Oceanic Flight 815

How do you measure an app’s success? The common answer would be in the number of downloads or the average star count in the ratings. Emoji—one of my favorite iPhone apps—was in part responsible for my choice to up the number of texts in my iPhone plan. That’s a tremendous success metric for AT&T, anyway.

In late April, we lost our beloved Nutmeg. As the first pup to roam our halls, she will forever be the original Big Spaceship dog.

A Löwchen (“little lion” in German), Nutmeg was a stoic canine, whose admiration was difficult to earn. Smart to the point of discernment, she had her favorites and didn't let just anyone linger by her side. Lest you think she was shrewd, know this: Underneath her gray fur was a heart that would bring the Tin Man to his knees.

During last week's presentation on Advertising & Transmedia Storytelling, I touched upon a wide range of topics, examples and people, and didn't have enough time to do most of them justice.  So, as promised, this post provides some further detail, as well as links to additional resources and recommended reading for anyone who wants to know more about the topics that I mentioned. (Apologies in advance: this is longer than most Think posts, since there's a lot to cover.)

For a project we were building recently in PaperVision3D I came across a problem when trying to clip MovieMaterials inside of a plane.  Another big factor was that my stage was not set to scaleToStage, which seemed to fix the problems the little I played with it.  However, for this site it wasn't an option. Following is some insight into the steps I took to solve this problem in hopes that it saves someone else some time.  Admittedly, this problem should be no biggie for the papervision buff, but it took me a while to track down an answer.

User backlash has become a predictable reaction to redesigns of Facebook. Polls show that 94% of people disapprove of recent changes to the site layout, rejecting the ‘stream and filter’ system.

It seems, as Robert Scoble puts it, that Facebook has “pissed off its users” with each reinvention it undertakes. Back in 2006, the introduction of a newsfeed sparked  major outcry, with users petitioning and boycotting the changes. Today, people are just as furious: a disgruntled mob – one million strong – has pressured Facebook into bringing back some ‘old’ design and user experience features.

Why are people so upset?

There are skills and habits you acquire when you live in New York. Like standing by the subway doors instead of the middle of the train (or its variant, getting out of the station and standing lost right at the top of the stairs). And then there is the all-important walking through the crowd.

14 Street Union Square is perhaps the busiest station I use - it has multiple lines railing through it. I’ve been using it since junior high, and while it has gone through some cosmetic changes, the swarm of people shuffling through has always been chaotic. One of the skills you need is a technique from aerodynamics called drafting. In science speak, it’s a way of "reducing the overall effect of drag or air resistance due to exploiting the lead object’s slipstream." In language I can get behind, drafting is when an object uses another object in front of it to go faster. Race cars use this maneuver though it’s not confined to vehicles.

We all want to be original, right? To turn heads, to raise an eyebrow...But what is original anymore? Two topics prevailed during yesterday’s lunch table conversation: pantyhose and applications. I’ll spare you details on the former. The gist of the latter was that many of the apps people are thinking up already exist in some state.



Swissmiss recently posted a lovely quote from Jim Jarmusch, opening with the phrase “nothing is original.” Proving his point, Jarmusch borrowed words from Jean-Luc Godard. I stole that snippet and pasted it above. Why not? After all, “originality is non-existent.” Or maybe it’s omnipresent. Originality is not about creating from scratch. It’s about exploring what’s around you and turning that into something entirely new.

I've been working on a Keynote deck for the past week or so about reaching people in a post-advertising world. We all acknowledge that we are in this world, but it seems like we're less willing to define what that means. One of the things that I see holding us back is the fact that so many people are relying on buzzwords and adverspeak to come up with new ideas. "Make that viral." Uh-huh...yeah, coming right up. "We need to create a community." Um, why?!?

In a very informal poll, I asked my Twitter friends which buzzwords they feel are overused. The results were not that shocking but definitely informative. Viral topped the list, followed closely by widget, community and authenticity. I was surprised that people didn't seem to have much of an issue with location-based or cross-platform. But hey, today's vocabulary is tomorrow's adverspeak.

Thanks to Twitter, my friend Scot was reunited with his lost cellphone. In fact, he didn't even realize it was gone. But the ever determined samaritan sent a tweet via the phone to alert Scot that the phone was in good hands.

Wired caught wind of the story too.

Yesterday my trial of Flex Beta 3 expired, forcing me to finally uninstall/reinstall the Flex 3 final release. A lost my beautiful custom perspective and all those plug-ins I had grown to love... sigh.

The worst of it was that I the reinstall brought the full wrath of the evil "Waiting for Flash Player to connect to debugger" error of doom. I looked around online for anwers -- none. The only documented solutions were to try to reinstall Flex and insure I was using a debug version of the player. I was on my own.

How did I solve this issue?! Well I didn't... sort of.

Apparently someone is clamoring for a class that we use here called "Out". This post will deliver said class, as well as provide a brief overview of its usage.

"Out" really doesn't do anything particularly useful, but it does make it a lot easier to scan through large volumes of trace() output and find the information you're looking for by formatting it nicely. This means that every line traced out is prefixed with the classname of the instance executing the trace, as well as the type of event the trace is intended to represent. There's also the option of filtering the outputs such that only traces from specific classes or of specific types are displayed.

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