Scott Bush

First off: OWA is Outlook Web Access, the web-based version of Microsoft’s e-mail, calendar, and contact manager. Typically you use it when you’re away from your work computer but need to check your work e-mail (to learn the latest office gossip or which benefit the company is cutting next; that sort of thing). Today, I’m using as I work from home.

Now, OWA is pretty cool, especially the latest version. (In fact, XmlHttpRequest, the technology behind most cool web applications like Gmail, was first developed by the OWA people.) However, the dirty little secret behind OWA is its mouth-breathing cousin, OWA Light. A great comparison of the two can be found here.

Having developed web apps before, I know about cross-browser difficulties, and having worked for a corporation I know about fiscally-driven business decisions. So I understand the OWA team at MS probably sat down and said “let’s give those losers on the Mac and Firefox-using counter-culturists something so the Justice department keeps off our backs.” Just kidding. Seriously, giving up some advanced features like adding/editing mail rules, viewing messages in conversation mode, and recovering deleted items seems justified. Other features are on the fence and probably only matter if you need them: accessing the Tasks module (I don’t even know what that is, so I don’t care) and viewing your calendar in anything but day view.

Some features are absolute essential and why they’re missing I can’t understand. My two biggies: message flags and search.

• Message flags - I organize my inbox and track what I need to do (in part) with flagged messages. Someone requests a change on the site but I’m too busy right this second to do it–boom, red flag. An e-mail with a website I need gets flagged green for reference. Sometimes I use purple or orange flags for a bunch of messages that come in for a specific project. Quite useful, but it’s missing. Why? Simple thing to do. Even if MS left out sorting or searching by flag, they could’ve implemented a simple drop-down menu with colors in it to represent the flags. There’s no cross-browser concern there.
• Search - I am a Gmail user (okay, fanatic might be a better term). It’s simplicity and power in search is amazing. OWA Light has no search… unless you want to search your contacts or address book. This is a non-trivial feature, I know. But honestly, something as integral as searching e-mail! Why wouldn’t they have included this at the expense of other features or simply said “even non-IE users need search!”

Okay, I feel better for having said my piece. I’m probably stuck with OWA Light until I get my nice new Macbook Pro where I can run Windows (at a decent speed) and use the desktop Outlook client.

This may be a weird post but I simply couldn’t go on without singing WordPress’s praises. I use the open-source publishing platform for this blog, so if you have no idea what WP is, at least you know you’ve been seeing it.

Until a few days ago, I had been running version 2.1.2 of the software; I’m now reveling in version 2.5.1. Whereas it was useful and usable before, it’s now beautiful and slick. This version has a refined user interface on the administrative side, with a classy light-blue, white, and yellow color scheme. It now organizes post-related functions in a more sensible manner, including a more intuitive method to publish posts at a set time in the future. Another exceptional new feature is how easily you can add media: audio, visual, images, etc. There’s a much-improved media browser that clarifies how images will appear in posts by showing small visuals of how text will flow around images. It still auto-saves posts, too.

Besides blogs, WP is an excellent platform upon which to build regular websites. I’ve built one that way, and am working on another. It’s also great for distributed website projects such as a student newspaper like the Mountlake Terrace Hawkeye (they’re implementing a WP-based site for the online version of their paper). Student journalists are given “contributor” roles, allowing them to login and write stories (or copy and paste from the printed versions) but cannot publish them. That duty is left to those in “editor” or “admin” roles, who can edit and them publish the stories. The turn-key ability to leave comments is an automatic community for the school to discuss stories (comments should be moderated in that environment, given the penchant of high school students to write something shocking just because). There are many plug-ins to make WP-based sites even more functional, too: online forms, photo galleries, etc.

As I mentioned, this was going to be a weird post.

My wife is participating in the breast cancer 3-Day walk
in Sept. Part of that commitment includes a $2,200 donation for which she’s been fundraising. She and her team, the Wonder Women, are hosting an evening event they’re calling “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas” (that’s “martinis” for breasts—get it?! Har har har…). July 9 should be a very fun evening at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, thanks in part Ruby Shuz, our friend’s band for generously donating their musical services and magician Joseph Réohm for agreeing to perform close-up walk-around magic. So we’ll see you there at 7, okay?!

I agreed to help by designing the event poster that is being posted around Ballard as I write, and will appear on college campuses and other places next week. It’s been a while since I designed a visual document like this so I wanted to share it.

A striking image of a woman with a martini at a party is the basis of the poster (see the full poster here). I ran across it on iStockPhoto while browsing for images with “martini” keywords (and trust me, there are lots). I saw it and thought “perfect!” My Illustrator chops aren’t very good so creating something from scratch would have been very difficult; heck, even modifying any vector image would have tricky, and I didn’t have a lot of time. This image pretty much fit the bill completely.

Using it as the hook upon which to hang the other elements, I dove in. The poster had to include five elements:

1. Title
2. Date and time
3. Location
4. Music and magician
5. Purpose

First, I filled in the bottom portion of the letter-sized page with the same dark burgundy color and decided to reverse all my type (meaning it appears white rather than black). The font is Neutraface Display and Neutraface Text, two excellent OpenType families that have a lot of weights and variation. I didn’t want the bottom to be too information-heavy so I started with the bar across the top of the poster to balance out the bottom. The three items in that list (”Fight breast cancer,” “Have a martini,” and “Rock out!”) pretty much sum up the event.

Next came the title. The image’s composition was perfect for the three-word phrase “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas,” allowing me to position the words in relation to the martini and, er… ta-tas in the image. Perfect. I had a couple of additional visual elements with the Ruby Shuz CD cover and Joe’s image. I played around with the sizing before ending up with the CD cover taking precedence; that is what most people would be interested in, after all.

