First Week with the iPhone: The Apps

While not exactly the first week, a majority of the apps about to be reviewed are ones I got within the first week. I’m going give a screenshot of my iPhone pages and give some quick-fire reviews of the apps I believe are worth mentioning. Since I have so many apps I will split this post into two different ones, so expect the second one to come sometime next week. All of the apps listed are free unless otherwise noted. Finish Reading »
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First Week with the iPhone: The Phone

It’s been a week since I said goodbye to Verizon and switched to the iPhone, so I would like to take a moment to give my first week’s opinion about my new toy. For this post I’ll focus solely on the iPhone itself by giving my impression of the hardware and software the phone has. I’ll be publishing two more posts discussing the iPhone apps and iPhone accessories I’ve been playing with in the next few days.

As I write this review of sorts I’m going to stay away from elaborating on any of the normally lauded features. If you’re anything like me, then you know what big item features comes in an iPhone 3GS. This post should give a more personal understanding of what owning this device is like to someone who only has read about the iPhone.

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Dear Verizon, Goodbye … for now

Dear Verizon,

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to say this so I’m just going to get it over with. You know band-aid style, right off.

I’m breaking up with you.

As you and I are both aware, my two-year contract ended with you today and I’m leaving you for someone else.

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Designing for Failure

When any device, product or gizmo gets released to the world, it is the lovechild of the designer’s initial idea and hours of refinement. The refinement may come from the device’s physical makeup, the materials used for the manufacturing or the colors used for the aesthetics. It may also come from the addition or subtraction of features. But a majority of any refinement comes from removing all of the flaws, bugs and malperformances of the device.

Removing all errors from a device is an obvious goal. Some product makers don’t always seem to take it to heart as well as others do. But I can image that even for those more failure-prone devices there was some manager during the brainstorming session discussing how this product should work, with an assumption that frequent failures for the device isn’t an option.

But have you ever noticed a device that was designed for failure. Meaning that instead of fixing the problems that occur in the device, the maker designed the device to make recovering from failure easier.

It almost seems oxymoronic to do such a thing, but I recently came a device that does just that which prompted a few thoughts.

First, I’d like to give brief definition of what designing for failure is to me. Followed by my post-inspiring story of what device I came across that was designed for failure. Then I will dissect what criteria this device follows that could make it possible for devices to also be designed for failure. Finally, I will pose a few other thoughts that came to me about this whole idea.

And here … we … go

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A (short) Rant about Crappy Advertising

Pardon me for a bit while I vent about a poor implementation of advertising I saw this past week. Hopefully, you can empathize with me and maybe even tell some similar stories yourself. Finish Reading »
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Optimizing a WordPress Blog for Speed

Your new theme is finished and live. You’ve squashed some remaining bugs. Maybe even added your favicon that was forgotten. Your blog is ready for the flood of traffic that is about to pour in, except for one thing. It’s time to optimize your WordPress theme so that visitors get a snappy load time when they visit, and so that your host doesn’t come to it’s knees if you get a flood of traffic from something like Digg or SlashDot. This post will show how I optimized this blog and reducing its size by over 1MB and shaving over 3 seconds from its load time, with a step-by-step guide with screenshots of what I did. Finish Reading »
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The What, How and Where of Favicons

While working on my current blog theme I got so caught up with doing all the larger design aspects that I forgot about adding a favicon to my new theme. So often this little site element gets forgotten when it shouldn’t. It’s presence is important to help brand a site and make it recognizable when viewing lists of sites in bookmarks. So in honor of our little friend that is oft neglected, here’s a good resource for all things favicons. Finish Reading »
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The Making of a Monsta … WordPress Theme

I love posts that follow the author’s design process for things like logos, illustrations and website designs. I decided to do one describing my process for building my current WordPress theme called Monsta. This post will give an overview of each step I took in the process, with pictures, while trying not to go too in depth on any one section. Some larger topics, such as the character illustration process or some of my custom WordPress stuff, will eventually get their own posts. Here's the design to development process of the Monsta WordPress Theme:
  • Brainstorm
  • Sketching
  • Wireframe/Design
  • HTML
  • Character Design
  • WordPress
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Giving Windows Live Writer a Whirl

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer the last few days for an upcoming post and I wanted to give a quick write-up about it.

What is Windows Live Writer?

Live Writer is a free desktop blog editor. It can write and publish posts without having to log into WordPress admin. Finish Reading »
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