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.

Trying to define Web 2.0 is all the rage these days, some people say it is social networking others say it is about interactivity (AJAX). At the end of the day all the definitions are right because the whole point of a new version is the fact that it is new, so defining it as stuff we didn’t do in the 1.0 days is good enough for me. With that being said there are a couple things I’m excited about and they all tend to center around data aggregation. Now aggregation in general can apply to a lot of different things happening on the web, RSS for example is a simple way to help you aggregate your favorite authors or news sources.

Google and Microsoft for example are now aggregating traffic information, they are both using the information in similar ways but with just slightly different twists.

In Google’s case they take the traffic information and let you see what traffic is like on certain days.

Tomorrow I have to head to the airport around 2 o’clock, with this new functionality I can see what the traffic might be like around that time. Now they can’t predict accidents but I like the fact that if I’m in an unfamiliar city with a meeting the next day, I will be able to determine loosely what the traffic might be like.

I say that is pretty cool and some functionality that I’m sure a lot of people that travel will find useful.

Now Microsoft has taken this information and put a slight twist on it. What they do is when you ask for driving directions you can choose for them to factor in live traffic information. So if you are running out the door and are printing out directions it might be able to save you a big headache if it helps you avoid an accident. Now on the flip side of that is the fact that the piece of paper you print out is not magically going to update when you are on the road so if you print out the data the night before and are factoring in live traffic it isn’t going to help you the next day.

Obviously nothing substitutes having gps in the car with a live traffic feed but for you all out there not lucky enough to have that or are not psychic maybe a mix of what Google and Microsoft are doing will help you out. I’m sure ultimately they will start blending functionality so what Google has Microsoft will and vice versa.

Another great example of aggregation is a site called farecast.com, I have been using them for a couple years and it is a great free service. So good that Microsoft bought them a few weeks ago. Here is the cool part about farecast, it will tell you if you are getting a good deal or not. Now you can surf around the net and look for the best deal, you can even use a service like kayak that aggregates a whole bunch of sites together but farecast has a twist. Farecast will study historical trends for the route you are flying and will predict with sometimes fairly hight accuracy if you should wait to buy your ticket or if you should get it right away because the fare is only going to go higher.

For example I flew to Seattle this past March and I knew about the trip a couple month ahead of time, I was able to save a bunch on the ticket because farecast told me to wait. It felt based on the trends that the price will start to decline now I followed the advice and sure enough it went down almost a hundred dollars a fee weeks before the trip.

All of these are great examples of the impact websites can have on our day to day life by helping aggregate and mine all the data that is out there.

I can’t wait for football season, college or pro. Today I came home to a package at the front door and to my surprise it was my 2007 Fantasy Football Championship tshirt. ummm, Yes Correct! We have a big time fantasy football league at 352 Media, last year I think we had 20 teams. We split the teams into two leagues and I got lucky and won my league.

Now I need to defend my title so I have a couple suggestions for Yahoo, who provides some top notch service for our league.

First, provide a way for guests to view the league. Since we have two leagues it would be nice to see how my friends are doing in the other league. I think that should be an easy thing to setup, just an admin setting to make the league public or private.

Second, along the same lines as the first request make a widget or some embed code that we can include on our blogs or sites so show people how we are doing in our league. Not that the growth of Fantasy Football is slowing but the more exposure the better.

Third, take your live stats tracker to the next level. Put it in Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight I would love a basic desktop app for my stats. Add some better play by play for all the games, god knows if I could watch every game at the same time I would try to. Since I can’t, my live stats let me know how my team is doing. Add some sound or something when I score. Form a deal with NFL.com to put highlights of my players. Add live chat to the league members through the app, many of us are in different parts of the country so we can give each other updates for the games they are able to see. It is simple, I just want it to be cool.

Hopefully we will get to see some of these features here next season, truth be told Yahoo does a great job doing updates and every year they are making improvements.

Defend the Championship!

Well I’m probably a little goofy as a person but when it comes to snowboarding I’m not. For the non-snowboarders out there “goofy” is when your front foot on the board is your right foot. “Regular” is when your left foot leads, your lead foot is the one you put most your weight on and use for turning.

I went a couple weeks ago to Sugar Mountain, NC to learn how to snowboard. A couple of my good friends do it and love it so I wanted to give it a try. It is every bit as hard as you would think and it hurts even worse.

Here is how my two days learning went…
Day 1 – Horrible. Wrong board size mixed with lots of pain.

Day 2 – Fun. Right board size mixed with less pain.

After my two days I learned that the board can make all the difference in the world, I’m a big guy and the board I had on day one was not right for me. As soon as I would get up and move a yard I would fall. The instructor could tell right off the bat that it was the wrong size board so on Day 2 I was able to switch it and I was able to get the hang of it.

I liked snowboarding so much that I’m thinking of buying a board, a couple days of rentals will add up to the cost of a board so it makes sense. Everyone I have talked to says Burton makes the best equipment, add the fact that the board I had on Day 2 was Burton and I’m sold.

Now my friends and instructors I had gave me a ball park on the board size I should get, unfortunately XL is not a size. The way it works is length of board, I’m 164-168cm, and width of the board, which I’m around a 260mm.

Here is where my web designer side kicks in…. Burton’s site on a coolness factor is a 12 on a scale of ten, it has all this great flash work mixed in with killer videos. The part I don’t like is that I can’t sort all their boards by what is available in the size I need. Since all their boards range in length and width you have to go board by board to find ones that works. It is far from the end of the world but it is the little things that make websites truly usable and great. So Burton if you listening put a cool little filter on your boards page that lets you pick a length and height range.

By the way, I’m going to get a Burton Bullet. It has a sick design… and it comes in the right size.

Now if only Burton offered the design we did for Microsoft…

P.S. I will write back after my next trip would should be in mid March… We are heading up to Seattle then driving to Whistler, BC!

So our Atlanta office is relatively close to the expressway and at our exit is one of these new Digital Billboards. This thing looks amazing to me, it is super bright and crystal clear. From what I can tell the ads displayed are on a loop, display for a few seconds, and move on to the next. Now I might be wrong but I also assume that this tower has an internet connection so ClearChannel (whoever) can change the ad lineup from their home base.

To me this is amazing, I can think of a ton of cool applications for this (I’m probably not alone), from what I understand right now it takes about 24 hours to get your ad changed on the billboard but, what if the ad was able to take in some information over the internet like weather for example around the billboard location and display a different message or product based on that info. I can see the StarBucks ad right now saying “It’s cold out there! Take the next exit for a Venti NonFat Caramel Macchiato.”

With all the new media like these billboards, digital signage, iPhone, etc. it is an exciting time to work in New Media.