Fans turned photographers at indie rock shows
Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell on fans who take pictures at the band's shows: “You see it getting progressively worse. It’s almost like the skateboarding community, where everyone’s a fucking photographer now. You look at shots, and it’s hard to keep the photographers out of the shot, you know? It kind of seems like the same thing with indie rock; everyone’s got a fucking camera in their hand and, I don’t know, is there no sanctity left for live performance with going to a show and seeing it with your own eyes and remembering it? Do you have to tape every second, or even just your favorite song?”
The “Xylophone” wine & food tasting method
“Xylophone is a useful analogy for thinking about wine and food pairing…Before sitting down to taste, arrange your wines in a manner inspired by the percussion instrument of graduated wooden bars: from light-bodied to full-bodied, using the wine’s alcohol level (low to high) as an estimate. When taste-testing wines of similar alcohol levels, you might line them up by color (yellow to pink to red), which can suggest a crescendo of flavor intensity. Either way, it’s then easier to make generalizations about the styles of wine you enjoy best with certain foods: often lighter wines with lighter foods, and fuller-bodied and -flavored wines with heavier foods. Prepare a tasting sheet for taking notes. Listing the wines down one side of the page and the foods across the other, create a simple grid. Into each of the boxes, note your impression of each pairing using a five-point scale, from +2 (perfect) to 0 (neutral) to -2 (awful). After a few glasses of wine, you might skip numbers in favor of smiley or sad faces, a technique we learned from restaurateur Danny Meyer: The broader the smile or frown, the more intense the judgment.”
Design lessons from the kitchen
“Chefs organize their cooks and their space with a few key principles in mind: maximizing consistency of product, ensuring creative freedom to experiment, and encouraging effective problem solving under incredibly stressful conditions… For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance these principles effectively.” [via AP]
iPhone fix request list
“The Macworld editors have all weighed in with a list of things they’d like to see the iPhone do or, in some cases, do better…It’s these consensus items that appear below—and that will make a great mobile device even better.”
BusinessWeek: The Best Product Design Of 2007
“This year’s awards run the gamut from ‘split-head’ hammers to ultralight jets to savings plans for shoppers.”
Great coders can’t write anything else
“The best developers I know write great quality code every time they touch an IDE. This is because they realize that writing good code is something you have to practice, something that you have to do over and over again to be able to do right. They realize that writing great code is something you do all of the time, not something you save for a party trick.”
IE-induced headache
“We have a text area named ‘tags’, which we use to allow users to edit the tags on their pages. Seems like a natural enough name, no? However, IE didn’t like that name. Oh, it handled it fine most of the time, displaying it, editing it, etc. It handled it fine, right up until the time you tried to print, and then IE choked on it. Perhaps IE uses that name internally during printing or something. Who knows? Changing the name to ‘edit_tags’ (and fixing all the relevant functional tests and auxiliary scripts that referenced the field as ‘tags’) caused the error to go away. Talk about bizarre. If I were Microsoft, I would be frankly embarrassed to own a product like IE.”
Thirteen simple rules for speeding up your web site
1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests 2. Use a content delivery network 3. Add an expires header 4. Gzip components 5. Put css at the top 6. Move scripts to the bottom 7. Avoid css expressions 8. Make javascript and css external 9. Reduce dns lookups 10. Minify javascript 11. Avoid redirects 12. Remove duplicate scripts 13. Configure etags
XRAY shows box model for any element on a page
“XRAY is the first in hopefully a suite of free cross browser tools for helping web designers and developers better visualize what their code is doing in a browser. XRAY is designed to help you get beneath the skin of your web page. XRAY let’s you see the box model for any element on a page in action – where is the top and left of an element, how big is each margin, how big is the padding, how wide and high is the content box?”
Online video is the future of marketing and advertising
“A job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer. Like a news producer at a television station, she decides every day what’s worth covering at the company and produces a short video segment for YouTube, the company blog or even the company intranet.”
Single-take music videos
“Cheap, lo-fi single-take videos are showing up all over.”