Limitless Pulse

The image above is yet another example of my work getting out there solely by my approach to Creative Commons licensing everything I upload to Flickr.

The only requirement of the version of the license I’m using is attribution. I just checked again, and it’s even possible for someone to contact me if they wanted to drop the attribution. If they reached out, within reason, I’d more than likely allow them.

Even after all these years, getting published is still thrilling, and these days it’s happening with only the littlest bit of effort on my part.

We’ve only soft-launched the new Trendpool.com, but it’s at a point where I’m ready for you to have a look.

A month ago was the last time I brought up the progress of the project. At that time I’d just been charged with adding ribbons to several elements on the site. After having a look at those ribbons, Florian decided to remove them from the posts, leaving the single ribbon accent on the site’s header.

It’s funny, as I was mentioning a month ago, I thought the ribbons were extraneous, but by the time Florian had asked me to strike them, I was actually falling for them a bit. With or without, they were a minor detail. I’m happy enough with the design as it stands.

In terms of the design, I’ve got to say, aside from the input I was getting from Florian and Paula, the look and feel has largely been my doing, and three months after starting in on the project I’ve gotta say I’m happy with the way it’s all panned out.

The site utilizes just the tiniest bits of jQuery. You can see it in the sidebar where I employed jQuery UI to get the tabbed content broken up and accessible. A problem I ran into here was the duplication of entire pages from the site crammed into the sidebar. Even after a couple friends had taken a look I couldn’t resolve the issue.

Instead, in the places where the content was being duplicated we removed the tabbed section from the sidebar entirely. This is far from a perfect fix, but is good enough for us to launch with. Once the final elements are incorporated I’ll likely look to rebuild the tabbed sidebar section from scratch.

Another element where I was able to incorporate a bit of JavaScript was in the field in the backend that accepts each post’s summary:

In the panels that hold the introductions to each post, there’s a summary displayed in italics. We didn’t want the summaries to wrap to more than two lines, so I found that the magic number of characters needed to hold to this length was 125. To hold writers/editors to that number, I setup a countdown display that updates with the number of characters left that will fit in that summary.

At the same time, I held the number of words in the first bit of each post’s content to 30. Again this fills the container with just enough content without growing outside its given size.

Well, there certainly is more I can say about the site, but apart from a few people, this is likely getting boring for most. If you’re interested, I’ll simply leave it to you to explore.

To coincide with the September release of Bjork’s new album, Biophilia, a companion iOS app has been developed and launched.

An umbrella app, presented as a galaxy that the viewer can fly throughout, is available in the App Store. Individual elements relate to individual tracks on the album and can be explored within the context of the galaxy. Different sub-apps / corners of the galaxy are being released over the next couple weeks in the run-up to the album release. The first element, Crystalline, is out now and I’ve had a bit of time to explore it.

Within this corner of the of the app’s galaxy are several ways of presenting and interacting with the song. A game is one method of exploring the song in which the viewer / player flys through alternating views of outer space and of tunnels drawn with colored vectors. By collecting “crystals” on the walls of the tunnel patterns can be decoded opening up still more levels to play. The soundtrack to the game shifts and develops along with the game play.

Another way of exploring the track is through a streaming timeline populated with animated colored circles that correspond with the notes of the song being played. At the bottom of the screen the lyrics of the song are presented in an enticing font.

It’s early yet in the evolution of this revolutionary and tantalizing presentation of the content of the album. I look forward to watching this app progress, and if you’re at all a fan of Bjork herself, of art, music, different forms of media or of video games, I’d suggest you take a peek at this stunning work.

Last time we saw Eric Fischer visualizing the locations of locals vs. tourists in various cities. This time he’s mapping data based on Flickr pictures and Twitter tweets.

“Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.”

New York is above, and here’s all of Europe:

via Business Insider

And a pleasant surprise when I liked the video on YouTube: 1111. :)

#CosmicConsciousness The world is vibrations in a vacuum. Consciousness gives it form & makes it tangible

#

It is a projection of reality where there is only one RT @EsjayMusic: So your relationship with your son is not reality?

#

Looking to post it yesterday, I was searching for a rather sublime 4th of July image I’d come across quite a while ago. I was looking through my Flickr Favorites, starred items in Google Reader, even my long since abandoned FriendFeed account.

Not remembering if or how I tagged the image, I was using the following terms: July, fourth, 4th, 7, and fireworks. However, it was Evernote’s OCR identification of the word “fire” that struck me most whimsically:

You can see in the screenshots above that I was searching Evernote for the word “fire.” You can also see the highlighted parts of the images that reveal where in the notes the word “fire” was found.

It’s a huge stretch, but comes through to me as an entertaining little quirk in the performance of the software.

Happy Fourth!

After seeing a couple in the wild, I’ve started experimenting with Tabs in Facebook which can easily be used as landing pages when a user loads a Facebook Page.

At CScout we’re approaching the opportunity in a couple ways. First, we’re experimenting with a normal day to day tab that features the different CScout outlets/online properties. Not everyone knows all there is that we give attention to, and even though the information is repeated in several places, we know some of it is falling through the cracks.

Second, there are projects that we feature from time to time. In some cases we draft up white papers focused on different bits of information/research. Other times there’s an event we want to highlight. For these types of info we’ll draft up custom Facebook Tabs to draw attention to them.

Here’s a very early mockup of the typical, day to day type Tab:

Not everybody is doing this at the moment. Nike and Audi are, but Adidas and Chevrolet aren’t. I don’t know how long this functionality has existed, but it’s integration should get more popular very soon.

So you can do this for a Facebook Page of your own, check out Static HTML: iframe tabs.

At CScout we’ve been looking to launch the Trendpool by July 1st. While we won’t be able to quite get it out the door tomorrow, we’re very close.

As it stands, running on my local machine, below is what the homepage is looking like, the image linking to the full size screenshot.

In the previous post announcing the start of the redesign, I mentioned that Limitless Pulse might be a good place to collect ideas and inspiration for the project. Before I go further in regards to the screenshot you see above, let me quickly link to the project’s collected inspiration. Not all of the collected screenshots are especially attractive, the reason for this being that I was finding sometimes ugly sites that had some element I found engaging.

Now onto the current state of the homepage. The first thing I want to point out are the ribbon treatments on the header of the site and on the titles of the posts. These ribbons I don’t particularly care for as I’ve seen them implemented on a few too many sites these days.

The reasoning behind the inclusion of the ribbon motif is that we’re trying to unify the designs employed across the CScout properties. This consideration is especially recent, coming only after designs and implementation of the Trendpool local install were basically finalized. That said, it wasn’t terribly difficult to make this fairly minor tweak. I just had to air that concern.

Now that I’m this far into this post, I’m realizing that the elements of the site that I’d like to point out aren’t worth talking about without a working example for you to play with. Therefore, I’m going to pause for the moment, and return to this soliloquy in a separate post in the near future.

Stay tuned.