Fresh

I love quotes! And no, I don’t mean an estimate for how much your time will cost (sorry, lame joke). Here are a handful of design related quotes that I’m digging right now, in no particular order:

“Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.”
—Erik Adigard

“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”
—D. H. Lawrence

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On the 12 days of Fresh our creative team posted these…

Twelve Wicked Interfaces

Eleven Twitter Tools

Ten Social Crimes

Nine Steps to Flip

Eight iGoogle Gadgets

Seven IE Hacks

Six Workweek LOLcats

FIVE FIREFOX EXTENSIONS

Four jQuery Plugins

Three New & Nerdy

Two Campaigns of Fury

and…

1 year of eROI in Old Town!

Just over one year ago eROI moved its office from the Albers Milling Co. building under the Broadway Bridge to a revamped multi-floor space on NW 5th and Couch St – right in the heart of Old Town/Chinatown.  Not only is our new space cooler,  bigger and greener, it’s also in the ‘most exciting’ neighborhood in Portland!  ‘Most exciting’ can be interpreted many different ways… but for most of us I think being in OTCT is overall a very positive experience.  Yea, there’s drug dealers, crazy people and homeless folks asking for change or cigarettes – but it’s all part of the special charm of the neighborhood.

Plus, we have some awesome neighbors: Someday Lounge, Backspace, Ground Kontrol, Compound, Upper Playground, Floating World Comics, just to name a few.  Access to galleries, good food & drinks, and public transportation is primo.  And there’s good things in the future too: A new restaurant, Ping, should be opening up in the Hung Far Low building soon, and there’s potential for our very own neighborhood Uwajimaya right across the street from us.  (But hopefully all of the ‘rejuvination and modernization’ of OTCT doesn’t take away all of that neighborhood charm – once the Hung Far Low sign gets put back up we’ll all feel a lot better.)

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In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to ones campaign but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs to support their campaign. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the Mccain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry-over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no discontent as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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It’s that time again when we all make promises to ourselves for the upcoming year – “I’m going to quit smoking” or “I will lose 20 pounds” or “I will write more Fresh posts”.    This year I’m mainly focusing on expanding my geek knowledge – nothing gets me more excited than adding some badass new skillz to my nerd repertoire.

So, here we go!

[1] Get Down with OOP (Hey you know me)

My first encounter with an Object-Oriented Programming language was in my Java class in college.  Since then I’ve been mostly wrapped up in HTML, CSS and scripting languages.  For a while I thought I’d never need to touch OOP again – after all, who uses Java anymore!?  But man was I wrong… OOP isn’t just for writing ‘boring’ Java applications.  More and more I’m encountering OOP in scripting languages – PHP, Javascript and (especially) Actionscript. (more…)

Just a couple years ago, I thought all JavaScript could do is spawn multiple popups with no end in sight. An online nuisance, if you will. Those days of popup mania are largely and thankfully gone. Now, JavaScript is used to power web page functionality that was thought to only be possible in Flash. JavaScript frameworks like script.aculo.us, Dojo, MooTools, and Yahoo! UI Library have all flourished as popular and leading frameworks out in use today. However, there is one JavaScript framework that, in my opinion, stands out from the rest of the pack: jQuery. I’m guessing the reason why the j is lowercase is because they want to be as hip as the iPhone. That’s gotta be it, right?

Why do I think jQuery is the ish? Very easy syntax, useful built-in functions, easy-to-read online documentation, blah blah blah blah blah. But what’s really great about jQuery is that, like the great Firefox web browser, it can be extended through the use of plugins. jQuery plugins are nothing more than just additional JavaScript files that are loaded after the core jQuery file has been loaded. And because jQuery has a great user-base, there are a LOT of plugins out there. Let’s highlight some plugins that will allow you to ditch Flash for good…

1. Cycle

Cycle is a simple, yet powerful slideshow plugin. You can be casual and use the standard-issue Fade effect to transition between images or be daring and use any of the multitude of effects available through this plugin. Other options include randomizing images a la iPod Shuffle, the speed of the transition; you even have the option of having callback functions that are called before or after every slide.

See a live demo of the Cycle plugin in action on the Seven Planet homepage.

Cycle plugin »

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Writing web applications or even simple static HTML pages requires the pooling of a multitude of technologies all of which can become a broken link in the event of a failure. Anecdotally, most of a developer’s time is spent troubleshooting so it can be a real headache tracking down a bug when you are jumping between three or more scripting/markup languages and more client environments than you have fingers to count.

A good web developer knows to look at their sites in every browser available to them however we all have a favorite when it comes to our primary development environment. Unless you’re working in a Microsoft shop you are undoubtedly using Firefox for this purpose …. right? Well in any case, it’s always a good idea to use the right tools for the job and a well equipped tool set can really boost productivity quite substantially. Given the extensible nature of Firefox, the web is rich with nifty plugins to give a web developer tools to speed up development, debugging and profiling and generally make life a little more bearable.

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Today I wanted to share with you the beauty of LOLcats and how they relate to our eROI workweek, but it has come to my attention that not everyone understands LOLcats or knows what they are. This is a travesty!

In short, a LOLcat is a picture of a cat with a funny caption, usually in all caps with bad grammar. Sometimes they are funny because of the picture, other times they are funny because of the associated caption. They aren’t cat-exclusive, as many pictures include hamsters, walruses, dogs, and even birds, but most are cats or cat-related.

The go-to site for all your LOLcat needs is I Can Has Cheezburger, a website dedicated to posting these pictures. (They have since branched off into LOLdogs, LOLcelebs, and LOLnews&politics.)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the LOLcat workweek!

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As a web developer, one of the most frustrating things to deal with is cross browser compatibility issues. In the past there were not so many browsers available, but as time goes on, more browsers are released, as well as all of their updated versions that follow.

It actually gets ridiculous sometimes, where does a developer draw the line, and cut their losses? Most commonly found now, are sites being tested in IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Safari.

According to the latest statistics on browser usage, here is the breakdown:

Firefox: 44.2% | IE7: 26.6% | IE6: 20.2% | Chrome: 3.1%b | Safari: 2.7% | Opera: 2.3%

While Firefox is leading the category with 44.2%…IE6 and 7 still account for 46.8%. This means, unfortunately we must find ways to work around the IE bugs.

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Google has quickly become the cool kid in school when it comes to anything online. Have a question? Google it! Need easy access to documents and spreadsheets from anywhere? Check out Google Docs. Want to chat with friends and coworkers during the day? Try Google Talk! And if you haven’t kicked your old email address to the curb, do it, and get with Gmail. You’ll have way less spam and lots of cool page themes and features to choose from.

If you want to be one of the cool kids of the online playground, then you should also have an RSS reader, aka aggregator. If you don’t know what RSS is, Google it! Haha, just kidding…but seriously. An RSS reader gathers all the news and info feeds you choose and organizes them on one page, either web-based or desktop-based. There are tons out there, but my favorite is from…wait for it…Google, of course! If you have a Google account, then you have the RSS reader called iGoogle. iGoogle organizes everything with “gadgets,” which are small blocks throughout your page with little snippets of info. You can either search for gadgets within iGoogle, or you can add any RSS feed to your iGoogle home page directly from a site. I’m gonna give you all a little peek into my iGoogle page and my favorite 8 gadgets.

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