rob’s blog

I’m pumped to announce availability of Rock Show 2.0.  This is the first version of Rock Show that works on the iPad and both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A lot of fixes and tweaks are in this version of the application, along with some new posters as well!

Two articles are up about the release, Padgadget is hosting one item and a second can be found at IntoMobile.  For a full low-down and updated info on the app, visit its page: http://www.rockshow.fm

Some pages require an inordinate amount of time to load.  For most sites, this is a big problem.  Webmasters and SEO specialists know the value of a quick landing page load, because they know that netizens have short attention spans.

Dynamically built webpages, (especially applications), require time to load and visual feedback that something is happening.  The most famous example is the gmail loading page:

Gmail uses a more sophisticated progress bar to represent the loading of the webpage.  I found an article on yensDesign that gives some great advice on how to do this, if you want to get really fancy.

If you have a dynamically built page that you’d like to give a loading message to that doesn’t require a full progress bar, I recommend simply displaying a message and an animated gif.

The Method

The trick to accomplishing this is a small mix of JavaScript and CSS.  You don’t have to be using <div>’s to display your content, but you should.  My example uses <div>’s. Continue Reading »

I struggled with April’s song of the month, “Gifted,” which appears on the album  Spirit of Apollo by N.A.S.A.  N.A.S.A (North America / South America) is a project of Sam Spiegel aka Squeak E. Clean and  Brazilian DJ Zego spent five years assembling a gang of artists spilling across genres.

Performers on this record include:  George Clinton, David Byrne, Cee-Lo, Seu Jorge, Sean Lennon, RHCP, Tom Waits, Ol’ Dirty, RZA, Method Man, oh and Kanye West. Continue Reading »

One of my guides for creating a slick FB profile recently made PC World’s list of 10 tips for Facebook Power Users (Tip #5).  That coverage sort of endorsed me as a thought leader in tweaking Facebook.  The user interface and design of Facebook is only of interest to me because I enjoy the service so much and like sharing my experience with it.

As you might guess I’ve been following the redesign of Facebook pretty closely. My pal Bryan just posted a link to another great PC World article on Facebook “caving” to user concerns in the redesign. The article contains a good summary but also some important links worth checking out:

• Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox official reaction (blog entry)
• Techcrunch shames Facebook for caving to users.
• The idea that while 2 million users complained about the redesign, yet that is only 1% of the userbase is highlighted here.

The main changes they will be making in the near term to satisfy complaints are: Continue Reading »

My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

Continue Reading »

Radiohead may know music–but they and their management do not know digital downloads. In trying to be artsy, buying In Rainbows was confusing and clunky. When it came time to download, they couldn’t handle the traffic. I found that particularly startling because a band with that kind of IT budget should have been able to get a decently distributed web server set up in 10 days.

Anyhow, three cheers for Saul Williams and his management for connecting with Musicane on the pre-order of his new album Niggy Tardust. (Yes, that is a racially charged album title. This guy has some pretty serious stuff to say to you.)

Musicane’s system for doing the pre-order was the slickest I’ve seen yet, offering a pre-order download of the 192kbps version for free or you could pay $5 and have access to 192kbps, 300kbps, or FLAC. I paid the $5 and it was worth it! Continue Reading »

[Updated 10/31/07, see bottom of post]

I had a professor ask me for more information on what made OiNK special and what it was all about. I assembled the following information for him:

Why Oink Was Special

• The community was very tightly controlled:
  • Only albums that had a certain level of audio quality (192kbps+) were allowed to be uploaded. Albums had to fit a stringent set of criteria such as being original rips from real CDs, and not “transcodes.” A transcode is a song that has been ripped to mp3, decoded back to wav, and then re-encoded to an mp3. This was despite the fact that many feel double compression is not noticeable to the ear.
  • All torrents had to fulfill certain basic requirements such as a complete tracklisting. A basic description, accurate meta data, cover art scans and a playlist file were highly encouraged and more often than not taken care of by the uploader.
• The community was self-policing and highly active. Torrents of albums were uploaded weeks sometimes months in advance of their official date. High profile albums were combed over very quickly and rejected if either they appeared to be transcodes or had been doctored in any way.
  Continue Reading »

I’ve been playing more and more nexus of technology and entertainment. I realized during my trip in Vegas that it is no longer okay to not have a business card to exchange. I printed these up using Avery’s 28877 Clean Edge business cards and Anne’s Deskjet 5160. Here’s the front (Some info obfuscated):

I needed a new flyer for my obsessive-compulsive Dave Matthews Band fan site.  I have some obsessive fans on the board who are willing to help promote the site at shows.  They’re like the Jehova’s Witnesses of the DMB fan community.

I ran across a flyer for an old Dropkick Murphys / Sex Pistols show and decided it might be a good hack possibility. 

Here’s the original:

Click here for full size 

 And here’s my hack:

Click here for full size 

Interestingly, I did all of the editing in Fireworks.  I would have preferred to use photoshop, but it was not starting at that time.  (Installed CS2, to replace junky old CS1)

Long-story short, I am a sa-weet image editor.  And I’m fun at parties.