My first thought after seeing the damage — OK, my second through, first being #$!@&*! — was to contact my good friend Rob Stanley over at AX Micro to see what my options were. Rob and I met back in the day when he got started in his business selling replacement glass for the original Palm Pilots. His business has exploded since then and I figured if anyone knew what my options were, it’d be him.

Thankfully, he quickly responded and explained that the iPhone 4 has the screen married to the glass, so I could just replace the glass, I had to do the whole screen. That explained why the iPhone 4 replacement screen was $99 and the iPhone 3 is $40. I ordered one along with a few accessories and everything arrived last night.

Before I began the take apart, I decided to check out Rob’s take apart video and I have to admit, I have a bit of a doubt. There are a lot of screws and small pieces! The video provides plenty of detail, so I’m going to soldier on and I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Update

Here’s a handy tip. Be sure to order a screwdriver with your replacement screen! Yeah, none of the tools I have in my office are small enough for the little phillips to even begin this project. LOL! So I just ordered the phillips, standard and pry tools from DirectFix, which should arrive next week.

Then I had another thought. We have a company here called iRestore that specializes in iPhone repair and after a quick call they explained that they could repair it in about an hour. I think the price of having them do the work is worth the time it’d take me to do.

Update 2

Two hours later and my iPhone 4 is as good as new. Only cost $40 to have the guys at iRestore replace the front screen while I went to lunch. Totally worth it and if there’s a next time, I’ll just have them supply the part(s) as well.

My First Impressions

Actually, I’m very impressed! After un-zipping the file, I looked high and low for a .readme file, or something providing the instructions of all the plugins I’d need, custom fields, and whatever other errata in order for the theme to work properly. In actuality, all I had to do was simply upload the theme like I would any other theme.

Once uploaded, customizing the theme was a breeze. Most of the settings were in the custom sidebar and all the necessary widgets were already installed. It took me all of 5 minutes to completely customize the site. It seriously could not have been easier.

95% There

Now that the new theme is in place, I’d say I’m a about 95% there. I’m not wild about the headers for each entry and the body type. It’s not horrible, but I’d like to punch it up a bit. Of course that’s easy enough to do through CSS, it’s the other 95% that’s hard and thanks to Themify, that part is already done.

In the meantime, I’ll keep playing around with the new “Post Type” feature in WP and how I can customize MarsEdit to take advantage of some of Wumblr’s additional features.

What Do You Think?

Overall, I was looking for something clean and minimal, but with a nice overall design ascetic. Other than wanting to make a couple of tweaks, I think the new theme is a nice improvement. What do you think?

Tumblr’s built-in themes are great on their own, but then you have designers knocking it out of the park on free templates like Sean Farrell’s new theme Leatherbound, or premium themes like Vintage Scrapbook by Pixel Union and I have to admit to a bit of blog envy.

Tumblr is a simplified tool for blogging, so perhaps I’m drawn to the simplicity of the designs, but I’m having a hard time finding themes on par for WordPress. It’s not that WordPress is lacking in the themes department. ThemeForest recently announced that they now have over 1000 WordPress themes. Sifting through those 1000 designs, I see that many of the premium themes out there are focused on taking your weblog beyond the basic blog. Magazine styles and portfolio styles abound, but none of those fit my needs.

I have a simple weblog and I need a simple, but elegant template. This may explain why designers are drawn to doing Tumblr templates. The format is standardized and simple in nature and doesn’t require that you design with a framework in mind, or with the expectation that — through custom plugins and custom fields — a user will expand your work beyond the basic blog and thereby “break” your design.

Could that be it? Tumblr is easier to design for and that’s why so many designers are trying their hand at it? To test this theory and end my frustrations with my earlier searches, I Googled for “Tumblr WordPress Themes” and was surprised to find a couple of good links with decent resources.

