Year: 2007

Categories
glamorous industry iphone OSX

iPhone “disappearing photos” bug

No moving parts. No gears to wear down, no pads to replace. The code-powered device is an engineer’s dream and a user’s delight—until the software heads south.

Take my iPhone. Please. This morning, it stopped taking photos, and none of the approved means of restoring erring iPhones to sanity—restart, reset, restore—is of the slightest use.

Oh, there is still a lens on the back of the iPhone, and there is still a Camera icon at the top right of the Home screen. Clicking that icon still initiates camera-like functionality. I can still frame my subject in the glorious full-screen viewfinder, still press the shutter button at the bottom of the viewfinder window, and still enjoy the satisfying shutter click sound effect when I do so.

But I will not have a photo to show for my efforts. For the device does not actually take photos any more.

White box outline hack

Yesterday it was a camera. Today it simply emulates one.

If I try to view my photo(s) in the Camera Roll section, the iPhone tells me it contains “No Photos” and advises: “You can take photos using the camera.” Awesome suggestion, dudes!

If I navigate to the Camera Roll from inside the Camera (by pressing the blue outlined camera roll icon at the bottom left of the Camera’s viewfinder window), I see an empty white box indicating where the photo I’ve taken would be if the iPhone had not obliterated the data the moment the shutter snapped. (For that’s what it seems to do: take photos and immediately obliterate their data.)

If I take five photos before pressing the camera roll icon, I see five empty white boxes indicating the five photos whose data the camera deleted. Take ten photos, see ten empty white boxes.

I discovered this bug after using the iPhone to take photos of my three-year-old wearing a bathing suit and angel wings (she dressed herself). They were the best photos I ever took whose data was immediately obliterated.

88 photos, 96 tears

Yesterday the camera worked beautifully. During a long and wonderful day, I ended up taking 88 photos with the thing, all of which I synced to iPhoto, and a few of which I uploaded to Flickr. And I think it’s the number of photos I shot yesterday that sent my iPhone on a first-class carriage to Bugland.

I have noticed in the past that the iPhone is most likely to act up after I take a lot of photos—more than, say, a dozen.

Sometimes when I’ve taken a lot of photos (for instance, at a wedding or concert), iPhoto doesn’t sync. Instead, it erroneously tells me that the iPhone contains no photos. Usually, though, restarting the Mac restores proper sync, and no photos are lost in the process.

Here, every photo I take is immediately lost.

The standards fixes don’t

None of these help:

  • Restarting the Mac doesn’t help.
  • Restarting the iPhone doesn’t help.
  • Resetting the iPhone doesn’t help.
  • Even restoring the iPhone’s software—the court of last resort—doesn’t help.

Firmware problem? Hardware problem? Dude, I just work here.

Pin the bug on the lug

Mac fans are like Maoists. We are masters of cognitive dissonance. (Look it up.) If an Apple product delivers a less than satisfying experience, we assume the person reporting the problem is a fool. If not a fool, he or she must be an apostate.

You’ll have questions. Am I running the latest version of the iPhone’s software and firmware? I am. Am I running the latest version of iTunes? I am. Did I erase my iPhone lately? No. Was my iPhone “jailbroken” (i.e. hacked)? No. It’s a standard iPhone running Apple’s iPhone OS and nothing else.

Did I drop the iPhone, hold it under water, boil it in oil? No, no, no.

Do I think busted iPhone functionality is an earth-shattering problem? No, I think it is a luxury problem. Not only is it the least of the world’s problems, it is the least of my problems. Still. I saw at least a dozen things I absolutely had to photgraph today, and shot not a one. And that makes Sonny blue.

Thanks for sharing

Options. Be proud that my iPhone is “special.” Disdain photography. Cultivate an inverse snobbery that fools no one. (“You take … pictures? Really. How quaint.”) Or bring the damn thing to the Apple store nearest me and demand a replacement. That sounds like the winner.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses a photo.

