GregBellDesign

"If I am going to speak, it will come from me," he said, adding that the technology allows him to bypass the media to speak directly to the fans.

As for the temptation to rely on a team to supply his words, he said: "It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you."

- Shaq through: When Stars Twitter, A Ghost May Be Lurking

Where does this leave the budding social marketing industry and twitter? Can a ghostwriter create a sincere voice and message that people care about on such an intimate technology like twitter?

280 North, the makers of the very cool Cappuccino javascript framework (port of Objective-C) are working on a new project called Atlas, basically a port of XCode to Cappuccino. The vid below shows them building an RSS reader app in a few minutes. I can't wait to play around with this.

Amazing video, animation and user experience work went into this video that explains the credit crisis. Here's a brief snippet from the author, a graduate student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Found through Ryan Townsend

Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas

This week Palm announced a new mobile device, the Pre, as well as a new operating system named Palm webOS.

The interesting thing about the operating system is that applications written for it are developed using HTML, CSS and Javascript including a new Palm application framework named Mojo. 

Adobe AIR has had some success attempting to create a similar platform for the desktop, so it will be interesting to see if this takes for Palm.

Could the future of cross-platform application development be done with HTML, CSS and Javascript?

If you're on a Mac and want to take full length webpage screenshots, I've written a little AppleScript which uses the neat little capture utility Paparazzi! and the latest version of ScrnShots Desktop.

First thing you need to do is make sure you have both Paparazzi! and ScrnShots Desktop installed. Then download the script "Take Screenshot of Safari Window" and place it in your ~/Library/Scripts folder.

Voila, you can now run the script and it will take a screenshot of the front most Safari window and place it ready to upload in ScrnShots Desktop.

For ease of use I've set up my scripts folder to be accessible via Quicksilver.

Here is the complete source for the AppleScript file:

 
set filename to (path to desktop) as string
set filename to filename & "scrnshots-desktop-script.png"
 
-- You could easily change this to work off any browser you want
-- Eg: Change "Safari" to "Firefox" and it should still work
tell application "Safari"
    set current_url to URL of front document
end tell
 
tell application "Paparazzi!"
    set image_created to false
    capture current_url
    repeat while busy
        -- do nothing...
    end repeat
    if save as PNG in filename then
        set image_created to true
    end if
    quit
end tell
 
tell application "ScrnShots Desktop"
    uploadFromFile filename
    activate
end tell
 
do shell script ("rm " & (POSIX path of file filename))
 

Today Eric Anderson (ScrnShots alter ego of esquareda) asked if there was a way to add your ScrnShots feed to lifestreaming app Sweetcron.

Sweetcron uses RSS feeds from webapps that you want to display in your lifestream, so I though how hard would it be to put this together? Originally I looked at the API docs and thought that I would put a plugin together, but it looks like Sweetcron is smart enough to do some basic parsing of RSS feeds and pull out images. Which is all we need.

So, if you want to add ScrnShots to your Sweetcron lifestream do the following:

1. Add http://www.scrsnhots.com/users/{your username here}/screenshots.rss as a feed. For example my feed is at http://www.scrnshots.com/users/gregbell/screenshots.rss. Refresh your feeds and you should have your ScrnShots feeds mixed in.
2. If your using the "Boxy" theme you have to edit the main theme file to display your screenshots properly. Open system/application/views/themes/boxy/_activity_feed.php. Find the block of code for Flickr and paste this line in directly beneath it:

 
<?php elseif ($item->get_feed_domain() == 'scrnshots.com'): ?>
<p class="activity_image_text"><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink()?>/<?php echo $item->get_name()?>"><?php echo $item->get_title()?></a><span class="activity_image_content"></span></p>
<a class="activity_image" href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink()?>/<?php echo $item->get_name()?>" style="background: url(<?php echo $item->item_data['image'] ?>) center center no-repeat"></a>
 

And voila, you have beautifully formatted screenshots from ScrnShots in your lifestream.

Idea from Eric Anderson's post on the ScrnShot's Forums

As an information architect or interaction designer, have you ever looked at a finished product and thought "this is not what I had in mind" or "why isn't it just like my wireframes"? I have and I know that many of you have also.

The very nature of the user experience happens through the implementation, not within the document we create to define it. Its not that complicated to create a wireframe deck for product X that has a kick-ass UI. But why is it so difficult to actually release that product with the excellent experience?

The user experience can be planned and defined within documents, but we have to remember that it IS NOT the user experience. This means is that its next to impossible to hand off a document to someone who could care less about the user experience and get the previously defined experience. The entire team must have user experience on its agenda.

Who's fault is this? Well, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. I think it's completely crazy to put someone in charge of the user or customer experience when the fact of the matter is that everybody should and has to be in charge of it.

How does your company define user experience? Do your implementers know just as much about user experience as you do? Do you sit beside them? Do they care?

When was the last time that you made the recomendation NOT to create a wireframe deck?

It's no secret, I love TextMate. However, the project based search is crazy slow. If you're in the same boat and looking for a good solution, install the Ack in Project plugin. Believe me, its worth it!

$ cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/
 
$ sudo git clone git://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle.git Ack.tmbundle

Found through: eval(code)

Now that we've announced the public API (beta) for ScrnShots.com, I can start blogging about some of the tools I've built to interact with it.

The first, is a folder action for Mac OS X that lets you drop images onto it and they are automatically uploaded to your ScrnShots account.

DISCLAIMER: This script was created fairly quickly and is very simple. It is in no way complete or robust in its error handling. If you find any bugs or errors, please post a comment below and I will update the script as necessary.

Here are the steps to get the folder action setup:

1. Download the ScrnShots Folder Uploader (1.0) script file.
2. Put the above file in "~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts" (create the folder if it does not already exist)
3. Double click the script file to open it in the script editor, then edit the following code at the top of the file to include your ScrnShots username and password:

   -- SETTINGS
   -- Update to be your username
   property user_name : "INSERT YOUR USERNAME HERE"
   -- Update to be your password
   property user_password : "INSERT YOUR PASSWORD HERE"

4. Create a new folder on your desktop called "Upload to ScrnShots"
5. Right click the folder and select "More > Enable Folder Actions"
6. Right click the folder again and select "More > Attach a Folder Action..."
7. From the file selector, select the downloaded applescript file in "~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ScrnShots Folder Uploader"
8. Voila! You should now be able to drag images onto that folder and they will upload to ScrnShots! After a screenshot us uploaded it moves it into the "Uploaded" folder.

Hope this is useful to anyone who needs to quickly upload screennshots without using the ScrnShots Desktop app.

BONUS POINTS

If you really want to make the Folder Action cool, create an icon for the folder and add it to your dock. Then you get immediate access to upload images to screenshots with the drag of a file. I've tried this out with Skitch and it works beautifully.

Please post any bug, comments or code updates below! Enjoy.