Tag Archives: technology

NightScene and Simplicity

24 Nov

NightScene: Find Your Scene

This is a series on a brand new social website that myself and several other team members are getting ready to launch called NightScene, a social search engine that helps you discover new venues, events, and friends that suit your own tastes wherever you go. To see more posts about NightScene, just click here. And to visit the NightScene landing page to find out more and follow us, click here.

Simplicity is key to the internet — everyone is opening a million tabs in their browser trying to find a million different videos, keep tabs on their friends, and discover new content all at the same time. It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention, especially now that all of this is happening not just on a laptop in someone’s house, but through such a large number of mobile devices such as cell phones like the iPhone or tablets such as the iPad. Everything is pretty much single serving content that is designed to be consumed in one brief view and then the user moves on to something else.

So how do you get this right? Well, I’m not an expert in traditional sense that I work for some multi-billion dollar advertising company. (On second thought, I suppose the Navy is one of those entities…) But, what I do know is that I consume a ridiculous amount of media, be it social or traditional media. Except newspapers; I live in 2010 not 1910, thank you. I also have had the fortunate experience of working for companies that produced social media as well as traditional marketing and advertising. I feel like this gives me grounds to say the following:

There, you don't even have to click the link. It's Google, not like you already didn't know what it looked like. Oh yeah, that reminds me that Thanksgiving is coming up. Thanks again Google!

Google got it right. So right. Go to their page right now. What do you see? A search bar. It’s so intuitive and simple; no one needs to know what the site is because it’s already so obvious. The thing that most users probably never realize is that there are so many features to Google that its depth and complexity is pretty much endless. Everything is presented in a simple way, but the information there is surprisingly complex. (I know that sometimes this can be overwhelming; Google’s “Wave” was an attempt to simplify sharing information and it turned out to be way too complicated to make it useful. For the most part though, Google has it down.)

The problem with emulating Google is that everyone understands a search engine. And in most cases, everyone understands, say, Facebook, a common social website. Where things start to get tricky is when you want to combine those two and you get a social search engine. What is that? No, really, I’m asking you to tell me because even I have a hard time grasping it — and I’m making it. NightScene, therefore, has to be both forgiving to the new user so that they can get into it and deep for the returning user who already is exploring their scene. It will take time to justify this concept as being the best thing since Al Gore invented the internet, but I’m actually pretty confident that it will be.

Wow, this looks kind of cool but what is any of this junk? Is it sorted? I don't get what any of this means or how it connects to me. It all seems like a big advertisement. (It is.)

In my mind, when I’m coming up with design ideas and general strategies, I want to keep this site simple enough that anyone can jump on and use it and feel familiar while still feeling fresh and socially relevant. It really needs to be accessible from anywhere easily and have the main features be right there, front and center. Honestly, we’re going to be dealing with a lot of bars and clubs, so this will mean that people who are feeling no pain need to be able to figure it out too! So, how do we accomplish this? Here is a list of thoughts in a bullet point form because I know you’re loading a YouTube video of someone falling off a skateboard right now and you’re running out of patience for all these words. (Why couldn’t I have just done this in 140 characters?!)

  • Make vital features take as few clicks as possible to access.
  • Make smart use of advanced coding to reveal more detailed information only when a person wants to see it.
  • Keep the pages as simple and clean as possible.
  • Help the user understand the site by guiding them through unfamiliar features.
  • Don’t post blatant ads on the site. Make them match your demographic when you do use them.
  • Allow the user to control the content that they interact with so they develop a connection to it.

I know these are really pretty general concepts, but you’d be surprised at how many sites completely ignore the user and just assume that the user is on the same level as the person running the show who is intimately familiar with everything aspect of the product. Similarly, many popular sites just try to push their sponsored content onto you without making a real connection as to why you should care about whatever is being promoted.

You too will cheer for joy like this awful corporate stock photo when you use NightScene.

