Today I decided to finally sign up for Evernote since it's finally out of private beta. Basically it's a way to organize and keep all kinds of things you come across all day. There's a desktop app as well as a web app that allows you to add a new note to evernote. The feature I'll probably use the most is mobile uploads where I can take a picture of soemthing and upload it right to the site via MMS on my phone. Evernote will even do some OCR on images and try and pull out text it see's in the images. Incredibly useful.
A few weeks ago I had to start on a site design for a client, and I went through more design revisions on this site than any other I've done. Now this isn't all the clients' fault, most of these are just suggestions I got from the great people over at the Godbit Forum. Overall, I've got 11 different versions of the same site here. About mid-way through I was worried, (especially when the client requested a purple background!), but it turned out to be a site that both the client and I were happy with.
Click to the left to see the full sized image (beware it's almost 2MB!)
Wanna be hip and check out the new cool website to go to? Wanna get a taste of the music I like? Well now you can do both. Muxtape is a cool new way to make an MP3 mixtape and share it with the world.
I uploaded 12 songs (the max) and organized them to go from rockin’ to chill music. It’s a lot of my favorite artists, and I hope you find something new you like. It’s almost an hour long, so check it out, play it while you work or something.
While working on a simple website that didn't need any kind of CMS with it, I came up with a very simple way of creating a dynamic navigation bar with PHP. The code is pretty simple, but I've always done this manually before and this just makes it simple. So here it is.
So if you are on the page that navigation button relates to it will give you <li id="current">Home</li>. If you're on any other page, it gives you <li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>.
Easy enough. So just call that for each button you need between your <ul> tags:
I know it's nothing spectacular, but it sped up the coding process for me once I figured it out, and it will certainly be a lot faster in the future if anything needs to be changed or added.
When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the default view is a 320x240 video stretched to fit in a 640x480 player with a low audio bitrate. For some newer videos, youtube also retains a full 640x480 copy of the video with higher quality audio. Sometimes you will be allowed to see a button that allows you to watch the higher quality videos, but it’s not on every video.
I recently discovered that by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, you can view the higher quality video for those that have it! Check out the screenshot comparison below from the Starcraft 2 trailer:
I’ve used Google’s text messaging service before to look up movie times and such when I’m not near a computer, and it’s great. If you’re not familiar with it, just send a text message to GOOGLE (466453) with the message being “movies 32466” (thats a zip code by the way) or something similar, and it will text you back with movie listings for that area. It’s a great service that’s free and I use it all the time. Read more about it here.
Now Amazon has done something similar, which I’m just as excited to try out. Send a message to AMAZON (262966) and then type your search term in the message. You can put product names, authors, artists, or even ISBN numbers for books. It will reply with the results, you pick the one you want and it calls you to explain more details. You can even set it up to be able to purchase items over your phone. Check it out here.
I know this sounds like a big ad for Amazon, but this is seriously a great idea and it’s something Ill be using in the future.
Well I haven’t posted on here in a while because I’ve really been working hard to get my personal portfolio online. I started sometime last week, and it’s really been a much larger project than I first thought! The hardest part was finding old projects, and deciding how the portfolio itself should work. Now that I’ve selected all my work and completed it, take a look! Just click on the new tabs up top.
Something I've been wanting for a while was a way to integrate a contact form in Expression Engine with some nice AJAX effects from my favorite Javascript library, Mootools. I've not been able to find anything out there that does exactly what I want, so I've made my own. This does require the FreeForm Module for Expression Engine from Solspace as well as Mootools 1.11.
This past week web work was a bit slow, so I decided to make some stuff for my church‘s new contemporary service called Seven30Seven. I spent a lot of time in Adobe After Effects, which I haven’t been in for a few years, and it took some time to get re-aquatinted with.
I made two videos for Seven30Seven, one is just a simple background to put on the screens that will animate in and stop, and the other one is a 5:00 countdown video so people will know when the service is starting. I also created a Youtube account finally, so I put the videos up on there. So either head over there and check them out, or just click the jump below to see them here.
I love the idea of Facebook apps, they let developers get known by nearly the entire Facebook community for their hard work, and they allow people to even further the social networking experience. There's a lot of great apps out there that are actually very useful, fun, and promote a great user experience.
The problem with Facebook apps is the users, and how Facebook deals with them. For the majority of the apps out there, when you add it you must invite at least 20 friends! For some reason the majority of users are fine with this, but lets call it what it is - spam! Unless you actually want an app, or legitimately think a friend of yours would like an app you've found, there is no reason whatsoever to have invites for an app, let alone forced or required invitations!
Now this problem lies with the developer of the application. They are the ones who choose to force you to invite 20 friends to add an app. This is purely an ego thing for them I'm sure - "Look how many people have installed my app!" According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook will soon be punishing stupid applications, and rewarding the good ones. They determine stupid apps as ones that serve no purpose, spam the users, and no one actually uses - meaning people are just blindly accepting app invites.
Another completely separate problem are the people who just blindly accept every app they get an invite to. People like this end up with a ridiculous looking profile that almost rivals MySpace. Take a look at the picture to the left, this is one of my Facebook friends who has been adding apps like crazy! She has 71 applications installed!
This included 4, count em, 4 separate walls that all do the same thing, an app displaying their loyalty to Starbucks and what her favorite drink is, and the ability for your friends to let you know if they think you're hot or not. There reaches a point when you have unused and empty app containers, your profile picture appears 8 times on your own profile, and your finger becomes tired form using the scroll wheel, that you need to re-think how you use Facebook.
Wanna be hip and check out the new cool website to go to? Wanna get a taste of the music I like? Well now you can do both. 
I finally signed up for Twitter today. 