22 Tumblr Style WordPress Themes and Microblog in WordPress with these 15+ Tumblr Style WordPress Themes both yielded some nice designs that were definitely in line with what I’ve run into for Tumblr. Below are a few my favorites:

• LightBright
• Minblr
• Wumblr
• Memoir

With thousands of themes out there both in free and premium models, roughly 25 are in a “Tumblr Style”. That’s not a lot. Maybe I’m an edge case, but Tumblr is clearly capturing mindshare and I have to think that some of it is due to it’s simplicity and great looking themes.

The differences between what I have now and the new 27″ i7 are:

• A processor that is .6 GHz faster
• 2MB less L3 Cache
• Upgraded video card with quadruple the RAM (2GB vs. 512MB)
• HD FaceTime camera
• (2) Thunderbolt connections

Last time it was easy scoff at, but I have to admit that this time has me scratching my head a bit. I even went so far as to price the value of my current machine on Gazelle (screenshot) to see how much I’d have to come up with.

$2,730.16 – New 27″ iMac w/ Tax
$1,132.00 – Current 27″ iMac
————————-
$1,598.16 – Difference

With that much of a gap, it just doesn’t seem worth it for the upgrade. The difference alone is enough for a MacBook Pro.

So do I have any buyer’s remorse? Absolutely not. I’ve had this machine for almost a year and a half and if my 2007 MacBook is any indication, I’ll be using this bad boy for many years to come.

When I switched to the Mac back in 2006 I wasn’t happy with the Mac version and so I continued to use the Windows version. In 2009-2010 I switched to Quickbooks Online because it looked like the product had become more stable and relable.

Why didn’t I get QuickBooks for Mac? Well, for starters it’s almost $200 and (from what I’ve heard) lacks many of the features found on it’s Windows counterparts. Of course QuickBooks Online charges me a monthly fee, so I suppose it’s all the same in the end.

I have looked for alternatives, trust me. I bought Cha-Ching, but they were acquired by Intuit. I signed up for Mint and they too were acquired by Intuit, but they’ve at least kept the service running. Even today, I did a search on AlternativeTo.net, but I just don’t see any viable alternatives.

There are some great invoicing products out there, like FreshBooks, but I need the full accounting package, not just invoicing.

Why am I so down on QuickBooks? Because of a new little gem that happens every time I need to print more than one item. I can consistently crash QuickBooks Online meaning that my browser completely shits the bed and crashes. What special magic does it require? Simply print more than once. Don’t use Safari you say? Well, the same thing happen in Firefox and Chrome as well. It’s a pain in the ass, but at least it’s consistent.

Here’s a video that will show you how the crash works happens.

QuickBooks Online Crash Issue When Printing from Michael Ashby on Vimeo.

I posted a question in the Intuit Community [link] and was surprised that I got a response. Unfortunately, the response was to call customer support. I’ll be sure to get right on that when I have an hour to waste.

In the meantime, if anyone has any other suggestions, I’m all ears.

This really takes me back to my heydays with my lust for Palm and all things clear. And the fact that all it takes is patience and paint thinner is driving me nuts. I can’t tell you how badly I want to run to Home Depot right now.

I’ll keep you posted.

I had a client ask me to walk them through how to import a movie into Apple’s Keynote presentation software. I took the opportunity to use ScreenFlow and play with the new features, like text overlays.

I encourage you to open the video in a new window and then the pop up to see it at full resolution.

If I were to replace my 27″ i7 iMac today, I would get the following:

• A processor that is .13GHz faster.
• Memory that is 266MHz faster.
• An upgraded video card (ATI Radeon HD 5750) with twice as much RAM (1GB).

All-in-all, that’s not a huge bump and certainly one I can live with. This iMac is still the most insanely powerful, gorgeous computer that I’ve ever owned. I often feel unworthy to own such a pristine piece of technology, but there’s no way I’d ever think of giving it up either.

