Barbarian Group Rick
July 02, 2008 01:25 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Man I know four people who have had the iPhones lost or stolen in the last week or two and let me tell you, it is a bad time to have an iPhone stolen. They’re all suffering from iPhone withdrawal,trying to make it to July 11. It’s bad. It’s funny, too, because Apple clearly has a store of them – another friend of mine had her iPhone break, and she went to the store and the genius opened up a drawer and had a whole batch of 1st gen iPhones for repair swapout.
There should be some sort of program (he says, half facetiously) where if you can prove you owned an iphone, you can get another one in the interim. Or something. I understand Steve’s obsession with low inventories and no obsolete devices in the storerooms, but I think he took it a bit far this time. He literally took the hottest consumer electronics product out of the market for two full months. This is sort of unprecedented, isn’t it? I can’t think of any other example of it.
In any case, hold on to your iPhones, man. It’s a jungle out there without them.
June 30, 2008 09:26 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Marilyn visited the Barbarians @ The Roosevelt Hotel today. She lives here as a ghost you know. Here she is with Kim
June 30, 2008 02:32 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Okay! Now that Cannnes is over, we have some big news for you!
The Barbarian Group is supremely happy to announce that one Mr. Noah Brier has joined the company as our Head of Planning and Strategy. Noah is a good friend of ours, we’ve known him for a while now and are super happy to have him on board full time.
Read more…
June 29, 2008 09:00 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Oh dear lord
please let it be true.
MMS on the iPhone right now is about the worst usability nightmare imaginable. You get a text message with an unclickable
URL, and a username and password, both impossible to copy and paste into the fields in Safari. There is no reason for it. It’s awful.
Please please please let this rumor be true so I can see all the baby pictures my family members are always sending me instead of me faking it.
June 28, 2008 08:02 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
June 13, 2008 12:09 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
I posted this comment over at
TechCrunch, but I thought it was worth mentioning here, along with my extended rant:
June 10, 2008 05:23 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
So last night was the big Webby Award debut of
Moodstream, our new project with Getty Images. Last night it debuted at the Webby Award Film and Video Awards after party here in New York at the Angel Orenz Foundation down in the
LES.
This thing is so awesome. It’s so awesome! You gotta try it.
What is Moodstream? It’s a concepting tool. The modern version of the fireplace. An interactive art piece. TV for the future. It’s a website we created for and with Getty Images to showcase all of their offerings – still, video and sound – and inspire interactive creatives. And it’s really, really fun to use.
Oh, AND, it’s in .NET. I mean, come on. How hard core is that? Anyway mad props to Kim and Mike P and Shelby and Renee.
June 09, 2008 05:50 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Nice writeup in the New York Times today about
CNN Shirts, and they name-checked us! Many of our projects have been featured in the Times through the years, but rarely do they actually mention us, so this is an honor!
June 05, 2008 04:50 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Hey all -
Just a quick note to let you know we updated
Plainview to fix a few of the bugs you found. You can check for updates, or it should update when you next run the browser.
Also, we didn’t mention this before, but
Plainview does have a locked kiosk mode for kiosks. Type Command-/ and enter your password to enter it! We updated the Faq on this one.
Thanks for the comments. We’ll fix things as we find them. Still checking in on the Oracle bug that was reported.
June 02, 2008 04:22 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
In other news,
Adobe is adding video to PDF which is pretty cool, because now my plan to add braile to night clubs is totally validated as well.
June 01, 2008 11:21 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
So I was in Seattle for the Memorial Day weekend, visiting our friends at the
McLeod Residence, an art gallery in SF we own part of, checking in on our beloved
McLeod Mirrors and hanging out with my girl for
Buster’s 32nd birthday party when my friend Buster told me about his new project:
The 8:36 Project. Buster seems to have gotten the idea from his friend
Chadwick. Whatever, I’m into it. I’ve been doing it more or less since I was in Seattle (though one day I flew across the 8:36 line when coming back to
NYC from SF so I missed my alarm on that one).
Here are my 8:36PM flicks. I also like that the second most interesting one on the global 836PM tag search is Judi hula hooping @ the McLeod Residece.
June 01, 2008 10:42 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
489 Days.
That’s how long it was from the day we first posted in beard about a windowless fullscreen browser that we should make. How many times had we done presentations where we just wanted to show our work in a browser – screw powerpoint – but couldn’t do it because it would look lame with all that browser chrome? How many pointless Powerpoint presentations have we made of Quicktime movies of our sites, just so we could show them in full screen and look slick?
Well no more! Today we give you Plainview – our full-screen web browser for the Mac, complete with presentation mode, so you can compile a list of a bunch of websites, and show them one by one, all full screen, all without ruining your flow.
The second product from Barbarian Software, it’s free. Because we know other web geeks out there have had this problem too. Because we wanted to futz around with Cocoa in advance of the iPhone. Because web shops shouldn’t have to learn Powerpoint.
Woo!
May 14, 2008 12:57 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
ANYWAY, the Recaptcha words were “Brontë” and “tificate”. I gamely put on my designer hat and typed shift-b,r,o,n,t,option-u and e as any good former typesetter would do on a mac to get an umlaut, and then typed out the semi-word “tificate.” It rejected me. I wonder if Recaptcha knows how to handle umlauts? I wonder if millions of people keep tying that word and getting it wrong and Recaptcha can’t figure out what’s the DEAL?
