Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

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Monday, June 9th, 2008

To cel­e­brate Mac Day (any Steve Jobs keynote address deserves a world­wide hol­i­day as far as I’m con­cerned), I’ve decided to do my first screen­cast, so you’ll have some­thing to play with while wait­ing for the Mac­World mad­ness to begin (it also helps jus­tify my pur­chase of Screen­Flow a few months ago).

Thanks to the awe­some folks at Vid­dler for mak­ing my life a bit eas­ier once I got past the “export” stage…

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Sidebar Creative: Collective Realignment

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Two years ago in Austin, Texas, at SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2006, an idea was con­ceived by 4 friends, and nine months later Side­bar Cre­ative was born. That was a lit­tle over a year ago, and now that our fledg­ling design col­lec­tive has had a chance to stretch its limbs, open its eyes, and all the other lovely things that new­borns do, it’s time for some changes (no, not the dia­per kind; and yes, all pos­i­tive). But first, a mini-retrospective of “Year One: The Awakening.”

Let’s go back

Over the course of the first year, Bryan, Jon, Steve and I have learned more about each other and our­selves than any of us expected — and more about what Side­bar means to each of us, and how dif­fer­ent that is from what we all expected at the begin­ning. We expected that join­ing forces would be a good way to attract larger projects and clients (which it was, and con­tin­ues to be), but none of us antic­i­pated the attrac­tion of bring­ing our own ideas to the table and using our com­bined expe­ri­ence to bring them to life.

Has any­one seen my shoes?

Though the prospect of more client work was a key incen­tive at the start, our indi­vid­ual con­sult­ing busi­nesses saw increases around the same time Side­bar launched (either a coin­ci­dence or poten­tial clients hop­ing to get a lower price by con­tact­ing one of us indi­vid­u­ally — false logic for what it’s worth), and though we received RFPs for large, lucra­tive projects from day one (the stream of requests has remained steady since Jan­u­ary 2007), sched­ul­ing and avail­abil­ity became a bar­rier to accept­ing many of them. The projects we have been able to work on, how­ever, have been lots of fun, in one case even allow­ing us to stretch beyond the com­puter screen to design for pix­els of another sort (more on that when we’re allowed to talk about it ;)

Hav­ing more than enough client work has served us two-fold: on one hand, we’ve become even more selec­tive about the clients we choose to work with than we were before (being selec­tive is the key to stay­ing inter­ested and engaged: only accept projects you can be pas­sion­ate about for clients you’ll enjoy work­ing with), but it’s also afforded us the time to indulge our own interests.

Dude, I hear a car

And indulge we have: the Side­bar Net­work is home to four projects so far, with more on the way (use the net­work navbar at the top of any of the sites in the net­work to bounce between them).

My Mile Marker

Known within our ranks as “M3”, MyMile­Marker tracks your vehicle’s mileage, MPG, and pro­vides pro­jec­tions so you can judge just how much gas you’re really guz­zling. The orig­i­nal idea was Steve’s, and we all chipped in dur­ing our spare time to make it hap­pen, from brain­storm­ing to IA to design (with Steve tak­ing on all the Ruby on Rails pro­gram­ming duties), includ­ing a handy mobile site that fea­tures a lick-able cus­tom stylesheet for iPhone/Mobile Safari users.

SMS via Twit­ter and Edward Scherf’s beau­ti­ful cus­tom icons are the icing on the cake for this lovely lit­tle app that already has almost 10,000 users, spread­ing purely by word of mouth (thanks in large part to the Twit­ter community).

Snit­ter

What do you get when you put Snook and Twit­ter together? Why, you get Snit­ter, of course. What started as an exper­i­ment of Jon’s to become famil­iar with Adobe AIR has turned into one of the most pop­u­lar 3rd party Twit­ter clients on OS X and Win­dows. The pro­gram­ming (includ­ing loads of cool fil­ter­ing options) is all Jon’s — the rest of us chipped in fea­ture sug­ges­tions and improve­ments, with Steve and I pro­vid­ing designs for the default set of themes. If you haven’t tried it yet, what are you wait­ing for? Get Snit­ter and start Twittering!

