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After realizing I had surprassed 2,000 photos in my iPhoto library, I decided I needed a serious camera. I exhaustingly read reviews about cameras and lenses and the new and hottest and chromatic aberrations and looked at photos of brick walls and compared crop factors and… well, I learned a couple of things.

1. The Nikon D90 is hot.
2. I don’t want to spend that much.
3. Lenses are really the worthwhile investment for a budding enthusiast, anyway.

I believe I arrived at a good decision; I acquired the best of the entry-level DSLR bodies, and splurged on a higher quality lens that will last me. The total cost for an excellent piece of glass, a 12.3 megapixel body, a lens hood, and a dual-function camera bag and holster was just under $1,000. I’d recommend anyone taking lots of photos with a point-and-shoot look at upgrading.

Just look at the photos.

It’s their website.

We’ve all seen them: websites with a generic logo, the whole website full of chrome, gradients, and a large stock photo of a data-center; the whole thing reaks of template. Below the data-center, two or three columns speaking in very general, professional, corporate, human-less language about that company’s individual merits. The about page refers to the company as an entity; it doesn’t mention the people or the passion. It mentions the corporate structure and the 2/47 365 uber commitment to you, the customer, the savior of the corporation, the mother of our children, and the human-less desire as a corporation to satiate you, to be the hosting nipple on which you suckle.

As the internet grows, as more and more people use more and more services accessed through more and more websites, even the layman will begin to notice the human touch that creates an intrinsic bond and trust with a company, that feels more like communication than business, that gives you a high-five instead of a handshake.

Until then, companies like GoDaddy will continue to thrive.

1. A person I don’t like; a bro: God, look at that schmead with his schmeady popped collar.
2. Alison Stiven: Schmeadison Schtiven is such a schmead.

verb [trans.]

1. make something less awesome or more uncool: Quit schmeading up this party with your gelled hair, bro!

ORIGIN 2000s: from Cloughish schmeadiocrity ‘the existence of dumb’

Everything but the Nerdery

This Place is a Fucking Palace

Jesus, what a fancy hotel to host a website convention. The Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco is, at first glance, a very classy establishment, old-world with its ornamentation, presentation, and stuffiness. This provided a simple contrast for conference attendees: those in hoodies, graphic t’s, jeans, holding a Mac, looking the least bit uncomfortable: these are my colleagues. The rest of the guests in the hotel were overly dressed, pulling expensive roller-luggage, speaking prettier languages than comparatively caustic-sounding English, and otherwise looking self-important (hey, much like this post!). Upon later reflection, the hotel was an obvious choice: the Palace has the infrastructure to handle a 500-person meeting where Motel 6 does not.

San Francisco is Uglier than Portland

Mother always said that everything in moderation is best. This is true of Portland and why I feel it is vastly more successful at being a clean, friendly, livable, accessible, approachable city. San Francisco is very much like Portland, but with everything taken to an extreme. Put another way, San Francisco is Portland actualized: Bums that are actually hungry, buildings that are actually tall, hills that are actually mountains, scary looking people that will actually steal your wallet, apartments that are actually unaffordable, weather that is actually pretty crappy, China town that actually has Chinese, and a web design community that actually gives you free booze.

Oh Yeah, Did I Mention Free Booze?

Open bars are a ridiculous invention. I’ve never attended such an event, and it was a bit inundating. Literally. Ok, that was a terrible joke, but I did take it too far, consuming four-too-many dry & dirty martinis plus an assortment of other libations throughout the evening. I suffered today as a result. Thank you MediaTemple for paying for my drinks, despite the badmouthing you received about uptime when I inquired to others as to what you actually do. Really, I adore you if for no other reason than Grey Goose is delicious, and I’ll be looking towards you when my mad ideas come to fruition. Or BoxCar, because they’re local. I hope you understand, MediaTemple.

The Conference

Day One

There was a clear contrast between the two types of presentations and their content: technical, and creative. Jason, Heather, and Liz’s presentations were the most thought-provoking presentations, giving their ideas and specific mechanics for arriving at destinations where there is not a right answer—creating story through design, building community through personal voice, and building frameworks of interaction. These are ideas that you can read a book on, create a successful site that makes you millions, fosters community, has a clear tone, and tells your visitors an excellent narrative, but that you could still use the advice of others: this is a creative process, this is art where you don’t design the best painting of your life and retire.

Those creative presentations were in stark contrast to the technical presentations—these were not the IE6 of knowledge of which there is no max-width. Perhaps this is why I was left rather disappointed with Eric Meyer’s presentation, even despite him bearing my namesake. He provided knowledge and analysis of CSS frameworks that was in the same quantity superfluous for the average designer and self-congratulatory in his overly-analytical approach to inform us of three things:

1. CSS Frameworks exist.
2. You shouldn’t use off-the-shelf frameworks.
3. The perfect <h1> size is 2.33em if you average all available frameworks, and 2.0 if you want Eric’s personal and arbitrary interpretation of the former average.

