Martin Young - Web Designer

October 31, 2007

:)

On our lunchtime walk today my lovely gorgeous wife led me to the Apple Store at Myer Melbourne, walked up to the iPod Touch, and bought one. It’s my birthday present (no idea where she got the money from - clearly she’s been saving) and although she tried, she simply couldn’t NOT give it to me there and then - even though it’s not my birthday until next week. I’m such a spoilt child.

I have no idea whether or not she read my recent post “Which iPod should my wife buy me”, but I’ve been bending her ear about the convergence of video, wifi and cheap computing for a while now so she’s clearly put two and two together.

So right now I’m in Australia on Collins downloading iTunes 7.4 (hooray for free wifi - see my post from this morning) so that I can format it, set it up, load it up with music and video and start using it.

It’s such a slick little thing. It’s covered in fingerprints already but I try not to sweat the small stuff.

Gotta go - iTunes download is complete.

______

Just going through the registration process now via iTunes. I named it “Touch” but I have Bluey and Fatty at home (and MacBook, which is about as original as Touch), so I’m thinking of changing that to “Barney”. No idea why. Might get around to that later.

______

OK - syncing music now. Selected a bunch of playlists (albums). 1084 songs to start, which is about 1/3rd of my 14gb library. I’m sure I’ll tweak what’s there over time so that there’s enough room for video, podcasts, a selection of photos etc.

Next task when it’s synced is to get some video on there, have a bit of a play, then I’d better get back to work.

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Posted by Marty in Apple, Web & Tech

Wiki-woki. Straya’s cottoning on

Maybe it’s because I’m immersed in web strategy research for work, but I’m definitely noticing a shift here in Australia around wiki-woki stuff like HDTV, mobile web, RSS, social computing, podcasting, videocasting, wifi, and so on. (What’s wiki-woki? That’s a term my manager likes to use when I talk tech with him.)

Sidenote: If you’re from almost anywhere in the world other than Australia you’ll be thinking “Huh? Podcasting? Wifi? That’s, like totally 2003, dude”. Well, it’s a laconic place down here, and the fact is that the wiki-woki gear just hasn’t had mainstream penetration.

But things are changing. Some thoughts, most of which will be bleeding obvious to anyone who’s close to all this:

1. Broadband’s getting faster and cheaper. 1.5mbps 3gb/3gb ADSL1 plans are hovering around $50 a month, and 5gb ADSL2 plans are about the same (if you’re lucky enough to live near an exchange that’s hooked up). It wasn’t so long ago that 56kbps dial-up set you back $40 a month. You don’t have to be Sergey Brin to realise that cheap fast broadband = video and music for all, not to mention a better browsing experience for regular web sites.
2. Hardware and software is getting faster and better and cheaper. My 2001 20gb G3 iMac Ruby cost me well over $2,000, and boldly proclaimed that it was ready to be my “digital hub” whenever I was. It probably would have been, had I been able to afford a $1,500 digital video camera, a $1,000 digital camera, a $500 iPod, another $400 of RAM so that it would cope with the video editing and $500 for an external hard drive to store all the media. These days you can kit yourself out with a handycam, a digital camera (or maybe just your phonecam?), a fast laptop, an iPod, a big external HDD and a 19″ widescreen for around $3k.
3. Free wifi is on the rise. More and more of the mobile phones offered by our telcos for $0 on their Cap plans are wifi-enabled, the iPod Touch is already here and hopefully the iPhone will also make an appearance shortly. However, there’s hardly anywhere to actually USE the wifi. We still talk of hotspots down here. IMHO a hotspot should be the place that doesn’t have wifi. But Fed Square recently announced they would offer a free wifi network and I reckon this will kick things off. Their timing, I’m sure, is nothing to do with their 5th anniversary and everything to do with recognising that wifi device ownership is increasing. I reckon wifi’ll be all over the place in the capital cities by Grand Final Day 2008. Obviously this makes owning a Touch or a wifi-enabled phone vastly more appealing.
4. The rise of social networking is enabling Joe Blow to research products more thoroughly before purchasing them. I recently posed the question “health insurance - yes or no” on my family & friends blog and the discussion stretched to 35 comments (usually I get one or two). The slackarse hardware and software vendors who used to put out reasonable products, trick us into buying them and then sit back and watch us struggle to set them up and/or use them alongside the other products in our lives have realised that we (a) have learnt how to use our social networks for research, (b) can easily access those networks through cheap computing, and (c) consequently won’t buy anything that our network tells us is crap. Now we buy products or use software that works seamlessly with whatever we already own.
5. Tiny software companies are creating amazing web-based applications that do just one or two things very well. (And they’re making mobile versions of them.) I’m thinking Remember The Milk, Gmail (OK, so that’s not a tiny company), YouTube, Wordpress, Flickr, iTunes (OK, another not so small company) and so on. The key here is that those apps are built for the community, as opposed to products like Microsoft Office that are built for business. As such, the personal apps are much more personal/interesting/fun/simple/rewarding to use, and we’re more productive/entertained/relaxed/connected/happy as a result.
6. Podcasting, videocasting and RSS are going mainstream. iTunes is making it very easy (automatic, in fact) to obtain regular content whenever it’s published but watch it whenever you want. If you own an iPod you use iTunes to sync up your content and take it with you, even if that means just taking it into the loungeroom and plugging it into your TV. At the same time, cheap and capable hardware and software is enabling creative types to produce and distribute content for a fraction of the cost of the “traditional” processes. Variety and choice are becoming a reality.

