As spring seasons go, this one has been extraordinarily busy for me so far. Between work, traveling for work and working more, we’re doing more projects and more intensive projects at Behavior than ever before. This means good things for us and our clients, but bad things for the frequency of posts here while I go crazy over work tasks.

Another reason for my slacker performance on this weblog over the past week is Adobe Illustrator CS’s new, bewildering habit of creating dozens of unaccountable temporary files all over my hard drive. There are various explanations for the cause, none of which are conclusive, but the answer seems to lie somewhere between the Creative Suite’s PDF features and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Continue Reading

Weblog posts about music, in my opinion, are a kind of no win situation, because there’s nothing that you can say about a piece of music about which you’re currently very enthusiastic that will really mean anything to anybody unless they’re already familiar with it, or unless they’re so powerfully predisposed to that particular genre or style that a positive reaction is a foregone conclusion. The exception to that, of course, is if you have a weblog that is primarily focused on music and/or has accrued a significant share of musical credibility when it comes to endorsing bands. I don’t have that kind of weblog, clearly, so when I think about writing a post about music that’s exciting to me, I generally resist it.

Continue Reading

This guy one row behind me is on his mobile phone and he won’t shut up, but overall, I’m pretty happy to be traveling for my current business trip — this time very briefly to Washington, D.C. — by train. Amtrak, for all its faults, is a far, far better experience than hauling myself out to the airport and suffering through the perfunctory and arbitrary TSA screening processes before getting on an overcrowded airplane. Between New York and Washington, you just can’t beat the train for how easy and how pleasant it is.

Continue Reading

Some people say that, whether it was truly a case of plagiarism or not, it would have been polite if the propietor of Lethean-Sound.com had emailed me in advance to say he was lifting somewhat heavily from my own Web site, as discussed earlier today. In fact, I did get an email in the middle of the day today (still after the fact, but better late than never) from Lethean-Sound.com that was very polite and apologetic, and afterwards, at my suggestion, a small credit appeared at the bottom of the site’s home page that read, “Some CSS and code courtesy of Khoi Vinh.”

As I said, I was not, in general, made particularly angry by the affair, though neither was I pleased. But the correspondence quickly mollified me and made me realize that, if it was not polite for the site’s proprietor to fail to contact me about the design in advance of launching it, neither was it particularly polite of me to fail to contact him without first posting about it here on my weblog.

Continue Reading

An anonymous somebody or other posted this link to one of the comment threads here this weekend. I removed it immediately, partly because it didn’t have anything to do with the topic of the weblog post to which it was appended, and partly because I wasn’t sure how to react. If you click on the link, you’ll understand my situation: it’s a French-language weblog that looks very much like what a weblog would look like if its designer was trying to rip me off.

Continue Reading

In the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

Continue Reading

It’s going to take me a little while to really come to grips with the fact that DC Comics has changed its logo, obsolescing the long-standing, Milton Glaser-designed icon for something, well, different. The new mark includes forward-leaning “D.C.” initials against a swooshy, Saturn-like ring in a dimensional rendering, with a hint of Adobe Illustrator-style gradient along its edge. A curiously Captain America-like star, drawn in perspective, punctuates the whole thing.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t find it particularly attractive or probably as utilitarian as Glaser’s original triumph of compactness and visual exclamation. To the designers’ credit, it does attempt to rescue what’s good about its predecessor from the short-sighted imperatives of DC Comics’ current marketing strategy, but in doing so, it completely misinterprets the old mark’s substance for rather shallow style.

Continue Reading

I’ve done a lot of trash talk about Mac OS X Tiger but I still resolutely insist that it kicks ass, and one of the reasons why is the operating system’s new Cocoa-based dynamic dictionary and thesaurus lookups. This feature has barely been publicized by Apple, oddly enough, but even on its own, it would be fair to say that it accounts for at least thirty dollars’ worth of the US$129 Tiger sticker price.