[tags]apple, iphone, bugs, firmware, updates[/tags]

Categories
events family glamorous Happy Cog™ industry work Zeldman

Facts and Opinions about Zeldman

  1. Yesterday I spoke at BusinessWeek and was interviewed for a podcast that airs next week.
  2. Tomorrow I will speak for Carson at Future of Web Design.
  3. I will not be nicely dressed.
  4. That is because the fancy drycleaner—the best in town—has not yet returned the sharp clothes I wore at An Event Apart San Francisco.
  5. Don’t get me wrong. I do have another dress shirt.
  6. But I wore it to BusinessWeek yesterday. Hence, nothing “tailored” that is also clean.
  7. Which means nothing tailored for my meeting today with a client whose business and premises are somewhat traditional.
  8. All because my drycleaner takes longer to clean my dress shirts than my company takes to design a website.
  9. Almost.
  10. I would switch, but the other drycleaners in my neighborhood tend to shrink my shirts and then deny responsibility for the damage.
  11. So. What to wear.
  12. I might go for the Steve Jobs look.
  13. Or I might go for the “Zeldman” look.
  14. Which, admittedly, is not much of a business look.
  15. But I got into this business so I would not have to dress up. That was kind of the point. Learn HTML, and work in your underwear.
  16. Now that I actually have to dress for clients and the public, I have, in the words of Imelda Marcos, nothing to wear.
  17. Although Imelda was talking about shoes and my problem is shirts.
  18. I could buy a new shirt.
  19. If I didn’t have to work today.
  20. Why, yes, I have been using Twitter. Why do you ask?

[tags]zeldman, businessweek, FOWD, futureofwebdesign, carson, aneventapart, aeasf07, mockturtleneck, stevejobs, apple, twitter[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design development writing

ALA 248: Obscure meanings and addresses

In Issue No. 248 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation

by Roel Van Gils

Hide e-mail addresses from spam bots while revealing them to readers as real, clickable links. This transparent and fully automated solution guarantees that all addresses on your site will be safe—even the ones that show up in blog comments!

Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written

by Nick Padmore

“Got Milk?”, “Don’t leave home without it”, “Good to the last drop.” You know these taglines and the products associated with them. So what makes a great copy shot? Is there a formula? And can understanding advertising help us write better web copy?

[tags]design, webdesign, alistapart, copywriting, email, e-mail, obfuscation, headlines, taglines, themelines, advertising[/tags]

Categories
Applications books facebook Standards

DWWS Facebook group

A few days ago, Douglas Vos of Dearborn, Michigan, created a Designing With Web Standards group in Facebook just to see what would happen. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not like he started a group about moss formations or watching paint dry. Doug has read both editions of the book twice, and is a big fan of standards-based design. He started the group because he was interested in web standards and he wanted to understand, from the inside, how such groups function and grow in Facebook.

At this moment, the group has 422 1,142 members, seven wall posts, eleven discussion topics, three photos, one video, and two links. I wrote a post there today about my upcoming web standards talk at BusinessWeek.

I am curious whether the new group will become a passive affinity group or something more.

By passive affinity group, I mean the kind of group people join to show they belong—and then don’t do much, if anything, once they’ve joined. For instance, hundreds of thousands of people joined a Facebook group in support of the monks’ protest in Burma. Everyone who joined supports free speech and democracy, but only a tiny handful of group members create content or begin initiatives. For the few who are active, membership in the Burmese monk support group is an act of political and spiritual engagement. But for most members, it’s passive. This is true of all social groups (online and off) and nearly all human activities.

If people who incorporate web standards in their work join the DWWS Facebook group as an act of affinity, that’s fine and dandy, and it will be in some small way a measure of the progress of web standards as a movement or discipline. But the group could do more. Much more.

For instance, the group could track large-scale conversions to web standards and accessibility among corporate or government websites. It could also track backsliding, such as the infamous British Disney site, redesigned for standards compliance and accessibility by Andy Clarke at the beginning of the 2000s, and then redesigned back to tables and cruft by a successor web agency.

The group could track which schools and universities are using Designing With Web Standards and other “web standards” texts in their design or web curricula.

