Like tweets, but with grammar.
Needless to say, Hans and Umbach are extremely excited about this new article in Wired magazine, which champions a trend of garage tinkerers and other DIYers acting in concert to bring the world its next generation of products. Just as the internet democratized digital publication, so will new prototyping technologies democratize physical production.
We’d better get crackin’.
Maybe you’ve already heard, but I recently helped launch Adaptive Path’s new home page. A few of the other kind folks at the office designed it, and I cut it up into its hot-and-buttery front-end code. I used 960.gs for the pixel-perfect CSS grid system, and cooked up some slick back-end code for streaming our recent essays and blog posts into their proper sections.
What’s more, I wrote some tight little scripts to hit up our Twitter feed and pull down our most recent tweets. Javascript implementations are nice for low-volume sites, but when you get as much traffic as AP you need something a bit more robust. I developed a lightweight caching module that wraps around our call to the Twitter API, keeping our tweets fresh without hitting Twitter on every single (insanely frequent) page load.
Meanwhile, I’ve pretty much been living at Musée Mécanique the last two weekends, digesting their incredible collection of antique coin-operated arcade machines. While these pictures certainly won’t leave that familiarly cold smell of metal on your hands after you’re done handling them, I’ve nevertheless been dropping my observations into a set on Flickr.
The other day I learned from one of my coworkers that Bay Area culture is deeper and more nuanced than I could possibly imagine. Heart-touching music videos such as this one from E-40, that detail the finer points of the Hyphy movement, apparently make many locals’ hearts quicken with pride.
Confused? Yeah, I am, too. This video helps me make a bit more sense of it all:
But not that much more sense.
My father just finished washing the car, and now he’s drying it off with the leaf blower. I don’t know whether to commend him on his brilliance, or curse him senile and sentence him to a home.
And the world is a better place for it.
My neighbors celebrated June by drinking beer from 10:00 in the morning until 3:00 the following morning. Outwardly I pretend to be impressed, but inwardly I’m annoyed and disappointed that they didn’t make a day of it.
Just as soon as we started describing Twitter as a micro-blogging/text-messaging tool, a well-oiled jealousy engine, and a scalable narcissism platform, it seems to have evolved into something beyond all that. Judging by my list of favorites, as well as those of others, Twitter has become a venue for sharing your profanity-laden sexual innuendo with a willing, self-selecting audience.
Not that I’m complaining. I’m just saying. I mean seriously, listen to the art that Twitter has made possible.
Wait, did I say innuendo? I meant penis.
Dane Petersen is an experience designer who enjoys playing outside, talking loudly and waving his hands around. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in human-computer interaction design at Indiana University. He spent this past summer in San Francisco, riding his bike and working as an experience design intern for Adaptive Path.
Dane is excitable and has trouble sitting still. He's worked as a wilderness guide, snowboard instructor, windsurf technician and envelope stuffer. Recently he was the web director for Big Winds, and before that he ran his own freelance web design consultancy. He loves tea, saunas, typography, photography and homebrewing.
Dane's portfolio at Brainside Out will give you a great idea of the range of work he does.
You can email him at
.