There’s a real balance that needs to be achieved between showing a large amount of information to the user and keeping things simple. Keep it too simple and the user might get bored. Make it too deep and the user might be confused or turned off by all the content. NightScene is still in its infancy but the design is essentially finalized and I think we’ve done it right. There’s a lot of interesting information up front, the site is easy to use, and it offers depth to the user who wants to support the social aspects of it. But this is coming from me, the guy who is making the product and not the actual user. It’s really up to how the user actually interacts with the site to shape and evolve its future. What we’re doing now is laying the groundwork for something that can be huge, but it’s up to you to make it the site you want it to be. And I think that’s the freshest idea on the web right now.

Nightscene and Social Networks

8 Nov

NightScene: Find Your Scene

Although I’ve kept this idea a secret for almost a year now, it’s finally in its beta stages and we’ll be accepting users in the near future. I think site has it all, and what it is, I can only summarize from the brief page online. Nightscene will revolutionize how you find things to do at night in your area. Currently, we’re referring to it as NightsceneDC because it’s being tested in Washington D.C., a bastion of social networking users who are active in a huge amount of nightlife around the city

Essentially, this is a social website mixed with a review site, but how we’re approaching it is mostly unlike every other site out there. If you’re trying to find some booming nightlife, it really sucks trying to find a site that does it right, and we’re attempting to make it easy to find new places, share them with your friends, and make a social site where the user controls what they see and how venues are shown. The ideas are familiar, but doing it right, that’s the thing that matters.

And so, on this note, doing it right is what I want to speak on. I’m a graphic designer that has spent several years working both freelance and for firms, and I’ve worked with so many clients it’s hard to even count the amount of projects I’ve been a part of. This alone really doesn’t give me any credibility. Isn’t everyone a designer these days? It is a fun field to get into, and one of the most competitive, especially when the economy sucks and no one is buying advertising (welcome to my life).

Gotta go hard, gotta go in a black v

The urge to just rush this thing out the door has been there from the start. I like the idea, I want to use it, and I want other people to use it. And I wouldn’t mind getting a profit since my current job (working in the oil field) is a far cry from the comforts of a Wacom tablet and a water cooler. That said, everything in my gut is telling me to wait, to make this as polished and engaging to the end user as it can be. Without this, I feel like we’ll feel generic — like we’re ripping off other social sites and trying to make a buck. We can’t do that. Both myself and Sam, and the other contributors to NightScene, have such a love for this idea because it’s our idea, and it’s something that we’ve both experienced when trying to find the right nightlife. (Trust us, we wear black vnecks and pound drinks like the best of ‘em.)

So, we’re at the stage where we can see the results: our developers and designers are delivering things that are close — but not quite there — and we can already taste what we want from the site. Personally, this idea has become one of the few creations that I absolutely love. It’s the culmination of everything social that I like and everything that I see on sites that I dislike, I made sure that we don’t repeat it. Fun, functional, and easy. We just have to make sure that we come together as a team to make the last push and then go from there.

Right now we’re all excited, nervous, and, hopefully, very happy with our progress. This started as an idea in Sam’s head, and then it spread to me, making mockups and coming up with functionality ideas, and now it’s about to have real life, be a real business. We should be taking a fair number of beta testers right after the new year, if all goes right. It’s actually already up in landing page form, if you want to find out more and follow us.

What I guess I’m saying is that if we do this right, this will be huge. If we do this wrong, we’ll be tossed aside. If we take too long, we could get muddled  and confused. Everything has to be perfect, but unfortunately I can’t tell the future. There’s not an app for that. (Actually, I checked and there is but it’s 2.99. Rude.)

Why iPhones Suck

8 Nov

iPhones are really cool. I like them as a phone because I can take such a degree of technology with me that I can manage so much of my life at one time I rarely need a computer. In theory, they are great devices and are leaps and bounds ahead of other smart phones, but in practice, the frustration that comes from using them makes them outright awful. So here’s a narrative story on why you should never get an iPhone. Because if you already use an iPhone, it’s too late to turn back.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

The software (called the iOS and what runs the iPhone’s features) is an absolute bugged out mess. From the smallest annoyances to the greatest frustrations, the iOS has it all. Examples are plentiful and I’ve actually started an album on Facebook to chronicle my unfortunate problems. This is actually the main detractor from the phone because it’s the software that you end up dealing with all day. And yes, before you tell me to update, I am using (at the time of writing this) the most updated version of iOS.

