Creative Community Bulletin 09 July 2009 Through 28 January 2010

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 09 July 2009 through 28 January 2010:

  • Exhaustive A‑to‑Z cov­er­age of Apple’s #iPad announce­ment – The announce­ment of Apple’s new iPad has every news out­let, blog, and tech geek talk­ing, but keep­ing track of all the lat­est announce­ments and reviews could leave your head spin­ning. Luckily, we’ve col­lect­ed a mega list of the web’s best iPad-related links. Check back through­out the day as we con­tin­ue to update and be sure to check out the all new ipad​.all​top​.com.
  • Avatar is actu­al­ly only the 26th biggest movie ever – # “Gone With the Wind” (1939) 202,044,600
    # “Star Wars” (1977) 178,119,600
    # “The Sound of Music” (1965) 142,415,400
    # “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) 141,854,300
    # “The Ten Commandments” (1956) 131,000,000
    # “Titanic” (1997) 128,345,900
    # “Jaws” (1975) 128,078,800
    # “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) 124,135,500
    # “The Exorcist” (1973) 110,568,700
    # “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) 109,000,000
  • Take a Step Toward a Sustainable Household: Opt Out of Phone Book Delivery – Nick Welch (@bunengine), a con­sci­en­tious Portlander, con­tact­ed Mayor Adams through Twitter last week to ask a sim­ple ques­tion: “what if I don’t want these annu­al deliv­er­ies of mas­sive phone books at my doorstep?”

    I called the nice peo­ple at Dex (there’s an office in Beaverton, which can be reached at 971.732.1589), and learned that opt­ing out of this deliv­ery is real sim­ple. I just did it! Details below:

  • The World’s Dirtiest Hotels in 2010 –
  • Why It’s Better To Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers (Cartoon) –
  • 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee –
  • How to use a semi­colon (car­toon) –
  • Creditworthy? Lenders Delve into Your Social Networks – Creditors are check­ing out what you post to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. They’re check­ing out who your friends are and who the peo­ple are in your net­works.

    The pre­sump­tion is that if your friends are respon­si­ble cred­it card­hold­ers and pay their bills on time, you could be a good cred­it cus­tomer, accord­ing to CreditCards​.com.

  • The View from Adobe and the Field re: Discontinuing the Print Service Provider Program – While there are like­ly good finan­cial rea­sons for ter­mi­nat­ing the pro­gram, it might have been more ben­e­fi­cial to Adobe to wait until a full tran­si­tion plan was in place and ready to be rolled out before mak­ing the announce­ment. Leaving all of this uncer­tain­ty float­ing about in the indus­try is not a good thing for Adobe and its rela­tion­ship with an indus­try that has unar­guably brought many ben­e­fits to Adobe.

    Meanwhile, we are wait­ing for the next shoe to drop and will con­tin­ue to inform our read­ers as new infor­ma­tion becomes available.

  • Adobe, you’re break­ing my heart – Printing Industry Analysis from WhatTheyThink – “We expe­ri­enced an improve­ment in cus­tomer demand for our prod­ucts in Q4,” said Shantanu Narayen, pres­i­dent and CEO of Adobe. “We believe the invest­ments we have made in the past year, and the new prod­ucts we will deliv­er in the com­ing year, will dri­ve top line growth as the econ­o­my improves.” I am sor­ry to tell you this, sir, but when you lose print, you will lose the heart and soul of your com­pa­ny. Please do not have your PR folks inun­date us with false promis­es to con­tin­ue to sup­port print. Actions speak loud­er than words.
  • BumpTop 3D desk­top enhance­ment: Organize, cus­tomize, be pro­duc­tive – BumpTop™ is a fun, intu­itive 3D desk­top that keeps you orga­nized and makes you more pro­duc­tive. Like a real desk, but bet­ter. Now with awe­some mouse and multi-touch gestures!
  • History of Desktop Publishing Software, a Timeline by Pat Marchese – History of Desktop Publishing or DTP software -
    Aldus, Adobe, Macromedia and Quark – 25 years in the making…
  • DTP History: Quark and Font Wars – Last blog I men­tioned own­ing a 20 MB ser­i­al hard disk from Quark. In case you did not notice, that hard disk was made by the same com­pa­ny that even­tu­al­ly sold the page lay­out soft­ware Quark Xpress. Yes it’s true – before Quark sold XPress they made hard disks.
  • Beautiful Typographic Business Cards – There is some­thing tru­ly fas­ci­nat­ing about beau­ti­ful busi­ness card designs, I can look at them for ages in awe of their respec­tive sim­ple and some­times com­plex designs. Having a beau­ti­ful­ly designed busi­ness card get have last­ing effects on your busi­ness. I for one have a huge col­lec­tion of busi­ness cards that I keep to build con­tacts and pro­vide visu­al inspi­ra­tion. In this post I am going to focus on typog­ra­phy in busi­ness card design.
  • Funniest Unofficial Star Wars T‑shirts | #StarWars – Who’s Your Daddy Tee

