clear.your.mind

This one has been going around the internet for a couple of hours now; it’s a campain from Dove where a model take sit and a group of professionals start working on her until she is a real beauty… don’t know why, but it seems like those models look all the same; she had a personality when she sit down and they crushed into what you see below on the picture; a normal magazine model. There is a bit of photoshop on the youtube video and it’s really interesting how they play with her eyes in order to make them look bigger; it takes only a second and it’s done

I really like how the use photoshop to make that campaing, never thought they do it so fast. The campaing name seems to be Evolution Dove. Enjoy!

The firefox team has launched a wiki to gather user’s points of views and suggestions on their upcoming update for firefox, that would be firefox 3.0. Excellent idea fellows! right to the user’s chin! :) Yes, some users will of course make strange suggestions (I read someone already wanted a tab expose for firefox, there is a plugin for that; but they seem to want it integrated with the browser).

The only thing I will want is a lite version, something really light you can carry on a USB pen drive or even on your desktop. Something very, very basic, with no functionalities at all, just the minimun to get people started and to help those ones (like me) who doesn’t want a button for every single functionality of the browser. I don’t even use the Go button since 1999, I use the enter key like every human been on this planet.

Now you know it and you have no excuse, if you want a better firefox, here is your opportunity to brainstorm with the developers.

Related Links

• Firefox 3 suggestion wiki
• Foxpose (expose for firefox) (what is expose?)

First of all, I’m good! I’m working on several interesting projects, and doing my best to keep everything up to date. I will start blogging more here and on 15tags.com so keep your eyes open!

I was speaking with a very, very good friend the other day about business. He was telling me some little issues he has with time, and I’m not speaking of organization, but with timing on business. Isn’t it great when the right things happen at the right time? but, on the other hand, we all know it sucks when the right things happen at the wrong time, and there isn’t much we can do about it, or can we?

Think outside the box: my plan

I like to think outside the box, always. This doesn’t mean I always try to do abstract, stupid or incoherent things on my life or work; but I like, quoting Tom Peters, I like I said, Re-imagining things. I don’t like to stay with what there is on the table, I don’t want more either, don’t get me wrong. I want something different, something nobody has, and I want to do it myself.

With Emaginacion the plan is fairly simple: I want to create and build a business from scratch that will lead me into the opportunity to develop, research and explore other business. I want to create a team of professionals that can work with my minimal supervision in the future, so I can develop more ways to improve the quality of life on people.

What we are doing right now, is creating the necessary atmosphere to make that happen. There is a lot of learning, and research we need have to acquire on the journey, but believe me when I’m saying: we are on the right path, exactly now.

This isn’t me selling you my agency, this is my trying to communicate my vision of what can be done if you think for a second, outside the damn box!

15tags is that, is an experiment, which is going well, with all the fails and trials any experiment has. Every failure, is a new way to see the final product, every try is a new way to see where we should pay more attention. We thought outside the box, instead of charging for the use of the product, we will support it with our own jobs (that is, me and my collegue Anty).

My plan is that, to think different.

Now this is interesting. Blogs isn’t just to communicate with your customers or write your daily journal; Blogs have becoming a way of showing people work in progress (WIP) and today I found a very interesting example of this: Carson Systems (you may know them for they earliest project, DropSend) has came out with a very interesting blog called Bare Naked App in which they show us, step by step, how they new app is being developed.

The web app (web application) is called Hey Amigo and right now, I have no idea of what it does (I didn’t read all the blog) but the logo looks good; this may be because is done by Jason Santamaria, a great designer which I admire very much.

From wireframing, to budget, they tell us all about it; even on video. This kind of Blogs are the best, because you know is going to end with a full developed product, and you will be seeing all the process online. Is pretty much like living with a pregnant woman, you will see how the baby is growing and the launch day, is going to be for sure, a pretty nice party.

Great Blog guys, keep it up!

Related Links
Bare Naked App
DropSend

A thumb down for the TWiki community; very hard to install and configure, really hard boys! The interface is lovely; the use of colors for the text headers, the webs and the icons is very well done, but it’s so cluttered with information that I had to waste almost two days going through all the “documentation” in order to get it working.

Be nice to me, I’m an idiot!

Regular users aren’t idiots, they are business owners, employees, professionals, etc. You know it, he know it, we all know it. They are people; we are people! Usability isn’t for “dummies”; usability is for people who don’t have two days to learn a whole application and how to use it. I had to waste my time because I honestly needed that wiki running and I had no other choices. Don’t get me wrong, TWiki is an outstanding wiki system! It has a beautiful interface, but the information architecture isn’t very well done yet. I’m confident TWiki community will improve this.

Easy on the eyes, hard to use

The interface isn’t really the problem. The main problem is how the information is grouped all together into chunks of text that aren’t really there in order to help anyone. I think everything should be on one screen and one screen alone; configuration (in whole aspects) user registration by admin, etc. All in one single page. I don’t know one single guy or gal in the world that enjoy going through fifty pages of documentation in order to get an user activation started.

I’m not mad, I’m just tired

Please, do not confuse my arguments with my humor. I’m not angry or anything, I LOVED the TWiki application and how it worked, but I HATED how much configuration was needed to get it working and how many pages I had to read in order to do that, when you should be able to do it in a minute with a button (learn from WordPress, PMWiki, Backpack, and others).

Let me see the CLICK HERE AND RUN and I will give you my kingdom!
Cheers, have a good day!
Javier Cabrera

http://www.siteshuffle.com has launched, it’s a nifty bookmark manager with some Ajax effects cool enough to use for a while. At the Feedback forum I read this quote and I liked very much:

This is where you get to tell us all the bad (and good) stuff about SiteShuffle.com. Go ahead! We can take it. My Dad always said that you’re still a man if you cry where no one can see you.

Hahahah-ahaha! very funny! Visit SiteShuffle.com; it’s a really cool web app to look at!

On Valentine’s Day the U.S. Government granted a patent on the AJAX technology to Pro:FX, a web shop from what I read on Zeldman’s Daily Report. This web shop wants to license the technology thousands of sites and products are using to interact with their users. This kind of actions could discourage people to think on new ways of interact with their users. If you come up with some kind of idea, you need to have plenty of $$$ to request a patent, like my dear friend, Dr Nielsen, or you will get sued by someone who moves faster than you and have a big, ugly, fat, smelly lawyer behind his back. [via Zeldman]

So far so good for the opinions like “we aren’t like those big companies, we don’t make money; we want to share all information”. Yeah, right. Maxxuss has released a patch at [EDITED: we can’t show you this guys!] to kick MacOS 10.4.5 Intel protection ars. Now you can install the beautiful MacOSX in any compatible hardware. Of course, there are a couple of fixes and not all will be working, but it is an “advance”.

He is planning to release a DVD (I guess, he is planning to sell it) with the pach and other stuff inside (ATI SSE2 patches, and the Maxxuss Tuning package) in a bit, so stay tuned. I don’t see the patch on the page, but I’m sleepy and maybe it is just me ;)

Discussions, comments a side; maxxuss, if you did it; that’s impressive man. Really impressive!

NOTE: William has made a pretty good points on his comment, about how I rushed my conclusions (which, I think is true in part, but I argue different below) and he gives a very argument about the patch. Scroll down and read it!