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Das Boot Camp

Boot CampHere was my first reaction to Apple’s announcement that they are now officially enabling, if not supporting, the ability to boot Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on their new, Intel-based hardware through a software utility they call Boot Camp: “Holy shit!”

This is a momentous move for Apple, something representing a real break from the nagging case of N.I.H. syndrome that’s dogged the company like a lingering cough for years and years. The world outside of Apple’s many legions of overboard devotees seems to think so, too: this afternoon, the Boot Camp story made it into the prized top-left slot on our home page at NYTimes.com (I swear that I have no influence over such decisions), and when the market closed today, AAPL was up by over six dollars.

My second reaction was to email a friend who actually works inside the Apple Computer ‘mothership’ in Cupertino, CA, and ask him how he could ever keep a secret like Boot Camp — indeed how he manages to keep all of Apple’s juicy, expletive-inspiring product secrets — to himself. His response was, “Every day is a trial, man. Every day.” He’s twice the man I would be in that situation, to say the least.

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The Awesome Redesign I Didn’t Do

The New York TimesAlert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.

I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.

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The Awesome Redesign I Didn’t Do

The New York TimesAlert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.

I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.

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I.A.s in Isolation

For folks still recovering in whole or part from the exhaustion of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, just think about those fellow attendees who went on to this year’s Dorkstock — I mean, this year’s Information Architecture Summit, wrapping up right now in Vancouver. I kid, I kid. Because if you follow the blog-borne reports coming out of the conference, you’ll see some really interesting stuff going on: tagging, tagging and more tagging, as one attendee told me, and lots of fascinating discussions on the organization, management and manipulation of information. Plus some flat out, wild and crazy fun. Look out.

Seriously, I’ve been following the events through excellent summary posts from Luke Wroblewski, among other bloggers, and feeling like I’m getting way more reporting value from the generally more analytical mindsets of the information architecture audience than I saw come out of South by Southwest. A lot of this ad hoc reporting is so good it’s almost like I’m there, but I’m not. It all sounds geekily absorbing, and it makes me think that maybe next year I’ll go.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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Wireless Gone Wacky

Wireless RoutersAmong the many things I wish I knew a lot more about is how my home network works. I mean, I have a pretty decent if admittedly fundamental handle on how TCP/IP and DHCP work together, but heaven help me if I ever try to get them to behave reliably for anything other than the most basic of configurations.

I use a heck of a lot of what I think is network address translation or “port forwarding,” directing traffic from outside my LAN to a specific computer within it — a feature I find incredibly handy for SSH tunnels, light HTTP serving and AFP access. All of which frequently amount to exercises in frustration. I can never get my computers to reliably acquire the same IP address on repeated reboots and re-connections to the network. I’ve tried fiddling with a countless combination of settings, including manually acquiring IP addresses and address reservation, with little luck.

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The Deck That Didn’t

Traditional Design & New TechnologyHow many more weblog posts can I squeeze out of my trip to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival? This is the last one, I think: it wraps up the panel discussion in which I took part on the first day of the conference, “Traditional Design & New Technology.” As promised, I’m making the slides available for download. However, be forewarned that this deck is unlikely to be of much good to anyone. It was prepared as just a skeletal framework for the discussion, so there’s not a lot of content in the slides themselves.

In preparing for the session, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria and I all labored through several rounds of a much more detailed and extensive deck of slides that we used to help us get our bearings with the subject matter. After several rounds, we ultimately decided that first framework was too constricting, that it would too forcefully guide the discussion and suppress the spontaneity of the group. So we took a deep breath and threw it all out, keeping only a choice few slides as touch-points for the conversation.

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The Deck That Didn’t

Traditional Design & New TechnologyHow many more weblog posts can I squeeze out of my trip to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival? This is the last one, I think: it wraps up the panel discussion in which I took part on the first day of the conference, “Traditional Design & New Technology.” As promised, I’m making the slides available for download. However, be forewarned that this deck is unlikely to be of much good to anyone. It was prepared as just a skeletal framework for the discussion, so there’s not a lot of content in the slides themselves.

In preparing for the session, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria and I all labored through several rounds of a much more detailed and extensive deck of slides that we used to help us get our bearings with the subject matter. After several rounds, we ultimately decided that first framework was too constricting, that it would too forcefully guide the discussion and suppress the spontaneity of the group. So we took a deep breath and threw it all out, keeping only a choice few slides as touch-points for the conversation.

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I Am the Answer

Almost forgot about this until I was cleaning out my travel bag this morning: on my way to throwing out the mostly superfluous contents of my 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival goodies bag, I ran into Jeff Croft and Wilson Miner in the lobby of the Hampton Inn. They pointed out that I might want to hang on to the “SXSW Activity Book,” a “cheeky” collection of nerd-friendly, rainy day-style games included amongst the ad flyers and industry magazines stuffed inside the bag. The back of the four-page booklet featured a trivia question, the answer to which is actually my name. I got a kick out of that.

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