I have been wanting to get a DSLR for a long time but they were just too expensive, in the last couple years Canon and Nikon have introduced relatively in expensive dslr’s so I tried to save some more money and buy it off eBay I decided on getting a Nikon D60 but instead of buying the kit which included the camera body and lens I bought just the body and then separately bought a lens. I did this because I like taking close up photos (macro) but I also love being able capture a scene so having a wide angle is important. I bought a 18-200mm lens which gives me a really wide angle for regular shots and really great zoom for shots that I need to get close on, it is generally consider a very good all-in-one lens. The kit lens is a good wide angle lens so having one lens that does both was what I was going for.

So I have only really used it twice and here are the two separate sets from Flickr, you get to see wide angle and close up

We have been working on a number of things at Flipskake but our recent priority is an embeddable object that will allow our users to display flips all over the net. Now being able to show the Flip is great but Flips are meant to be collected so one of our goals was to allow the user to collect anywhere our code is used.

Now if a user doesn’t have a Flipshake account they can just put their email and we hold the flip for 48 hours then when they are ready they can comeback, sign up, and they will have their flip in their stack.

Here is the larger version of our player with a Flip from one of my favorite Flipshake artists, Shockbolt. I’ll post some of the behind the scenes info in the future but if you would like to embed flips like Shockbolt’s to the right just click on the Flip and grab the embed code from Flipshake.com.

I have been using OS X for development now for the last couple months and one of the apps I was looking forward to trying out was Panic’s Coda. Unfortunately the first version of Coda was missing a critical feature for me, site wide Search. Recently Coda released an upgrade and among a ton of other awesome new features was site wide search.

One of the first things you will notice is that it is fast, I mean really really fast. Now I suspect that it is because Coda is using OS X’s Spotlight. Now on the other hand I have been using Dreamweaver for the last 9 years, starting with Dreamweaver 3. Dreamweaver does a lot of things very well but it has become a very big application, some what bloated. Search has always been really cumbersome and it becomes more evident when you compare it to Coda.

Since Dreamweaver is on Windows & OS X, I suspect Adobe has not got around to optimizing Search on the OS X version. Take a look at the video below to see how much better Coda is in Search.  I’ll continue to highlight the differences in Coda and Dreamweaver, since Coda is only $99 it could save some people money without losing functionality.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

A couple years ago I went to vegas for New Years and I had the privileged of learning how to play BlackJack properly from my good friend Don, who happens to run a great vegas blog.

Now I like BlackJack but there has not been a convenient way to practice, until now. Apple has a fantastic app store for the iPhone/iPod Touch and one of the free apps is 21 Pro. I had been searching for an app and tried a couple out, 21 Pro is the way to go. This is the simple convenient way I had been looking for.

Besides the basics of betting and giving you two cards the game also has game history, built in card counting that follows your game, and a cheat card in case you need to brush up on strategy.

I get to practice Don’s Hedge Ecomonics on my phone, it doesn’t cost me a penny, and I can make sure I practice not spliting 10s. All in all it is a great app, It doesn’t let you play multiple hands at the table but that is me being nit-picky. Lucky for me I get to put my practice to good use, 7 nights in the caribbean, won’t be free but hopefully I’ll have a better chance at the tables now!

Hopefully these make you laugh… Spread them to your friends and be a hero. So in this first edition of “Things that make me laugh” here are two great videos I saw this week, enjoy!

Mastercard - We got the funk

SexDrive - Trailer

Microsoft finally came out with a pretty good counter punch to the I’m a Mac ads that have been mocking the PC for a few years now. It briefly starts off with a Hodgman lookalike ( who apparetly is an employee sean@windows.com ) that says he has been made in to a sterotype… it then shows various people including some famous people saying I’m a PC and generally something cool about themselves. 

I think this type of ad is great because it goes directly at what Apple is trying to make people feel, PC’s are for losers. Now I know Apple is talking about the computer and not the users, but because of how corny PC is portrayed it does lead you to feel that you shouldn’t be caught dead with one.

