February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
1 tag
WatchThis semester at CCA, I’m taking an Advanced Motion Graphics class. This is my first project: a short video which visually illustrates the feeling one gets when going clubbing and drinking, and the night gets crazier and crazier, until it morphs into something that isn’t so fun anymore.
Partying is fun, but it’s important to know one’s limits. I’ve made that mistake...
Lament of the Delicious Librarian →
Jessie Char:
I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to...
January 2012
1 post
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be...”
– Steve Jobs
December 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Enter the Dragon →
Mike Lee:
With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to...
Path's "+" Button →
Rick Fillion:
Details take time. Details are exhausting, and require a ton of trial and error. I spent at least 5 minutes last night just tapping Path’s button again and again looking at the animation to try to figure it out exactly, to figure out why it felt so right. Recreating it would take me much longer than those 5 minutes. This exhausting trial and error is how you can manage to create...
1 tag
WatchSo I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting up pretty much everything else so I could get these done in time. But now that’s over, I’ll finally be able to show off my hard work. This is my final project for my Type 3 class, a class on information graphics.
Dangerous binge drinking in America’s youth is the result of a prohibitionist culture and excessively...
November 2011
2 posts
A Conspiracy of Hogs →
Willy Staley on how McDonald’s essentially transformed being in the restaurant market into being in the commodities’ futures trading market:
At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that...
1 tag
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
WatchFor a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.
1 tag
A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew...
“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s...”
– Barack Obama
“If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles...”
– Zack Morris
September 2011
6 posts
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the...”
– Andy Warhol
3 tags
How to fix the US economy in a week*
* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.
Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.
Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)
Tuesday: Declare...
“There are two ways to strike out: looking and swinging. Striking out looking is...”
– Chad Etzel
Jobs are obsolete
Douglas Rushkoff:
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
[…]
What we...
August 2011
8 posts
“One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the...”
– Dave Winer
“And so, as someone who does a lot of writing throughout my day, having a text...”
– Shawn Blanc reviewing Macchiato
1 tag
What Happened to Obama?
Drew Westen for the New York Times:
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his...
Patrick Rhone reviews Macchiato:
Recently, Ive been taking a tour of various text editors and writing environments in an effort to, well, give them all a fair chance. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m so tied to TextEdit that I far too often give most everything else only a drive-by chance before running back to the comfort and security of what I already know. That said, while I love TextEdit, it...
3 tags
Macchiato
This past June, I attended my very first WWDC. The conference, the people and the parties were all amazing, and it was definitely a highlight. Inspired by the spirit of the conference, and all the new technologies presented, I set out to conquer my laziness and build and ship a new app.
I’m a huge fan of Markdown. So much so that I write nearly everything in it. From emails and notes, to...
1 tag
Marco Arment:
I don’t think the results of the 2012 election will significantly affect the next term: the modern Republican party controls the country’s policy and all mainstream political discourse extremely effectively, even when they don’t hold the presidency or a congressional majority.
I have no idea what the Democrats are trying to do, generally. The only coherent message they’ve...
2 tags
Paul Carr:
To make money — real money — at this game you have to attract millions, or tens of millions, of users. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, it’s literally impossible not to treat your users as pieces of data. It’s ironic, but depressingly unsurprising, that web 2.0 is using faux socialization and democratization to create a world where everyone is reduced to a number...
July 2011
2 posts
4 tags
The Incredible Hypocrisy of Modern Citizens
One thing I’ve noticed about American culture from living in the USA for over two years now is that there’s a deep kind of hypocrisy running through our morals. We condemn many things for being indecent, while we allow much worse things to go under the guise of free speech. Meanwhile, individuals feel an incredible sense of entitlement when it comes to their perceived rights.
One...
Santiago Lema on the business of selling iPhone apps:
The average iOS user has a very short attention span and there are 200 apps that do exactly the same stuff yours does. You have to win at each step, and the decision will be made in less than 60 seconds. Whether you manage to get your app in the Top 50 rankings or your app shows up through search, the same steps apply. Bringing the user to...
June 2011
2 posts
“It’s a lot easier to convince one person you’re worth a million...”
