I’m somewhat of an armchair physicist. I don’t play the game myself, but I read the easier books, and attend the more general public friendly lectures. Today is what one might consider the beginning of the play-offs for physicists (I can’t believe I just used a sports analogy).

Just hours ago, CERN successfully tested their Large Hadron Collider. This test consisted of shooting a bunch of Hadron particles down a -271°C, 27km tube at nearly the speed of light. In the next few weeks they will begin shooting particles down a tube in the opposite direction. These tubes intersect at four points in the circle. When particles reach these intersections they smash into each other. It’s not very much unlike Hot Wheels Criss Cross Crash, accept the Hot Wheels are very tiny, and they are much hotter, and much faster, and there are a whole lot of them.

The crashes are also more frequent and MUCH bigger. In fact, the point of the whole experiment is to recreate the conditions just trillionths of a second after the big bang occurred. Studying what happens to these particles when they smash into each other at such high rates of speed will shed much needed light on our fundamental ideas about the way the universe is and behaves. This research may lead to the discovery of a grand unifying theory for electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity. We may also be able to see dark matter, and discover additional dimensions to the universe. This is a big deal.

This morning, CERN successfully tested the machine in one direction. Next they will test the machine in the other direction, and in a couple of weeks, the collisions begin!

An interesting aside that attests to the infinite world changing possibilities in performing these experiments, CERN essentially created the World Wide Web to provide a more efficient way for scientists to communicate with each other on this project. This project has already changed our world, and they just turned on the machine this morning.

Sometimes I have too many things going on on my computer and need a fresh start. I don’t want to go through every single Photoshop file, Safari tab, iChat conversation, text file, etc. to review changes and individually quit everything. I just want everything to go away. Without saving. And I want my computer to turn off. I want to start over.

Previously when I felt the overwhelming need for an immediate fresh start, I would just hold the power button in for a few seconds. This isn’t very good for your computer, though. It’s better to let each application properly quit and your disk to spin down. So I made an Automator application that does just this.

I call it Kill Start. When you run it, everything dies. No annoying dialogs. No force quitting. No waiting. No apologies. Your computer turns off, and then it turns back on. Anything you failed to save previously is lost forever. Sometimes that is the desired effect. If you ever have this desire, then Kill Start is for you.

Download version 1.0 (279k)

A few weeks ago, Jason Fried of 37signals caused a mild stink by blogging about why his company doesn’t comp their designs in Photoshop:

…we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience. HTML/CSS is real in a way Photoshop will never be.

Be sure to skim through the comments.

One thing I think web developers tend to miss when reading Signal vs. Noise is that 37signals isn’t a web development company, they are a software company. The majority of web developers build custom websites/web applications for clients. 37signals (primarily) makes hosted software based on what they think is useful, intuitive, and powerful. They make the rules, they decide how it works, they get to make it look the way they want it to look. As far as the design of their product goes, they are essentially their own client. Yes, they need to deliver a product that makes their user base happy, but those details are largely usability related, not texture, drop-shadow, serif, help me sell my sunglasses to 20-something surfers related.

I don’t think for a minute that 37signals should cater their blog to web developers, nor do I think they should attempt to clarify this difference in their blog posts (not when posts like the above play off this confusion and increase ad revenue). There is an endless universe of web developer resources online. They are a wholly unique company. If any one company should have a blog that celebrates what makes them unique, it should be them.

I think it’s more important for web developers to remember what they are reading. And for those web developers having trouble remembering why it is they do what they do, allow me to offer my list of why we scrutinize every detail of every project in Photoshop before going to build:

1. Delivering a product that isn’t anything close to what the client envisioned is a product you have to build again. Building a project more than once, but getting paid only once is bad business. In our experience, laying out exactly what the end result will look like weeds out all the discrepancies about how information will be displayed in every possible state. Doing this after the fact can often require significant changes to back-end logic. Changing the format of a date in a smart layer in Photoshop is infinitely quicker than changing database queries, CSS, and PHP/Ruby/Python/C# code, and then changing it back when the client decides they liked it the old way better.
2. Not every client has contracted a website before. Many of them are clueless as to what is even possible on the web, or possible within their budget. “I wanted ITC Berkley Oldstyle for the body type, just like our brochure!” Again, weeding all these limitations out in the design phase is much more efficient that recoding a framework after the fact.
3. The PSD files used to build the site comps can be directly exported for the web to use in the style sheets and as embedded content in the actual site. All of the graphic elements have to be built anyway, and it is much easier to build them in context with each other.
4. Fleshing out various states of a particular element is often critical as well. Not every page we build is static. In fact, no pages we build are ever static. At the very least, each anchor element on an html page will have a hover state. Popup menus, tool-tips, context menus, zooming image widgets, all of these things need to look like something, and their graphic elements need to be created somewhere.
5. Most people like to see site elements a few different ways before deciding on what they want to go with. Often times it’s helpful to see them side by side during this process. Coding three versions of a page and displaying them side by side is not faster than pasting and dragging around a few layers in Photoshop.
6. Starting build before final designs have been approved, and more importantly—signed off on, has cost us more money than I would probably be allowed to say here. It is mostly because of this that I can say without a doubt, not presenting your client with a comprehensive visual representation of what their finished site will look like before build begins could put you out of business.