Anyway, I think I’m pro Recaptcha. More and more I’m into it. We should probably implement it on our site. Except it still has a few usability problems and we don’t have THAT much of a spam problem here. Still, though, good idea.
May 13, 2008 11:50 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
A couple months ago, I did an interview with some of the students of “Hyper Island”http://www.hyperisland.se/, a really great interactive design and development college in Sweden, whose class of 2009
Creatives Unlimited project we are a sponsor of. I realized as I was writing it that it tied in nicely to my recent lecture/post about interactive design education, so I asked the gang over there if I could reblog it. Groovy. The original is over on Hyper Island Student
Max Orlander’s Blog
May 13, 2008 10:31 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
I always get a kick out of pictures of Benjamin at formal events. He’s one from the One Show Interactive last week. Good hair day, that one.
May 09, 2008 04:10 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Friend of the Barbarians and
CMO of the forthcoming
Hello Health,
Jay Parkinson, MD wrote a
post the other day about Adobe submitting the
DNG Raw file format to the
ISO for a standard in Raw file storage.
I’m a rabid archiver, and this reminded me of an idea I had a year or two ago: a call for OS-level version migration. Much like time machine does OS level backups, there could be a background process that migrates old files to newer file formats via a set of adaptors. The gist, from my old LJ post:
But nonetheless, applications die, and despite our best efforts we’re gonna have files saved in .graffle or .keynote or .chat docs. What we really need is an OS level version migration system, similar to Time Machine, but which migrates documents, according to a user’s settings, to newer versions of the same documents. Of course it saves the original, Time Machine style, for posterity’s and provenence’s sake, but basically at any time a new version of some app comes out, the service would migrate them – maybe once a month, or whatever you set it to.
This really shouldn’t be that hard – iView and DeBabelizer have a myriad of converter information saved in them to open documents – it would be relatively trivial to develop a set of converters that migrate your applications according to your preferences. I would love to see this, more than anything, as a future feature of an OS. Just make it automatically work. The vast majority of people out there really don’t care that they are losing some original metadata when they migrate their files from MS Word 95 to MS Word X, and if you did care, or were an archivist, you could set your settings appropriately. And the system could, of course, migrate over the important metadata – date created and modied, original application version, etc.
You can read the whole old post
here. I believe in this so whole heartedly. I’d love to see apple pull it off within Time Machine, which I have become addicted to.
May 06, 2008 05:03 AM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
This was interesting. It’s interesting to me how IV are indifferent to which of their ventures are successful, which bear fruit. I’m often that way in meetings, and people are always so disappointed. They want to see me, or us, excited, or passionate about one of the ideas. And I’m interested in seeing which one they’re most passionate about.
May 05, 2008 06:30 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
I know it’s a bit too soon to speak, but is 24, 25 really a “black friday” for Yahoo!? 5 point premium over the start of this whole debacle?
And I, for one, think Jerry did the right thing. I know, I know, fiduciary duty, shareholder value, blah blah. He made his bed with shareholders and he has to live with it. But in my mind, Kenji summed it up pretty nicely yesterday when I said I was against the merger: “why because Microsoft makes things that are broken and confusing and no one wants, and Yahoo! makes cool shit that does useful things and are well made?”
Yeah. That.
Yahoo!’s a better company. It builds better stuff.
That being said, of course, it’s stock is woefully pathetic for how awesome the company is, and there’s no one to blame but the leadership. Maybe it’s time for someone else to take the reins. Of course, they tried that before and where did they get? And who would run it? Ideas?
May 05, 2008 05:13 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Haha ben spoke at Flash in the can and wore his CNN shirt. Cross promotion!
May 02, 2008 01:17 PM - via Barbarian Group Rick | View All Barbarian Group Rick Posts
Last night, Google was kind enough to invite the Barbarians to the New York launch party for the iGoogle Artist Themes. We’ve been working with Google on the artist themes for a few months now, and we were excited to see them go out into the wild and spread the creative love.
But boy, we sure weren’t ready for the high class event! What a good time. We’ve seen our share of tech gatherings, of course (we hit an awesome Nokia/Webby Award event on Tuesday at the Nokia Flagship store), and ad events (we also hit the
ANDY Awards on wednesday), but this was an
ART event. We’ve not seen this kind of art star power in one room since the opening of the
New Museum last fall.
The highlight of the night was a panel, moderated by
Marissa Mayer, featuring… wait for it… Mark Ecko, Anne Geddes, Bob Mankoff (of the New Yorker, whose theme we produced, among others), Jeff Koons and Michael Graves.
Jeff Koons and Michael Graves? Holy heck. It’s not every day you accidentally stumble into a room featuring two of your high school idols. Also spotted: Diane von Furstenberg, and a personal hero of the Barbarian Group, of course, John Maeda. I was too chicken to go say high to him, even though I was recently on a panel with one of his former students and now a tenured prof at the Media Lab, David Small.
Anyway, awesome night. We’re proud to have worked on this project with Google, and we’re ever thankful to Maya Moufarek, Michaela Prescott, and Andy Berndt for the gig.
iPhone anxiety
