Technology and design in plain language.

When I wake my computer in the morning, my inbox is full of messages and notifications from social networking sites. I work through these quickly, hoping to begin the day with a clean slate. Then come the instant messages: friendly hellos, work requests, miscellaneous and sometimes frivolous comments about the day. With a little discipline, I’m able to ignore these for now; but I have a harder time with the telephone. Most calls require full attention, bringing other work to an abrupt halt. And while I’m on the telephone, the messages and comments and requests are piling up in the other channels. The miracle of instantly connecting with people all over the world from my living room is lost in the sheer volume of conversations this produces.

There’s no doubt this impacts my productivity; but the greatest victim of this mental fragmentation is my writing.

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This here’s the story of how I voided my warranty and fixed an iPhone 3G.

A few weeks ago my wife dropped her barely a few months old iPhone 3G on the kitchen floor and broke not only the glass digitizer on the front but also the LCD screen.

We took it to an Apple store and an AT&T store and both places gave us a chuckle and “man, that sucks”. Our friends at the AT&T store told us it would cost $199 just to replace the glass and that was only if we had Apple care. Since we didn’t have Apple care on her phone, they told us they wouldn’t even touch it.

Fortunately, not longer after that happened, I stumbled across Jason Beaird’s 3G Surgery post and got all inspired-like.

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For reasons that I can neither understand nor explain, it seems that a good number of people are interested in what I have to say—I just recently crossed the 900 follower mark on Twitter.

Numbers don’t mean that much to me. I’d be writing in much the same way whether I had 9 followers or 9 million followers. The numbers only hold significance to me when I think about you, the individual, the living, breathing person reading these words. I’m really humbled that number.

So I’m proposing a celebration that involves you: I will send my 1000th follower a new, hardcover edition of the Essays of E. B. White.

And have no fear, current followers, I have something for you, too. When we cross the 1000 mark, I’m going to give away 4 like-new paperback copies of Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury to 4 randomly selected current followers.

These books and authors have been some of the most influential in my own life, and I’m hoping they can bring you some of the same inspiration they’ve brought to me.

You should follow @plasticmind on Twitter, or if you’re already following me, spread the word!

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I’m blogging again.

Actually, let me rephrase that: I’m writing again.

Blogging is too specific a term. It sounds like something only tech savvy individuals do, people with computers dangling from every appendage, people who type faster than they can speak. It tends to conjure a vision of sweaty-palmed folk in basements wearing pajamas. Yes, yes, I know I’m describing a caricature of myself, but at the end of the day, blogging is just plain writing, and I’ve been doing a very lousy job of writing.

Which is why I recently took the P52 challenge. For those of you not familiar with the P52 project, it’s simply a loose association of people who are promising each other that they’ll write at least one article a week in 2010. Why in the world would I promise a group of individuals—most of whom are strangers—such a time-consuming thing?

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The vBulletin.com redesign was a particularly enjoyable project—it’s not that often you get to help shape the branding of a tool you frequently work with.

The goal of this project was simple but crucial: breathe new life and energy into the vBulletin branding without alienating almost 10 years worth of loyal customers (can you believe it’s been almost ten years!).

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Introduction

I started this post out as a fan of Tinychat. Being able to create a virtual room with a button press felt a lot like what Twitter did for miniblogging—streamline and simplify an obvious need.

Sure, it has it’s annoyances. The Flash-based text chat is slow, unresponsive, jumpy and hard-to-read, making it nearly impossible to effectively follow a conversation. Lack of support for standard UTF-8 characters is annoying. The room controls are sometimes unreliable (mute doesn’t always mean mute, volume indicator frequently incorrect) and sometimes outright maddening (camera/sound selection wonkiness). But the tagline for Tinychat is, “your own chatroom, simple and easy”—and that it does well.

So well, in fact, I use it constantly, despite it’s flaws. I’ve used Tinychat to forge new relationships and share ideas with designers and developers I respect. I’ve even used it to organize family webcam gatherings. It’s been a useful tool for connection with other.

So today I decided to take the plunge and try out a pro account, specifically so I could play around with the API. I went to the site to sign up—and this is where things start to go downhill…

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I’m a bleeding edge guy, but sometimes being a first adopter can get you in trouble. Such is the case with the recent Snow Leopard install. The $29 price tag was too good to resist: I pre-ordered it and installed it as soon as it arrived in the mail.

Now, let me start by saying there are several great things about Snow Leopard. I regained 11Gb of space on my hard drive and most of the native apps feel zippier than ever. The new Exposé features are really handy and the ability to navigate Dock stacks makes them somewhat useful.

But there have been far more annoyances—some small, some huge—that leave me wishing I had waited to install Snow Leopard. Here’s a brief overview of my Snow Leopard problems so far:

• Snow Leopard screws up my custom modifier keys. This is by far the most tragic flaw (for me anyhow) in that it kills my productivity. As a former PC user, I swapped the CTRL and CMD keys so my shortcut muscle memory would be the same on both machines. Snow Leopard unswapped them. Sadly, changing them back doesn’t seem to have any effect on the system, even after restart. Long and short: I’m going to have to relearn shortcuts for all of my apps. [Demo] Update: Michael Richardson discovered the solution to this problem.
• Preview forgets your zoom level when viewing multiple files. Switching from file to file unzooms. [Demo]
• The FlickrExporter plugin in iPhoto doesn’t seem to work—won’t log in to Flickr, requires a force/quit. [Demo]
• The spinning beach ball in CS4 seems to have been replaced by an eyedropper in Snow Leopard. [Demo]
• The Cisco VPN app stopped working. Good news: Snow Leopard has built in Cisco VPN support. Bad news: You can’t import .pcf files so you’ll have to input the settings manually which may mean you’ll have to find a shared secret decryption tool online. This article was particularly helpful. Update: I’ve been told the latest version of the Cisco VPN app actually does work in Snow Leopard.
• Camtwist works, but you can’t apply any effects. I think it has to do with the quartz filters. Demo
• Snow Leopard wiped my HP PSC 1300 print driver and doesn’t support it natively, so I had to redownload and install the drivers because I couldn’t find the disk. Frustrating.

I’ll be sure to keep this list updated as I come across any more… and please feel free to share your own Snow Leopard problems.

You should also look over the Snow Leopard compatibility list before upgrading.