Chris Barr

So, Photoshop crashed on me.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

I hope this helps the nice people over at Adobe.

Photos from Vegas

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Now that I'm all recovered from the trip to Vegas and my photos have all been processed, here's some more highlights from the trip. We were able to go out and see the beautiful Red Rock National Park, and even though it turned out to be a cold rainy day I think I got some really great photos (and some of the best panoramas I've taken so far!)

Click to see a larger version.

Mix ’09 Session Videos

Sunday, March 29, 2009

I just got back from the Mix '09 conference in Las Vegas, and it was so much better than I expected! For being a Microsoft sponsored conference mostly focusing on .NET and other MS technologies, there was about 50% Mac users there and most of these people were designers. It was a really nice mix (haha?) of designers and developers. I've got some photos from my trip up here on Flickr.

I think one of the best things they do is put up ALL the session videos online for free! There's some really valuable information in these! http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 (also you can view past years MIX sessions at http://videos.visitmix.com )

Here's some highlights I'm going to recommend:

• Web Form Design - absolutely one of the best sessions I attended. Watch this video! He talks about why forms suck and what we as designers can do to help the process along. Very very well done and extremely informative. As soon as this session was over I went and bought the speakers book.
• The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Anotehr great session, but not necessarily directly related to web design. It's on how to get ideas out of your head and communicate them properly to people via a whiteboard of napkin.
• Measuring Social Media Marketing - If you or your company does any kind of social media marketing, this is a great one.

The following sessions I did not attend, but they seem great:

• Copyright Law for Web Designers and Developers
• Wireframes That Work: Designing (Rich Internet) Applications
• Using Total Experience Design to Transform the Digital Building
• Go Beyond Best Practices: Evolving Next Practices to Prosper in the 21st Century
• Design Prototyping: Bringing Wireframes to Life

And finally, for any other ASP.NET or Visual Studio users, These are somre great previews of what's coming soon!

• Web Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio: Now and in the Future - A preview build of Visual Studio 2010 is shown. Looks amazing!
• Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 : What's Next? - awesome new features is ASP.NET 4
Posted by Chris Barr on 03/29 at 09:34 AM
Filed under Design, Web, Code, Javascript, ASP, MIX '09, Productivity, Tech • 0 Comments • Permanent link

MIX ’09 Days 2 & 3

Friday, March 20, 2009

Wow, this conference has been a lot more involved than I initially thought, and I haven't been able to do the daily blog post that I was hoping to. My initial impression was that I would go back to my hotel around 5, and then be able to chill out and browse the web and write my blog posts. It turns out there’s a lot of great optional Mix ’09 related stuff to do after the official ending time, plus my hotel has no web access!

Day 2

Day 2 opened with an awesome keynote presentation. They really had the atmosphere down to get everyone pumped up. While we waited for the keynote to begin, they had a cool app called running on the big screens which grabbed tweets and Flickr photos tagged with “MIX09" and they all dropped in like tetris blocks. Also, some sweet tunes by the DJ.

Finally they keynote began with a great speech by Bill Buxton where he talked about how important good design is. This was followed up by Scott Guthrie making announcements about ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Silverlight 3. All of which I am thoroughly impressed with.

People from Netlix, NBC, Stack Overflow, Vertigo, and a few others came up and talked about how they use all this technology. I will have to say the most interesting part for me was when the VP of Netflix came up and demoed how their Sliverlight player works with bandwidth throttling and al they debug information. You can watch the entire keynote online here.

Right after this we attended sessions about what’s new in ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m very excited about the changes coming to both of these technologies. Most notable (for me anyway) in ASP.NET 4.0 is better control over viewstate, and the ability to control client ID’s that get rendered out! You can watch this entire presentation online as well.

Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) presented on what was new in Visual Studio 2010, and there’s so many great changes! Most notably are big speed improvements and a complete interface overhaul. Check out the picture below, it’s a word cloud of the most typed things in Visual Studio. Larger items are typed more frequently. They’ve come up with some great ways to resolve this by adding in custom code snippets. You just type the word “listview" (or “lvw", or whatever you define) and it puts all the code that you need or a listview out there!

Later that night there was a party at an amazing club called Tao. Free drinks and nerds everywhere! We met up with Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) and Juan Rivera (who’s writing full PHP support for Visual Studio) and got to pick their brains about what they do, the future of Visual Studio, programing conventions, and all kinds of cool stuff. Overall, we had a great time talking with them.

(not my photo)

Then the party moved up to a section of Tao called Tao Beach, which turned out to be on the freaking roof of the Venitian hotel! It was just like you see in the movies, amazing! We met up with Jarrod and Geoff from Stack Overflow, just hung out and talked for a while.

(not my photos)

Day 3

Day 3 opened with another keynote, which we dicided to skip; and this turned out to be a good idea. The only big announcement was that Internet Explorer 8 was released and now available for download. We heard a lot of that that it was a pretty boring presentation other than that.

More sessions with some great content, and some that were just ok. Around lunchtime they had a small Q&A with Scott Guthrie moderated by Scott Hanselman. This seemed to be mostly focused on Silverlight, but it was still a pretty cool thing to attend. Plus, I got a picture with him!

