serious about camo

Plushie toy modeler

Since I saw the Plushie Interactive Design System for Plush Toys website over a year ago I have had many discussions about with artists and designers who I think would benefit from using such an amazing tool. This is a lazyman's 3D modeler designed specifically with the intention of generating 2D patterns. It let's you make toys lickety-split!

Here's a video of it in ACTION!

The problem is, as I have sent people off to find it, they inevitable stumble upon Plushy love, an NSFW search term that I recommend you avoid unless you have a thing for stuffed animals, in which case you probably know more about plush than I ever will!

I think if I can create a post with better SEO than the current posts that discuss Plushie, maybe I can make it easier for people looking for this awesomeness to find it without having to turn on SearchSafe. Even better, you can download the Plushie modeler here!! It's a Java2 Windows app, but it's worth swapping over to Boot Camp for if your a Macky.

Link: Download Plushie-e

Bookmarklets increase your browser power without plugins - what I use

First, if you don't know what a bookmarklet is, it looks like a standard bookmark, but uses a chunk of javascript code to make the browser do something with a lot more capacity than simply redirecting you to a new webpage.

As an example, try clicking this: Share on Facebook If you're logged into Facebook, you get the standard Facebook Share window.

Facebook Share window

There are a million of them out there. This post on Make Use Of has some interesting ones; rather than reiterate theirs, I thought I'd focus on the ones I use. 

In the order, left to right, they appear on my browser Bookmarks Bar.

Note: you can start using any of these right away by dragging on the names onto your Bookmarks Bar. 

 

Location of your Bookmarks Bar

Post to Delicious

This bookmarklet will take the url you are at and redirect you to the "Share on Delicious.com" page. Because I use Delicious as my primary bookmark list, this is invaluable for me.

bit.ly it

Using bit.ly is one of the best ways to share links on Twitter, read what I say about them here. This bookmarklet makes it super simple to get a short url that you can track.

Share on FriendFeed

This bookmarklet is shockingly robust in the features it offers. Makes it very simple to share things on FriendFeed in one or more feeds. 

Share on Facebook

Unfortunately, this bookmarklet doesn't enable you to post to specific Pages you own, but it will post the page that you are currently looking at to your Facebook feed or let you share it with a specific friend.

♥ imgfave

This bookmarklet lets you share the images that are on the webpage you're currently viewing on the social network imgfave, built on top of Identi.ca. There are some incredible finds on imgfave.

Readability

Readability will take the current page you are looking at and make it more readable! It really works.

Apple tablet?

Gizmodo has a post with a secret source discussing the Apple table which people have been speculating about ad naseum. I just want the damn thing already. 

Apple tablet rendering from Gizmodo

Who knows if this is for real or not, but there are a couple of comments in the post that I find incredibly compelling.

one with a webcam and one for educational use

and

there was talk of making the device act as a secondary screen/touchpad for iMacs and MacBooks

If there is any veracity to either of those, I can see some serious change in behavior coming. Higher education is how Mac stayed alive through their dark ages, prior to the return of Jobs. If it hadn't been for massive contracts with universities and the ♥ of professors, I think Apple would have eaten it. With textbook sized device and software akin to iPhone Kindle, why would we ever need another textbook in primary school, much less secondary school?? This would indoctrinate a massive number of kids into the Apple product line.

From the perspective of a designer: the second speculation above would be incredible. I could turn a tablet like this into a sketchpad, thereby obviating the need for a $500 Wacom tablet. 

The holiday season can't come fast enough!!!

iPhone app best practice: Lite

Techcrunch recently posted an overview of an internal study the appfarm performed and blogged about. It seems there is some debate in the wild about whether it is a good idea to provide free, lite, versions of paid apps. 

The gist of the story? Launch a free lite version of your app at the same time as you launch the full featured one. Make sure it works, is sexy and update it regularly & often. 

Some the appfarm's key findings:

1. Should have released lite version from the beginning – There was no point to waiting and sacrificing the initial new release buzz. Since it is harder to get featured once your app is launched, say for app updates, it is important to strike early and hard with your app release.

2. Lite does NOT cannibalize sales – If your app is a gimmick then it might not make sense but in all other cases it only helps to increase sales (see our previous post on this topic).

3. Get the bugs out for your lite release – users churn lite apps and are fine giving you 1 star if they don’t like the experience. This is especially bad because the App store prompts users to rate an app when they try to delete it.

4. Lite sales trail off too but paid sales remain higher – if you don’t have the x-factor that is needed to spread the word your lite downloads will fall as they have for iCombat, but in our case paid sales have continued to sell at a minimum rate several times higher than the pre-lite period.

5. Frequent releases do juice downloads – Pocket God and other frequently updated apps have benefited from a weekly sales bump as they show up in the new releases section of the app store (users also like this episode style model)

Augmented reality done right: Sony EyePet

Are you familiar with augmented reality? The idea is basically providing real world interactivity with virtual objects, or as Wikipedia explains:

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. The term is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time^[1].