Joe Blow is tech’d up, he’s getting and sharing content like never before, and he’s not going to tolerate any more crap from corporations that treat him like a dummy.

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Posted by Marty in Random thoughts, Web & Tech

October 28, 2007

It’s nearly wakeboard season

I realised today that Melbourne Cup day is the 1st anniversary of buying my boat Muchacha. I’ve taken her out a couple of times this winter but now that the weather’s heating up it’s time to get busy again. I spent an hour or two tidying her up this afternoon: greased all the grease points, turned the engine over, tidied up the interior, thought about what I can do to improve her for not much money etc.

Even though it was 5.30pm I was very tempted to take her out for a spin (hooray for daylight saving) but I’d already knocked over a couple of beers so I didn’t. Ah well, there’s always next week.

I’m dead keen to get some weekends in at Mulwala and/or Eildon before the Christmas/January silly season. With any luck some of my friends will too - I need an observer!

Good times at Mulwala last year

I found this book today - Runabout Renovation. From a customer review:

This is the ultimate source of information for the do-it-yourself fiberglass boat restorer. The time, money and effort saved by following Jim Anderson’s advice makes this an absolute bargain. By using this as a guide for my own restoration project, I now have a boat that is unique in appearance (1964 Glastron Starflite Deville) yet it is stronger in construction than it was new. But the best part is that I was able to do it all for less than $1,000…a fraction of the cost of a new boat!

It’d make a great Christmas present…….

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Posted by Marty in Not important, but potentially interesting

October 23, 2007

colr.org

No, that’s not a typo in the title of this post. colr.org is an online tool I stumbled across yesterday via one of my feeds.

It’s a widely-held view in the design world that if a combination of colours is present in nature it will look good on a web site (or your print collateral, I guess). Your brain thinks that the colours work well together because they’re natural. Simple, but effective.

I’ve been using this technique for a while via the Eyedropper tool in Fireworks (i.e. open a photo, use the eyedropper tool to select colours from it).

colr.org simplifies things by extracting a set of colours from the photo for you.

When you load the site a random image from Flickr is displayed top right (you can ignore this and ask for a different Flickr image, or load your own photo, btw). Mouse over the image and a whole bunch of little squares of colour appear. Click one of the squares and the hex value is displayed for you. You can start a new scheme and save a series of colours via the Edit Scheme box.

Handy!

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Posted by Marty in Web & Tech, Web design

October 20, 2007

Which iPod should my wife buy me?

Last Thursday I was in an Apple store and played around with an iPod Touch. What a sensational piece of kit that is. Sure, plenty of people are bagging it (touchscreen too susceptible to fingerprints, not enough storage, too expensive etc etc) but I challenge those people to use one for 5 minutes and not be fascinated by it.

The touchscreen interface is just amazing to use - you flick and slide things around with your fingers, tapping here and there, slowly scrolling in other places - wonderful. A massive leap forward for personal devices. It’s like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Why has it taken this long for someone to make something like this?

When I finally put it down 15 minutes later I picked up a Nano. That was boring in comparison.

However, I hope my wife buys me one. This review and a brief analysis of current iPod options have sold me on it.

Let’s dissect my current iPod.

The good:

• It works.
• It holds my 14gb of music (although I also have two more copies of that 14gb - one on the MacBook and one on my external HDD).
• It also holds another 1gb of Get This and This Sporting Life podcasts.
• It works as a back-up for all my photos (another 11gb)
• And it still has room to spare.
• An iTrip lets us make the most of it on long trips in the car.
• It’s not in pristine condition anymore, so I don’t mind if it gets a minor scratch or two when I chuck it in my work bag.

