This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

BumpTop is a working prototype from the mind of Anand Agarawala, former computer science grad at University of Toronto.

The concept really excites me! Though I’m not sure yet how much I’d want my entire filesystem organized this way, I would love to be able to organize my desktop in this fashion.

Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a fresh user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3D extreme. In this physics-driven universe, important files finally get the weight they deserve via an oddly satisfying resizing feature, and the drudgery of file organization becomes a freewheeling playground full of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls.”

This week we’ve decided to review Coda, a fully furbished text editor built by Panic Software. Our office has recently started using Coda and since Panic offers a free trial we thought we’d download it and try it for 2 weeks. Having been long-time Transmit FTP owners we’ve really appreciated the quality of software that Panic has produced in the past we were certain that this would amount to a killer of a text editor.

What caught our eye initially about Coda was it’s feature set. Here are just a few of the features that Coda boasts their product offers:

• Advanced Site Management
• Top-Notch Text Editing
• Visual CSS Editor
• Live Web Preview
• Built-in SSH Terminal
• Comprehensive Reference Material
• Real-time Collaborative Editing

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Continuing the saga of interesting media I have found this week… I heard the song “Code Monkey Like Fritos” for the first time on TWIT.tv and just couldn’t help but track it down and add it to my blog. For all you programmer’s out there with day jobs you do not enjoy, this one is for you! It’s great to listen to even if only for a few laughs.

There’s a hilarious video titled “The Breakup” available over at Dailymotion.com that poses the question:

Are you communicating with your customers, or merely advertising to them?

Bring back the love!

Having had a few weeks to digest An Event Apart I now have decided rather than detailing the entire event cover to cover, to just focus on the highlights.

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I just spotted the new Philips: Drag & Draw Technology on Youtube today. A very interesting laser based technology that will allow kids to draw all they want on a wall, then point their magic wand at their drawing and watch as it comes to life. The best part is that unlike pencils or pens, these drawings won’t require you to paint over them.

I wonder if there are any practical business applications for a tool like this. I could see it being an efficient way to flowchart thoughts in a meeting if it was articulate enough – say goodbye to that whiteboard and eraser. Interesting.

This video has been removed by YouTube. Sorry

This video from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, explains the basics of Web 2.0 in 5 minutes. It’s a little fast paced, but for those of you needing a true crash course, this may help you wrap your head around it.

This image is from the New York Times. Do any of these Microsoft marketing gurus seem excited about the launch of Windows Vista? If you take a close look, not a single one is smiling, and they certainly don’t look as though they’ve been “wowed”. As Seth Godin (marketing guru extraordinaire) said on his blog this week in response: “Just because a marketer says something is amazing, exciting or just plain wow doesn’t mean it is.”

I’m very inclined to agree. While Vista will be a evolutionary step from Windows XP, it certainly is not doing anything nearly as innovative as Apple is doing in it’s next iteration of Mac OS X codenamed Leopard. Perhaps the “wow” refers to the fact that they’ve finally managed to make a copy of Apple’s Dashboard, or Expose technology and bring it to a new version of Windows. I bet all these guys own a Mac and are loathing giving this presentation.

There will be some routine maintenance performed on our server on January 23rd (today) at 10:00PM that will result in all client sites being down for 20-45 minutes.

The recent announcement of Apple’s iPhone has caused a massive amount of buzz on the net. After watching the keynote last week all I could say was “I want one” with one of those jaw dropping expressions that I’m sure the majority of the global geekisphere was performing. It is very clear that the phone will be revolutionary and I can only imagine what the CEO’s of Blackberry and Palm stated after watching Steve’s keynote. I believe it would go like this:

Well there goes that… what the [insert old-English curse word here] do we have that can compete? How long is it going to take us to get something similar out there?

Luckily it doesn’t look like Apple will be targeting enterprise users with this initial glimpse at the iPhone (so Blackberry and Palm may be able to hang onto that market for a little while longer), but it sure will blow away the competition in the personal pda phone arena. The combination of Mac OS X + Movies + iTunes + Camera + WiFi + Bluetooth + GSM + Multitouch screen will definitely put Apple substantially above the competition on a number of levels. This phone will also be a web designer’s dream, since it will run Safari, and with any luck it will spark a revolution of devices that utilize modern browsers (I’d love to see Firefox run on an iPhone competitor). Wouldn’t it be great if you never had to design a separate CSS stylesheet for cell phones?

There are a lot of positives about the iPhone, but I think there’s been so much buzz about how awesome it is that there has been very little coverage of some of the potential down-sides (and Apple’s potential solutions). The first thing I thought of while watching the keynote was: What if you are driving? (more…)