Be sure to visit Apple’s profile of Takagi Masakatsu in the Apple Pro section of their website. Masakatsu is a visual artist and musician who creates beautiful, liquid videos, filled with motion and sound. The sample videos are lovely and inspiring.

TED is an annual conference about technology, entertainment, and design. The talks are often legendary, and this year, for the first time, they’re offering free video downloads of many of the speakers. And they are amazing, and inspirational.

Do yourself a favor, and go watch them all. Sure is cheaper than the $4,400 admission.

Tomorrow kicks off Portland’s Webvisions conference. To start off the festivities, the Portland Web Innovators will be hosting a get-together 7 p.m. at The Rose and Raindrop (details). This is an informal group of people fired-up about being innovative online. Sound fun? Come on by!

I was recently asked if we came up with the idea of our client survey. Truth is, many examples of surveys can be found; we found inspiration especially in Kelly Koto’s Web Redesign 2.0 and example client survey.

However, designers often put simple contact forms on their websites, leaving potential clients without a way to start getting themselves together. What information do they need to gather before contacting you? What should they be thinking about? It is not just designers that can benefit from client surveys; check out this photographer utilizing a client survey adapted from ours.

An excellent resource for creating these surveys (and tracking answers) is Woofoo, an online tool that helps anyone build and host amazing online forms. What particularly draws me to this application is that, as a designer (with a free account), I am able to create the code for a form and then use it on a site. Handy!

If you often find yourself commenting on other people’s blogs (and there are many good reasons to do this), then check out Commentful:

Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr pictures, and many other types of content.

After a couple days of using Commentful, I’ve it intuitive to use and a great help in keeping tabs of online discussions I’ve joined (the Firefox plug-in is a must – a small yellow circle glows at you whenever watched blogs have new comments. And, Commentful is free!

The major drawback is that watched posts automatically expire after 3 days. So, it is not currently useful for, say, watching comments here on Needmore Notes. I have a hunch that this limitation won’t last for long. Since Commentful is in beta, I wrote to inquire about adding paid subscriptions without expirations.

[UPDATE] Heard from the nice folks at Commentful. The 3 day limit is only for a short test period and limits will be soon (this is still free). It appears that there are no current plans for a paid version.

Ex novo has posted a great collection of Spanish ads on Flickr. Beautiful. Also, you may want to visit this collection of pages from the Russian magazine “USSR in Construction,” mostly done in the 1930’s.

(As seen on Three Minds and Signal vs. Noise)

Coming in fast on the heels of last week’s two site launches, Needmore presents the website for 360° Photographics, designed to interact with clients from initial contact (via client survey) to presenting groups of Quicktime tours. Not only did Needmore design and produce a modern updateable Flash portfolio, we also created a Rails-based administration area for creating and managing the panoramic tours.

With clients such as the Coachella and Bonnaroo music festivals (as well as Portland’s own Masu Sushi), we’re looking forward to seeing what is next from 360° Photographics.

I like a lot of the ideas behind Apple’s .Mac service, but the service itself is quite frustrating. The file storage is awkward, seems a bit slow and buggy, and with only 1 gigabyte of capacity, seems rather behind the times at this point. The .Mac service handles email, bookmarks, contacts, and so forth via a web interface, but it’s a poor and dated interface, and others such as Google have long since shown how backwards it is.

Yet there’s so much potential here. The file browser is hardly even useful. Integration is awkward. You can share calendars, but only one person can edit one. What if I want to tag or share any event or file or contact on a whim? And I’d sure love a way to view my keychain online.

Enter Joyent. While still in its early releases, and has quite a few kinks to work out, they are so on the right track. They bring an outstanding knowledge of networking infrastructure, courtesy of TextDrive, to the table. They also bring a well-designed, modular Rails application to the web, which integrates with IMAP email technologies, among other things. If you haven’t seen what it can do, be sure to have a look.

So why doesn’t Apple consider buying Joyent? I personally have no idea if it would work for either of them, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. It might take a bit for the .Mac customers to get used to it, but it’s so far and away better than what Apple has now, I think people would fall in love with it quickly. This move would bring Apple up to speed with their web interface, and make using the website to get to your information a viable option. And imagine the Strongspace-like view of your backups!

And I’m sorry, but WebObjects (the platform .Mac is based on) has fallen too far behind from neglect and disuse. Rails is where it’s at!