Reid Beels

This should give a quick idea of how much snow had come down in downtown Portland by about 8:45 this morning. It’s still coming down pretty steadily. It’s very pretty, but it’s making this apartment search a bit more difficult.

A while back I came across a piece of software called Sidenote, developed by Pierre Chatel. It’s an incredibly neat little notepad app with a beautifully clean interface that sits on the side of your screen and pops out whenever you need it. At the time I found it originally, I didn’t really see the need for its functionality, but it was so incredibly cool that I kept it around just in case. Last week, when I was looking for a way to keep track of all of the stuff that I had to get done before the end of the term, I dug out Sidenote.

I soon discovered that, while it WAS great at storing my todo list, it also gave me an amazingly quick place to dump all of the other things that I wanted to get done, but couldn’t. I started using it almost as a digital version of my moleskine and soon found that I was getting more done because my mind was clearer.

Of course, it’s arguable that the real reason that I’m currently so enamored with the little program is because of one obscure design detail. When you upgrade to a newer version, the software tells you that it’s going to upgrade your note database. Many developers would have just spent twenty seconds, stuck this message in a standard dialog, and called it good. Pierre went so far beyond this, creating the beautiful animation you see here and making the message fit his interface flawlessly. When I saw the animation, I was struck with this giddy euphoria. “People still care about details!” I thought, and it made my evening so much better. Thanks, Pierre.

Attached Files:

• Sidenote Upgrade Animation

Problem: The Mac OS X version of the Flickr Uploadr (http://flickr.com/tools) automatically enters the filename in the title field. Contents of this field override title information that is already stored in the file’s metadata. This means that if you want flickr to read IPTC titles, you have to manually remove all of the automatically entered titles. (If you don’t know why this is a problem, you probably don’t need this script.)

Solution: AppleScript! Using the UI Scripting features present in Mac OS 10.3 and higher, this script will quickly flip through all of the photos in the Uploadr and delete the contents of the title field.

Usage:
1. Open some photos in Uploadr.
2. Once Uploadr has finished generating thumbnails, run the script.
3. Sit back and watch the titles disappear. (Seriously, sit back. Don’t switch to another application while it’s running because it’s going to be simulating hitting the delete key a lot. I take no responsibility if you don’t listen to directions and end up deleting things. You have been warned.)

In order for this script to have any point, you’ll need to have titled your photos and written the metadata back to your original files. I use iView MediaPro to do this, but there are plenty of things out there that can do this. If you happen to be be using iView, you can stick this script in its scripts folder (~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts) and it will appear in the script menu. This offers a convenient place to run it from without having to enable the system-wide script menu.

If you experience problems, email me at uploadr [at] reidab.com.

Feel free to do whatever you want with this script. Hack at it, improve it, break it, distribute it. All I ask is that if you find a way to improve it, let me know (because I use it too) and if you start distributing your own version, take my email address out of it.

Attached Files:

• Remove Uploadr Titles 1.0.zip

  AppleScript to remove automatically entered titles from the Flickr Uploadr

Subway Speed 2 on Vimeo

With 468 stations, more than 700 miles of track, and over 6,400 cars, the New York subway is one of the largest and most complex transportation systems in the world. As someone who has long been fascinated with railroads, maps, and public transportation in general, interacting with the subway on a daily basis has been a highlight of my stay here.

Time has worn heavily on the subway but even in the deteriorating spaces created by years of lacking maintenance, the iconic simplicity of Massimo Vignelli’s wayfinding system shines through. Each line is represented by a letter or number in a circle or diamond. Lines that share a route are grouped by a common color.

This color coding is arguably the system’s most powerful component. By breaking the network down into chunks that serve a similar function, the colors place the incredibly complex network within the paradigm of The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.

I assumed people would refer to these lines by their color codes, but they don’t. It’s not “the blue line”, but always “the A-C-E.” I don’t know where this naming convention originated, it actually ends up increases the usability of the system greatly by providing a nemonic device for the contents of each group.

All of this wayfinding is great on its own, but is tied together by the ubiquitous subway map. The map has taken many forms over the years, which I’ll be discussing in my next post.

This post was originally written as part of a blogging project for PNCA about my time in New York.

I stopped by the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade earlier this evening and caught these amazing pumpkin-headed puppets before the crowds got so thick that I couldn’t see anything. At school, the Halloween celebration came early with a costume contest sponsored by the Communication Design department. A pair of students with wheeled hands and feet, representing “The Spirit of the G Train” (the notoriously-late subway that runs near campus), won the grand prize.

The design department’s sponsorship of this event got me thinking about just how much a well-conceived costume can communicate. While many are archetypes of the season (zombies, witches, etc) or distinct fictional characters, I find costumes that are based on more abstract concepts or on unexpected physical objects to be the most interesting.

Outside of the holiday, a living representation of an idea can sometimes be the most effective way to communicate, yet designers are often hesitant to move away from the ‘flat’ world in which they work. Only rarely, in select advertising campaigns and theme parks do we see companies taking their brands off the page and into the real world. While I’m not saying that costumes are necessarily the best way to solve most problems, they are often overlooked.