This presentation seemed to pander to the lowest of all denominators in the crowd while adding enough technical detail to lose them. On the third point of his presentation, there was no discussion of what is the correct heading for your composition, what’s right for balance on your page, in proximity to navigation, logos, etcetera. In entirely irrelevant terms, Eric told us the size of headings to use. This was the most pointless of all thirty-minute-long points made the entire conference.

Then I got drunk (I mentioned the open bar, right?).

Day Two

The second day was similarly excellent despite being more technical in nature. Interaction design, information architecture, and overall British zanyness was illustrated by Jeremy first thing in the morning, thankfully waking the crowd (and me) from our (okay, maybe just my) alcohol-based stupor. The rest of the day covered reset stylesheets, some great accessibility information and analysis, microformat discussion, and workflow strategy that was completely irrelevant to my development team of one.

Doggy Bag

Of everything I’m taking away from the conference outside of marginally neat schwag and a more poisoned liver, the most important is designerly inspiration. The overarching message I got out of the event was that I need to design more humane, focused, patient (and ultimately more socially and professionally responsible) websites. Websites that care and are specific and set a mood, sends a message, that makes the internet a better place. If not me, then who?

Unfortunately, I have to say, Jakob has perhaps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

I have to agree. I’ve found Jakob’s site in dire need of some of his own usability magic—the font is too big, the leading too tight, the yellow color too brash, and the margins too small, or in some cases nonexistent. It makes his site useless for long reading because of the visual noise of his type and color choices. It’s 2008—one would think Nielsen could find time to take his own advice and put “line-height: 160%” into his stylesheet to make a free, fast, and huge usability improvement to his site.

This site (kylemeyer.com) parallels Nielsen’s site in a couple ways:

1. This site, too, is devoid of images used for the design
2. We both use yellow as an accent color

Despite these, this site is much more legible because of the reduced contrasts in design and sensible default type. These are not design concerns—proper type is a finite proposition. Type can be legible, or not. Surely he doesn’t mean his site to be an example of poor usability, but it appears that this is the case.

The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.

Dear Starbucks employees,

It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.

With love,
Kyle Meyer

Internet, meet Herberta.

People are so fucking stoked for the new iPhone. I arrived at the Pioneer Place Apple store a little before seven this morning, expecting to find a line, but found a crowd instead, sixty nerds deep. Thankfully, I was next to some rather interesting people to pass the time with, especially important because of the apocalyptic failure that was the in-store activation process. By the time I walked out of the store with my new iPhone at 10:30 (still inactive), there were about 300 people in line, first in switchbacks and then stretching down the walkway and around a fountain. Extrapolating my two hour, thirty minute wait (from the time they started selling at 8am until I finished), with sixty people in front of me, it led to a 2.5 minute wait per person. With 300 people, that wait would be a mind-blowing twelve and a half hours.

It fits within Flickr’s 90 second limit!

The problem shown is from the copyright notice of a Google Map overflowing the map bounds, and overlapping adjacent information.

I’ve only found a single page that’s provided any information on the problem, and it’s full of bad advice: Change the overflow of the map div to hide the offending portion of the copyright, remove the copyright altogether, or change the size of the font to fit within the map. Unfortunately, all except the last suggestion breaks the Terms of Use, and reducing the font size for a 150px-wide map to make the entire notice fit within would make it entirely illegible.

Fixing this problem The Right Way™ is easy:

#map div {
     max-width: 150px; /* Change to the width of your map */
}
#map div span {
     white-space: normal;
}

This puts the entire copyright notice within the bounds of the map, at the font size that Google specified, and makes it wrap within the frame. Everyone wins.

Let me get the formalities out of the way first—I love you both. You bring utility-based love to my computer every day. Even on the weekends, I tinker with your wares. I’m writing this post in your digital orgasm of a program Mr. MacroMates. Ctrl+Shift+W and Command+Enter are as much a part of my consciousness as my first name.

But Mr. Panic, while I dream about being able to converse with you daily, Coda is my Ferrari without wheels, my toast without jam, my web development app without Ctrl+Shift+W. You have so much going for you; you upload my files after every compulsive save, automatically. You organize my mess of websites into a visual metaphor that works impeccably well. You even house all the documentation I could ever need—right in that one gorgeous app. You’re even from my hometown of Portland, Oregon! I live right down the street from you, in fact. And yet, there’s a fundamental flaw that keeps me from purchasing and using Coda. I need Ctrl+Shift+W, Mr Panic. I want to love you, but I need your help.