You can invoke a dictionary lookup within any Cocoa application — one of the best indicators of those is the presence of the notorious font panel, but Safari counts too — by holding down command-control-D and simply hovering over any given word. What results nearly instantaneously is a contextual display of that word’s definition as recorded in the Oxford Dictionary (or synonyms as culled from the Oxford Thesaurus). Both the dictionary and the database are stored locally on your hard drive, so the feature is thankfully not contingent on the presence of an Internet connection.

Continue Reading

For no good reason, I continually get my hopes raised up over the idea of clean, seamless synchronization across multiple databases and devices via my Macintosh. For example, I just want to be able to maintain a single store of contacts, at least, and have it reflected across all the various applications I use: Entourage and Apple Mail, iChat and Adium X, my mobile phone and my PDA if I ever use one again.

This just isn’t the reality, though, not even in the latest and greatest iteration of Mac OS X. In fact, if anything, synchronization has gotten markedly worse; not necessarily less reliable, but less sensical and more de-centralized. I realize there are several third party utilities designed to ameliorate the situation, but I’m frankly disappointed in the infrastructure that Apple provides in the operating system. We seem to be in a kind of transition with Mac OS X, an unfinished state wherein synching functionality, though perhaps more prevalent that ever before, remains regrettably paltry and conspicuously lacking for a clear interaction model.

Continue Reading

Talk about a change of pace: this morning my girlfriend and I flew out to the quintessentially suburban and exceedingly pleasant town of Lafayette, California to help my mother watch my nephew for roughly four days (his mom is on a short holiday). On the slate for this weekend: a science fair, my nephew’s Little League game, a trip to San Francisco to see the Giants play the Washington Nationals, and lots of Nintendo GameCube. We stopped by Hollywood Video this afternoon to rent a DVD, and I was reminded how few movies are really appropriate for watching with a seven-year old and how just about any seven-year old in 2005 will have already seen every one of them. In spite of having my own child-at-heart preoccupations, it’s very different keeping an actual young kid entertained.

Just because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

Continue Reading

An Adium instant message window interrupted me at my desk last night. It was Jason Fried of 37signals, and he was like, “Dude, up for guest-posting over at our Signal vs. Noise weblog for, like, the month of May?” I was all like, “Dude, what does that entail?” And he was all like, “Dude, whatever you want!” And I was all like, “Dude, can I start off with something mildly inflammatory about Microsoft?” And he was all like, “Dude, go for it.” And then I was like, “Dude, that’s totally radical, I’ll do it.” And he was like, “Dude, right on!” And now you know.

As if you could avoid hearing the news: the prolific 37signals launched their latest online application today and it’s called Backpack. As a beta tester, I took a crack at helping the company craft its messaging for this hard-to-describe product, and the best I could come up with was this: “It’s perhaps the most convincing Web answer yet to the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spiral-bound notebook.” You can tell that I had my little marketing hat on for that particular brainstorming session.

Continue Reading

Several readers have noted some problems in the display of my comments entry form, courtesy of the very recent iterations of Safari released with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and, of course, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In essence, what were once orderly boxes now appear tumbled and in disarray when rendered by the new versions of this Web browser. The form remains fully functional; it’s presentation has just been more or less destroyed, is all. This is a byproduct of Apple’s vigilant, ongoing improvements to Safari’s CSS rendering engine, a process which I wholeheartedly support, in theory… I won’t lie to you, though, the fact that little bugs like this continue to arise annoys the heck out of me.

Continue Reading

Between Friday night and this morning, and between trips to New Jersey and Brooklyn, I managed to find some time to get Mac OS X Tiger installed — all the while demonstrating quite admirable restraint and patience, I don’t mind saying, given how much of a lather I’ve been working up over the release of this latest version of my favorite operating system.

Part of that was the idea that dedicating a weekend to something so clearly geeky, while undeniably satisfying, might perhaps be a case of misplacing one’s personal priorities; I still endeavour to have some kind of balance in my life. Also, thinking in terms of ounces of prevention versus pounds of cure, I took great pains both to properly prepare for the upgrade and to perform the most extensive flavor of installation available.

Continue Reading