The Web Standards Project used to keep track of such things when I was running it, and I used to keep track of them here, as well; but I can’t do it any more, and The Web Standards Project doesn’t seem to be doing it either (probably because The WaSP is busy with other activities).

Maybe that’s where you come in.

It’s just a group on Facebook, but it could do some good.

[tags]dwws, designing with web standards, facebook, zeldman, books[/tags]

Categories
Community

Deck deal

We have a slot open for November in The Deck, our advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals. Give us a holler if you can pull the trigger quick and we’ll make a nice deal for a first-time advertiser.

Comments off.

[tags]deck, thedeck, advertising, ad, network, creative, web, design[/tags]

Categories
family glamorous homeownership

Into the murky deep

Tucked away in a quiet corner of The New York Public Library at 42nd Street sits a small, clean, neatly appointed classroom. At 3:30, we commandeered it for an impromptu meeting with an attorney.

For half an hour, the secret, quiet room was a lawyer’s office. In it, after discussing various ways the deal could end tragically, we signed five copies of a contract to purchase an apartment. I wrote the biggest check I have ever written in my life. And then, like bats startled by light, we flew off in different directions.

The attorney headed to his next meeting. The wife hopped a bus downtown to hand our documents to a secretary at the seller’s lawyer’s office. And I ran here.

We do not own a home yet. A lot could still go horribly wrong. But after two weeks of frantic paddling, we have dived cleanly into the murky deep.

Related

[tags]homeownership, homebuying[/tags]

Categories
architecture business cities Design dreams homeownership poverty reportage wealth

Don’t sleep here

Makeshift bed at construction site.

The area above Madison Square Park in Manhattan is in a condo- building frenzy. Of course all of Manhattan (and Brooklyn and Queens) is in a condo-building frenzy. But above Madison Square Park there is a particularly feverish keenness to the activity, as the glamor of the Flatiron District moves north to a zone that was formerly best known for its gaudy wig and cheap lingerie wholesalers.

The richie rich are buying, and who can blame them? Proximity to Madison Square Park and the chic shops south of 23rd Street makes for an elegance that is almost Parisian—or at least suggests the possibility of such a way of life.

Huge signs affixed to newly rising high-rises and condo converted prewar office buildings trumpet the glory of living here. But there are other signs, as well.

Barely noticed in the builders’ gold rush, the poorest poor, pushed off the benches of Madison Square Park, take shelter in the very construction sites that signify their doom. When this building is finished, the rich will sleep here. ‘Til then, it’s the poor who do so. And what do they dream?

Related

[tags]americandream, housing, homeless, homelessness, shelter, cities, urbanism, newyork, newyorkcity, NYC, boom, highrises, condos, condosandcoops, nest, citythatneversleeps[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart client services Community Design eric meyer events family glamorous Happy Cog™ homeownership Publishing Zeldman

Faster, pussycat

Have you ever bought clothes while traveling, and been unable to fit everything in your suitcase when it was time to go home? That suitcase is what my days are like now. For starters, The Wife and I are buying an apartment—or at least we are attending all the meetings, filling out all the paperwork, hiring all the attorneys and assessors and brokers and fixers, faxing and messengering and hand-delivering all the documents, auditing all the books, returning all the missed calls, sending all the e-mails, digging through spam traps for all the missed e-mails, rescheduling all the appointments, raising all the money, applying to borrow all the much more money, digging and refilling all the holes, and running up and down all the staircases that are supposed to lead to us owning a place.

Timing is the secret of comedy and an ungovernable variable in life. Our first-time homebuying marathon comes during one of The Wife’s busiest weeks at The Library, and amid a frenzy of new client activity at Happy Cog and the planning of next year’s An Event Apart conferences. In my idiocy, I agreed to speak at other people’s conferences, which means I need to create the content for those engagements. I am days behind in everything because completing the Findings From the Web Design Survey sucked nights, days, and dollars. It was our Apocalypse Now. The dog is sick and requires constant watching. The Girl must be taken to preschool and picked up and played with and loved and taught and put to bed.