I recently directed the music video for Hot Chip’s “I Feel Better.” Contractually, the video had to be hosted on EMI’s official YouTube channel, which disabled non-UK users from viewing it, limiting its audience by around 80%. Frustrated, I put it up on my own YouTube channel with no region restrictions, and at time of writing is just shy of a million views. EMI then remotely disabled embedding on my version, thereby limiting its audience again. If you’re in the business of promoting a band, why would you want to stop people watching their promotional video? (emphasis added)

What I liked about this article is that it isn’t just another geek railing about how business just doesn’t get it and old people are stupid. Peter is incredibly talented and is a content creator himself — and yet he pirates his own content too!

If you don’t know who Peter Serafinowicz, then here’s a couple of nuggets:

• Played “Sctanley” in the movie Couples Retreat and “Pete” in Shawn of the Dead
• Done some great voiceover work, including Darth Maul from Star Wars: Episode 1 and “The IT Crowd”.
• There’s a nice interview with him from last February on Boing Boing.
• And last, but certainly not least… wait for it… he freaking created “Look Around You“.

If you’ve never heard of “Look Around You”, then go bit torrent it right now! Just kidding. You can watch it on YouTube [link]

I thought it might be helpful to explain the tools behind mashby.com, so below are the four tools that make up my blogging toolbox.

WordPress

At the heart of my tool set is the Content Management System (CMS) that I use to manage all the content on this blog. The software I use is called WordPress.

I’ve written before about how wonderful WordPress is in an article entitle Alchemy In Action, so there’s no need to to repeat myself. However, I will add that since I wrote that over a year ago, WordPress has just gotten better-and-better. It’s an amazing blogging platform and it’s what allows all the other tools I use to really shine.


MarsEdit

As great as WordPress is, I find that I prefer to create my articles in an off-line editor versus creating the posts through a web browser. My tool of choice is MarsEdit by Red Sweater software.

Do I have to use an offline editor? Of course not, but there’s something special about being able to save drafts of posts, or easily format images in software written specifically for the Mac. There are a bevy of features, such as a robust WYSIWYG editor and the ability to have a perfect preview of your article before you publish, but the following are the key features for me:

• Ability to save drafts — I tend to write in fits and starts due mostly to interruptions. With MarsEdit I can save an article I’m working on and then finish it later.
• Easy Image Posting — Posting images is as easy as dragging and dropping directly into the article. The image will upload when the article is published, but I can position it and see what it looks like in preview prior to publishing. Brilliantly easy and this feature alone is worth the price of the software.
• External Editors — I’ll go into detail on this one in the next section, but when I really need to focus, this one little trick is worth it’s weight in gold.
• Support For Multiple Blogs — I actually use MarsEdit for multiple sites, so having one tool to publish from is a big help.

Write Room

Sometimes I need to drown out some of the distractions on my desktop. E-mail, instant messengers, not to mention Twitter can make my desktop a bit of a minefield. So when I need to focus just on the text of what I’m writing, I turn to WriteRoom, by Hogsbay Software.

It may seem like a simple tool, which it is, but it can make a big impact on helping you to focus. Everything drops away behind a solid background and all that remains is the simple text and cursor. The only thing I can focus on is typing. In the immortal words of Stimpy, “Joy!”

Thankfully MarsEdit supports external editors, so I simply select “File \ Edit in WriteRoom” and I’m now in typing bliss. When I’m done, or ready to do some fine tuning with links and images, I simply hit escape, and save and close WriteRoom and everything imports back into MarsEdit.

The process is actually so smooth, you’d think that the two programs were written by the same developer.

Skitch

Last but certainly not least in my toolbox of blogging must-haves is Skitch.

Skitch is a unique imaging tool that lives directly in your title bar. When you need to grab an image, you simply take a quick screenshot and drop it into MarsEdit. It literally couldn’t be easier.

If you need to do some editing, you can resize, crop, add text, or graphics and of course name the file. It’s intuitive and easy to use and best of all — it’s free!

I use Skitch all the time, not just for blogging and I really wish these guys would ask for money. I would happily pay for it and I want to ensure that the program stays around. It’s not a replacement for Photoshop, but for 99% of us image editing mortals, it’s more than enough for what you need.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My complete arsenal of tools and how I use them. Hopefully some of what I shared may be of use to you and may assist you in finding an easier way to manage, edit and publish to your blog.