Showcased to the left is myself trying to send an e-mail of a YouTube video to a friend. Astoundingly, it decided to bring up the keyboard while sending an e-mail and playing the video at the same time. I’m not sure how this happens, but it’s happened on more than one occasion. You have to exit YouTube, then stop YouTube from running, and then relaunch, find your video, and try again. It’s just a random added hassle that is more hilarious than it is harmful, but still an example of a bug that seems completely random.

The problem is that a lot of the bugs are completely infuriating. For example, the iPhone has a lag when locking and unlocking the phone (that button on the top right). This is not too big of a deal unless you’re trying to use it during two events: first, trying to lock the phone after you end a call may freeze the phone, or the end call button might be pressed and you lock the phone, and then it tries to lock the phone after the call AND by you locking it, and the phone freezes; second, and the most unbelievable, is when you have a password on your phone. When you unlock the phone you are prompted to enter your password and while the screen displays the digits for you to press, it is not fast enough to catch the first or second numbers you enter, making you re-enter your password immediately after. What a crazy place for lag to be, and one that drives me up the walls. Of course, why do you even have a password when people can still access your contact list, photos, and make calls?

Typing a message to my friends is so easy here

It doesn’t make sense to me how a phone can be so buggy and be so widely used… and everyone just loves them. And so do I, I guess, since I put up with it every single day. Believe it or not, today I got up at the wrong time because the iPhone, using its sophisticated future technology, was not able to correct my alarms for daylight savings time. But that’s okay, because they issued a warning on the internet. Thanks for the update that I never got. Oh well, it wasn’t too big of a deal, but you’d just imagine they could fix such a simple issue. Computers have been dealing with it since their inception, after all.

Neat, always wanted a keyboard that was completely broken and stretched out

The next issue is one that I can’t personally attest to happening on my phone, but rather on my mom’s phone. She kept complaining to me that the battery life was awful and that she could never make calls. Both of these are true: the battery life on the 3G is abysmal, but is thankfully better on the 4; AT&T provides some of the worst service ever (at least in Midland, Texas) and having calls fail while being in the middle of the city at home are commonplace (I actually bitched about it on Twitter some time ago and a representative responded saying sorry… sorry about what, that you’re selling a busted service? You don’t fix anything by saying sorry. Give me a refund of a dollar for every call that’s dropped and you’d more than pay for my phone service! But I digress).

Anyway, today I finally told her to give me her phone so I could show her how she was doing it wrong, which she usually is. I tried to make a call and the phone just sat at the calling screen for about 5 minutes with full signal. I decided to restart the phone, and when it came back up the battery had went from full (she just had it plugged in when she gave it to me) to about 10% or so. How is this possible? I’m guessing something in the software isn’t reporting the battery percentage life. As well, I could now make calls. What a joke.

This next one is a combination of the software and the actual hardware of the phone. I can’t believe that this phone was made with so many blatant design flaws. The first of which is that I bought my 3GS in June of ’09, my first iPhone purchase. After using it for a little under a month’s time, I was texting someone and typing and the screen just cracked. You might be wondering how many times I had dropped the phone. None. Even then, it was in a case to prevent things like this happening. Apparently, my unit was defective because the screen should not be so weak that typing on it makes it break. Fine, whatever.

Another thing that probably no one besides myself a few others will ever see is the text message limit. Apparently after 75,000 texts, you go over a limit and the phone tells you to delete some. Well, I’m the kind of person who likes to have full logs with whoever I talk to, so I never delete messages and I can pick back up and remember what I told some girl whose number I got in a bar at 3 AM a year ago when she messages me asking how I’m doing randomly. (This is a real situation. I am prepared.) But, after this limit, you’re screwed. Why such a limit? My phone has 4 gigs of space still free on it. There should be no limit. It’s not like the phone is pulling up this information every time I text; it’s only used when I want it.

Uh, thanks for the cryptic message?