My life is like everybody’s. I’m too busy and I’m grateful for everything, but I worry that I will miss some detail, forget some essential, give less than everything to some e-mail or document review or design.

I intended to write about the Findings From the Web Design Survey on the night we finally published them, but there was nothing left inside. I intended to write about them this morning, but instead I have written this excuse for not writing about them. During my next break between brokers, I will clear up one area of confusion as to the motivation behind the survey’s undertaking.

Meantime, Eric Meyer, the survey’s co-author and co-sponsor, has written nice pieces about practical problems overcome in the survey’s creation, and how to keep probing the data for new answers and new questions.

[tags]aneventapart, alistapart, webdesignsurvey, design, survey, happycog, homeownership, NYC, newyorkcity, newyork[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart Boston Design events New Orleans Travel Vancouver Zeldman

That’s me all over

An Event Apart is over until next year; we open in New Orleans in April, 2008. If you need a Zeldman fix before then, I can be seen in these interesting places:

[tags]zeldman, FOWD, businessweek, webdesignworld, webdirections, webdirectionsnorth, NYC, boston, vancouver, design, conferences, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart Community Design development industry jobs

Findings from the Web Design Survey

Happy Cog, A List Apart and An Event Apart produce free 80-plus page report; first true picture of the business of web design.

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals participated, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

Months of data crunching later, what emerges in our free 80-plus page report is the first true picture of our powerful yet little-studied profession. Presenting the Findings From the Web Design Survey.

Join the conversation

Comments off. After reading the 80-plus page report, please join the conversation at A List Apart.

[tags]webdesign, survey, webdesignsurvey, profession, careers, salaries[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart family glamorous industry work

We live as we dream

My cold is in its second week; I slept less than four hours last night. Yesterday we decided to check out the housing market in our neighborhood and ended up making a bid. Anxiety woke me at 1:00 a.m. and kept me eyeballing the dark ceiling for hours.

Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we will publish the findings of the web design survey. The findings document alone will weigh in at more than 80 pages. It has been less work than building the pyramids, but I may revise that opinion by the end of the day.

Lots happening. Watch this space.

[tags]alistapart, survey, careers, webdesign, webdesignsurvey, NYC, apartments[/tags]

Categories
planet war, peace, and justice

Congrats, Al

Thank you, Al Gore. I thank you, my wife thanks you. One day our daughter, who is now three, will thank you. And so will her children, whose existence you will have helped make possible. Thank you and bless you.

Comments off.

[tags]algore, gore, aninconvenienttruth, planet, globalwarming, nobel, prize, nobelpeaceprize[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart Boston Design eric meyer events New Orleans San Francisco Standards Zeldman

Please and thank you

An Event Apart thanks its attendees, speakers, and sponsors for a great 2007, and announces dates and locations for 2008. Please join us next year! New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago.

[tags]aneventapart, aea2008, neworleans, boston, sanfrancisco, chicago[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Design

Testing designs for color-blindness

What toll does color-blindness take on design usability? Even experienced designers and art directors, assuming they think about color-blindness at all, can find it hard to predict how their work will appear to someone with, say, protanopia, the most common form of red-green color-blindness.

Enter Sim Daltonism (donationware), a color-blindness simulator for Mac OS X. Its floating palette filters your web page in real time, showing how the area around your mouse cursor looks to people with many different kinds of color-blindness, including rare as well as common types.

Windows and Linux users, or Mac users who would rather view complete pages than floating palettes, should check out the Colorblind Web Page Filter. In our studio, we use both tools. Here is Happy Cog as its front page may appear to a person with protanopia. (Allow time for the page to load, and don’t all click at once.)

[tags]colorblind, colorblindness, design, accessibility, usability, software, tools, apps[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart Design development eric meyer events San Francisco Standards

Not at our desk

Apologies for the quiet, here. We’ve been enjoying family time in San Francisco, leading up to the final Event Apart show of the year in the beautiful Palace Hotel.

[tags]aneventapart, aeasf07, sanfrancisco[/tags]