Monthly Archives: October 2010

Long Beach Comic Con Photos are Up! (2010)

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Kelson

I had fun this past Saturday at Long Beach Comic Con. I haven’t had time to write up a report yet (probably tomorrow), but I’ve posted my photos on Flickr.

Enjoy!

Update: I’ve finished my write-up of the convention.

Posted in Comics, Photos | Tagged LBCC, LBCC 2010, Long Beach | Leave a comment

Adobe MAX in Tweets

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Kelson

I haven’t quite found the time to write up my experience at the Adobe MAX designer/developer conference, but here’s a digest of my Twitter posts. As usual, photos are on Flickr.

Sunday

Watched a nearly-full moon set into the cloud layer behind the LA skyline on my way to Adobe MAX. #
Obligatory pic of Adobe MAX entryway. #

Monday

Made it to the keynote just as, I kid you not, Martha Stewart took the stage. #
Nice demo of dynamically wrapping text around image content (not box), to be contributed to Webkit. #
Content aware fill demo on a tablet – “performing witchcraft” on the progress bar label. #
Multi device link: iPad as classic color palette mixer for desktop Photoshop. #
Blackberry Playbook approach: don’t dumb down the Internet for mobile devices, bring up the performance of the devices. #
Green Hornet game demo: same app running on desktop & touch screen phone, auto-detecting input methods. #

The Green Hornet car. I wasn’t expecting overlap between a tech conference and Comic-Con. #
Something else Adobe MAX has in common with Comic-Con: Flash fans. #

Tuesday

When I got here, the line for Starbucks was about 5 people. Now I can’t see the end. #
Managed to scarf down a sandwich from Starbucks before the evening session. Interesting mix of tech crowd & Lakers fans. #
Ok, I am officially a geek. I ranked 7th in a phone-powered Star Trek trivia contest with several hundred people at a tech conference. #
And then tweeted about it. #
Adobe MAX sneak peeks’ method of keeping people from going too long: A Klingon with a phaser creeping across the stage. #
Very cool demo of auto-converting long video to a tapestry for better scene selection. #
Nifty Photoshop demo: post process photo based on a model. “what if this photo had been taken by Ansel Adams?” #
Nice! Automatically compensating for camera motion blur! #

Wednesday

Gotta love LA traffic. I left for Adobe MAX 40 minutes earlier than yesterday and arrived at the same time – too late for my 8:30 lab. #
Funny how you can get nostalgic for your first version of Photoshop. (Sadly, 2.5 is missing.) #
MAX is definitely less crowded today. No problems finding a table for lunch, and the cell & wifi networks are a lot less congested. #

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged adobe, Adobe MAX, cons, Los Angeles, Photoshop, Tweets | Leave a comment

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Touring Version

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Kelson

Today we drove down into San Diego to see the new touring version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast stage musical. The simpler staging & costumes work (though the castle set from the 1995 Los Angeles production really added a lot to the mood), but the big numbers like “Be Our Guest” do suffer from the smaller cast. And while I don’t really miss the two songs they cut (“No Matter What” and “Maison Des Lunes” were the weakest of the score), I did miss the battle between the townspeople and the enchanted objects…and the new song (OK, not that new, but it wasn’t in the original production) they added, about how happy Belle is to have given up her dreams, is actually creepy. Seriously, did no one think that one through?

Posted in Music | Tagged Beauty and the Beast, Disney, musicals, theater | Leave a comment

GPS Navigation Convert (Sort of)

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Kelson

I’ve never been a fan of actually using GPS navigation. Sure, I’ve always thought it was insanely cool that it was possible, I just didn’t want to use it myself. For unfamiliar destinations I generally prefer researching a route first, and for familiar ones I generally prefer just relying on my local knowledge. But I’ve found something that I do like using it for: Traffic.

I recently started a new job, exchanging a fairly short commute for a ~40-mile trek across the Los Angeles freeway system. Under ideal conditions, it’s about 45 minutes. When the freeways are bogged down (i.e. when I’m actually going to be driving), it can take an hour and a half or more.

When I landed the job, I replaced my phone with a G2. It’s a heck of a lot faster than my old phone, plus it can handle newer software…like Google’s turn-by-turn navigation app for Android. After trying a couple of different routes the first few days, I tried it out…and discovered that it factors in live traffic data when calculating the remaining time.

The upshot: I can walk out the door, start up the app, and figure out which of three main routes will get me there fastest. (Well, least slowly, anyway.)

Of course, it’s not perfect. It’s based on traffic now, and over the course of a predicted hour-plus, the route could easily get more congested. That’s not even counting potential accidents. It does seem to update frequently, though, and knowing I’ve avoided a 100-minute drive in favor of 70 minutes really outweighs the annoyance of a mechanical voice telling me how to get to the freeway from home.