To show you how all of these tools work together, I threw together a quick screencast so you can see each tool in action. Enjoy.

As you can see from the image above, I don’t qualify for the subsidized pricing until March of next year. QQ

Hopefully the text message above is an indicator that AT&T is looking to be more proactive in customer service.

AT&T has been ranked lowest in customer satisfaction as far as service is concerned. However, 98% say they’d buy another iPhone on AT&T because they’re so happy with the device.

I’m no huge fan of AT&T, but my service here in Nashville has been good and I’ve been happy with the service since I switched from Sprint for the iPhone back in 2007.

They have sent me several text messages (all free) letting me know about my minutes and text messages remaining, which I think is fantastic. The screenshot above shows a text message of a new cell site that’s been installed near my home.

I haven’t had to deal with customer service, but if the above image is any indication of how they’re being pro-active, I’m all for it.

In 1997, I took my first contract as a consultant with the Kansas Building Industry Workers’ Compensation Fund, which was based out of Topeka, Kansas. Wanting to stay in touch with family and friends, I came across an application called ICQ (pronounced I seek you). I was online a good bit, even back then, so when a friend would log on to the Internet I was notified that they were online and I could say “hey”. It was revolutionary at the time and I guess for me it was the Twitter of the late 90′s.

Soon there were copy cats as other Instant Messenger networks entered the market. Each one offered a new feature, or I had a client that used a different network, and thus I ended up joining them all. Fast forward to today and I’m looking at eight different messaging networks that I’m logged into on a daily basis.

• AIM — npugdotorg
• Google Talk — mashby@gmail.com
• ICQ — 12443768
• MSN — ashbygroup@hotmail.com
• Facebook — mashby@gmail.com
• Mobile Me — michael.ashby@me.com
• Skype — mashby
• Yahoo — ashbygroup

Wow. Do I really need to be logged into all these networks? Of course not. Programs like AdiumX (mac) and Trillian (win) make it easy to stay connected, but that doesn’t justify the number of open loops and potential distractions.

So Who Made The Cut?

I use Google Talk for work and it’s my primary IM network, so it stays. Mobile Me allows me to support Mac users via iChat and Skype I use from time to time, so I think both of those will stay as well.

As for the others, I’m canceling my accounts as soon as this article is posted. If you’re on one of these networks, I’m sorry, but feel free to use Google Talk, or send me an e-mail.

What’s Next?

I’m still contemplating other areas of my digital life, such as RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc., but I haven’t finalized my decisions as of yet. When I do though, I’ll be sure to post about it.

Been awhile since I posted a screenshot of my desktop, so I thought it was time for an update. I’ve been on a minimal kick these days, and this is about as lean as I’ve been able to get it.

What’s Different?

• Removed all icons from the desktop.
  I usually have so many apps running, that I can never see the desktop and since I use QuickSilver, there’s rarely a need to click on an icon, so I opted not to have any.
• Removed icons from the dock and set to hide
  Again, since I use QuickSilver, it’s a rare occasion that I need the dock so I remove every icon I could and set it to hide. There’s a closeup shot on Flickr that shows what’s running at start up.
• Removed / Hid icons from the Menu Bar
  I used to have a have a TON of icons in the menu bar. Then the thought occurred to me, “Why do I have so much clutter and distractions?” So I took a look at what I actually needed and dispensed with the rest. The only icon I’m undecided about at this time is the DropBox icon. There’s no way to remove the icon within the app itself, but there is a method to hide the icon.

Last, but not least, the wallpaper is PinPoint by Otis Bee. So there you have it. Way too much detail about my minimalist Mac OS desktop. Enjoy.

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/12/my-desktop-12112009/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/11/been-busy-streaming/ http://mashby.com/2009/11/been-busy-streaming/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:26:43 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=1093 Recently Dan and I have been doing some video streaming gigs with a buddy of ours Nic Dugger. I came across the on demand links on uStream, so I thought I’d share.

