An app called Stamped launched earlier this week and immediately caught my eye. The concept of ‘stamping’ something you like didn’t wow me, but I did fall in love with the idea of personalizing yourself through a stamp color. Many apps and services these days rely solely on a username and avatar to distinguish users from one another. Because of this, signing up with a new network feels almost routine. When signing up with Stamped, however, I was caught off guard.
It’s not everyday you come across a color picker in a registration form. And the colors you choose carry a significant weight, representing you to others, all the while following you throughout the entire app—on the stamps, on the stamp button, even on embellishments like the horizontal rule of each profile. This experience makes me feel more connected to the app, like I contributed to the design in a small way.
Personalizing each user with their own stamp is strong and I can’t say I’ve seen this before. It’s a unique way of making the user feel comfortable without letting the customization get out of hand. Most of Stamped’s users won’t be designers, but by providing only two variables, it’s highly unlikely someone will pick a color combo that makes the app look bad. And that’s what we should strive for—give the user enough personality to feel a connection without risking degradation of the overall look.
Today, I noticed a Google Analytics widget on fellow co-worker and bearded friend Kurz’s screen. Considering the time it takes for me to check my site’s analytics, I knew I needed one. Though his is simple and to the point, I instead found GAget. It displays the exact info I’m after, contained in a beautiful UI, emphasizing the numbers that matters. If GAget gets one thing right, it’s to include the current day—one downside about the Google Analytics website that still boggles my mind.
Like the rest of the world, I find myself using mobile devices more and more. In the morning, I check Twitter on my iPhone, then I run through the RSS feeds on my laptop when I arrive at work. At night, when I’m working or writing posts, Jen is on the iPad, browsing her favorite websites. All three of these devices have different resolutions and, consequently, different viewing experiences unless the content adapts.
This past week, I spent a few days upgrading Destroy Today to handle these varying resolutions. Sure, I did this to ensure the site reads across all devices, but mostly, I wanted to learn how to do it. I plan to follow this up with a few posts on how to make your own site responsive. Keep an eye out.
I realized recently that I care more and more about household appliances the older I become. To that question, “If your house were burning, which one item would you take with you?”, I’d now say my Dyson vacuum. Everything’s in the cloud these days, so I no longer need my computer, and my cats dart out the door as soon as it’s opened. Getting back to the original purpose of this post, someone decided to reinvent the thermostat. The product is called Nest and it’s a beaut. Living in SF, I rarely have to change the thermostat, but when I do, it’s a nuisance—even using a “smart” thermostats. Instead of requiring you to explicitly set the wake/sleep time for each and every day, Nest learns how you live. Whenever you change it, Nest takes note. As a renter, I don’t see myself picking one up any time soon, but I’d love to see it in person.
I intercepted this video from a Twitter conversation between two Baltimore friends. It’s a hilarious and fun music video for Martin Brooks’ song “Golden Tree.” After watching it, I’m now dying to go home to rural Pennsylvania and ride my bike past all the cornfields. I haven’t tried riding no handed since I was a kid, but I imagine I could add a moves to the list.
If you have any web work in your portfolio, I’m sure you’ve come across this scenario at least once: You need to update all of your images not because the content changed, but because the browser in the screenshot is out-dated. No one wants Netscape Communicator in their 2011 portfolio shots—maybe just me because NC is the bomb-diggity. You can easily avoid this situation by making the window chrome browser-agnostic. I first noticed this trick on Dan Mall’s website. Dan is so baller, he even uses a device-agnostic shell for his mobile work.
Today, my buddy Chris Jennings at Disqus tweeted this gem by Orman Clark of Premium Pixels. It’s a PSD of browser-agnostic window chrome that can be used for displaying your web work—perfect. It’s simple, easy, and subtle enough that it keeps the focus on your work.
Since we’re on the topic of capturing web work, I should also make you aware of Paparazzi, a terrific little OSX app that can save an entire web page as a PNG, PDF, or TIFF. It can also crop or scale a page to a given set of dimensions. Paparazzi combined with Premium Pixel’s PSD makes the perfect duo. I made the dizzying screenshot above using them and it was easy as pie. Now someone just needs to write an app that automatically adds the chrome to the screenshot.
Andy Mangold was originally my intern at a small design studio in Baltimore. Ever since, he’s been one of my closest friends. Now, he’s living the dream, running a studio with his best friends, aptly named Friends of The Web. Today, they launched Quiption, an iOS app that lets you take a photo, place designer type on top, and send it as a postcard, all from your iPhone.
I’ve been beta testing it for a few weeks now and it’s honestly one of the smoothest and cleanest apps on my 3GS. Most apps tend to crawl these days, but Quiption flies, all the while looking good. Friends of The Web partnered with Sincerely to make the shoot+print+ship process effortless. For less than the cost of a store-bought postcard, I was able to send one with my own photo to my parents in under a minute. Money. I can’t wait to see where Quiption goes from here.
The way in which developers can accept payments is always on my mind. It’s mainly out of pure curiosity because the thought of charging for apps brings with it a terrifying amount of responsibility—much more than my 9-2am slot for side projects can handle. Nevertheless, I keep my eyes open for services that might help.
Enter Stripe, a new service that “makes it easy to start accepting credit cards on the web today.” And they’re not kidding—you can get started before even seeing a sign up screen. Stripe supports one-time payments, subscriptions, you name it. It also handles customer and credit card storage using a dead-simple API that “gets out of your way.” I love it. So much that I’m dying to find a reason to use it. Check it out and give her a whirl.
I’ve been experimenting with Rails lately, casually developing a color-centric web app in the after hours. I often brainstorm with my friend and fellow super-burrito-lover, Jungho, and he pointed me to this color tool he swears by, 0to255. I can’t believe I didn’t know about this earlier! I consistently find myself in Apple’s sub-par color picker, sliding the brightness up and down to find highlights and shadows, but I never feel confident in its results. Most of the time, the color picker adapts its hue to normalize the brightness when I return to readjust it. 0to255 addresses all of my qualms, providing a white-to-black fade of any color, with a dead-simple click-to-copy interaction. I also love that its URLs use the hex values (0to255.com/007998 is my jam). A tip of the hat to Shaun Chapman for developing and designing such a killer web app. We can never have too many makers out there.
After speaking at Flash and The City this past June, I had a hard time finding an accurate and easy-to-use service for hosting my slides. I tried SlideShare and Scribd, but both butchered the embedded fonts. I just recently discovered Speaker Deck while checking out the slides from Zach Holman’sHow Github Uses Github to Build Github talk. After receiving an invite and trying it out for myself, I must say I love this service. It processed my slides verbatim and did so with such simplicity, which is their main selling point. So far, my only gripe is that it only supports PDFs, no Keynote yet, but I’m sure that’s on the backlog. Speaker Deck is out of private beta as of today, so sign up and check it out for yourself.