I do have to remember not to rely on it too heavily at the end of the trip, though. I left it on by mistake after selecting my route to the LA Convention Center for Adobe MAX this morning, and instead of turning it off, I let it direct me straight past the parking garage.

Oops.

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged Android, G2, GPS, maps, mobile, phone | 2 Comments

New Plugin: Nice Links for Twitter Tools

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Kelson

Lately I’ve been linkblogging via Twitter, and using Alex King’s Twitter Tools to build a weekly digest in WordPress. The problem is that since I’m pulling the posts from Twitter, I’m stuck with Twitter’s limitations: Short descriptions, cryptic URLs, and unreadable links.

So I wrote a plugin to process the links. When Twitter Tools builds a digest, the plugin calls out to the remote site, follows redirects, retrieves the final URL and (if possible) extracts the page title. Then it replaces the cryptic-looking link with a human-readable link, transforming this:

Check out this site: http://bit.ly/9MhKVv

into this:

Check out this site: Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning

If it can’t retrieve a title, it uses the final hostname. If it can’t connect at all, it leaves the link unchanged.

The download is here, and that’s where I’ll put future versions:
» Plugin: Twitter Tools – Nice Links.

Future

One thing I’d like to add at some point is cleaning up the title a bit. They can get really long, even without people trying to stuff keywords and descriptions in for SEO purposes. All it takes is a page title plus a site title, like this one. That’s a much more complicated problem, though, since there isn’t any sort of standard for which part of a title is the most important. I suppose I could just clip it to the first few words.

I’d also like to clean up duplicate text. Often the link title and tweet content are going to be the same, or at least overlap, especially if it’s generated by a sharing button or extension. That should be easier to check.

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged links, plugin, Twitter, wordpress | 2 Comments

Mobile Web Layouts vs. the Viewport

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Kelson

A few years ago, I tried to give some of my most-used websites a nice, clean look on mobile browsers by adding a stylesheeet with the “handheld” type. Then the iPhone came out and ignored them, and everyone copied that behavior, making it useless.

Somewhere along the line, I revisited the same CSS techniques, but used the “max-width” media query to change the layout on smaller screens. This seemed even better in the long run, since screen size matters more than whether a device is a desktop computer or a handheld computer. (The iPad was nothing but a long-standing rumor in those days, but demonstrates this clearly.)

The raw screenshots (click to view) are slightly larger, but since mobile devices often have denser screens, if you’re reading this on a desktop, it’s probably about the same physical size.

That worked great on the iPhone, and on the G1, which I updated through Android 1.6. I stopped testing it after a while, and no one commented on it, so I figured it was still working. (Reminder to self: that’s always a mistake.)

Last week I got a G2, which came with Android 2.2. Last night I visited one of my websites, and was presented with this shrunken, unreadable mess…because Android doesn’t actually use the real screen size anymore. It pretends it has a bigger screen so that it can present a desktop-like view and then let the user zoom around. Mobile Firefox does the same thing.

<rant>Why is it that every time I find a clean technique to use the same markup on both desktop and mobile devices, some browser manufacturer decides to bypass it in favor of giving the user a clunky imitation desktop view instead of one optimized for their experience?</rant>

*ahem*

Anyway, it turns out it’s possible to fix this problem with the <meta viewport tag> as shown here:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

So I can provide nice, clean small-screen layouts again…after I add extra markup to every single page that uses these stylesheets.

Problem solved!

Well, almost. It fixes the layout…but it also prevents the user from zooming out for quick scrolling, which can be awfully useful on a long page.

Screenshots of the Barry Allen Flash profile, taken using the Android SDK emulator with stock Donut and Froyo images.

Posted in Annoyances, Web Design | Tagged Android, css, G1, G2, html, mobile | Leave a comment

Not Quite NNTLGBL

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Kelson

License plate spotted the other day:

NNTLGBL

I’m 90% certain it’s supposed to be unintelligible…in which case, it isn’t.

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged license plates | 1 Comment

Orange Clouds at Sunset

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Kelson

The view when I stepped out of the office last Thursday night. Not retouched at all except for cropping.

Posted in Photos | Tagged clouds, sunset | 1 Comment

If This Were a Real Emergency, You’d Be Dead By Now

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Kelson

I suppose I can understand putting one of those “If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 911″ messages on a health insurance phone menu. But if you’re going to have one, shouldn’t you put it before the five-minute member identification/sign-in process, not after?

Admittedly, the process only took that long because their voice recognition system wasn’t getting along with my voice, but still, isn’t the point to route people to the fastest response in an emergency?

Posted in Annoyances, Computers/Internet | Tagged phone, usability | Leave a comment

Monthly Archives: October 2010

Long Beach Comic Con Photos are Up! (2010)