For more conceptual (and incredibly witty) costume ideas, I’d recommend taking a look at Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress (especially the later pages).

Inspired by, and based on, Harvey Ramer’s Autolink Attachment Plugin, this plugin lists attachments to a WordPress 2.x post in a list following the text. Only attachments that are not already linked to or displayed in the post text will be shown (this is mainly to prevent inline images from being listed).

Attachments are shown with an icon mapped to their file extension from Mark James’ excellent Silk icon set. The attachment’s title will be used for the link name and, if the attachment has a description, it will be shown below.

Update Feb 7, 2007: I’ve put together a new version that fixes the CSS typo (oops!), the post id issue Pete mentioned, and is now compatible with WP 2.1. There’s also a version available that just fixes bugs for WP 2.0 users.

Attached Files:

• Attachment List Plugin 1.1 (for WP 2.1+)

  Displays file attachments to a post, with descriptions and icons, following the post.

• Attachment List Plugin 1.01 (for WP 2.0)

This widget displays your WordPress archive as a dropdown menu. It supports dates, categories, and tags (if UTW is installed). Dates can either be shown in the default WP format, or in a hierarchy. The widget title may be left blank to display the menu without a title. To see what this looks like in action (showing dates in a hierarchy and categories) take a look at the bottom of this page.
To install, just toss dropdown-archive.php into your wp-content/plugins directory, activate the plugin, and add the widget to your sidebar.

Attached Files:

• Dropdown Archives Widget 1.0

As part of the redesign of this site I decided to implement my site search to support the ’search’ input type supported by Safari. It renders as the native OS X search field and can keep track of a user’s search history.

This widget is meant to be a drop-in replacement for the default WordPress search widget. To make sure other browsers aren’t confused, it checks the user-agent of the requesting browser and only serves the search element to Safari. Other browsers will get a standard text element. Optionally, this text element can be filled with placeholder text that is cleared on focus by javascript. If the widget title is left blank, no title will be displayed (which is ideal if using placeholder text).

To install, just toss safarisearchfield.php into your wp-content/plugins directory, activate the plugin, and add the widget to your sidebar.

Attached Files:

• Safari Search Field

• Safari Search Field Widget 1.0

Yesterday I got the chance to head out to the New York Hall of Science hoping to gain inspiration from their signage for a museum project I’m working on. Their wayfinding system was effective, but didn’t provide too much enlightenment. The museum offered a nice assortment of hand-on exhibits, many that I had seen elswhere (I think I was spoiled by OMSI and the Exploratorium as a child).

By far the thing that stood out most to me was an exhibition called ‘Connections: The Nature of Networks‘. It deals with many kinds of networks that exist in the world, from rivers to the internet, and the theories behind them. A bit of research shows that it was designed by Jeff Kennedy Associates who has a fascinating (and probably internal) site on the early development of the project.

I was quite impressed with the variety of networks that the exhibit managed to cover. You could see what happened when a break occurred in a power grid, scrub through video showing social interaction of various creatures, and visualize node interaction in a network of ropes and pulleys. Among the other geeky wonders showcased were a giant version of Conway’s Game of Life, Internet Arm Wrestling, and a touchscreen GIS viewer turned exhibit showing the paths of subway, telephone, major roads and cable TV throughout Queens.

My personal favorite installation was a video processor that tracked the paths of visitors through the exhibition space (shown above). It wasn’t the most accurate, but it did a pretty good job and definitely had that “wow, this is cool” factor. You could scrub through about 5 minutes of path history with a trackball and switch between the path-only view and a live video feed from the cameras above the space.

The first thing that came to mind after seeing this exhibition was a session at barcamp that I didn’t get to go to but wish I had entitled “Spreading the Meme: How people get into hacking. How can we get get more to start?“. Connections: The Nature of Networks seemed that it could be quite effective as a step towards this goal of getting kids interested in technology and networking.

More photos

While walking to school this afternoon, I noticed that the top of the Broken Angel art structure, had some smoke coming out of it. Further inspection showed that the smoke wasn’t coming out of any chimney but that a small portion of the upper tower was on fire. Out came the cell phone. After talking to a couple of dispatchers (first general 911, then fire) I was told that the fire department was on the way.

The FD turnout was impressive. I think there were seven engines on surrounding streets within five minutes. By the time they arrived, the flames had grown to engulf the entirety of the upper tower. Soon, a bucket truck was up and they hosed down the tower continuously for several minutes, mostly extinguishing the fire.

There was still a small bit of the tower burning after the initial spray was shut off, but it remained tiny and didn’t spread. Some firefighters entered the structure and, after they emerged, a second round of spraying took care of the last bits of smoldering.

The Broken Angel seems to have survived this day and will continue to provide an interesting feature to the neighborhood. All the same, I have to wonder what toll the water took on the already decaying structure. How much longer will it continue to survive the elements? The fire remained contained to one tower and the surrounding buildings remained untouched (except for a bit of water fallout from the spraying), which is incredibly lucky considering the amount of dry wood I imagine is used in the construction of the building.