Come shake your cane with me, o ye veterans of 90’s Web development, and read Zach Holman’s hilarious ode to 1×1 spacer GIFs, DHTML, the BLINK tag, and more. Now, excuse me while I go repeat the word “DeBabelizer” in front of a darkened mirror. (Oh yeah, made your brain hurt for a sec, didn’t I? Here, I’ll do it again: GifBuilder. JPEGView. Man, I can do this for days.)
[Via]
“Now let’s get out there,” said Jack Black in School of Rock, “and MELT SOME FACES!” I guess artists Dvein took that literally, creating this deeply trippy music video:
Here’s a look behind the After Effects-loving scenes:
I love the banality of the actors sitting around in makeup & enjoying a beverage.
I’ve been a diehard Snapseed user since the app’s debut, but I’ve always wished it were more flexible, letting me go back & change my mind about edits. Thus I’m delighted that my new teammates have just released a powerful, Snapseed-inspired mobile editor. Todd Kennedy lists the key enhancements:
Non-destructive photo editing across devices
Starting today you can start your edits on one device, and continue (or start over) on another. This means you can backup full-resolution photos from your desktop, edit them in seconds on your phone, then add some finishing touches from your tablet. (And you can revert to your originals at any time!) The technical term for this experience is non-destructive editing in the cloud, and we think you’ll really enjoy it.Brand new filters and creative tools
Now when you edit your photos, you’ll have a powerful set of tools (like crop and rotate), 1-touch filters, and Snapseed-inspired enhancements (like Drama, Retrolux, and HDR Scape). Mix and match to make your photos look their absolute best.A single view of all your photos
The new ‘All’ view displays your entire photo library — whether it’s on your current device, or backed up in the cloud. If your library is really large (> 10s of thousands of photos), the app won’t show all your photos initially. But stay tuned, because we’re supporting larger and larger libraries over the next few weeks.An easy way to browse your photos by date
In addition to search, there’s now another way to find your photos fast. Just swipe through your photos in the ‘All’ view, and look for the scroll bar on the right. Dragging the scroll bar up or down will quickly move you forwards or backwards in time.
As Bill & Ted might say, “Great things are afoot at the Big G…”
Apparently one needn’t wait for the I Am Legend zombie apocalypse before freestyling all over the city’s structures:
[Via]
“After seeing the Macintosh and then reading this issue of Macworld,” writes John Siracusa, “I had an important realization in my young life: people made this.”
That’s how I felt upon popping my first CD-ROM into the first Mac I actually owned, at the start of freshman year in 1993. It was From Alice To Ocean, and it blew my mind. It wove Rick Smolan’s gorgeous photography together with Robyn Davidson‘s story of trekking thousands of miles across the Outback with camels:
The work established Rick as my interactive storytelling hero, and his later works (Passage to Vietnam & many others) have kept him there. Now the Alice story is coming to the big screen via the producers of The King’s Speech:
I can’t wait to see it.
[YouTube]
I continue to drink from the proverbial firehose, learning users’ likes, dislikes, and desires around photo backup, editing, and sharing. I’m looking forward to working with Google Usability, and they’d like to meet you:
During a study we may present you with and gather your feedback on an existing product, a new feature, or even prototypes. We may also interview you about particular daily habits or ask you to keep a log of certain activity types over a given period of time. Study sessions can happen at a Google office, in your home or business, or online through your computer or mobile device. Afterwards, you’ll receive a token of our appreciation for your cooperation.
If that sounds interesting, please sign up via their site.
The PS team has released fixes for a range of issues discovered after launching the recent update to CC. As always you should be able to install the update simply by clicking the Creative Cloud app icon, then choosing Apps, though I needed to quit & relaunch the app just now in order for the update to appear.
A surprising number of people expressed interest in our research into plug-in cars that qualify for HOV-lane access in California, so I thought I’d post a quick follow-up in case it’s useful to others.
I really hemmed & hawed about buying a Tesla Model S, but my frugal Midwestern self came out and we opted to lease a plug-in Ford Fusion. The sticker price was a full $40,000 cheaper than the Tesla, and while it won’t be blowing anyone off the line, I’ve found it smooth & polished—plenty of comfort & tech (voice-driven Bluetooth, nav, etc.) for a commuter car. It felt like a lot more car than a plug-in Prius (same price) and a lot more value than a plug-in Accord ($45k!). And you know what’s faster than a now-traded 350hp Audi? Anything in the carpool lane.
