March 2nd, 2011 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Steve Jobs introduces Ipad 2
Ok so for everybody that didn’t hear about the event in which Apple unveiled the new iPad 2!
Here it is:
1. Most of the revenue to Apple comes now from iOS devices.
2. 15 million iPads sold in 2010. That is more than any tablet PC’s.
3. As usual Apple – Steve Jobs, always comes out saying how great Apple is and how much their competitors suck.
4. The new ipad has camera. No shock here.
5. Facetime to the iPad. No shock here either.
6. Phil Schiller: “No one predicted this would be as successful as it’s been.”
7. Ipad is being used for a variety of things and in many industries including medicine (brain surgery), and others.
8. Dual core processors, Up to 2X faster CPU, 9X faster graphics, Same low power as a4 and first one to ship with a dual core.
9. Metallic back.
10. Read and Facing cameras.
11. 33% thinner to a 8.8 mm. Thinner than the iphone 4! It feels totally different. 1.5pounds to 1.3pounds. It feels lighter.
12. Available in white and black from day March 11th, 2011.
13. Available also from At&t and Verizon.
14. Same 10 hour battery life – dramatically thinner.
15. Prices: $499, $599 and $699 for wifi and $629, $729 and $829 for wiFi and 3G (prices are 16gb, 32gb and 64gb respectively). Same pricing options as before. 5 of this 6 models are less expensive than $799.
16. Available on March 11th, 2011 in the US -> March 23rd in the main 26 countries that Apple works.
17. THIS IS THE AWESOME PART: HDMI Video out that works with every app. You can use it while charging it. This output is in 1080p. Supports rotation. No setup or config. Only for $39.
18. The case is simply not my type of case, but it is a cool thing… either leather or polyurethane.
Ok now other software upgrades – 4.3:
1. Personal Hotspot for the iphone 4 – Share your 3g connection?
2. Photo Booth, of course, you can now use it to manipulate your photos and apply effects as usual.
3. iMovie – new in iOS4.3. You may share your movies directly to Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo, CNNiReport or Itunes. Only for $4.99 Available on March 11th, 2011.
4. 65,000 apps available for the Ipad.
5. GarageBand – Guitar Amps and Effects, 8 Track recording and Mixing and over 250 loops. In this I like the drums – view.
Ok we are good with the iOS4.3 improvements and the good new apps.
So in a nutshell: Faster, lighter, thinner. Cameras and gyro. iOS 4.3 and FaceTime. iMovie and GaragrBand. 3G on AT&T and Verizon. Same battery life. Same prices. Black and white. Smart Covers.
February 24th, 2011 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
So all the Egypt problems last month have shown that when people get together for any cause, amazing things can happen. The reason is simple: people in numbers have a lot of power. Today I was reading about how J.C. Penny got penalized by Google because of their “dirty” practices in buying links. It is almost like Google is trying to send a message to everybody saying if you get involved in link schemes we will punish you.
Now, there is a problem with that approach. Google can indeed punish a lot of businesses but it can’t punish all of them. Google lives only because it actually can return relevant results. For example, today I tried to find the samsonite luggage page in JCPenny and it’s nowhere to be found -> because of the penalty.
Now what would happen if a big group of the Fortune 500 companies decided to get together and all of them do whatever they want with SEO instead of listening to Google guidelines? You guessed it right. Egypt’s case. Google wouldn’t be able to enforce its guidelines without loosing what it is.
The biggest problem is that this is happening already. So many big companies are bending the Google guidelines that it is impossible for Google to target all of them, or any of them for that matter. Simply impossible. So are we getting ready to see an incredible decline in the capacity of search engines to provide valuable results? Yes.
The problem is that Search Engines are destined to fail because they can be manipulated. The more people manipulate the algorithms the more it becomes useless as a search engine. If it is useless, then people (searchers) won’t use it to find their information, and therefore they will turn to other alternatives. Then, companies won’t be interested so much in manipulating the algorithm because they don’t get a good return from doing it.
Google has a fundamental flaw (imho), they are so big that it seems like they own the Internet: but they don’t. Google is similar to a dictator ruler that decides to rein until he wants to. That may happen for many years, and people may sometimes be happy with the way they govern, and sometimes they will get upset, but surely they eventually will want change. When that change is so powerful in the community, they won’t stop until the dictatorship is ended.