Afterwards, Scott Hanselman hosted a session about how he built NerdDinner.com using ASP.NET MVC. I learned a lot about MVC, which looks great, and Scott presented all the information really well. That was my first time hearing him speak, and he’s really got a way of communicating well with the audience.

Later that night we went to check out a session where Mix ’09 attendees could show off past work they had made. We got there late, but it was still interesting for what we saw. After that we were able to just walk around the city and take some photos.

MIX ’09 - Day 1

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Well, my first day is finally coming to an end as I write this post - a really great first day considering how this first looked as I got here...

My flight out of Pensacola was delayed by 2 hours, but I was lucky enough to still make my connection in Atlanta to Vegas. My luggage however, was not so lucky. I had to go back to the hotel that night with only my laptop and camera. No change of clothes, no toothpaste, and being forced to sleep in my contacts. Thank God my bag was brought in on the next flight from Atlanta, so I was able to get it delivered.

Diego and I got up early, took a brief walk around the Venetian for a quick errand. Also, our hotel has no 13th floor.

Initial impression about MIX were not good. Very little signage and no directions. We got the general idea of where the conference might be, but no specific information. Then it occurred to me, what else should I expect from Microsoft organizing a conference? Once you figure it all out, you’re good to go - but that initial learning of where everything is located was the hard part.

First things first - breakfast and then check Twitter. There’s no wifi at the hotel, but there’s gigantic 8 foot wifi repeaters for the conference - making sure you can be connected from anywhere. Very nice touch. Not to mention, the food provided here is stellar!

On to registration, and then our first workshop entitled “Design Fundamentals for Developers” presented by Robby Ingebretsen. Robby did a great job - really well organized slides and information - i took notes until my laptop battery died - which reminds me, i need to take notes by a plug next time...

This workshop was not at all what I expected, and it turned out to be very informative - I feel like I learned plenty right there. I was expecting it to be somewhat technical since it was aimed at developers, but it was quite the opposite, very abstract and all about what art and design is. No code at all. Snacks and drinks provided of course.

haha? Apple juice on a Windows napkin!

Some big points I took away from this workshop:

• The opposite of design is not no design, it’s bad design! The very act of creating anything at all implies a design and therefore must be considered.
• Coding has exact answers to problems, design does not.
• Design has ponies and babies. Everyone loves babies and won’t let go of them, even if they aren’t right for a project. Everyone wants a pony, but you can’t always have them and they may not be practical. A good designer will be able to let go of their babies and let others know they can’t have a pony.
• The triumph of design is when the complex seems simple
• Gradients != design

I also noticed the presenter was presenting from a Mac, and there were way more Macs here than I thought I would see at a mostly Microsoft event.

Next, it’s lunchtime! Again, absolutely amazing meals provided. Veal, ravioli, green tomatoes, potato salad, and an incredible line of deserts.

Off to the next workshop, which started out OK, but we decided to leave after the first hour. The presentation and information provided was not nearly as good as the first one.

I did have a few take-away points here though: Designers tend to design projects for the “10 second wow” - meaning you are immediately impressed visually, but may not come back later for real information (think of any “flash” site you’ve ever seen). Developers tend to make projects that don’t really appeal to you at first, but after a while you learn to like the information and function - the “10 minute wow” (think of Twitter - ever tried to explain it to a new user?). A balance between these is needed.

As you move down the chart from designer to developer, you can compare each step to a character from Lord of the Rings. Also notice how the amount of facial hair increases in a logarithmic fashion.

After this, some other guy got up to speak about Silverlight and how to pay attention to details in your project and he really lost our interest. Not well organized, not prepared, and he started to get technical on some things we weren’t familiar with.

He also really turned me off to wanting to ever use Silverlight. One thing he kept talking about was how hard it is to get text to look good in his Silverlight apps. His solution? Duplicate every single text element, offset it by 1 pixel, and lower the opacity. Thus creating a fake anti-aliased effect. LAME!

That’s the point when we decided to leave and pick out sessions for the rest of the week. I got back on the Twitter, both posting and checking out what was happening on the #MIX09 hashtag. I noticed a picture from @jarrod_dixon that looked like it was only about 10 feet offset to the right of where I was sitting. I sent him a tweet just to say hi - then Diego and I got up to do it for real.

As it turned out, we met two cool people named Jared and Geoff who do a lot of the work for Stack Overflow (A site I use and love, and will now use more)! We had a long talk about code, Vegas, what they do, what we do, photography, etc. I’m very glad we got to meet them.

Microsoft Surface was also here! I’ve been wanting to sit down and play with one of these things since it was first announced! Very very cool technology that I hope comes way down in price and becomes more common.

Overall, the screen is not as high of a resolution as I had first imagined, and it can actually be quite laggy at times depending on what you’re doing - but it runs on some fairly meager hardware (mid range Core2 Duo and an average ATI card), so I can understand that. But for $15,000 I thought it would be top notch hardware in there.