I put up with this for a while and shortly thereafter I kept getting strange messages popping up that didn’t make any sense to me. I literally had no idea what they meant and tried to ignore them. However, after they came up, I realized that I could no longer make a call and speak — that feature had been disabled somehow in the software. The error message in question is shown at the right. Essentially, this random message that seemed unrelated to me was that I had connected some mystery accessory to my phone that it did not approve it. That’s fine, only that it wasn’t connected to anything at all. It was just popping up every 15 minutes and letting me know this. At this point, I became absolutely infuriated: my awesome future technology was a busted piece of shit already and I had only had it a few months. Really Apple?

So I called these guys up and of course I was transferred to some Indian guy who could barely speak English as far as I could tell and he told me that first, I had gripped the screen “too firmly” (I will never forget this) and that caused the phone to crack. Too firmly? What the hell, should I hold it lightly like it is a magnificent baby kitten? No, this is a phone and I don’t want to drop it and break it. The irony. I also mentioned that I couldn’t make calls and this was making the phone a giant paperweight. He said that I could should remove the accessory (the one that I didn’t have) and that cracking the screen had probably caused this. I asked if he had ever heard of either of these problems, and he said no.

Thanks, love that YouTube feature

I was told that I could replace my phone no problem. It would be 130 dollars to get the screen fixed and it would take 3 to 4 weeks for this to happen, and that I would also be out shipping. I asked if there was any way that Apple or AT&T could give me a loner phone to use while mine was being fixed, and I was told there was a way. All I had to do was give them 650 dollars (a holding fee plus shipping) to get this phone. So, basically, Apple told me that I was shit out of luck. I called AT&T and they told me to use an old phone or to call Apple. They didn’t care about me either. I called Apple back to see if there was anything they could do to work the situation out and I was told I needed to pay 30 dollars to talk to a representative. Uh, what? I cursed loudly and hung up the phone (not my phone, mind you).

Texting someone(?) my candid thoughts

So, I did what anyone would do: look online for a fix. First, I found a number of other users complaining about their screens cracking in dubious ways and a ton of people who had the problem where it said there was an accessory plugged in (and a ton of people who called Apple and had them say they never heard of such a story!). So, the problem was the moisture in my pocket had created a bond between two connectors in the docking port, causing it to think something was plugged in. The solution was just a rub down of alcohol and it was fixed, but I wish I could have been told that over the phone instead of reading it on some forum. And why is that such a common problem? What a great design feature. I still don’t get why there aren’t rubber plugs that cover those areas that are common on pretty much every other phone ever made. Whatever.

Here's the screen I saw before my phone wiped all of my text messages away completely

I guess there is hope for the future, because Apple does release updates to fix all the bugs. Or introduce new ones. When I upgraded to the iOS 4, it had the awesome feature of turning my phone into a paperweight. Yeah, it actually managed to make my phone break by updating it. The phone got stuck at a screen showing a plug and the iTunes icon, meaning, to me, to plug it into iTunes. Well, nothing happened. So I tried again, restarted my computer, reinstalled iTunes, and nothing worked. I called Apple but this time couldn’t even get through to anyone who knew what I was talking about… much less anyone who could keep track of my data. They kept getting my name wrong and thinking I was someone else. Cool guys.

So what did I have to do? Well, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to read a lot of nerdery.
Uninstall iTunes 10 after putting the iPhone in DFU mode
Delete all the old files in the iTunes directory
Install iTunes 9, but find out your library is now incompatible
…So rename your old library files
Then iTunes 9 will start and see the phone
Then recover it
Then copy the iPod directory from Program Files for iTunes 9
Then uninstall iTunes 9
Then install iTunes 10, and ignore the error messages when installing
Then rename your library files to the originals
Then cut and paste the iTunes 9 iPod directory over the iTunes 10 directory
Then start iTunes 10 and it will see the phone, the music, and the iPod service will work
Then restore your last back up and wait a few hours

RIP 3GS

Neat, so after you follow those steps your phone will work again. Glad that Apple told me how to do that. Oh wait, I had to spend my night on forums hating life. Either way, the phone has lasted me a good while and over time my time crack became another crack and another. I wasn’t going to put it in a case after it already had a crack — what’s the point? But just a few days ago, I dropped the phone from about 4 feet onto the dirt (the most extreme diamond covered dirt in the world, apparently) and my phone just lost it completely. That’s fine, whatever. I was out in the oil field and people kept trying to call me and I couldn’t slide to unlock it so they just assumed I had electrocuted myself and died somewhere. That or assumed I didn’t have service because I have AT&T, the nation’s fastest worst 3G network.

