impress with their attitudes toward work. 

It is certainly important in early-stage start up companies to hire the most appropriate people for the job, and it is important to realise that these people aren’t always the most technically qualified, uber geeks you find. A self-managing, self-starting employee who can manage their time, set their own goals and work of their own accord without guidance is a godsend to any time-poor start-up founder (of which most are). 

Matt sums it up best with his last paragraph:

You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less. 

Well I must say I am impressed. The upgrade process from 2.6.3 to 2.7 beta3 was as simple as the document stated. It took under 2 minutes, was flawless and once I copied across any custom modifications I had made everything was up and running again. 

The new administration layout is very simple and user friendly. I prefer it over the 2.6 admin interface. The reorganisation of the new post screen is very nice and shows a maturing product that is continuing to consider how to improve the usability of the interfaces. This is certainly something eZ Systems should be considering more, especially in the case of the administration panel. 

The core upgrade functionality is very nice, when I clicked on the upgrade button it notified me there was an upgrade available, prompted for appropriate details and proceeded to update the installation. This obviously causes a few issues if you have made manual changes to your core files and isn’t suitable for everyone, but a nice feature nonetheless. 

I look forward to seeing what 2.8 holds in the future.

I decided to download the iPhone app for Wordpress and give it a whirl. I am writing this blog post from my phone so lets see how it goes. It certainly looks and responds like an app should, and backs this up with stability.

The interface design has been well thought out and typing a blog on the screen isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, provided you mind your spelling.

The photo interface is nice and the fact you can take a pic on the fly or pull one from your library is great. The preview tab told me it couldn’t access my theme but the default one looked fine. I will have to look into why it can’t access mine.

I don’t know when I will find a need to blog from my phone but then many people said the same thing about twitter. In any case I now have the app and I think it is here to stay.

Well it seems the blogosphere is filled with news regarding the release of SearchWiki yesterday, a new social user experience approach from Google. 

I can’t say I am all that surprised with the move, it certainly is bold for Google to make such a dramatic change to the look of its search results, but with the growing traction of OpenSocial and Google’s understanding of socially driven content with the likes of Blogger it makes sense. 

Hell, it makes sense anyway. Google exists simply because they provide the most appropriate search results to queries made by their users, and whilst their fancy algorithms and thousands of engineers have gone a long way toward providing accurate results, there are still things that remain very difficult to cater for through programming.

Whilst the current release allows you to only influence your own search results, with comments being available to all logged-in users, Google has not ruled out the idea of using such influence in future versions of their algorithms. User influenced rankings adds another dimension to the search results hopefully providing increased accuracy, the same thing that has gotten Google to it’s current 75-90% market share depending on country. 

I welcome the change, it’s something that has been tried by other startups recently, but they all lack the clout Google has in the market, not to mention its index of over 120 billion pages. Any search start up that can’t provide such a comprehensive index of searchable results is obviously going to find it hard to compete, but I shouldn’t diverge. 

Congratulations to Google continuing to deliver technology to the masses, whether it’s through innovation or simply implementing someone else’s idea with your corporate clout it’s good to see that my search results will continue to improve.

Aaron Irizarry has a very interesting post over at his blog entitled “If You Build it They Will Come“, a short article considering the benefits of Twitter to graphic designers around the world. 

“What I love about this is I met both guys by interacting on twitter. Through this I realized the power of building a community of designers that we can interact with for feedback on designs, help with a snipet of code or when we are stuck on a design. There are a lot of awesome people that I have met through twitter, and I am getting some awesome opportunity to colaborate, and have also learned quite a bit in the last few months simply by interacting.” 

I have to agree with this, and whilst I have a more development, and business focus than graphic design I find I have an increasing number of them on my list. It’s interesting to watch how quickly Twitter has grown into a network for quickly finding answers to common problems, seeking assistance or feedback or even recruiting and recommending people for contracting gigs. 

Coupled with Tweetdeck and it’s interface to search.twitter.com it is quick to setup custom searches for topics that interest you, find new and interesting people within your industry to connect with and to improve your networking skills. 

Twitter of course isn’t without it’s downsides, and whilst it used to be downtime, it is now more than ever working out how to manage the information overflow you experience with hundreds of friends and followers. As your network grows, so do the number of tweets with the potential to distract you from work. As with any distractions, moderation is key, whether you need to shut down your app or just minimize it while concentrating it’s important to make sure your new friends don’t impact negatively on your work. 

I certainly look forward to meeting with a number of new contacts from twitter in person at upcoming conferences.

I read today that Jamis at 37signals has fallen into the same trap their “Getting Real” philosophy tries to avoid. 

I kept chasing my tail. I’d look at the existing reporting UI that we have for our other products, and then I’d start thinking what needed to change to adapt it for the Jobs/Gigs reports. That would then lead me to think about potential refactorings in the code needed to support the (hypothetical) UI changes. Thinking about the code refactorings would lead me back to the UI, where I would think some more about the visual impact of the code refactorings, and so I would go, loop after loop, ad nauseam.

It is good to see the staff at 37signals still fall into the same traps everyone else does, even after evangelising their “Getting Real” philosophy. 

I certainly agree that it is a hard habit to kick, and in some cases I don’t have a desire to. There are a number of projects and clients, especially so in the enterprise space where these approaches just aren’t desirable or suitable. But that is a topic for another day, what really caught my attention was the last line..

So, if you ever catch yourself playing mind games with your code, just stop and make something. Pretending is poison. Stop drinking it!

This is great advice. This is something every web developer, user interaction designer, graphic designer or similar should seriously consider and take note of. Rather than spend countless hours thinking about how it might work, build it quickly, visualise it, tweak it, delete it and move on if it’s not suitable. This in many ways follows on from the previous blog post at ZURB regarding failing fast. 

Designers seem to be able to do this well inside of their fancy Adobe toolkits (ok, you caught me, I have CS3 as well) but handing a PSD to a programmer isn’t very useful, it happens often, but prototyping inside graphic programs is usually done without too much consideration for the real content to fill those spaces. 

Increasingly the best solution seems to be rapid prototyping in html/css/jscript. If you can free yourself from the mindset that html/css are left only for the actual development then you can start to rapidly prototype and see if things work. Mark Boulton Design is certainly a great inspiration for this approach as they continue to work through the redesign of the Drupal website. In the past 8 revisions it’s been possible to see the site come together through quick prototyping, with user feedback. The great thing about this approach is you can click it, interact with it. Rather than just seeing the navigation looks pretty, you can determine if it’s usable, if your content overflows your containers and if users feel comfortable with the interface. 

So next time you get caught “pretending”, as the 37signals guys would say, then whip out your favourite editor and just prototype that interface in 5 minutes, see if it works, if it does great, if it doesn’t then change it, or delete it and go make another coffee (my preference).