The surface itself is not made of smooth glass as I imagined, it’s actually a diffuse textured plastic, but very easy to slide your hand around on as well. Talking to the Microsoft Reps there, it’s just running Vista under the hood and these are just special Surface apps. with in Visual Studio with WPF.

There’s and entire fully lit stage for Rock band - and there’s a tournament tomorrow. That should be fun to watch!

We were all given the schwag bag of course which mostly contained a bunch of crappy ads, but also had some great stuff in there as well. T-shirt, book, notepad, a sharepoint water bottle and an IE8 coffee thing. I might slip off the IE8 logo and use it that way.

That was a busy day! After some dinner, I walked around a bit at night and snapped some photos. I want to try and do this every night that I’m here.

Foxmarks

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Just wanted to give a quick plug to of of my new favorite products, Foxmarks.  Foxmarks is a great little online service and browser plugin to synchronize your bookmarks between computers.  I rely on this between my computer at home and my work computer.  If I see something at work that I want to look at later, I simply bookmark it and forgot about it.  When I get home, I have it already in my bookmarks bar.  They also have a pretty nifty web interface so you can access you bookmarks from anywhere without installing software.

So if you want to try it out, download the Firefox Plugin, create an account and start backing up and syncing your bookmarks.  If you’re not a Firefox user (and you’re not afraid of alpha or beta release software) there’s a version for IE and a version for Safari as well.  The Safari syncing really comes in handy for iPhone users since your iPhone bookmarks are synced from Safari.

I’ve just now installed the Safari plugin and everything seems to be working great so far.  Let me know what you think, leave a comment!

Restoring from a Time Machine Backup

Saturday, January 24, 2009

It's usually a good idea to wipe off your hard drive and start fresh once every year or so, regardless of what OS you run. In the past it's been a thing I've dreaded mostly due to the huge time commitment involved. My process before was to:

1. Make sure all important files were backed up (1 hour minimum)
2. Wipe the hard drive and re-install OS X (1-2 hours)
3. Reboot and install OS updates (~30 minutes)
4. Copy all the backed up file back onto the machine (~1 hour)
5. Install all software needed from installation disks and the web (3-4 hours No thanks to Creative Suite...)

Needless to say, that's pretty much an all day event. It involved so many steps that were spaced out just enough so that you couldn't really leave and get anything done. It can also cause a lot of mental stress because you're always worried with "Did I remember to back up my _____???" In the end, it was worth it though, I got rid of all kinds of junk that had built up and I ended up with a faster machine that's no longer bogged down.

Enter Time Machine. I began to use this last year and haven't looked back yet. For those that don't yet know, Time Machine is Apple's brilliant and easy backup solutions. You just designate another hard drive for backups, and once an hour it makes a copy of all the files that have changed. Because of this I have pretty much everything I've worked on since the beginning of 2008 - and multiples copies of it.

For those curious, I choose to trust my data with a Drobo, which is like RAID for dummies. I've got two redundant 1 Terabyte drives - I feel my data is safe.

One of the best new features in OS X was the ability to use that Time Machine backup as a way to restore your computer to a previous state. This is perfect for you if your hard drive crashes, or even if you're having problems. My initial thought was that if I was having problems, wouldn't restoring from Time Machine just restore the problems as well? In short, no. Time Machine only backs up your user data, no system files are backed up and noting that can be re-generated will be backed up (things like caches and your spotlight index).

Recently my Macbook Pro was feeling pretty sluggish. Videos didn't play smoothly, applications took forever to load, and importing and browsing through my photos in iPhoto was painfully slow. It was time for a clean start. Lucky for me, Time Machine removes the majority of the steps I listed above. Basically all that needs to be done now is:

1. Wipe the drive, install OS X
2. Restore from Time Machine
3. Install OS updates

Now this isn't a quick process, but it's no longer a thought intensive, worrisome, all day process. So if you're in a similar situation to mine and you're already using Time Machine, lets get started! Follow the jump to read more.

Read more...

Flash Drive Evolution

Sunday, January 11, 2009

I'm constantly amazed by how disk storage is constantly growing larger, yet takes on a smaller form factor at the same time. Take a look way back in 1956 when IBM made the worlds first hard drive called the IBM 305, a 5 Megabyte disk that actually had to be transported via forklift and airplane! It weighed in at just over 1 ton and cost $160,000! Today 5MB of space is hardly enough to store a single song or photograph. It's just a tiny amount to us today, but back then it was revolutionary.

Several years ago I purchased a 256MB flash drive that I could keep in pocket for about $20-$30. This is over 50 times the storage at 1/8000th the price of IBM's first hard drive! Again a few years later I spent another $20-$30 and bought a 1 Gigabyte flash drive for a similar price, and roughly half the physical size. When compared to IBM's original, this has 200 times the storage!

I usually use my flash drives to transfer my music from my home to my work computer, or share photos with friends. All of these take up a considerable amount of storage, so I decided it was time for yet another upgrade. I had heard about this awesome little KingMax 8GB flash drive that's roughly the size of a paperclip and only cost me $12 + shipping. To top all of that off, it's completely washer/dryer safe as well!

We've really come a long way in storage. Check out my USB flash drive heritage.