Monthly Archives: July 2007

One Percent for the Planet

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We’ve recently joined One Percent for the Planet, a group of businesses that donate 1% of their slaes to environmental organizations worldwide. In the past, we’ve given to local and national organizations here and there. Most of these donations were spurred by one-time occurances, such as Katrina. One Percent for the Planet is somthing altogether new and different for Needmore – it is a way for us to not only raise awareness, but also to make a commitment to ourselves and the environment that is directly tied to the work that we do.

The list of supported environmental groups is astounding and constantly growing; everything from Global warming to Portland organizations such as Ecotrust and the Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation are represented. What environmental group or cause is close to your heart?

Best of Portland 2007

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We were genuinely surprised to find Needmore Designs listed in the local weekly magazine Willamette Week today as one of their Best of Portland picks for 2007.

If you’ve spent any length of time perusing local websites, you’ve undoubtedly seen the work of Needmore Designs. Kandace and Ray Brigleb started Needmore in 2003, beginning with Stumptown Coffee’s site, and have steadily grown their business with such clients as Amy Sacks Eyewear, Masu Sushi, The Burnside Review , Literary Arts and Viso Beverages….

Thanks for the mention – we are quite honored.

 

Going to Las Vegas

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Well, it looks like we’re leaving this morning for Las Vegas. We’ll be back in the office on Tuesday. See you next week!

Las Vegas in Legos

(more Lego pix here!)

Happy Thoughts Only, Please

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I had the oddest experiences with AT&T today. I phoned them to adjust our iPhone plan (1500 text messages is way over our need). At the end of my conversation with a customer service rep, I was asked how I would rate my satisfaction with the phone call. This wasn’t an automated survey; I was to verbally tell the person I had been talking to my rating. The service went well and I was happy to give a good rating, but was doubtful I would feel comfortable rating someone poorly over the phone.

It doesn’t appear AT&T is interested in the poor ratings anyhow. Coincidentally, I phoned the same division at AT&T earlier today. I had such a difficult time making changes with them that I decided to wait to make plan changes until later, when I could call back and try to get a new representative. During this unpleasant call, I was not asked to rate our conversation.

If AT&T is interested in hearing about positive customer experiences only, they miss out on tremendous opportunities to improve! In our own project end survey, we’ve learned a great deal from clients who have answered the questions How did you like working with Needmore Designs? How could we improve? For example, while we are usually applauded for our quick communication, we’ve had a couple clients mention that they would have liked to talk more to us over the phone (or in person) rather than via email, etc. We took this to heart and began to keep our phones handy for more frequent chats throughout projects. Without this valuable information, we would be much less likely to find out what more we can do right.

On Viral Marketing

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ECCNApple posted a trailer this week for an upcoming, yet-unnamed movie, which has created quite a buzz. Part of the buzz has to do with its creator, JJ Abrams, also the creator of the TV show Lost. And part of it is that the trailer is pretty awesome in and of itself.

Also appearing were some related sites which seem to offer clues about this mystery movie. It’s all very interesting, and about as viral as it gets, and others have analyzed this much more than me.

However, these things remind me of something I wanted to do about a decade ago. Back then, I was working for a company in Santa Cruz called “Osiris Studios” that developed computer games. I only lasted there about nine months, but at one point we were talking a great deal about computer game ideas. One of my ideas hinged on our ownership of the domain coincidence.net (now owned by the former principal of Osiris Studios, Quinn), and a “viral” game I wanted to base around the Internet.

My idea was that the game would actually take place over the course of a year or two, in real time, and involve a large number of websites around the then-young Internet. Finding and correlating these “coincidences” is how you advanced in the game. The ideas were very inspired by the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, to whom we actually pitched some of these ideas.

Alas, it was not to be, and Osiris decided to pursue more traditional games – a bicycle racing game, at the time. I don’t blame them, since none of us could really figure out how to monetize these ideas. But since then, I’ve seen many of the ideas we had back then come to life, and I love it.

In fact, this inspired me to dig up an old archive of the coincidence.net site, circa 1998, when it was my little web playground. It’s kind of strange, and many of the links won’t work, but you might enjoy poking around. It’s a little piece of history. (Click around a bit, I wasn’t so into obvious links in those days…)

Love is a Balancing Act

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Join us 7:00 pm this evening as we take part in a PDX Web Innovators panel discussion on balancing client work with your own projects. We’ll be joined by our friend Peat (of Blue Hill Solutions) who teamed up with us in 2006 to co-create Cuppin, our coffee tasting site.

Get a leg up by reading about our recent client and internal projects (and hear about our most recent love affair) in our July newsletter

FOSCON 2007

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Yesterday afternoon we designed a logo and simple website for the FOSCON 2007 event coming later this month (July 24th) at Holocene.

Once again the Portland Ruby Brigade will be hosting an evening of wide ranging talks about Ruby. This year the focus is on people doing strange things with Ruby. Strange, of course, is anything just a bit outside the expected. If you’ve created a new Ruby-based interface for hacking your brand new internet-enabled phone (rPhone anyone?) or composed your latest bit of metaprogramming magic, we’d love to hear about it.

If you’re interested in Ruby (or even just Ruby on Rails), we hope to see you there. The event will be free, although you may well have to buy your food and drinks, but Holocene is a really fun place that’s not too far from OSCON 2007!

Read more about FOSCON 2007

An IDE for the iPhone

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The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

This is really nice. I was first introduced to this in May, at RailsConf 2007, and I was impressed. I was even more surprised yesterday to learn that they’ve already added iPhone support, as well. I’m an avid TextMate user, but I’ll give it a try.

Flash and the iPhone

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I think that Apple made the right decision, as a company, to exclude Flash from the iPhone. And this is coming from someone who largely develops Flash websites for a living! But let me explain a bit more about my thoughts.

When we develop Flash websites, we typically fix our designs on a dimension that is intended to fit the sweet spot that the largest number of computer configurations, including the largest percentage of host operating systems, largest percentage of screen sizes, and largest percentage of Flash versions are comprised of. These are very much designs that are squarely aimed at “the average PC.” And why shouldn’t we? We want as many folks as possible to be able to enjoy a Needmore site.

When faced with a mobile device, with a dramatically different screen size and category of hardware, you just can’t possibly see the same thing. There aren’t enough pixels, and with many of our designs, every pixel really does count. You wouldn’t be able to read the text without a lot of pinching and zooming. No fun.

This is precisely what the QuickTime video experience on the iPhone circumvents. The most popular use of Flash on the Internet is for video (YouTube alone probably seals the deal here), it is almost the “Microsoft of the in-browser video experience.” Would it really be in Apple’s best interest even to allow this to extend to the new category of mobile devices that they themselves are pioneering?

Apple aims for the high end, as a company. They have brought the best quality of all kinds of media to the largest number of people in the history of computing, between their QuickTime technologies, the iTunes Music Store, and their affiliations (via Steve Jobs) to the entertainment industry at large. They want this market. They have a rather convenient opportunity to exclude Adobe from the party, and perhaps they’re taking it.

Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices.
– Roughly Drafted