– Yours truly
On Battleships →
Guns that squirted out bullets as heavy as a Volkswagon; 14″, 16″, 18.1″ in diameter! Armor a foot and a half thick! Giant coal and oil burning steam engines creating 150,000 horsepower and belching out enormous clouds of smoke! 60,000 ton craft at 30 knot speeds! Sweet baby Jesus, that’s damn cool. However, it was never real practical, except for the occasional shore bombardment, and for...
May 2011
8 posts
Unknown Author on what you choose to drink:
I like to order Martinis. Sometimes I stick with whiskey on ice. My friend likes white wine.
Apparently these drinks say things about us. They say more than “he likes gin.” They’re easy targets. “That’s an alcoholic’s drink,” I’ve heard. “That’s a girl drink.”
I reject that.
[…]
A drink isn’t a girl drink or a tough guy drink....
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So I got a lava lamp. Using the following image as a wallpaper right now:
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Level 2 Finals
I just finished my second year of Graphic Design at the California College of the Arts. What a relief it is to be done with finals… I really enjoyed this semester—and created some work I’m very proud of—but after 8 months of intensive design school, I’m ready for a summer where I can focus on personal projects and the cool stuff we’re building at Chartboost.
A small selection...
“Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service...”
– Jon Stewart
1 tag
Armin Vit on Khoi Vinh’s argument that sending well-crafted print promo is worthless and wasteful, because they inevitably end up tossed out:
Designers send out printed promos to get your attention OUTSIDE of the internet. They want you to look at the piece of work as an actual physical specimen that demands a different kind of interaction than a webby thing. Whether you toss it or not...
1 tag
I do not pride myself in my skills as a programmer. Complex algorithms scare me, and I stay away from them as much as I can. Rather, what I am good at is creating elegant solutions to problems. I’m good at imagining how things could work together, how something could be improved through programming. I’m good at building real-life products and streamlining processes. Breadth, rather...
1 tag
“I’m sick of charities telling me that by not giving them £10 a month I’m...”
– Stuart Turton
April 2011
3 posts
1 tag
New Apartment
I’ve just moved into a new apartment, and took the opportunity to act upon my love for minimalism in furnishing and designing it.
2 tags
Running a Modern Startup on PHP
I originally wrote this for the ChartBoost Blog.
In the modern world of agile startups and silicon valley, the buzz is all about Ruby, Python, and whatever the latest cool programming language or framework to come out is. Older technologies don’t get much love, and PHP especially has a bad reputation. In this post, I’m gonna go over why and how we use PHP as a modern technology, and...
Stop Panhandling your Ideas →
When most people see panhandlers on the side of the road, we condescendingly think “Why don’t they get a job? You’re not going to get anywhere begging for money. Get to work!” Yet, this is what so many people do with their ideas - they put their fate in the hands of passerby’s hoping someone cares enough to give them a chance. It’s the equivalent of standing on an off-ramp holding a cardboard...
March 2011
5 posts
The Cosmonaut: A Minimal, Wide-Grip Stylus →
A few months ago, right after the Glif Kickstarter campaign ended, I wrote a blog post about how most iPad styluses on the market today follow an incorrect cognitive mapping, in that they try to resemble a pen. The right shape to mimic — to match the low fidelity nature of capacitive touch screens — is a dry erase marker. I of course didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of...
2 tags
MongoModel →
MongoModel is a simple and lightweight ORM for MongoDB and PHP. I finally got around to posting it on GitHub. It’s a simple piece of code, but it’s the backbone for many of my recent projects, including ChartBoost’s entire backend.
2 tags
The Azure License: Meaningful Attribution
I’m updating and re-releasing this from my old blog. Feel free to use the license in any project. No need to attribute me, the license itself is released into the public domain.
Open-source licensing can be a real pain. Some licenses are nearly impossible to decipher, while some (namely—the GNU GPL) are just pure evil.
I have been trying to find a software license which, like the...
2 tags
Meet ChartBoost
We’re a small team of Tapulous alumni who banded together to package up everything we learnt about marketing iPhone apps and turn it into an awesome product. We’ve worked on building, running and marketing hit apps and, through trial and error, figured out what worked and what didn’t. Now, we’re building a service that brings together the best cross-promotion and marketing techniques.
I...
February 2011
8 posts
2 tags