So this is my open letter to the both of you, my plea that you’ll come to an agreement and make web development on the Mac perfect. Sit down over a cup of coffee, tea, booze, or whatever is necessary, hash out the terms and details for the unison of your apps, and implement—I will love you forever. I mean it guys. Love you forever.

With Warmest Regards and Highest Hopes,
Kyle J. Meyer

This was my first time attending Ignite Portland, the third of which happened last night at the Baghdad Theatre. There were two waves of speakers who each had 5 minutes, 20 slides, and 15 seconds per slide to give a talk on anything they wanted (that was approved beforehand through a selection process). Talks ranged from the history of Cup Noodles, to how to build a nuclear reactor to boil water. The place was packed, the crowd rowdy, and there was free food!

I arrived at 6:15, which was already enough time past 5:30 to be forced into the balcony. Next time, next time…

Nerds watched in unison today at 10 am, pretended to work, took the day off, or kept an auto-refreshing feed of the keynote speech on their second monitor. The keynote lasted over an hour without a single “boom” uttered and without any surprises. The Apple rumor mill has perfected the art of conjecture and piecing together of small leaks and bobbles into product-forecasting science, with the vast majority of details of today’s announcements made known within the last two weeks. For the uneducated, the new iPhone is as follows:

iPhone 3G

• The back casing is now glossy plastic:
  • 8GB model: Available in black
  • 16GB model: Available in black and white
• The prices have dropped severely:
  • 8GB model: $199
  • 16GB model: $299
• 3G (HSPDA) internet is 250% faster
• Now includes A-GPS:
  • The camera app now geotags photos
  • Google Maps utilizes the GPS in addition to Wifi and cellular positioning dynamically.

The only significant, earth-shattering change in the device is the price. The rest of the changes are far more evolutionary than revolutionary, and nothing in that list screams at current iPhone users to upgrade from the first iPhone model, except for perhaps one very non-obvious change: white casing. What the white casing represents is a shift in product aesthetics, in acute differentiation of the product from the first model, of conspicuous consumption. Certainly, when a friend sees me holding up a shiny white device to my face with an apple symbol front-and-center, they’ll know it’s new. This is not necessarily true for the black one. I’m certainly not above the ploy despite being quite aware of the reason behind the white casing; I want a white iPhone for the reasons listed above: because it’s different and because it’s obvious.

There are, of course, other reasons for a white iPhone. The United States and the six other countries that have the first generation iPhones are not the only market anymore. The iPhone 3G is being rolled out to 60 countries this year. Having choice is good. Women, for one, surely would prefer a white phone above a dark, serious, black iPhone.

Despite this, it will be interesting to see how many first generation iPhone users pick up the white one when they upgrade. I’ll be among them.

The idea is simple. Make a food-review website that is for the first time completely relative to your location, your lunch-time, and your work schedule. Many of you, like me, work an eight-to-five job and get stuck in ruts of eating at the same few places every day or every other day for weeks on end. Wouldn’t it be great to have something to recommend you new places based on what you enjoy?

That’s Lunchism. I hope to have a closed beta soon. Visit lunchism.com and sign up for the beta pool—your tummy will thank you. Hallelujah and r’amen.

I’d never seen a Bentley before, let alone three in one night. Or, for that matter, the sheer number of Hummers and SUVs in a place famous for their lack of hills. I’ve never been on an extended stay in a place where air conditioning is not a luxury but a life-support system. Another first: mountains of garbage.

Spend a single day in urban south-beach Florida and you’ll see why global warming is a reality. There are vast expanses of pavement moving thousands of Suburbans, V10 Ferraris and Bentleys, an air conditioner in every building, and mountains of trash on the horizon. Coffee shops chill their establishments to near-arctic conditions in order to provide Floridians an excuse for a warm cup of coffee, and tanning salons are abundant despite the punishing sun. Everything tangible is a pinnacle of excess and unnecessary living.

Living in Portland, growing up in the Northwest, and never really getting out much to see the rest of the country, it was shocking to see Florida and what a departure it is. If this is how the majority of the United States lives their lives, it’s no wonder global warming is a reality.

Photo credit: Andrew Ooms

I got bored. Again.

I’ve been experimenting with different styles of type-only layouts for this blog and in my other work for a while now. I finally got fed up with the low signal-to-noise of the previous design (see above), and went back to the basics. This most recent design uses only Helvetica and Palatino, and no images for anything but content.

Our total time was 2 hours, 40 minutes.

The fix is to call map.setCenter(GLatLng(#,#)) directly after instantiating the GMap2 object. For whatever reason, this fixes all ills, and relieves my headache.