Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

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Dean Cain's weird new IE8 ads.

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

So I just saw the Dean Cain spots that are running on Hulu for the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. There are a whole slew of them (I embedded my favorite at the bottom of this post), and while I thought they were funny and a decent attempt at engaging some of the markets who have abandoned them (hardcore, meme-loving Internet geeks), I just don’t think these are going to work the way they want overall.

The problem with these is not the spots themselves or even the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser (at this point anyway). The problem is the tainted, toejam-smelling legacy that is the Internet Explorer product.

Let’s suppose for a moment that Microsoft came to market with a fully standards-compliant browser on par with its competitors. Sites that you go to aren’t all broken and weird, and people developing sites have less nightmares thanks to Microsoft’s willingness to actually play with the rest of the kids in the playground. I know. It won’t totally be that way, but let’s say just suppose.

Even with all that, people have been so burned with their previous experiences with the browser (I’m looking at you, IE6), that funny spots alone are not going to be a reason to give them another shot. There needs to be at least one spot that clearly states “Hey! Our browser isn’t gonna chew and shit out your favorite sites!”

In fact, there’s the next spot right there. They could call it H.O.B.I.G. C.A.S.O.Y.F.S.

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Smart Playlists be damned!

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

promo-iphone3-20090619I, just like the rest of the iPhone fans out there, installed the iPhone OS 3.0 update last night and spent the remainder of the night in the basement playing with the new features. After going through all the big features (cut/paste, push notification, Spotlight, etc.) I decided to dig in and see how the little things I was looking for turned out.

I’m sad to say that the one thing I really wanted didn’t make it into the update. Smart Playlists still don’t live update properly on the iPhone.

Just in case you haven’t really delved into the power of Smart Playlists in iTunes, you can set lots of criteria to create a dynamic playlist that updates itself. For a long time I had a Smart Playlist that only contained songs in my library that had never been played. But, I realized that this list was prohibitive to many songs I liked, so I set up a list comprised of a random sampling of songs that hadn’t been played in the last month.

Now, ideally, if you have a Smart Playlist of 100 songs that meet that criteria, once the first song is played your playlist should be 99 songs long. That’s not the case with the iPhone. For some reason it doesn’t live update. There have been workarounds published on the interwebs that show you can fix this by creating your first Smart Playlist with all the criteria and then creating a second list whose only criteria is “Playlist is (name of first Smart Playlist)”

This only sort of works. The lists only properly update when you sync the iPhone. They’re supposed to update on the fly though.

I bring this up only because for me personally, I’d have rather had working Smart Playlists in OS 3.0 over copy/paste. Because as glaring of an omission as copy/paste was from the first two incarnations of iPhone OS, I can honestly only think of one time over the months that I’ve had the iPhone (and the iPod Touch for months before that) that I ran into a situation where I legitimately said, “Damn, I wish this thing would copy/paste.” However, I use the iPod function of the phone daily, and every day I use the “month old” Smart Playlist, and I want it to NOT REPEAT SONGS DURING THE DAY BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT I PROGRAMMED IT TO AVOID, DAMMIT! Amirite?

Call me whiny, but it seems to me that if the first 5 generations of iPods worked just fine with this iTunes feature, then it should be no problem to get in there and get that fixed in the next incremental update. I know I’m not the only one irked by this.

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Taking a finger out of a pie.

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

A few months ago I made an episode of the COCKTAIL NAPKIN entitled Fingers In Pies that talked about focusing energies to do the best creative work possible. In that video, I examined the fact that I’ve spread myself too thin with too many external commitments. Because of that, it’s too hard to do truly great work because there’s not enough energy to devote to the endeavor.

Last night, I pulled a finger out of a pretty big pie.

Last night was my last Art+Copy Club of Kansas City council meeting. I’ve been serving as president over the last year, and I decided around the time I made that video that I was not going to run for re-election to the council when my term was up this month. I’ve enjoyed serving and helping inspire the creative community of Kansas City for the past two years, but I really felt that there were other ways that I could use the time and energy that doing all that requires.

Even though I’m going to continue to support and advise the new president, I feel bittersweet relief that I’ve now got more time to devote to doing the types of creative work that I want to do.

I wrote a farewell address to the Art+Copy Club membership this afternoon, and that begins closure for me. I’m still officially in the position until June 30th, but the transition is beginning now.

Anyone want to help me finish Tiki Bar?

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