    Who’s Your Daddy Darth Vader

  • A List Apart: Articles: The Four-Day Week Challenge – And then it hit me: there will always be more to do. Working more won’t change that. In fact, work­ing more is actu­al­ly counter-productive. I was start­ing work every­day at 5:30 AM and work­ing till 10:00 PM, but I still wasn’t done with every­thing. If I was work­ing those extreme hours and still couldn’t keep up with my to-dos, then clear­ly work­ing more wasn’t the solu­tion.

    The prob­lem wasn’t a time issue, it was a men­tal issue. I knew I had a whole week to fin­ish my work, so I spread it out over five (or sev­en!) days. If I knew I only had four days to fin­ish a whole week of work, it would’ve moti­vat­ed me to get things done more efficiently.

  • How to Lose Followers – There are a lot of ‘how to’ guides on how to gain fol­low­ers and become more pop­u­lar on Twitter. Being pop­u­lar is very last cen­tu­ry of course. In the future pri­va­cy, dis­con­nect­ing and silence will become hip again.

    At least, that is what some peo­ple pray for.

    For those of you who get ner­vous of a crowd of hun­gry atten­tion seek­ers con­fronting you with every update you post, or a lack of updates, here is a guide on How to Lose Followers

  • 4 Easy Ways To Manage Twitter Followers | Matt Singley – Since I’m into orga­ni­za­tion, espe­cial­ly with email, I thought I would share with you my strat­e­gy for sort­ing and fol­low­ing back those that choose to fol­low me.
  • How to Unfollow on Twitter with Class – All you need is a sim­ple state­ment of why you will, or will not, fol­low some­one. While some feel any pol­i­cy is too much, I’ve found hav­ing a Following Policy allows me to both clar­i­fy what I want to get out of the rela­tion­ship and allows me to set some “ground rules.” I’ve writ­ten pre­vi­ous­ly about estab­lish­ing a Following Policy here on Twitip. Also, you can use my per­son­al Following Policy as an example.
  • Chrome OS for the clue­less: What it means for real peo­ple – CNET News – What does this mean to peo­ple who are think­ing about buy­ing a new com­put­er now, or next year? Is the Chrome OS some­thing to get excit­ed about, or even wait for?

    We won’t know for sure what the oper­at­ing sys­tem looks like until it comes out, which answers the sec­ond ques­tion hand­i­ly: do not wait. If you need a new com­put­er now, spend the mon­ey and get the use out of the machine while Google fig­ures out how and when to get the Chrome OS out the door.

    But to the oth­er ques­tion: yes, this is very inter­est­ing, and poten­tial­ly could cause some trans­for­ma­tions in the com­put­er indus­try, although they may be more sub­tle than Google–and Microsoft’s detractors–hope.

  • Get your own super-thin spokesper­son – CNET News – A new dig­i­tal dis­play tech­nol­o­gy is turn­ing heads at the International Stationery and Office Supply Fair in Japan. While not yet mass-market, this type of dis­play could cer­tain­ly liv­en things up at home or in the office.

    As trans­lat­ed by Pink Tentacle and found on Robot Watch: “This eye-catching dig­i­tal sig­nage sys­tem con­sists of a 0.3‑millimeter-thick high-luminance rear-projection film (Vikuiti Rear Projection Film devel­oped by 3M) applied to a 3‑millimeter-thick glass sub­strate cut into the shape of a woman. A rear pro­jec­tor beams video onto the film, whose microbead-arrayed sur­face pro­duces a crisp, bril­liant image view­able from any angle, even in bright­ly lit environments.”

  • SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers – SlickMap CSS is a sim­ple stylesheet for dis­play­ing fin­ished sitemaps direct­ly from HTML unordered list nav­i­ga­tion. It’s suit­able for most web sites – accom­mo­dat­ing up to three lev­els of page nav­i­ga­tion and addi­tion­al util­i­ty links – and can eas­i­ly be cus­tomized to meet your own indi­vid­ual needs, brand­ing, or style pref­er­ences.

    The gen­er­al idea of SlickMap CSS is to stream­line the web design process by automat­ing the illus­tra­tion of sitemaps while at the same time allow­ing for the pre­de­vel­op­ment of func­tion­al HTML navigation.
    Features and Benefits

    * Eliminates the need for addi­tion­al software
    * Easily revised with clients on-the-fly
    * Clickable anchors with vis­i­ble URLs
    * Design process results in work­ing HTML code