Thanks to our home solar panels (and Google’s), I should be able to make it to work (16 miles away in Mountain View) and back all on electric power, and in theory without burning fossil fuels. If you’re now asking, “Why not ride the Google bus and take a car entirely off the road?,” you’re right, and I plan to do so as much as possible. For the days when that’s not an option, saving 10+ minutes each way will be a godsend.
As for downsides, I’d list only the Ford’s small trunk space, but that’s not a big deal in what’s intended to be a pure commuter car. (We have the 44-mpg Jetta TDI wagon for hauling bikes, etc.) For the pure commuting case we could also have considered the Nissan Leaf*, but the 80-mile range couldn’t get me to SF and back without planning my trip around finding a socket & having enough time to charge up.
Lastly, this is the first time we’ve leased a car, and we figured it made sense given the (hoped for) rate of innovation in electric vehicles. Who knows, in three years Tesla may have delivered a non-eye-wateringly priced car (maybe we should get in line now), and if California has stopped issuing HOV lane stickers by then, we can buy out the lease and keep the car & sticker through 2019.
* One sees many of these at Google, and when I visited Facebook a few weeks ago, a guy told me, “Oh yeah, you can totally tell when people started [pre- or post-IPO]—all the Teslas up front & all the Leafs in the back.”
Speaking of great reinterpretations of classic songs, have you seen the interactive video for Like A Rolling Stone? Hit Play below, then use your arrow keys to flip among channels while it plays. I find it disconcerting & brilliant.
One channel features old footage of Dylan performing. More channels will eventually be added to the video, Interlude CEO Yoni Bloch said, adding that “you’ll always miss something because you can’t watch everything at the same time.”
“I’m using the medium of television to look back right at us — you’re flipping yourself to death with switching channels [in real life],” director Vania Heymann told Mashable.
Check out Iain Mullen’s awesome real-time map of song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Information Aesthetics explains,
The concept is simple yet funny: using a combination of an on-demand music service, an online lyrics catalog and some Google Maps programming magic, all the cities mentioned in the song are displayed simultaneously as they are mentioned during the song, as performed by Johnny Cash.
I’ve been intrigued by Sony’s new QX10 & QX100 cameras, which use your smartphone as a viewfinder. It’s the perfect tool for photographer Matthew Albanese to tell the big-little story of Steve Buscemi soundalike Bruce Zaccagnino & his labor of love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkLHt5dKwUk
Northlandz in Flemington, New Jersey, is a 52,000-square-foot world unto itself. Mountains, canyons, villages, cities, and, of course, trains. Lots of trains. It’s the world’s largest model railroad, made with enough lumber and drywall to build 40 houses, 200,000 pounds of plaster, and eight miles of train track.[…]
The companion site allows you to explore Northlandz yourself. There are three panoramas made from hundreds of photographs taken with the QX100 that you can rotate to change the view, zoom in to catch the tiny details and take pictures to share online.
[Via Chris Davis]
Energy, man. Energy & purpose. These guys are On. The. Move. It’s like a far friendlier version of Robert Stack in Airplane. 🙂
I love this little compilation from Nelson Carvajal:
Slate writes,
What’s most striking to me is how often these movies have actually stood the test of time better than the winners of Best Picture. Though some grumps may dismiss spectacles like these as “just effects,” how many people today would take Kramer vs. Kramer over Alien, Ordinary People over The Empire Strikes Back, Chariots of Fire over Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Gandhi over E.T., as the Academy did? If American Hustle wins over Gravity, I can’t help but think that the Academy will be making that mistake once again.
[Vimeo]
Trevor Morris has updated his list of Photoshop keyboard shortcuts to include version CC:
All keyboard shortcuts organized into four pages, by menu, as well as alphabetically by key.
This set of keyboard shortcuts includes dozens of extra shortcuts for commonly used commands (all documented in the above cheat sheet). Installation instructions are included in the ZIP and self-installing MXP files.
People talk about Silicon Valley being small, but sometimes it really hits you. Adobe had moved to San Jose before I started, but I now realize that I’ll be working less than half a mile from its longtime headquarters in Mountain View (see below; click for larger), for the company that now occupies that old HQ. Even crazier, I’m due to report for Google orientation directly across the sidewalk from the former HQ. Funny ol’ world. [Via Andrew Keith Strauss]