Pre-Show: Carrie Underwood at the Grand Ole Opry

Carrie Underwood at the Grand Ole Opry

Jimmy Wayne Live Chat and Performance

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/11/been-busy-streaming/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/10/the-road-less-traveled-e-mail-archives/ http://mashby.com/2009/10/the-road-less-traveled-e-mail-archives/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:39:50 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=1082 I recently upgraded from version 1.0 of the iPhone to the iPhone 3Gs and did so using the “Restore from backup” feature. For the most part everything went fine, but for a couple of security apps that I use, the transition was all but smooth. Without getting too technical, what I learned was that these apps rely on a serial number and when you do a restore, the app generates a new serial number and thus the application no longer works with your account.

After calling tech support, I found that the fastest way to resolve the issue was to locate an e-mail the company had sent me back in 2006 with specific information that would allow them to verify that I was indeed the owner of the account.

That’s when a larger problem reared it’s ugly, ugly head — e-mail archives.

I tend to hang onto things, especially when they are digital because they take no physical space. This is especially true of e-mail. I save every e-mail sent to me and I’ve been doing that from day one. As simple as that may sound, it’s been a long and winding road through a variety of e-mail clients I’ve used over the past 15 years.

As you might imagine, over the past decade and a half and I’ve not always been successful in brining my e-mail archives along with me. I have several “islands” of digital data stored in one program’s format or another. These drives have been pulled from old computers and are sitting in desk drawers, or on shelves somewhere. I could resurface Route 66 with my good intentions of going back to import my e-mail from the old program I was using into the new shiny program that I just had to try.

Right now I’m migrating back to Apple Mail from Postbox and this time I’ve vowed to do things right. I’m taking the extra time to bring my archives with me and it’s a tedious process.

How I Import My Thunderbird (Mac) E-mail Into Apple Mail (mail.app)

1. Run the Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Add-on to shrink down the archive and remove duplicate messages, if any.
2. Break up my yearly archives into quarterly archives so that the file sizes aren’t so huge by moving all e-mails within a specified date range (Jan 1 – Mar 31 for example) into their quarterly folder
3. Right-click each folder I’ve touched and choose “Compact”
4. Find the location of my profile (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/Local Folders/) and drag the archive I’m importing to the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner icon on the dock, which imports the archive into mail.app. I do this one archive at a time.
5. Launch Apple Mail, find the imported folder and choose “Mailbox \ Rebuild” from the top menu
6. Move the imported e-mail to the proper archive folder “On My Mac”.
7. Rinse and repeat as needed

Bear in mind, this process is something that has evolved over time. My first several efforts yielded very poor results, but as I tried one method after another, I whittled away at the issues plaguing me until I arrived at a proper solution that works well for me. As I write this, I’m currently working through my 2007 archives, with 2006 being my last archive.

The real question is how I’ll bridge to my other digital islands and import old e-mails from The Bat! and Eudora. Those are of course in Windows and I’m sure will each yield their own special kind of hell as I tear up the road that led me back to these near-forgotten artifacts.

So What Do You Do?

As the last of my 2007 archive is being rebuilt in Apple Mail, I can’t help but wonder what other people do. Am I alone in not wanting to discard past conversations and hang on to these little tidbits? Assuming I’m not alone, how do you handle your archives? Do you use MailSteward, or similar tools?

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/10/the-road-less-traveled-e-mail-archives/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/08/mashby-version-3-0/ http://mashby.com/2009/08/mashby-version-3-0/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:20:41 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=1059 This weekend I updated the template that I use on my blog. As I’m wont to do, freshening up the site turned my thoughts back to the the origins and history of my blog. Oh what a humble little blog we were back in 2003. Anyway, I decided to do a recap and share my little trip down memory lane.