So what did I do? Well, I debated either switching to Verizon and paying the fee to break up from AT&T so I could get the Droid which everyone I know that has it seems to love it (and the customer service is excellent: my brother dropped his and it broke, so he sent it in and they fixed it for free, and gave him a free loner phone), or I could just get a new iPhone. Admittedly, there’s not much different between the 3GS and the 4, but after using the 4, I find that it’s actually a better device overall. That screen really takes away from the strain on my eyes. Why would I get a new iPhone when I just spent the better part of an hour bitching about them? Well, I realized that Apple owns my life. I have so much stuff saved on this phone that I can’t switch. I don’t care, just give me the new iPhone. I’m screwed for life. All of my music is through iTunes (at least in the last couple of years), so I’m locked to devices that can sync my tracks that are purchased content. (That also means I have to use iPods when I go for runs, sly bastards.) Finally, the iPhone backs up all of your content into some magical file that will restore most of what you have, making it easy to transition to a new iPhone. This isn’t a complaint really because it makes it simple and convenient for people to change their iPhones. However, it also means that I don’t want the hassle of learning a new phone, trying to migrate all my content manually, and then being upset with the lack of all the apps that I’ve accumulated over my iPhone ownership period.

How meta.

I’m stuck. I will always buy the iPhone. I don’t care how much AT&T and Apple piss me off, don’t care about me, and in general, treat me like I’m a clueless fool who isn’t entitled to decent treatment. This is the worst abusive relationship I have ever been in; I wonder what iPhone user needs sex when they get screwed every day?

29 July 2004

29 Jul

I’ll be turning 16 on July 31. I already bought my present, a computer upgrade, in June before memory went up in price. I think the only thing I really want is a prints account, but I dunno, no big deal I guess. I will officially be driving my 1977 Porsche 924 Martini Edition without parents. Although, I still blow at driving. I should probably wait a bit.

30 July 2003

30 Jul

This graphics card made me really popular, cool, and successful in life.

I will be celebrating my birthday tommorrow, July 31st. I have purchased a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra already so my present is no surprise. I don’t like surprises — but, I do like rack of lamb, which I will be eating tommorrow for my birthday dinner. Mmmm, I love baby animals’ ribs grilled to perfection on my plate.

12 April 2003

12 Apr

Hey folks. My hard drive just EXPLODED! Now, I have to buy a new one… Man, it was only a year old… I was warned though

But, I lost my 100 plus or so vector projects, and all my ideas and everything that was who I am. All of that in a piece of metal! Amazing, eh? I’ll just buy a 120 or 160 gig… I already have one 160 and now a dead 80… I dunno what to do now… I should have listened to a friend. He said, “Dude, that IBM deskstar is gonna die in a year or less.” And I was like, “no!” and NOW?!! Arrgh…. I’m only buying quality maxtor now… only maxtor… the best brand of harddrive IN THE WORLD.

Oh, I’m ranting… either way, down with computers and technology, it always mucks up. I’m typing from an old brick once known as a “TOP OF THE LINE HP W/ 733 MHZ Processor”. This blows… crappy monitor… no gaming… no anything… Ahhh, I think I may give up on art and stuff for a while and just say :( to computers. Hell, I lost EVERYTHING. I didn’t think it meant that much to me, but my life and my soul are being killed.. my life … my soul… my metal box with a spinning disk… all gone.

May be able to get some back… Of course like something now rattles in the harddrive… So seriously doubt it. Hey, it’s kinda funny… but just not very funny. Good god, 800×600 res sucks  .

So anybody care to listen to one thing and one thing only? IBM DESKSTARS BLOW. It should be called IBM DEATHSTAR

Worst harddrive I’ve ever seen. I’m gonna keep it in the PC and just sector off the bad parts one day… But I’m pretty lazy… may just trash it. Hmm, well if only my 160 gig was awesome and wasn’t full of illegal warez and things of that sort… and if only it would SHOW UP IN THE WINDOWS HARD DRIVE MENU! Ahh…

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