The look and feel of products like Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack can easily be achieved in strait XHTML and CSS. I can see how jumping right into development builds could be a more efficient way to design those types of projects, especially when you are building on top of a sweet MVC framework like RoR. In the real, non-in-house designer world, however, clients rarely want their websites to look like computer software. Do you think Cuban Council designed Suicide Girls without Photoshop?

Further, you don’t always have control over what platform you are designing for, or what kind of markup you are being handed. Not every platform is as agile as RoR, nor are you always designing a brand new site, its logic or markup structure.

In the past two years, 2 of the 40 projects I worked on actually warranted a simplistic, utilitarian design. Even in these cases, compositions were created in Photoshop or Fireworks first. The simple fact is our clients hire us to design them something, and clients like to change their minds about what information they want displayed where.

I love reading Signal vs. Noise, but it is plainly obvious that 37signals is anything but a web design company.

There has been a lot of discussion round the office about how everyone manages email over the past couple of days. While the basic idea of email is pretty simple, the endless number of tricks people employ to wrangle their inboxes into a manageable state fascinates the ever-loving crap out of me. So I thought I’d share my tricks.

I’m a partial subscriber to Marilyn Mann’s inbox zero methodology. By partial, I mean I don’t really care about having zero messages in my inbox, but I do only turn on my email when I’m ready to go through and process all my new messages. By process, I mean put to-dos in my to-do list, put appointments in my calendar, respond to questions, and/or just plain do what I need to do so that I can delete the message and never think about it again; unless that message contains something I may want to hang on to, in which case I just leave it in my inbox after processing it. When I’m not processing my email, I quit my email program (I use Apple Mail to manage my 3 email accounts on all my computers via IMAP).

I don’t file emails into specific folders. Every email that I don’t delete, stays in my inbox. When I need to find something, Mail’s Spotlight search is 1000x more efficient for me than any amount of filing or color coding. To keep things easy on the eyes, I have a smart folder called Unread with a simple rule:

I use this Unread smart folder as my default email view. I read all of my messages in the preview pane, and have Organize by Thread enabled (this groups all messages by Subject). I keep my messages sorted by Date Received in descending order.

I also have two other smart mailboxes that I use less frequently:

• Flagged - all flagged messages in any mailbox
• Attachments - all messages with attachments in any mailbox

I’ve found that setting aside time to deal with and process email at regular intervals throughout the day has virtually eliminated my need to file or color code them in a way that makes them easier to find, simply for the fact that I have already dealt with them and no longer need to find them. When I do need to find something, a Spotlight query is simply faster than looking for colored subject line in multiple nested folders.

[Update] included some images.

I’ve been building two big ass sites for the past few months that both have auto-play elements on many of their pages. I work best when I can put the headphones on, but when iTunes is your main music source, listening to music isn’t very pleasant when you have audio that starts up every time you re-load a page. During the last phases of front end layout, I often have four or five browser windows displaying content. Multiple instances of the same audio playing at different intervals is horribly annoying, even if it’s a song you still enjoy after the 9000th time you’ve heard it.

My professional recommendation as a web developer is to not auto play media on your page. It’s annoying, it can be jarring late at night, and it can get you in trouble at work. These seem like things you generally wouldn’t want to do to the people supporting your site/business. But the customer is always right, and I aim to please.

Enter Audio Hijack Pro. I’ve been using Audio Hijack to some degree for years to capture audio from various applications on my computer, but until recently, it never occurred to me to use it for controlling live audio—or more accurately, muting the audio of a specific application!

Now that I can mute Firefox, Safari, and my entire virtual Windows machine, iTunes can have free reign of my system without interruption. I only wish I thought of doing this years ago.

Interesting piece by Prince McLean on Apple Insider regarding Apple’s dominance of WiFi market share.

Last week, the analyst told Macworld that the AirPort Extreme lead US retail sales as the top selling router in April

I find this interesting because we’ve been going through some ISP growing pains in our Sac office. We recently switched from an AT&T DSL plan to a plan with a smaller, lesser known company. A few red flags came up with this company when the technicians came in. For one, they were surprised to see we were an all Mac shop. None of them had any experience whatsoever with Macs. Secondly, they seemed to not be able to grasp the idea that the Apple Airport Extreme base station was actually a full-blown network router. Even after showing the technician the configuration screens of the Airport Utility, he still insisted that we get “a real router.”

To appease him, we got the new router and wired it into our network, but promptly removed it once he left. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Airport Extreme base station is a more than capable 802.11n router.

