Not since I purchased my PowerMac 6100 (lovely called the pizza box due to it’s form factor) have I been this excited about a piece of hardware. I am of course talking about the recent order of the Wacom Cintiq LCD Pen Tablet (12WX), now keep in mind this is NOT a review since I have yet to receive this bad boy (that is sometime late in January for us Canadians!) No, I am excited because of all the amazing video’s I have scene like the review over at Gizmodo. I watched this video on YouTube, and I ordered the unit the same day.    

It is with a heavy heart that I report that our beloved Pixelsurgeon is dead. We have setup a online memorial for all you who need a little time to grieve.   Pixelsurgeon was a buddy, a friend , an d even an online portal sometimes. We shall miss you. Here is my tribute. You can also find some fun mementos in the form of a desktop image there too!

Picnik sets the standard for how all online applications both Flash and AJAX should function. The online photo editing service is an excellent example of how to get things right when building a web service. The site features an extremely easy to use user interface designed for “joe-home-user”. Interface elements are clean and very obvious. What I particularly love about the site is the effective use of liquid layout. If you have a big screen you can make full use of it in this application. Seeing that 800×600 is almost dead, its nice to see more and more online applications taking advantage of the new big screen. This site also features a great business model as well. One small fee for the year and you have access to this wonderfully easy to user service. You can watch for this little puppy to get bought up in one of Microsoft’s buying binges. Also it has the classic green Dotcom vibe to it and the funny Web 2.0 logo… so it’s a sure-fire seller.

The Tiltviewer is a cleaver 3D Flickr viewer built using Papervision 3D. Ever since Papervision 3D came on the scene it has become the darling of the Flash community. There have been a great number of excellent applications built using it. The problem with 3D is just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should”.. the Titltviewer is a good example of this. While the interface is well done, viewing 2D photos on a slight slant doesn’t really enhance the viewing experience – in fact I think it makes alot of the photos hard to view. I once worked with a programmer who told me this: “As interface designers we know we have done our job if the end users don’t notice us at all.” And he is right, any interface that gets between the user and their content is a bad interface. Using 3D has it’s place, but viewing slanted photos from Flickr probably isn’t the place. No slag to the folks who build this app though, it’s well done and an excellent proof of concept.

I recently took an extended “Lunch Hour” to watch the new Michael Bay film Transformers. All and all it is a good movie. One of the things that will strike many people about the movie is the in-your-face product placement for General Motors. The Chevrolet “Bowtie” and the big bad red “GMC” logo are tagged everywhere. Fan’s of the 1980’s cartoon will attest that each episode of the Transformers was basically one big toy advertisement for Hasbro.

Microsoft Silverlight is   Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash Player. Now keep in mind I haven’t played with this yet (or the tools such as Expression that are used to created it) but my thinking is that this will probably be another tool much like FrontPage. Microsoft has never had much luck getting the professional web design community to use it’s tools. Maybe it’s because their image with in this community is so poor. Lets take IE 7 for instance, they had the opportunity to make it “standards compliant” … but no, they still had to throw in their own mix of proprietary rendering.

AEON Biz-Quality

Is a kinda weird little Flash site. The whole project is to demonstrate how the suit reacts under different “accidents” … coffee etc.. The only problem is every single page is one big video. This would be all fine and good if everyone was sitting on a T1 connection, but sadly most the world isn’t. (maybe their target audience for this suit does?) At any rate I couldn’t get 4 levels deep into the site before I had to hit the close window button and leave this site in the dust with other slooooowwwwww downloading sites. No matter how great / interactive your site is … if the download is slow you will make users run for the hills.

I recently downloaded the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to determine if my brand new Dell XPS (with the fun Windows Vista Capable sticker on the outside) can run Vista. The scan determined that many of my programs needed an “upgrade” to work.   I was frustrated to see that Photoshop CS2 (a program known not to work with Vista) was not on this list.  If Photoshop isn’t on that list I can’t imagine how many of my other design applications are not going to work on Vista. So the upgrade advisor isn’t that reliable to determine if your machine is ready for Vista.

This is my first blog entry using the new publish to blog feature in Word 2007. I must say that the new ribbon is very, very good. It’s like Microsoft took all the stuff I use on a daily basis in Word, Excel and Outlook and put it out where I can use it. By now you must have viewed the screen shots of the ribbon [See here]. Those of you will small screens might want to stick with Office 2003, as the new ribbon in Office 2007 takes up a lot of screen space. I doubt this is much of a problem for most users with modern computers running at 1024 x 768 or greater.

Every night I have my computer transfer all my working files from one hard drive to the other. I use a freeware tool called “Cobian Backup” This tool has a nice visual interface that enables you to setup backup sets. This tool also enables me to do a weekly FTP of very important files off-site. It is important to get your most important files for your business out of your house.