Overheard.it

With Twit­ter clearly play­ing a large part in our online lives, it was only log­i­cal for our minds to wan­der in its direc­tion. After inte­grat­ing MyMile­Marker with Twit­ter, and see­ing Dan Cederholm’s Foamee intro­duce the con­cept of a “bar­na­cle app”, we decided to fol­low the most pop­u­lar word on Twit­ter (“over­heard”) and see what peo­ple were talk­ing about. After a few nights worth of sketch­ing, design, devel­op­ment (by Jon, using CakePHP) and test­ing, Overheard.it was released upon the world (the domain itself makes it a site worth visiting ;)

Future plans for Overheard.it include event-specific fil­ters (for those great con­fer­ence quotes we all love), vot­ing, and all man­ner of other poten­tial silliness.

Django Plu­gables

Bryan is quickly becom­ing a Django savant (and has been toil­ing away at var­i­ous projects for a year or so), and in addi­tion to doing his best to con­vert the rest of us to Django-ites, he likes to find prob­lems that need solv­ing — a few days ago (this past Fri­day, to be exact) he decided the Django com­mu­nity needed an eas­ier way to access the grow­ing library of 3rd party “plug­gable” appli­ca­tions with­out hav­ing to dig around Google Code for hours hop­ing to find the dia­mond in the rough.

Three days later, he had designed, built and launched Django Plu­gables, and if you have any inter­est in Django, you should check it out. Speak­ing of Django, you should also dig around Bryan’s recently relaunched Aval­on­star, which, in addi­tion to sport­ing a ter­rific design, is all Django, baby.

It’s a mir­a­cle in a bowl

The design com­mu­nity uses the term “realign” to describe an adjust­ment of direc­tion rather than a bottom-up trans­for­ma­tion, and that’s a good way to describe what has been hap­pen­ing within Side­bar since last sum­mer (the course-correction was already evi­dent in our Dig­i­tal Web inter­view with Matthew Pen­nell back in Sep­tem­ber). It was clear that we needed to reflect our realign­ment on the site, while also tak­ing the oppor­tu­nity to realign the site itself, show­ing more of what makes us who we are as indi­vid­u­als, and with more empha­sis on con­sult­ing, train­ing and edu­ca­tion — areas we all intend to spend more time focus­ing on in the com­ing year, includ­ing a series of full-day work­shops we’re plan­ning to bring to cities nor­mally over­looked by larger conferences.

There are a ton of amaz­ing ideas bounc­ing around the Side­bar Camp­fire, and I’m more excited than ever to be a part of this group. So go check out our lit­tle realign, and stay tuned: the best is yet to come.

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Email Doesn’t Scale

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

I’ve been want­ing to write about my prob­lems with email for a while now, but keep com­ing up short when it comes to explain­ing exactly why it fails for me. That is, until read­ing Tantek’s lat­est on the subject:

“I’m prob­a­bly respond­ing to less than 1 in 10 emails that are sent directly to me, even fewer of those that are sent to a set of peo­ple or a list. The usabil­ity of email for me has dete­ri­o­rated so much that I exclaimed on Twit­ter recently: EMAIL shall hence­forth be known as EFAIL.”

He goes on to explain his thoughts on why point to point com­mu­ni­ca­tions do not scale, and how emails in gen­eral are becom­ing too bloated (the lack of a sin­gu­lar focus in many emails I receive def­i­nitely impacts my like­li­hood of respond­ing), as well as how 1:many or 1:all medi­ums are supe­rior to 1:1 meth­ods (e.g. email). This is exactly what I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to say.