Version 1.0

After dabbling a little bit with Blogger, I decided to take the plunge and install MovableType on my own server at the end of 2002. After playing with the software and learning how to blog, I officially launched mashby.com on March 1, 2003.



mashby.com v1

The template I ended up using was a Blogger template called Autumn Hues by Martijn ten Napel. I liked that it was a clean design and that it used this new thing called Cascading Style Sheets.

Version 1.1 & 1.2

Over the years, I opted to change the color scheme a little bit to brighten things up a bit.



mashby.com v1.1

Interesting Trivia
I was not the first person to own the domain mashby.com. Seems Marilyn Ashby registered the domain for her real estate business from 2001 – 2002. I picked up the domain in 2003.

I didn’t know this fact until I used the Wayback Machine to find some old screenshots



mashby.com v1.2

Version 2.0

On September 13, 2008, I switched from MovableType to WordPress and switched the design of site while I was at it. I ended up choosing the theme Amazing Grace by Vladimir Prelovac.



mashby.com v2

Besides the fact that it was such a departure from my previous design, what I loved about the Amazing Grace theme was how modern it looked. The design was elegant with lots of color and images. It was such an improvement over the previous version of the site.

Version 3.0

Which brings us to the current version. Although I had been a huge fan of the “Amazing Grace” theme, after all my tinkering and futzing about, I felt it was a little too busy. I was looking for something cleaner and more focused on the text of the entry.

Here’s a list of the themes that caught my eye:

• BlogTheme by Woo Themes
• Elegant Grunge by Michael Tyson
• Manifest by Jim Barraud
• Fontella by Horacio A. Bella
• Typography by miloIIIIVII
• Typographby Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Now that I’ve done this retrospective, it’s kind of funny to see that I my initial motivation was to move back to a typography based design. Forgetting that this is how the blog was originally designed.

Ultimately, I ended up choosing the theme OneRoom by Jeremie Tisseau. What drew me to this theme was the coloring and the clean lines. The copy takes center stage and then the left and right columns support the articles without pulling too much focus.



mashby.com v3

While I implementing the new template, I decided to simplify the extra bits that I had in the sidebars and take away as much as I could. Hopefully I’ve reached my goal and implemented a tight, clean, focused layout and design that makes reading these little missive’s a little bit easier.

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/08/mashby-version-3-0/feed/ 6 http://mashby.com/2009/07/wordpress-iphone-application/ http://mashby.com/2009/07/wordpress-iphone-application/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:56:25 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/2009/07/wordpress-iphone-application/ Following a link from Matt’s Twitter feed, I discovered that WordPress has an iPhone app and I just HAD to test it out.

It has a ton of cool features, such as: support for multiple blogs, posting photos, and moderatation of comments just to name a few.

I’m just getting into it, but I have to say I am very impressed. And this is my first post from the WordPress for iPhone app.

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/07/wordpress-iphone-application/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/06/seinfelds-take-on-mobile-devices/ http://mashby.com/2009/06/seinfelds-take-on-mobile-devices/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:12:49 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=590 There’s been a lot of chatter in my world regarding mobile devices recently, what with the new Palm Prè (and no, I’m not creating another Palm User Group) and the new iPhone 3 GS. With all the focus on specs and how-it-all-works kind of stuff, it was nice with I came across this video, where Seinfeld talks about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Crackberry, or iPhone nut.

Thanks Charlie for the link!

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/06/seinfelds-take-on-mobile-devices/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/05/little-bits-of-brilliance/ http://mashby.com/2009/05/little-bits-of-brilliance/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 18:23:32 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=588 Dan sent me a link in IM this afternoon that turned out to be quite the find. He said he was searching for the domain gumbydammit.com to see if it was available and surprised to find that it redirected to a blog entitled Ensuite at www.neodorks.com.

The blog is comprised of very short entries that almost come off as jokes from a FOO stand up routine, if it weren’t for their somewhat elitist tone. Being somewhat elitist myself, I found nearly every entry a riot, but a few were real standouts.

Ready?