It can be kind of a gimmick (as witnessed earlier,) but it's also the future of how we will interact with electronics. Why? Because it's the first step in creating TRON.

In comes Sony with EyePet, an augmented reality Tamagotchi-like game. See the engadget video below... the amazingness speaks for itself. 

 All I can say is YEOW! Now I have to buy a PS3.

Awesome App Store Hyperwall

I wish I'd been there, because this visualization of the App Store is pretty friggin' cool. What you see below is just a subset of the actual spectacle: twenty 30" cinema displays with a chromatic array of App Store icons. As apps are purchased on the App Store, the icon pulsates on these displays. It's a pretty fantastic effect, but it also is a fairly profound affect, as the number of purchases is at a pretty awesome tempo!

 

bit.ly launched today

I found out from a quick @marshallk tweet that bit.ly launched today.

I have been using Tweetburner almost exclusively for the last few months. It's been fabulous, but I have been experiencing some lost stats and some serious latency of late, leaving me looking for more. Things that I find very attractive about bit.ly:

• click through stats how many folks clicked your link?
• link thumbnailing probably very useful when linking to multiple subpages within 1 site
• custom keyword check out http://bit.ly/remarkd
• url-shortening API I can integrate this into my apps easily
• url mirroring (so if bit.ly goes down, your link still works)

There are definitely some things I would like to see added to bit.ly in order to increase its utility, including:

• referrer stats tell me what my link traffic sources
• popular peeps & urls have a leaderboard for people and urls
• daily osssom let people vote up the best link of the day

This tastybit: Finally got Skitch; using Mondrianum; Adobe's kuler

I finally got Skitch, and since I am using it, I figure it's a good opportunity to show off some other awesomeness.

I installed Mondrianum, which is a really great tool for color palettes that bolts on top of the standard OSX color picker.

Look how nice that is.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

It bolts on top of kuler, which I didn't initially realize was an Adobe product. kuler is pretty awesome, much like ColourLovers, but without that silly British spelling ;-)

Here's an example of kuler with Remarkd's palette.

Good stuff. I am very excited to use these tools.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Bank of America Mobile Banking at Apple

Bank of America Mobile Banking at Apple, originally uploaded by tastybit.

The following people were instrumental in creating an incredible mobile banking experience: Kyle Tait, Dave Walden, Suzan Revah, Peter Nies, Margery Kiehn, Cameron Park, Kathryn Anderson, Miguel Rodriguez, Hitesh Bajaj. I am really excited about how well this turned out! I'm looking forward to the end to end overhaul of the Mobile Banking experience!!

2 Lijit 2 Quit

About a week ago, I saw @colbyworld tweet with enthusiasm:

The lijit widget I installed in my blog sidebar is crazy! Searches my feeds, links & my network's blogs. Like the context of EVERYTHING I do

Knowing Colby's work and such, I figured it was worth my time to go check out this thing he was raving about. I dove right into Lijit and have been very stoked about everything about them.

Today I got an email from Barney Moran, evangelist for Lijit, asking for feedback. Rather than simply email back, I figured I would write the post I have been meaning to about Lijit and send it his way.

Lijit is teh Awesome!!1
I was almost reluctant to throw the Wijit on my blog. So many of these little things end up being woky little ad-fests that really make your blog look like it was designed by MySpace engineers. That was not the case in the least. The Wijit has a load of customization options that let you make it as forward or hidden as you like. I went for the fairly understated model.

Enrollment the way it should work
Getting your life aggregated by Lijit is the easiest, most robust experience I have had setting up something like this. I recently set up Jaiku and FriendFeed. These reach out to similar socnets for aggregation, but the process is far more serial than the Lijit's. This is something I appreciate.

Additionally, they have this really fun loading progress screen (at left) that gives you feedback and additional information as it is doing all the coolness of aggregating your mojo.

One thing I would do different here was that this took a bit of time, and as you can see, there is ample space on the screen for other things to be happening. It would be nice if I could have been customizing my Wijit while the aggregation was happening. That would have streamlined enrollment even further.

Getting it installed in Typepad was very simple compared to some widgets. A nice surprise ... sometimes I find Typepad's external content limitations really painful. This one just worked.

Really sweet results implementation
One of the things I really like about the Lijit Wijit is the way that it posts search results. It does it all through fancypants DHTML floating on top of your site content, so the experience feels really fluid and exciting.

A lightweight alternative to GOOG Analytics
At the end of the day, Lijit offers some really nice stat visualization tools as well. If you don't laugh at my meager numbers I'll let you see them. DOH! Too late. But srsly, though this isn't as robust as the GOOG, for a blogger or small site team who just wants some stats and doesn't want to get all conversion-centric, these tools are good enough.

Final $.02
Just about the only thing I would do to make this better is to speed up the search response. I know they are doing a lot and doing it well, but the responsiveness of getting my search results is a little slow.

Of all the things I have floated in and out of serious about camo and all my other blogs, Lijit is going to be one that stays around.