Semi-solutions

Tan­tek cer­tainly isn’t the first to write about the the prob­lems with email — Mike Davidson’s solu­tion last year was to reduce the length and detail of replies to a spe­cific num­ber of sen­tences, but that hasn’t allowed me to make a suf­fi­cient dent in my inbox.

Sim­i­larly, Inbox Zero (a process many of my friends use to keep the noise down) just doesn’t seem to work for me. Plus, hav­ing an empty inbox won’t stop peo­ple from com­mu­ni­cat­ing with me via email when they should be using another medium.

It’s not you, it’s me

Both Inbox Zero and Sentenc.es aim to reduce the impact of the full inbox by mak­ing it eas­ier to empty on a reg­u­lar basis, but for me that doesn’t solve the prob­lem as I see it–it isn’t a mat­ter of find­ing a way to work around what email has become, it’s just that email is being used improp­erly, and I’d rather use other meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that are more appro­pri­ate to the type and rel­e­vance of the message.

How do we fix it?

Email isn’t bro­ken for every­one (or at least, if it is they don’t real­ize it yet), but I find more peo­ple becom­ing frus­trated with email every week. Add the whole SPAM prob­lem into the mix (over the last 6 months, more and more of my valid incoming/outgoing mes­sages are get­ting caught by SPAM fil­ters than ever) and I just see email con­tin­u­ing its down­ward spiral.

I’m not sure of the solu­tion — as long as my clients con­tinue to send me emails and expect a response, I’m a bit ner­vous to tell them to shove it (it’s hard enough to get them to all use Base­camp instead for project com­mu­ni­ca­tion, let alone stop using a method that still works for them), but per­haps that’s what it will come down to. Tantek’s arti­cle ends with a list of sug­ges­tions that can serve as a decent start­ing point, and his Email Reduc­tion project is also worth check­ing out.

Does email = efail for you? How do you feel about the future of email?

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Pardon Our Dust

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

If you’re vis­it­ing this site for the first time, and are see­ing the default Word­Press theme (aka Kubrick), please rest assured that a cus­tom designed theme is hid­ing some­where within the Word­Press installation–WordPress is just hav­ing a bit of a tantrum lately, and has decided to keep revert­ing back to the default shortly after I reset the cus­tom theme in the admin.

Those of you who are return vis­i­tors are hope­fully miss­ing the usual orange and brown good­ness that has graced these pages for almost 2 years.

Host­ing Woes

For the last few weeks, my home­page hasn’t been load­ing at all — Dreamhost didn’t seem to think it was a prob­lem on their end (though I’d made no changes to the site between it work­ing and ceas­ing to work). After going around in cir­cles with them for too long, I uploaded a fresh install of Word­Press, moved my plu­g­ins and theme direc­to­ries, changed a few hard-coded absolute URLs, and things were work­ing again. For about 5 minutes.

Arti­fi­cial Intelligence?

Per­haps my blog­ging soft­ware is try­ing to tell me some­thing? I’ve planned a redesign for well over a year, but other endeav­ors have taken pri­or­ity (e.g. Side­bar Cre­ative, Web­graph, Rounders, var­i­ous client/consulting work, pre­sen­ta­tions, work­shops and toy­ing with things like Virb). I’ve also been seri­ously think­ing about hit­ting the redesign over the last month or so–is Word­Press now smart enough to read my mind? Or is my soon-to-be-replaced theme get­ting jeal­ous? It’s creepy from where I’m sitting…

Sep­a­rat­ing Con­tent From Presentation

Okay, so it’s not the use for which that phrase is intended, but in a way, it’s inter­est­ing to see my con­tent with­out its cus­tom skin. I’ve been read­ing through many of the arti­cles I’ve writ­ten, and pay­ing more atten­tion to the text. Per­haps this is a nor­mal issue with design­ers try­ing to objec­tively read their own con­tent while get­ting dis­tracted by their own designs–if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot some­time; it may help expose issues with your design, or your con­tent, or at the very least allow you a fresh per­spec­tive on your own writing.

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