We flew in to San Francisco as we’ve done a dozen times over these past few months.

Our tiny jet is more a floating foyer than a formal jetliner and, at 40,000 feet, the rules and conventions of commercial air travel simply do not apply.

“I’ll bet I could get that door opened before you could kill me,” she said in a voice that she would likely have described as playful.

I finished my scotch, turned my seat toward hers, and unbuckled my restraint.

“Ready?” I asked.

I’ll bet we never speak of this again.

It appears that several people write for the blog and it’s full of little tidbits of clever conversations. Conversations where the writer has the perfect comeback that most people think of 10 minutes later. Check it out, it’s worth the read.

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/05/little-bits-of-brilliance/feed/ 0 http://mashby.com/2009/05/alchemy-in-action/ http://mashby.com/2009/05/alchemy-in-action/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 19:47:16 +0000 Michael Ashby http://mashby.com/?p=586 I switched from MoveableType to WordPress back in September of last year and it’s been one of the best decisions that I’ve made regarding this blog. WordPress is just so much easier and, dare I say, FUN to use. There’s a richer developer community, more templates and generally more help out there than there is for MT. But my joy with working with WP over MT is more than just skin deep.

The feature set of MoveableType and WordPress are virtually the same. I really haven’t found where WP does something that MT can’t do, or vice versa. The difference is HOW each product approaches publishing online. There is something distinctly different in the WP approach that makes it much more accessible. It’s not just in the user interface, or the fact that WP uses PHP instead of PERL — it’s how the entirety of the application has been designed and you have to experience it to understand it. WP is just a much more coherent approach to publishing. It works better, it feels better and it helps me publish to the point that the tool actually disappears from my perspective. MT, on the other hand, feels more like I’m trying to pull a donkey up a hill. I’m constantly having to fight against the program to complete the task at hand.

These differences were recently brought to my attention as I compared how SixApart and Automattic addressed adding Social Networking to their product lines. Products like FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube have changed how people market their sites/products/services online. It’s now common practice to promote through all of these channels to draw traffic to your site, but there’s a new trend on the rise that is looking to reverse that process.

The new question that is being asked is “Instead of going out to these various networks, why not have them come to us?” In answer to that question, SixApart has released Motion and Automattic has released BuddyPress.

At first glance they may look similar, but as you dig into it, it’s clear that BuddyPress has a much more coherent approach and is easier to understand. When I first watched the video for Motion, I kept going “Huh? How am I supposed to use this?” If you take a look at the Motion Demo, you’ll see what I mean. It’s just a pile. In my office, we have a nickname for Facebook. We call it FacePile, because it just dumps a pile of various and sundry information at your feet. Motion does that to an even greater degree. After looking at the demo, the only feeling I’m left with is “Why?” Why would someone want this on their site?

Then you take a look at the BuddyPress Demo and there’s a remarkable difference. It’s clearly designed to mirror the FaceBook style of community, but it’s cleaner and clearer as to what you can do and how everything works. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a better design that FaceBook! I’m currently developing a new community web site and I actually had to stop and think about BuddyPress for quite some time. So at the end of the demo, I’m left thinking “How would I use this?” Not, “Why would I use this?”

So What’s Your Point?
Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is work with users and distill down complex technology systems into plain english for my clients, friends and family. I guess you could say that I live in the world of interaction between user and interface.

So often when I’m talking with a developer and the subject of UI comes up, they just roll their eyes and dismiss it out of hand. Since it’s not quantifiable and algorithmic, it gets treated like alchemy — which perhaps is right — but the attitude is one of disdain and frustration, not of respect and appreciation.

Add to this equation the fact that I’m not a designer, so my vocabulary is a little limited when describing systems and UI. Then along comes two answers to the same question and I can finally point and say, “Do THAT, not that.” and I find that a little exhilarating.

This example also reminds me why I enjoy WordPress so much and why moving away from MovableType was such a good decision.

]]> http://mashby.com/2009/05/alchemy-in-action/feed/ 6