If you were to look at the music on my iPhone, you’d find that a good chunk of it isnt even considered music. I’ve been a fan of podcasts (and podcasting) ever since it hit the scene. I’ve found it to be a great way to learn about topics that interest me or to get acquainted with new ideas and I can listen to them no matter what else I may be doing. If you’re looking to bolster your design knowledge or just want to soak up some great talk about the topic, here’s a list of design-focused podcasts you should subscribe to.
The Web Ahead - A relatIvely new show, I’ve enjoyed what the host, Jen Simmons brings to the table. The guest list has been an impressive variety of design professionals.
The Boagworld Podcast - I’ve enjoyed Paul Boag’s show for quite some time. He covers topic that are central to the business of web design and uncovers some areas that may be forgotten from time to time.
The Big Web Show - Jeffrey Zeldman and his guests cover the gamut of design topics in a fun yet informative way.
Media Artist Secrets - This podcast by Franklin McMahon may be one of the first design podcasts that I subscribed to. Usually focusing on one topic an episode, the show length is manageable and can be the perfect fit for your morning commute.
TEDTalks - This is a series of podcassts created from the amazing TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) events that take place throughout the year. Rather than focusing on how-to’s and techniques, these “episodes” focus on concepts, ideas, problems, and ultimately solutions that apply to all walks of life.
I hope you’ll find that these selections are not only informative, but are a pleasure to listen to!
With the project board pieces complete, it is time to put the elements together and apply the finishing touches. To get things moving, I set the board up to run on my office’s 40” TV. From there, I went smaller. Much smaller.
The big screen.
Making a digital project board is quite easy, if you’re only planning on having it used in one location. Since my plans called for the board to be displayed on a TV, laptop, Cinema Display, iPads and an iPhone, I had to set up a few stylesheets to cover all of the bases. The first implementation that I had set up was for the TV in my office. On the surface, this appeared to be an easy task, but after tossing a few variations of sketches up onto the screen I realized I needed to modify my approach. After playing around with the font sizing using standard Web fonts, I made a few trips past the TV to make sure I could easily read my project list at-a-glance.
After a few passes I changed my typography plans for the board and went the Web Font route. FontSquirrel.net carries a font by the name of Chunk Five, which has become my font of choice for my site headers and that remained true for this project. I finally had things set up for the TV display and could shift my focus to how the status board would appear on other devices.
Templates
When people ask why I like ExpressionEngine, one of the first answers I give them is “templates”. Templates are, by far, the best asset of EE (in my humble opinion). They’ve allowed me to quickly create a mobile version of my site, create and test different layouts and design options, and give clients quick previews of site adjustments without much time investment (or headaches). My project board relies heavily on them, specifically around the stylesheet switching for desktop, iPhone, and iPad viewing.
To assist with the user agent detection for style sheet and other functionality switches, I installed the MX Mobile Detect plugin. I recommend this plugin for anyone needing to handle mobile devices in various ways. It’s easy to implement and can be used in a variety of situations. In addition to controlling the specific stylesheets, I used this plugin to control certain interface and layout elements.
Holding my project list in my hands.
A breakthrough moment came when I began reviewing the project board on my iPad and iPhone to determine what changes needed to be made to the stylesheets. Although the main intent was to build a display for large-format viewing, being able to easily glance down at my status list from smaller devices quickly became a priority. After much experimenting and real-world testing, I found layouts that worked for me on every device that I had. I also noticed the potential for expanding the status board into a project management tool.
To streamline the appearance of the project board on the iPad and iPhone I set the page up to use the “apple-mobile-web-app-capable” meta tag to eliminate the address and Mobile Safari navigation bars. This not only maximized my screen real estate, but it cleaned up the overall look of the project board and eliminated unneeded distractions.
Making it Fluid
This project was a perfect application for Fluid, a great app with which you can run any Web site as a standalone Mac OS X app. Not only can I have my project board open when my laptop or desktop start up, I can run the app in full-screen mode and also take advantage of Spaces within OS X.
With any project, the design of the interface can make or break the usefulness of the final product. During the process of laying out the project board, I was in a state of constant flux, adding elements, removing elements, adjusting their size and visual weight to find the right combination that worked.
Starting with Panic.
The seed for this project was planted, as mentioned before, when I read about the Panic Status Board. This thing is amazing, and I’m still in awe of how beautiful, and more-importantly, how functional it is. It was the benchmark. I went to my drawing board with many ideas, possibly too many, flowing onto the paper. Before long, I had a mess on my hands. I didn’t like any of the ideas that I was coming up with. I didn’t want to do a complete hack-job and rip off the Panic design. I did (often) check back to their project board post and studied their images feverishly, comparing them to my sketches and wondering why solutions didn’t have the same impact. It didn’t take me long to understand the reason.