CP+B took a lot of crap for the Seinfeld ads, I hope at some point there is an article talking about the direction/strategy they were trying to go.

Anyways click the image to watch the ad and you can read TechCrunch’s take on it.

I zoomed in so you can see what I see

I’m often surprised by high profile sites that get a ton of traffic but don’t try to accommodate as many users as possible. I recently went on a trip and as we were traveling my friend tried to look at the Miami Dolphins website on his iPhone for a schedule.

As you can see to the right the Fins site on his phone isn’t the most helpful thing in the world. Flash is not yet supported on the iPhone so what do the good o’le Fins tell us… Get Flash… but we can’t. FAIL.

So here are two things the Miami Dolphins can do to make sure their website doesn’t stink as much as they did last year.

1) Continue to use a JS script to serve up alternate content, but PUT ALTERNATE CONTENT… Give me a link to the main site at least… only problem is when you go to the main site the site navigation is also in flash.

2) Now the first solution will help a lot but you could always check to see if the user was coming to the site with a nonstandard device like the iPhone for example. Easiest way is to use a conditional statement in your programming language of choice and check to see if the HTTP_USER_AGENT contains the word iPhone. Once you know that you can server up very targeted content. Like what is the address of the stadium, what time is the game, or what is the score of the game…. all things a user viewing your website from a mobile device might be interested in. Here is a link to learn more on some basic designing for the iPhone tricks.

NY Gaints site on the iPhone

Bonus Tip

If you are a developer and want to know what your site looks like on the iPhone and you don’t happen to own an iPhone there is two things you will need. 1) An Intel based Apple computer 2) iPhone SDK (Free)

Once you get those two you can look at your site on the iPhone Simulator provided with the SDK. Doesn’t the Gaints site look nice… get with it Fins.

Lots of things going on in my life lately and the blog was put on the back burner but nevertheless a friend asked me for an explanation of a technology which inspired me to post (which I plan on doing more of).

I was asked by a designer friend recently if I had heard of Subversion and if I thought it was useful. He had read some things about it and didn’t get the point of it.  I am by no means an expert but my former company was using it and I’m currently using it at the office so I shared my experience. I’ll bold key Subversion (SVN) terms throughout the article so the lingo gets included as well.

I will say that Subversion is not new, it has been around for a number of years but I think this post might be important to either new designers or maybe designers that avoided subversion in the past because it seemed more of a programmer’s thing.

At the end of the day SVN is like having a remote server (Repository) that you store your text based files ( html, css, js, php, as, etc) and every time you store (make a Commit) them to the repository it stores the changes in the file as individual snapshots (Revisions). 

When you start a project in svn you usually build the repository and import any existing files you have ( so if you have your sliced images and folder structure you would bring that in). Then on your local computer you setup a working directory, this is where SVN will monitor changes. So you can make changes in this directory ( I use a subdirectory in my localhost) and edit the files with Coda or DW or whatever you fancy.

Now in the past you had to have SVN running on a server and it had to be setup properly, I could see how this probably turned most designers off. Now there are a couple of Hosted SVN systems, I use Beanstalk but there are a few others Springloops, Google Code and Warehouse these make setting up a repository a breeze. 

So for an example you and a colleague are working on a Wordpress theme or a new client site but you are nearing the end of the dev cycle and both have the CSS file(s) open making changes for different parts of the project. What SVN prevents is you overwriting their changes while helping you merge your changes all the while keeping a history of each file.

So you make the changes and try to commit to the repository you will get a conflict, as I said I use Beanstalkapp.com as the repository, Versions for my SVN client, and an app called Changes to merge conflicts. Changes will help you view the file in the repository and your working copy side by side and pull from the left or right to resolve the conflict. My app choices are based on me using OS X, but at the end of this post I mention some Windows based tools that work just as well. It should be noted that Beanstalk is OS independent, you simply connect to it with your SVN client.