The not so good:

• It’s a bit too heavy to clip to my shorts (via a Booq case) when I’m running, and anyway I’ve read that extensive shaking isn’t good for the HDD mp3 players.
• It doesn’t play video, so I can’t watch Thank God You’re Here, Enough Rope or Summer Heights High episodes, vodcasts, other TV shows, music videos or YouTube stuff.
• I can’t look at the photos that are stored on it.
• The battery is still going OK, but I only get around 6hrs from it now before it carks it.

So, given those + and -, what am I looking for?

• Light enough to exercise with.
• Video (and video out to TV would be good).
• iTrip.
• Robust enough to withstand the inside of my work bag.
• Not too pricey.

The Classic, Touch and 5th Gen iPods offer me video, but are roughly the same weight and dimensions as my current iPod - so no real leap forward from an exercise point of view.

The Touch is almost irresistible, but I’d be very hesitant to chuck it in my bag. I’d want to protect it with something, and I hate those skins that people put on their iPods. They remind me of those Car Bra things that people put on the front of their cars to protect them from stone chips (losers). I’m also not convinced that I wouldn’t miss the physical volume and skip controls of the clickwheel.

The Nano has less storage capacity, but the review I linked to above has convinced me that if I’m smart with my iTunes I don’t need 30gb+ of storage on a portable device. My MacBook and HDD can hold the master content. It has video out, so I can watch Enough Rope on the way home on the train and Thank God You’re Here on our telly later that night (if I buy an Apple Universal Dock and a component cable. It’s amazingly light and small, so with some sort of armband it’ll be great for exercising. I might even buy a Nike + kit for it (not as good as a Polar Activity Watch, but good nonetheless).

So an 8gb Nano it is. A black one, I think. (Although if she bought me a Touch she wouldn’t get the smile off my face.)

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Posted by Marty in Apple, Web & Tech

October 16, 2007

Back to work

I’m back at work after my week off.

Last week I had almost five days to myself and no chores or work to do, which meant that I could do whatever I wanted. I found myself thinking about personal achievement, and formed plans to (in no particular order) become a better surfer, form closer bonds with my friends and renovate my house and garden in the coming year. That’s in addition to starting a family and spending as much time as possible with my wife.

What I didn’t do (at all) was think about my work life and goals. Today’s Tuesday, and so far it’s been disturbingly easy to slot back into the routine. The same old issues are still there … it’s almost as if last week didn’t happen (not surprising really, as it was only a week). So what I plan to do is change my approach to work a little bit. I’m not going to be able to set and achieve personal goals in the same way that I can at home, but I can come pretty close. I can push harder for truly quality outcomes rather than accepting mediocre ones due to time and resource constraints. If, in the immediate term, I devote time to tying up some loose ends, I can put more energy into innovation.

Today, when I look back at the last 12 months I see a bunch of achievements but nothing really stands out that I can really hang my hat on. That’s partly due to organisational circumstances that were beyond my control, but a piece of it is also down to my approach to my work and my career. That’s the bit I can change.

Last week Vaspers the Grate wrote a tongue-in-cheek list of reasons why a business shouldn’t blog. One of them is “… if it is totally satisfied with conducting Business As Usual (which generally leads to Business As Over).”.

Similarly, Seth Godin recently wrote that:

Most industries innovate from both ends:

• The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
• The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
• It’s the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.

Those two insights sum it up for me. In October 08 want to be able to look back at this 12 months and know that I wasn’t one of the ones who sat and waited. It’s as simple as that.

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Posted by Marty in Random thoughts

October 14, 2007

10 days of surfing - day 10

I had two opportunities to surf today but missed both of them as I was spending time with my nieces instead (I did watch the second half of Tubular Swells though).

So 6 surfs in 10 days. What did I learn?

1. That I’m not fit enough to paddle out day after day after day (yet)
2. That my hybrid board is VERY forgiving when it comes to catching waves and the time it takes me to get to my feet - I’ve been spoilt and am feeling very mediocre re my ability on the shortboard at the moment. I need to spend plenty of time on the shortboard if I want my wave count to remain high
3. That Ocean Grove doesn’t handle 3ft+ on a high tide without closing out, which will make it difficult to do anything about (2) if I don’t venture elsewhere, and
4. That I love surfing. Whether I’m on my own or having a laugh with friends it just feeds my soul to be out there.

Sadly the forecast for the coming weekend is for no wind and no swell. Crap for surfing but it might be time to break out Muchacha and the wakeboard ……….

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Posted by Marty in Surfing