No matter how bad or good the new government is, they just don’t care as long as the old government is gone.
In my opinion Google seems to be a pretty good government with some bad decisions sometimes, but overall good. However, I think that some problems with trying to play the card of “the user would think” and the “user would prefer if” sometimes gets in their way of saying: “we are Google and we want it a certain way and since we have much more power than you do, then we will do it the way we want it done.”
That is fair business. Google is huge and they have very good ideas and seriously the web wouldn’t be what it is today without them.
February 24th, 2011 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Ok so the very reason why I am writing this post is because I am sure some of you have trouble installing xDebug with MAMP in Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6. I think the problem is pretty simple, however if you don’t know it, you will scratch your head for hours!
Here it is. The first part of installing xDebug is to get it as an extension for Zend in PHP. So you traditionally would go to the xDebug Wizard and see that it has a nice box where it asks for your phpinfo(); results.
So go ahead and visit the xDebug Wizard first. Then head to your local machine and create a simple php script with the following:
phpinfo();
2. Ok so now go ahead and save your php script somewhere accessible by your local web server. Now head to your browser and run the script. Select all the output and paste it in the textarea box at the xdebug wizard.
3. Now, xdebug is going to give you tailored instructions on how to proceed from here. HOWEVER, at the end of the instructions you will need to do another step.
February 17th, 2011 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
So let’s say that you decided to install drush in your Mac OS and also you were running MAMP at the time and everything was working great a while ago. But lets say that you decided to upgrade Drush. And you simply grabbed the latest version of Drush from the repository in Drupal.org and everything worked great. Read the rest of this entry »
February 15th, 2011 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
The city of Raleigh a while ago had provided information about their $500,000 website that they had agreed to build. Now, from then to today, much has changed including the fact that now the price tag for the new website is $800,000 instead of the half a million. Now, if you were a private company that purchases a website for $800K you would make sure that the functioning of the website would be flawless, right? Not the city of Raleigh. The city’s website was crowded with functionality issues, display problems and also simple mistakes.
According to Justin Moss, reporting for NBC 17: “the City of Raleigh says it is making efforts to address concerns brought up by citizens about its recently launched website.”
According to Mr. Moss, Gail Roper, chief information officer for the City of Raleigh said: “she was not with the City when the final decisions about the site were made. She could not say which person gave ultimate approval on the site design.”
In other words, Mrs. Roper is not aware of which person gave the approval on the site design. This must mean to her that she is then not responsible for the outcome of such decision. It would be like a chef that starts working today in a restaurant and says that he is not responsible for the quality of the food.
I think this is simply outrageous. Not so much for the problems with the website, as a designer I can tell you, every website has its problems. The outrageous part is that it is a website with a price tag of 3 luxury 2011 Lamborghinis. Have you seen a Lamborghini fail the first day that it is bought? Have you seen a Toyota fail the first day that it runs? Hold on, have you ever seen anything that is constructed with a budget of half the cost of a car and when it fails nobody says anything?
I have a problem the moment that somebody purchases something at premium price with the expectation of receiving the highest craftsmanship and engineering, yet when it fails, everybody remains quite. That says something to me.
Look at what Mrs. Roper says according to Mr. Moss: “Roper said no additional funds will be spent on improvements, however existing staff will dedicate time to making the changes on the site.”ARE YOU KIDDING ME? You paid the equivalent amount of a luxury home in the best residential part of Raleigh and you simply say that the existing staff will dedicate their time to make changes to the site?
Friends, I am not a fisherman, but something smells fishy to me here.
The last time that I paid for a nice steak I made sure that it was cooked right. If that wouldn’t have been the case, I would’ve made sure that somebody would’ve known my complaint. If I pay a fair price for perfection, I expect perfection. If the people of Raleigh, through their representatives, paid top price for a website, they should expect top design.
Kudos to Mr. Moss for the article, I hope that he follows through and that the responsible people are held accountable for this. It is outrageous.
November 5th, 2010 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Oh yeah. So let’s say that you want to backup your mailman’s email addresses. Here is how:
Log into your account via SSH.
Navigate to your Mailman folder with command:
(cd /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin)
Execute command:
./list_members NAMELIST_DOMAIN.tld > ./list.txt
// (NAMELIST is the name of your subscriber list, DOMAIN is the domain, and TLD is the top level domain).