It’s interesting to hear that the Airport Extreme base station is actually the top selling wireless router on the market. Also interesting is that there is actually a fairly successful ISP with no grasp of reality as it pertains to popular consumer hardware in their industry.

We have since closed our account with this company as they were only able to provide us with bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps downstream, and not the 10 Mbps we were paying for. We are now very much enjoying our new 20 Mbps downstream/3 Mbps upstream Comcast cable connection.

Campaign Monitor has published their 2008 Email Design Guidelines.

As with most articles published by Campaign Monitor, this is a must read. To summarize, not too much has changed technically from last year when Microsoft decided to use Word to render HTML in Outlook.

What’s new in 2K8

The mobile market is expected to grow substantially. While the iPhone’s mail client can pretty much handle anything Safari can, Blackberry people will be best served with plain text this year.

Possibly the most important thing to keep in mind going forward is a push by ISPs and email providers to consider relevance as a key part of defining spam. I.e. being more upfront about what kinds of information you will be sending consumers during the signup process, and making good on that promise down the road.

Get up to speed

For those of you that are a little late to the party, it’s important to realize that sending email newsletters is an entirely different thing than making a website. For one, in the US there are federal laws in place that can result in steep fines and prison time for those who violate them. Do I have your attention? Good.

People get lots of email. Most people get substantially more email today than they were a year ago. Not only are email inboxes flooded with email, they are also increasingly becoming a hub for to-do lists, calendar appointments and RSS aggregation. Your email campaigns are competing with quite a lot of information. Because of this, it is important to remember that the primary focus of your email should not be the way it looks, but rather to clearly communicate a message to the reader.

Of course, a big part of clear communication is branding and visual design, but it’s important to know what is appropriate for the medium you are using, and even more important, what is possible with the medium you are using.

General Motors hosting an H2 test drive inside a movie theatre that is showing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would be equal parts inappropriate and ineffective. Sending a PDF file of your entire product catalog to your mailing list would yield about the same degree of success.

Before you send rich HTML email communications to your subscribers, take note of these facts, and then talk to someone with experience.

• Image blocking is the norm. Compose your email with actual text and pretty it up with images that have alternate content. DO NOT rely on images to communicate your message.
• You need to have permission to email people. It’s the law.
• Make unsubscribing easy. This is also the law.
• What is easy on the web is infuriatingly difficult in email. Keep it simple.
• On average, 50% of your subscribers will open your email. 10% will interact with it.
• Most consumers view email in a web client like Gmail or Yahoo!. HTML rendering varies from browser to browser, but more over, from within the web based email client inside the browser. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
• Most business people view email in MS Outlook. Outlook uses MS Word to render HTML. Try opening a web page in MS Word.
• It’s 1000x easier to keep your nose clean using a hosted email service than it is to use software installed on your computer or web server to do it. By keeping your nose clean, I mean not breaking the law and being sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Unsolicited ass kissing

I send close to 50 email campaigns out each year for clients in a wide range of industries, and I use Campaign Monitor for each and everyone. In addition to being light-years ahead of every other email campaign management service out there, they freely publish tips and tutorials for creating effective campaigns that are based on actual test cases and factual information. They have even started a grassroots coalition to improve support for web standards in email clients. If you are not using them to send your email campaigns, you should be using their site to educate yourself. They are the gold standard.

Andy Baio has been making some very interesting charts on music sales from Whitburn Project data recently. Friday he charted One-hit-wonders longevity.

I found the Diversity graph to be the most sobering. Obviously, those who get their music fill from top 40 radio have never been thought of as the most discerning music listeners, but to see that Billboard’s attempt to more accurately record diversity only expose the fact that there is actually less diversity in popular music is a bit of a surprise. Especially when it feels like there are more musical styles getting airplay these days. We didn’t exactly have hip-hop, metal, and smooth jazz in the 50’s.

Billboard charts reflect music sales, and with the decline of music sales as a whole, what’s selling for money, and what’s played on the radio don’t necessarily jive like it used to.

Selling records was a fun little blip in music history while it lasted. I wonder what will come next?

A new article by Jakob Nielsen addresses a couple of usability issues with right-justified menus.

Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.

Jakob Nielsen isn’t exactly qualified to speak on the subject of things looking cool, but the example from the University of Michigan who changed their menu shortly after reading this article is a good example of how to increase usability at the expense of elegance.

When designing for usability and esthetics, I find it most effective to focus more heavily on general typography rules of the print world, i.e. leading, kerning, point size, emphasis, etc. How might you have addressed the scannability and other legibility issues of these menus without ending up with an uglier menu?

There is much to be said for the usability issues of horrifyingly ugly things. A dead ton-ton carcas may be super snugly at night, but I’d still opt for the quilt my grandma made me. Non-antialiased text is my personal festering carcass.

RC Cars perform the Super Mario theme song on bottles. Human beings keep getting more and more amazing. Link via ejb.com (link not friendly for some employers)