I wasn’t focusing on what I needed, instead I was cramming the items that Panic had employed into my board, where they didn’t belong. My needs for this board were simple, a quick view of my projects that were in progress and on the horizon. Simple as that. Back to the drawing board.
With a much clearer vision in place, I laid out the items that I needed and tossed the “wish-list” items onto the back burner. The result was a clean solution that would give me the information I needed at a glance. Just as planned.
The more things change.
After diving into the Photoshop layout and markup stage, I discovered more adjustments were needed so the look (once again) underwent another round (or two) of changes. The flexibility of ExpressionEngine let me quickly make changes on the fly, review them and go on without wasting too much time. Now that things were taking shape, it was time to fine-tune and refine.
With the launch of iTunes Match I’ve encountered one of the first Apple products/services that has truly baffled me. It’s not the service itself that’s causing the confusion, rather the signals that it sends me. First, a little background information.
All (or most) of your music in the cloud.
While it’s not the first cloud-based music service to hit the scene, iTunes Match is the one that makes the most sense to me (thanks to years of iTunes purchases coupled with a steadfast dislike to purchase multiple copies of music just to have them available on multiple devices). Other offerings from Google and Amazon let you stream your music to your computer or mobile device for easy listening but they can take a while to upload content that wasn’t purchased through their services.
iTunes Match takes a slightly different approach where you can access not only your music purchased from Apple, but also any of the other music you might have added from other sources such as ripped CDs or Napst…eerrr…friends. The difference comes in where Apple is only scanning your library and matching this music and granting you access to (usually) higher-quality version of music that you have in your library. You can upload songs that aren’t available in iTunes which can mimic the storage-locker-style approach that both Amazon and Google have taken.
Say what?
Signup for this service is straightforward, I’ll admit that right now. The confusion and mixed signals sets in after the matching process begins, and in some cases fails. The error messages that Apple has implemented aren’t very “Apple-like”. They’re confusing. They don’t give the whole picture, or even a snapshot for that matter, of what the real issue is. In addition to the cryptic error messages, Apple has brought new iCloud icons into play that, unless you have a legend for, you have no clue what they mean. Thankfully Apple has shed a bit of light on this issue.
Issues and interface inconsistencies aside, I’m loving iTunes Match, though it keeps sending me mixed signals.
“One way to cut through the confusion is by turning on a new view option in iTunes. Choose View -> View Options and check the iCloud Status box. This will add a new column to your iTunes list detailing the status of every item in your library.”
When I set out to create an online project board powered by ExpressionEngine, I wasn’t sure how the project would turn out. After seeing the setup that the guys at Panic created, I immediately lusted after it, but quickly realized that I didn’t need all of the bells and whistles that they were implementing. My solution needed to encompass two main aspects. It needed to be simple and it needed to be clean.
Before working on any of the interface elements I made sure this project had a solid foundation and would be able to give me the information I was looking for when I needed it. As mentioned in my latest Thinking Out Loud post, preventing scope creep was important, but some additional items did find their way into the process.
Custom Fields are your friend.
The main reason I opted to build the project board with ExpressionEngine rather than creating my own front and backend system was the sheer power that’s under the hood of an EE system. I can create a custom template, a custom input channel, and top it off with custom fields that will do exactly what need them to do. In short, it’s the smart thing to do.
Making a list and checking it…many times.
After setting up the template and the channel for the project board, I needed to set up the fields that would make everything work. After jotting down some initial ideas that I needed, I began thinking about this project down the road and had visions of where I could take it and what it could turn into. The result was a list of entry fields that go beyond what a project board needs, but laying this ground work in the beginning will make expanding the functionality easier in the future.
Power and flexibility.
I’ve never paid too much attention to the Custom Field possibilities that ExpressionEngine offered until I began working on this project. Once I started looking around, I was shocked at the variety of field-types I could choose from. I had wanted a dynamic, JavaScript-driven date box to handle my project Start and Due dates, figuring I’d need to either build one myself or find a suitable option through searching. No need. One of the field types is a calendar-style date selector. Here’s a brief list of other custom field-types:
Text Input
Textarea
Checkboxes
Radio Buttons
Multi Select
Date
File
Relationship
There are some additional field-types that become available when you install select plugins and modules.
