I realize it’s been about five years since I’ve posted, but there are plenty of good reasons. I will elaborate on others soon, but for now, here’s a quick piece on an app I worked on. It’s a digital out of home execution built to keep 5000 Tweens occupied while they wait for the Demi Lovato/David Archeletta show to start. Feel free to look up who those artists are…I had to.
Users can send SMS/email messages to a screen then go to a site and see a ‘replay’ of their messages from the show.
It’s a small part of LocaModa’s strategy to be the only company that connects dooh with web, mobile, social networks, and - coming soon - more traditional media like TV.
More soon…oh, and I admit I already knew who David Archeletta was.
I’ll be starting at LocaModa in Cambridge on Apr 1. Pretty excited for the opportunity.
Digital out of home (DOOH) will provide exposure to a lot of the technologies I enjoy working with, and through a delivery mechanism that’s growing in popularity and innovation.
For more on what LocaModa does, check their site and blog.
This one listens to the noise around the computer (as long as you have a built in mic) and displays a quasi-equalizer. Nothing fancy, but definitely progress. You can adjust the sensitivity by clicking “Options…” I also learned about the importance of the nested iterator patch, reducing the number of total patches significantly. Screen shots below. If you give it a try, let me know.
Note: If you’re keeping track at home, you may notice that my original plan of February: Self-Sacrifice has gone awry. Not because I don’t want to explore self-sacrifice…but because I simply forgot I had changed my mind last minute before writing my original plan. I had decided to move self-indulgence to May because of our upcoming trip to Italy. So here it is now, instead. I’m sure I’ll find time for that self-sacrifice…
Anyway, taking into consideration that February’s main events were comprised of Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day, I decided this month’s challenge would revolve around food (no, not for Presidents Day). Specifically, food photography has always interested me. So I worked to explore how to take good shots of food.
Decided to open up Quartz Composer the other day for the first time. Pretty sweet.
After a little playing around I came up with an extremely basic screen saver idea that floats three cubes around your screen, displaying the first 18 images from a given Flickr RSS feed. You can change the feed to whichever you’d like; the default is mine.
Included my patch macros, below. If you have any thoughts, please let me know– I’m extremely eager to get better at this.
About 10 years ago I wrote a program in REALbasic that simply displayed the same phrase in each of your installed/active fonts. The purpose was to quickly see what your options were when it came to font choice. I uploaded the software to various freeware/shareware sites and it was downloaded a few thousand times. It was also twice featured on the CD included with MacAddict magazine.
FontTasteTester 1.0
Right before the new year I received an email from a past user forwarded to me from my father:
I tried again today to see if FTT had leapt the Mac OSX gap, or failing that, whether there was anytrhing similarly easy and rational for trying phrases and then concentrating purely on their visual effect. I had to upgrade to OSX about a year ago and I really miss that facility and wish I had written fan-mail at the time.
Nothing comes near FTT, even the Linotype widget with its many bells and whistles.
Thank you for your ingenuity and generosity…
So I decided that I would challenge myself to redevelop this thing. I also decided that, as part of my January Self-Improvement challenge I would try to develop something for a platform for which I had never written before. While Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard is technically a webpage in a widget, this was still a new experience. I used Apple’s free Dashcode for development.
As such, I present Font Taste Tester 1.0b3 for Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s definitely still a beta, as I haven’t done extensive testing and it’s my first foray into Dashboard. Anyway - if you give it a try and have comments, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.
This officially closes out my January Self-Improvement challenge. Look for a February Self-Indulgence intro/update soon.
I can’t stop telling people about this. It’s a brilliant concept, beautifully executed. Be sure to click through to view more like this as well as more by the filmmakers.
I’ve been waiting a while to write this. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I wanted to make sure I told the story of my trip once the “magic” of the whole thing wore off. But I promise – that hasn’t happened yet. I could also blame it on all the work I had to catch up on when I got back. Meh. Too easy.
The truth is I think I’ve been avoiding this because I was nervous I’d get it wrong. The entire trip was only 48 hours long, but from the moment we arrived at the airport in Boston, we knew this was something important.
Anyway - here we go. Feel free to skim, just watch the videos, leave comments (regarding the event, my vanity, or your disappointment in the Eagles).
