Making.
Tools, hacks, side projects, this site
- New theme, and it's slightly less simple
During Theo’s morning nap today, I updated this blog’s theme. I’m going to attempt to start using the blog more regulalry, as sort of an “open lab notebook,” and (in the true spirit of procrastination) figured I’d start by updating the theme. So here it is; I’ve ditched by previous Undesign for mo...
- Melkjug Fluid Icon
If you use Melkjug as a Fluid app, like I do, then you’ll love this: (Melkjug fluid icon) Continue reading
- Help! Can't drop
When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I started mocking up a zippy drag-n-drop front end for Trac, based on the snappy UI of tools like Things (working title is FasTrac). Then, bam! Bitten by a weird, seems-like-a-bug w/ jQuery UI drag and drop. It appears that droppables aren’t discoverable by d...
- Introducing The Board
A few weeks ago, I created a small web app for scheduling project teams at TOPP Labs. At any given time, we’ve got anywhere between 10 and 20 active projects, so keeping track of it all is difficult, and planning ahead requires a good clear overview of everything that’s happening. Why create someth...
- Crowdsourcing my schedule
I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews. What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re… Cont...
- Map drawing UX is still too hard
At work today, we are exploring the process of drawing routes on a map, thinking ahead to a few upcoming projects involving bike planning. So Sonali set up a Google MyMap and asked a few of us to mark our routes to work. In a nutshell, it was basically a flop, with two out of… Continue reading
- Backpack TOC Greasemonkey Script
Hot off the presses: Backpack TOC Greasemonkey script. Continue reading
- Chandler and Constraints
I spent most of this morning looking back through old posts about the Chandler Project and OSAF. I’ve thought about this a lot, due to the many parallels with my work at The Open Planning Project. For newcomers, those parallels are: Massive funding from a visionary with a dream (in OSAF’s case, Mi...
- 'Do You Know Me?' Authentication
For a recent personal project (I won’t say which since that would defeat the purpose), I was in need of a new kind of authentication. My wife and I wanted to create a website where we could post photos and news for our family and friends, while keeping that information off of the broader intertubes....
- New App Idea: Dude, Where's My Car?
Even though I shouldn’t own a car, I do, and as every car owner in NYC knows, dealing with alternate-side parking is a hassle. That, combined with my recent itch to write a small mobile app, has lead me to the following idea: the “Dude, Where’s My Car?” app for mobile. Here’s what it will… Contin...
- Too much structure makes for useless data
Over at TOPP, we’ve been talking recently about the “spectrum of engagement” — in other words, providing a variety of ways that people can engage with a website, ranging from quick & easy (e.g., thumbs-up-ing something) to slow and involved (e.g., writing a blog post or signing up for an account). ...
- Goldilocks and the RSS Theme
For your reading pleasure, the Broadsheet Wide theme for the Vienna RSS reader. Continue reading
- Same Bat Blog, New Bat Look
This week, we launched the new, improved GothamSchools. GothamSchools is the latest media / advocacy initiative from The Open Planning Project, and our first foray into the world of education. We’ve got a great team of reporters in Philissa Cramer, Elizabeth Green, and Kelly Vaughan, and the new s...
- Sorry, Chandler
For a while now, I’ve been using Chandler to keep track of my to-dos. Chandler is a semi-historic open source project which I’ve been following ever since I read Dreaming in Code (and in many ways, it’s saga parallels ours at The Open Planning Project with our work on OpenPlans) I’ve been rooting ...
- The power of releasing early and often
“Release early and often” is a phrase often heard in software development, and is more like a mantra for most web development projects. The idea being that it’s better to get something “out there” in a simple or reduced form, rather than wait and wait and wait for your grand plan to come together. ...
- New TOPP Website
Over at The Open Planning Project, we’ve always had a bit of a hard time explaining what we do. That job just got a little bit easier, with the launch of the new-and-improved TOPP website last Friday. Reactions from within the staff have been remarkably similar: something along the lines of “Phew,...
- Slip-n-Slide Photo Gallery
A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework,… Continue r...
- Sendible: "inspired by" Facebook
I came across a post this morning about a new service called Sendible. The basic idea is this: create messages of various types (email, sms, twitter tweets, facebook messages, etc) in advance, then sit back and relax as they get sent out right on schedule. Interesting idea — apparently there are a f...
- Coming soon… The Livable Streets Network
For the past several months, my coworkers and I over at The Open Planning Project have been hard at work on an important redesign and new product launch. I’m now excited to say that the final launch is, ahem, days away. Streetsblog and StreetFilms have been hugely popular since they launched two ye...
- Wanted: Awesome web designer
Here at The Open Planning Project, we are currently looking to add to our talented design team. If you’re a web designer with visual design talent, rock-solid production skills, and a strong intuition for user experience, we want to hear from you. Download the full job description. Life is good at...