October 12th, 2010 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
New versus Old Gap Logo
Ok, so I just wanted to give my two cents on this entire New Gap Logo thing. First of all one of the things that I think is pretty bad is the fact that the company pulls the logo and throws it to the trash can. I mean, if you have done your homework, then either it works or it doesn’t. You don’t go live and then realize this is a mistake. It is too late. Some decisions in marketing need to be very carefully planned. Logo design is one of them. A big company with a big brand like Gap, can’t take the redesign of their brand lightly. It is somewhat apparent that they did. Or at least it looks like it, and now the entire brand suffers because of this perception.
Having said that, lets talk about the logo a bit. The new logo utilizes a sans-serif font as opposed to the traditional logo using a serif font. Also notice the point size is larger, the width of the font is much larger in the new logo and the kerning is much tighter in the new logo. So having said all that “technical” stuff, what does it mean? Well, naturally the new logo is going to look younger and less sophisticated. It is going to look more relaxed but also it is going to look more corporate because of the kerning. The letters are so close together that they are read as a whole, as opposed to each one separately. This is also reinforced by the fact that the font-color is a dominant 100% black as opposed to a 100% white. Now, why does that matter? Well, the moment that you enter a Gap store you’ll notice that there is almost nothing 100% black in the store. Everything in the branding of the store and the experience is about comfort, about freedom, about space, about wrinkles and about pastels – certainly not 100% black.
Two more observations: The square at the top of the new logo is an attempt to marry the old with the new, however it just doesn’t work. because the font type utilized creates round negative spaces.
Negative Spaces
If you notice, you can see that every single letter creates a rounded negative space. This gets intensified by the high contrast (black on white) and also the width of the font. So why would you break that roundness with a blue square? Well, I guess you could, however in this case it doesn’t work because it doesn’t create enough contrast or similarity.
I guess it is way easier to critique a logo than it is to create one, so for me to sit here and to talk about it is much easier than for the designer to do it.
This logo is ineffective for the Gap brand because of corporate decisions, not so much because of designer decisions. The business (strategic) aspect of the logo is wrong and therefore not well appreciated by the fans.
Next time:
Next time Gap needs to do the following:
1. Make sure that if you are going to change your brand you are so sure that you push through no matter what. Hesitation is worse than a bad logo.
2. Take care of the process and the logo will be great. Hire a professional designer or group of designers and then let them do their jobs. Don’t have critique sessions with corporate leaders that know nothing about design.
3. Ask your fans first, then change it. Ultimately your fans are the ones who want that logo in their bags. Personally I like the old logo in the bag not the new one.
4. Don’t change something that is not broken. Change what’s broken.
5. Don’t ever change a serif font with a non-serif font in a logo that has been successfully marketed for more than 5 years (20 years in this case!)
6. Don’t mix rounded negative spaces with sharp edge unless they are clearly different in contrast, size and hue.
7. Look at the clothes of everybody walking out of the store and choose your colors based on the colors you see them buying – not the ones you want them to buy.
8. Market research is a must for a company with more than 100 employees (period).
9. Now that you have made the mistake, don’t try to hide it. Accept it and move on. People don’t want bs, simply move on. Don’t deny it, but give it the importance that it has now, it is in the trashcan; so should your time devoted to it.
10. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AGAIN IN THE NEAR FUTURE! Let the waters settle down. Perhaps reconsider changing the logo in 5 – 7 years if neeeded.
September 27th, 2010 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
If you are like me you are always looking for ways to optimize your online time and make your work more efficient. This video is one of hopefully many about one of my favorite topics lately: automation. How to make your repetitive online tasks a breeze. Small business owners have one thing in common: no time. In other words, if I can show you something that would save you 2 minutes a year you would certainly thank me. Well, how about something that could save you 10 minutes per day? That is more than 50 hours per year! In other words, this little secret could save you two full days a year! Come on, take at least another two days of vacation and nobody would notice.
In this video, I simply show you one of my examples for saving time online with Fake for Mac OS X.
September 18th, 2010 admin Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
I love Google updates. Every time they introduce a new feature is something valuable that brings something new to the table. This time the update is on Google Webmaster Tools (Google Sitemaps service).
The new feature is called: “Crawl Rate”. It gives information in three specific areas: Read the rest of this entry »
