Archive for June, 2007
Mike Rohde’s Podcast Interview on The Micro ISV Show Friday, June 22nd, 2007 by Mike
A few weeks ago, I was invited by author, micro-business owner and new MakaluMedia logo design client Bob Walsh, to be interviewed on Microsoft’s The MicroISV Show (a podcast for software developers) with co-host Michael Lehman:
It’s a brave new world for MicroISVs in which it’s no longer enough to drag some controls onto a form and simply make sure they’re lined up and the tab order is right. The mantra “form follows function” is becoming more and more important for developers as advent of Windows Vista, WPF and Silverlight once again change the expectations of how customers perceive software. You’ve got to “put your best face forward” and think about design of the user experience right from the beginning.
In this episode, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh talk to Mike Rohde, designer and art director for MakaluMedia, about the changing role of design in software development and how and why MicroISVs must incorporate design thinking into their development process.
Listen to The Micro ISV Show #22 podcast:
• Putting your best face forward - The growing importance of design for MicroISVs
• Direct Podcast MP3 Link (Size: 36MB, Runtime: 40:13)
We had a great time! I had an opportunity to talk a bit about my views on design being more than window-dressing on applications, the importance of starting early with a designer, how to choose a designer, vector-based development tools and how they may effect developers and designers, and more.
Bob worked in questions about my creative process, asked how I generate so many sketch ideas, and even slipped in a mention of my Moleskine Planner Hack project.
Advanced Communications and Collaboration with Drupal Thursday, June 21st, 2007 by info
MakaluMedia has been chosen to become one of a small number of companies participating in an ambitious project aiming to develop and evolve a communication and collaboration platform serving the needs of an international community of intergovernmental agencies and organizations.
The core of the platform is based on the Drupal open-source content and collaboration framework, extended to provide advanced collaborative services such a real-time natural language translation, distributed identification, embedded instant and store/forward messaging, and voice-over-IP (VOIP).
The system allows for technology profiles to be defined in such a way that context specific instances of the platform can be provisioned, tailored and deployed on short notice. Use cases would include instances providing support to educational efforts in Africa, or emergency disaster management support to tsunami relief efforts in Asia.
MakaluMedia’s efforts in the activity include definition and tailoring of the software development process, development in the area of advanced file management, research and development in the integration of instant messaging services, and design & development of the overall platform user experience and interface.
MakaluMedia was selected to become part of this international effort, due to its experience and capabilities in the areas of formal software development related to space ground systems, combined with its activities in the development and advancement of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS).
Zero to Launch in Two Weeks (Rock-am-Ring Photo Site) Thursday, June 14th, 2007 by info
Last week, around Monday or Tuesday, we got an urgent request from our longtime German customer, Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur:
We need a Rock-am-Ring photo upload and sharing site, ASAP!
So we hunkered down, conceived a rough concept, and Alex got to work from scratch designing and coding. About two weeks later, we just launched:
Rock-am-Ring Photo Sharing Site
This site is a good example of the productivity gains that can be realized (by great developers, of course!) with the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
Our new site features include:
User accounts, created from temporary accounts (i.e. every visitor instantly becomes a temporary user, which is migrated when they create their permanent account) with profiles. (This is an innovative technique that we’ll blog about soon.)
User uploading and management of images.
Probably the most advanced file upload interface on the web. You can select multiple files for upload (and we locally pre-filter by image size and type!), and they are sequentially uploaded and processed, with full interactive feedback to the user (You can literally upload hundreds of files at once.) We plan to publish this solution as Open Source.
Photo voting with AJAX (Digg-style, thumbs up/down). Notice we don’t display the count before voting, to avoid bias.
Photo commenting, with email notification, and 30 minute post-editing.
Community-based moderation. If three people mark an image as inappropriate, it’s no longer displayed, and we’re notified to consider suspending the user’s account.
Advanced slideshow viewer, with link emailing.
Photo tagging
AJAX implementation of carousel slider
Automatic creation of multiple sizes of uploaded files
Photo EXIF information display.
Lots of nice lightbox UI effects (signup, login, etc.)
Bilingual user interface (German/English)
Amazon S3 image storage and serving
Multi-tier server architecture
And lots and lots more…
There are still lots of features to add, but the main focus now is on database query optimization, to improve the page load times, and to support the large amount of traffic. (In the first 36 hours, we’ve got 900 images, and serviced 4 million database queries!)
All in all, this was a pretty amazing accomplishment, both in terms of what was produced and the time in which it was produced.
It was also a great (and fun!) team effort. Thanks to:
Alex, for working like a madman to get this designed, and coded in a week and a half.
Niall and Arto, for figuring out how to keep the servers handling the requests.
Christian, for being late to his movie, while providing the German translations.
Alvaro, Martin and Christian, for testing.
Nespresso, for creating the caffeine that kept us going.
Paul Stamatiou’s Logo Design Project Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 by Mike
I’ve just completed a logo design project with tech guru, and fellow 9rules blogger, Paul Stamatiou.
Paul writes commentary and reviews on varied topics with a focus on technology, and has very high visibility on the web. So as you can imagine, I found it a fun challenge to work with Paul.
Below are links to the set of mockups and final art at Paul’s Flickr account:
Paul Stamatiou Logo Design Set
Paul Stamatiou Final Logo Design Spec Sheet
It was fun, and different working with Paul, since he put all of the sketches, black and white and color mockups I did for him on Flickr — as they were delivered — and opened them up for public comments. I’ve not had that kind of in-progress, public critique done with my work before. Paul and the commenters liked the work and through the normal process, Paul selected a final winner.
One advantage to having your client post in-progress to final work posted on Flickr is, prospective clients can see the process, how it works and looks — which hopefully sends them to me and MakaluMedia for their identity design.
All in all, it was a blast working with Paul. I think we’ve found a clean, crisp and memorable mark for Paul to use as personal branding, on the blog and for other things, which makes me very happy.
Thanks for choosing to work with me Paul! :-)
Panoramio (and logo) are acquired by Google Friday, June 1st, 2007 by Mike
Congratulations to my friends Eduardo, Joaquín and José of Panoramio, in the recent Google acquisition of their startup!
From the Panoramio blog post on May 31st:
The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence. We have tightened our relationship with Google Earth more and more in recent months, and at the end we decided to walk one step further. After so much work together, honestly, we couldn’t imagine a better scenario than selling Panoramio to Google.
I was honored to work with “the boyz” back in October 2005, when we created the Panoramio identity (along with two other identities after it, including Cursoo).
I’m very excited for the Panoramio team, and just as excited that the identity work for the project had a small part in helping the team get to the next level.
Congratulations guys! :-)