After some fiddling, I realized the time, date, and location would be lost if they weren’t given prominence. That’s when I divided up the bottom portion into two sections, with information on either side aligned to a thin rule. Neutraface Display’s “titling” weight worked perfectly for the date, and different weights of that font filled out the remaining info: time, day, and location. The Tractor’s icon—<gasp>a tractor!—added another visual element to balance those on the other side.

The two remaining pieces of information, the cover charge and the benefits to Susan G. Koman needed to be included. Adding both to the bottom was too much, so I used a circular callout to display the cover charge and the included martini. The cover charge is very prominent, but I hope the free martini note is also apparent to the viewer due to its proximity to the large $15. The breast cancer pink ribbon and Susan G. Koman name wasn’t really coming together for me, so I decided to repeat a portion of the large image from above as a backdrop for it. It is a bit busy, but I think it works. I again used text on a path to explain what was in the circle… well, an oval in this case as a circle didn’t fit breasts background or suit the wide text-and-ribbon sitting upon it.

That’s the major work, but there were some minor tweaks: lots of spacing and leading (space between lines) adjustments, adding the rounded corners to images, etc. Those with sharp eyes will note the major issue with this piece: the burgundy in the image doesn’t exactly match the burgundy at the bottom and top. I don’t have a vector drawing program like Illustrator so had to rely on Photoshop’s import of the EPS file from iStockPhoto. For whatever reason, the CMYK values in InDesign didn’t create a like color, so I compensated visually. I know it was wrong, but I had to hurry.

Hope you enjoyed this not-so-little explanation of the piece and really hope you can come to the event at 7pm, Wednesday July 9 at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard!

If you’ve never had the pleasure of using a web application by 37signals… well, you should. My first introduction to them was Basecamp, a project-management tool that actually helps facilitate the project. They also offer tools for collaborative writing, information sharing, and customer-relationship management.

The reason I like Basecamp is because the site was clearly designed to work with the web browser. Rather than drowning under tons of images and page loads for every click, it employs a snappy interface relying on true interface design concepts like size, color, and hierarchy. The scriptaculous-style visual cues like fading colors and sliding elements provide a slickness that’s hard not to love.

I mention all that because 37signals recently posted a blog entry about why they don’t use Photoshop to mock-up their interfaces. In my job I’ve had to work with websites “built” by ad agencies in Photoshop and then sliced up into an image-laden table. 37signals’ entry outlines all the reasons why this approach doesn’t work well. To be clear, they’re mostly referring to interaction-heavy web applications rather than interaction-light brochure-style web sites of the sort I’ve been given to publish. But it’s so refreshing to read some of the reasons they present for not using Photoshop when I recall so clearly shaking my head saying “jeeze, why do people build sites in Photoshop?!” For example:

The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web. Once you’re looking at a static Photoshop mockup you can’t quickly change the text without going back into Photoshop, changing the text, saving the file, exporting it as a gif/png/jpg, etc. You can’t post it online and tell someone to “reload in 5 seconds” like you can when you quickly edit HTML. You have to say “Give me a few minutes…”. Also, type in Photoshop never seems to be the right size as type in HTML. It just never seems to feel the same. It doesn’t wrap the same, it doesn’t space out the same.

That’s the reason why, when asked to make changes on such a site, I mentally cringe and think about the time and frustration it’ll cause me to implement those changes. It’s a real mess, but to people just looking at the site it’s not readily apparent—it just looks like a pretty site. The next time this situation arises I’m going to give one of those Photoshop document-to-valid, semantic XHTML from it. Now that’s something I’d like to see.

I admit it. I’m a Facebook fan.

If you’re not on Facebook, you’re one of the few. But, I can’t get too sanctimonious though; I’ve had my account for all of a week now. But I’m impressed.

MySpace may be the older, more well-known social networking site but it’s crap. Since Newscorp bought it, MySpace has been changing for the better but it still sucks—from a development standpoint, of course: Nested tables, no API, and basically a horrible interface. It’s like anarchy.

Facebook occupies the other side of the social-networking coin: it’s like a well-run democracy. What struck me most was the ease and fluidity with which new accounts are made. Enter your name and you’re off. Want friends quickly? Import them from any of the major sites: AOL IM, Google, etc. and Facebook’ll bring them in. Enter your company and/or school and the year you graduated (FB even auto-completes your entries)… bam, you’re staring at the avatars of your work- and classmates. Click them and they’re invited to be your friend. All this is done with such web grace (thanks to graphic embellishments from a script.aculo.us-style framework) that it’s a joy to use.

There are security/privacy issues to be aware of. And the huge advertising dollars at stake. I could go on, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I need to get over to my page and change my status… it’s addictive!

I had an opportunity to waste some time on YouTube today and thought I’d share two very watchable shorts. Both are stop motion and let me tell you, stop motion has come a long way from Gumby.

The first, Tony vs. Paul, is better than the second, My Animated World, both in technical precision and overall story. I’ll wait while you check them out.

Can you believe the time these people spent on these films? That fact alone is worthy of all the praise you can lavish upon them. But add to that the incredible creativity of these guys. I’m not as impressed with My Animated World because it’s a bit jerkier and the story isn’t quite as compelling. But of course you have to respect the old-school Tetris and Snake interludes.There are a ton of other stop-motion films out there worth watching. Maybe it’s due in part to new software tools like Boinx Software’s iStopMotion? Or perhaps it’s just this generation’s abundance of free time? Either way it makes for some watchable content on YouTube.