The portfolio, resume, and blog of Nathan Chase
1 Aug 2008
My wife and I welcomed our new son, Cameron Alan Chase, into the world on Tuesday, July 29th at 8:24pm. Thanks to the aid of several web-based applications, we were able to quickly announce to the world our exciting news in a lot of really effective ways. For other parents-to-be, here’s a quick guide to the fantastic services we used to share our excitement:
28 Jul 2008
Now that music has become mostly a commodity in the minds of consumers, music industry companies are having to think of new solutions in order to stay relevant and profitable. While they struggle to figure out how to reach those consumers, companies like Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker are exploring today’s real innovation in music - customized and personalized listening experiences.
While all three services offer their own unique implementations of online radio, there are a number of ways that each solution trumps the rest in features and user experience. Let’s dive in to a comparison and find out what makes these services so slick:
27 May 2008
I recently started a Twitter discussion with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on the relevance and usefulness of the <small> tag. I’ve had this same debate with co-workers on why one would still use <small> over just using a <p> or <span> with an appropriate <class> or <id> to define the “smallness” of the tag. The one thing we both noticed is that no one uses the <big> tag anymore, so why should anyone use the <small> tag? This seems to be only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining which element to use for an intended result. Let’s look at a few more instances of controversy in the realm of standards and semantics on the web.
9 May 2008
Ever wished you had one place to test your web designs in all browsers easily? Well thanks to IETester, it’s now possible to check your work in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Beta (and even IE 5.5 for anyone still living in the year 2000). It’s still in alpha, so it has occasional crashes, hiccups, and limited browsing functions. In spite of this, the app in its current release is already incredibly useful. The developer has a forum set up for feedback and bug reporting as well which should hopefully keep the project moving forward.
With IETester combined with VMWare Fusion, I can now test my work on my Intel Mac in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox without having to resort to remoting to other machines, using slower web-based visual checks, or using Virtual PC to test multiple IE versions anymore. It’s a fantastic setup.
Now if only there were conditional comments, and a version of Firebug for IE and Safari… Hey, a web designer can dream, right?
27 Apr 2008
credit: CATR
Twitter is now all the rage. Your friends are doing it. Your mom is doing it. Even educated fleas are doing it. Microblogging is here to stay, and it’s caught on in a big way. According to Wikipedia, there are over 111 different ways to let everyone know what you had for breakfast online! Now the question is - how do we update them all at the same time?
18 May 2007
Well I have decided (in less than 1 day) to return the Helio Ocean.
It has some really nice things going for it. The next Sidekick could benefit from incorporating the following features:
Now for all of the things that convinced me immediately that the Sidekick 3 is a superior phone:
There are plenty of other smaller features that I liked and disliked - but the above sums up the things that really made my decision for me the most. The Sidekick 3’s trackball still is the best interface on a phone, hands-down. And it will remain to be seen if the multitouch iPhone really surpasses real physical buttons as the ultimate interface. You can rest assured that when the iPhone does hit stores, I will be visiting my local Apple store to kick the tires on it.
1 Oct 2005
I had a strange moment today when visiting out the new Winter Garden Library - I was checking out the new facility, looking through the books, DVDs, and CDs. I noticed they had a substantial jazz section, so I flipped through to see if there was anything interesting. Up comes a cool blue cover with a peculiar name for a jazz group -
The Bad Plus.
I check the track names. Smells Like Teen Spirit. Neat! I also see a track named Flim - now this has me thinking. I had heard about 15 seconds of a jazz cover of one of my all time favorite Aphex Twin songs, Flim, on WUCF, the local jazz radio station when driving around with my wife one day. I thought… “I would love to know who’s covering that.” I hope to someday be in a group that does jazz/electronic live combo music.
So I check out the CD, pop it into the car CD player, and sure enough - it is the one and the same track I heard on the radio. My wife says it’s proof that destiny exists. I say it’s just wild coincidence. Regardless, I have a new favorite CD, and also found about an awesome group, Halloween, Alaska, that features the same drummer from The Bad Plus.
I love finding new great music.
18 Sep 2005
The first thing I thought of concerning Sparkle is customer support. If we design a site using Sparkle, and our customers visit the site, what sort of experience will they have if they don’t have Windows Vista? Imagine a Mac user on Safari. Or a Linux user? They will have no way to view the content. The app will just break.
Alternately, you would have to point those users (XP, Mac, Linux) to a special download of an altered or limited version of Avalon made for those platforms. It seems that downloading something with that large of a graphic framework would not be as simple as a Flash Player download.
You would download probably a 60MB+ file (just a guess) and then after install have to reboot before you can view the content. That’s a journey that nearly any non-computer savvy customer will not be willing to take. And most companies, large or small, would be hesitant to help them through.
Right now we can do a LOT with the Flash Player using the tools Macromedia provides, and a new install takes seconds, and without a reboot if users don’t happen to have it. In my mind, Sparkle’s features will be the best thing ever to hit application development for Windows Vista and future platforms. But for the web, Sparkle has a lot of limitations compared to Flash’s cross-platform ubiquity.