Now say for example you are working on a huge app with a ton of people and you are about to push it live when you look at the latest build you have an error, if the error is not easily identifiable you can roll a whole repository back to a certain revision or even individual files. Another thing that also pretty cool, is you can branch your app out. Which basically mean you have a version you are happy with and you want to keep making small changes with it but you are ready to move on to phase two of the project. You would branch out the original to preserve it and you can work on the other branch.

So Beanstalk stores the revisions… Versions Commits/Updates the repository… and Changes helps clear any conflicts

In Versions and in SVN for that matter there are a few basic terms to understand Update, Commit, Conflict, Add and Resolve.

- Update this one for me was a little tricky to understand but when you update you are downloading all the files that have changed since the last time you grabbed them.

- Commit is where you would upload the changes you have made, when you setup the working copy it will know what has changed so you don’t even have to remember all the files you modified.

- Conflict is basically where you made a change and your colleague did as well, they committed to the repository and when you went to commit it said you were about to overwrite his changes.

- Add, say you add a new image during your dev process the repository doesn’t know to watch that file for changes so you need to Add the file to the respository so it physically adds it but also it knows to watch it now.

-Resolve is what you would click after you have cleared up a conflict, some SVN clients won’t let you commit without all the files being resolved.

If you are looking to get your feet wet try the apps I mentioned they all have trials. If you want to try SVN on a PC a good subversion client is TortoiseSVN and for a File Compare app on the PC try WinMerge.

There is something else that I have heard is better than SVN called GIT. I haven’t played with it enough yet to know if it is good for web development, I’ll be sure to update this post once I have given it a run through.

Hope this helps, SVN is pretty simple to pick up once you start using it and I think the revision history it provides is indispensable.

So yesterday I posted how I felt the tipping point with geoTagging might come with the new version of the iPhone well like clock work AppleInsider confirms today that it will indeed have it. AWESOME! With the fact that they are going to be rolling this phone out to 40 something countries this time and it has GPS & 3G…. this thing is going to rock.

You can read about it all at AppleInsider

First the definition: Geotagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images and is a form of geospatial metadata.

Basically it is adding Latitude and Longitude to an object, so if you search for information based on a location you can find relevant objects.

I have to say I love this type of stuff, for my senior project at The U myself and two classmates wrote a script that pulled your current position from a GPS receiver and sent it through a cell phone to a database. Then through a flash app we displayed your current position on a map with your heading and speed. I actually still have it online, projectgps.com click GIS, now be easy on me this is back in 2003.

Fast forward to today and Google is slowly but surely making my vision come true. One of the cooler things we did back then is we had a database of locations and their geotag, as we tested it we could see the distance from a location our friend was. Today I notice that google is pulling Geotagged photos based on areas that I’m looking at on a map.

My wife and I were thinking of taking a road trip for our day off on Monday. While I was looking up locations I opened up Google Maps and went to a lake with in driving distance. There was a new button I had not noticed before called “More”, under that is a check box for photos, when I clicked that BOOM a ton of photos from the exact location they were taken. I could now see exactly what real people see at different locations, not a brochure but the actual photos.

So as I was looking at this I was wondering how Flickr’s own geo tagging was going. Flickr was one of the first large website to incorporate geo tagging but since I don’t use Flickr for mapping it is not something i had checked out in a while. I have to say the quality of photos on Flickr are a lot better than the ones google is pulling in.

It is really cool to see the highquality professional photos for different locations from different photographers.However, major Fail on Yahoo for not having Flickr photos showing up on Yahoo Maps. They own Flickr, they should have it done already.

Now I really think the tipping point is going to come soon and I think that will be iPhone 2.0, the jesus phone. I’m really looking forward to the new version of the jesus phone because it should have a pretty good camera and there is rumored gps functionality. That combined with the SDK, I think there are going to be some really great geo tag applications. I would love to see an app that takes your position relative to a location and shows you information, whether it is coupons or events but I see a ton of possibilities to having your live position and an internet connection.