Harold's Blog

UW is going overkill with trying to get MBA recruits through Techcrunch!

Review of the Magic Mouse

I have been using the Magic Mouse for several days now and so far I have been pretty impressed. Upon first impression the mouse looks super sexy, and feels sexy in your hand. The clicker is very responsive and all the multitouch gestures work great. My biggest fear was using the two finger swipe to go backwards and forward, the fear was that this motion would bring upon a case of the debilitating and painful carpel tunnel. Unlike the ads or videos you see online the motion to go back or forward can be very subtle and still works great. All in all the mouse if very solid and performs well. I would of liked to see more multitouch gestures - pinching for zooming, and a way to access your expose without moving the mouse. My hope is that as all Apple products that the functionality will come in the next software update.

For several weeks now I have been using Wireframsketcher to do the wire framing for the new Incolo website. Wireframsketcher has been a fast, easy, and fun way to create the initial looks of a new website. Granted that this is my first time doing any wireframing so this review is taken from the perspective of an individual that has no prior experience with other wireframing software.

The first thing that many new people would be interested to know is that Wireframsketcher is not a stand alone product. You need to download Eclipse which is a coding environment and Wireframsketcher is an addon that you run within Eclipse. The installation is pretty straight forward and the Wireframsketcher website provides easy to use instructions.

The thing I like about Wireframsketcher is that it has a very low learning curve. All the icons are clearly categorized into larger buckets and within several minutes I found myself creating the barebones of a website. Once I had all the elements laid out I was able to bulk pdf export all my images. They were even exported within the same folder structure in Eclipse, which made sharing with others easier.

Even though Wireframsketcher saved me a ton of time conceptualizing my website there are still a couple things I would like to have seen. Firstly, it would be nice to have some sort of global template that would permeate through all my images. This way if I change the wording in my navigation or add an additional link to my footer, I wouldn’t have to update all my pages individually. Secondly, I would like to see a community icon library. For the most part I found what I needed or I could easily substitute a placeholder for something specific, but having a community shared library of thousands of designer graphics would add a pop to Wireframsketcher. Lastly this might not even be Wireframsketcher thing rather an issue with Eclipse, but multiple times after working in Eclipse for several hours elements would get stuck and I wasn’t able to click out of it anywhere. I would have to close down Eclipse and restart it before it returned back to normal.

All in all for my first wireframe software I was able to do what I want and the learning curve was really low. What other wireframing software are you using?

Go Shy Ronnie!

Pizo snacking on some Asian Chips

Yes We Can! Lets go Dawgs!!

Standing out in a digital world is tough. I can’t remember the last time I recieved a hand written letter. I recently recieved this wonderful personal note and Starbucks gift card from Ticor Title company after pulling title on a couple of units. It’s a small price for them to pay to keep me as a raving fan for the excellent work that they do.

Street food in China is great! They have meat on a stick for about 50c, you can get a bowl of noodles for $1. All the food is spicy too plus they have this numbing pepper that gives your mouth this odd feeling which helps eat the spicy peppers.

daryn:

We rolled out the latest version of the site tonight, including payment services for teachers, phone tracking, and lots of underlying changes to support those and other features moving forward.

The TeachStreet blog has more details, but I’ll just say that I’m pretty excited about what we’ve built, and looking forward to what’s next (perhaps after a few hours of sleep).

Thanks to the entire TeachStreet team, especially our awesome devs: Scott and Phil, our new designer/unicorn Greg, and Julie, our summer intern who turned my little call tracker project into a real full blown feature.

When you arrive in China dudes in these space suits come take your tempreture. Good thing I passed :)