Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Notable – The Easiest Way for Teams to Provide Feedback on Websites

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Notable

Notable is a web and iPhone based service that allows team members to easily share feedback on all aspects of a website. To start a discussion you create a new project called a capture, or a set to hold multiple captures. Captures can be created from a url, by uploading an image, from an iPhone screenshot or from a Firefox Plugin. After creating a capture your team can comment on the page’s design, code, copy or seo. Users can also output the results to a PDF, email, public or private urls.

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Design

When uploading a jpg, or a capture from a url, Notable creates and stores a full page screenshot of your webpage. Multiple users can create transparent boxes with comments on top of the page giving the designer consolidated visual feedback.

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Code

Code view is organized by html, css and javascript. You can isolate each source file and highlight lines of code by clicking and filling out a pop-up comment box.

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Copy

The copy tab removes all graphics and markup from your page and reproduces the page as plain text. Unlike code view, you can highlight individual characters or words for comment.

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SEO

The SEO tab analyzes how search engines see your page and only displays relevant content. The left column contains a list of keywords and keyword phrases appearing on your page. The right column breaks down the page by metadata, headers, first 100 words used on the page, bold/strong elements, alt tags and outbound links giving you a thorough view of how a search engine sees your site.

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Pricing plans for Notable range from free to $119 a month based on the number of users and the total amount of storage needed. Notable is one of the most thorough site markup tools on the market allowing you to give feedback on site design, code, copy and seo. Pair that with the companion iPhone application and you have a tool that no production team should be without.

Check out Notable here.

New Role at Atlantic Records

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Today the digital media department at Atlantic Records went through a reorganization, and my role at the label has changed significantly. Up until this point I was heading up our creative group, overseeing the work of our team of talented web designers, as well as our new technology initiatives. After today I will be heading up our entire web production team – overseeing all of our designers, developers, project managers as well as our relationships with external design and development teams. My primary focus will be overseeing our web platform from both the production and innovation standpoints in addition to our Fanbase application platform. We’ve rolled out some amazing sites over the last few months and I can’t wait to see how we can push this moving forward, as well as all the exciting ways we can align our application and web platforms to support our artists.

Simple iPhone voicemail backup

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

A great article from Strangely Dim on how to backup voicemail messages from the iPhone simply, with no additional apps, and no Jailbreaking.

1) Backup your phone in iTunes
2) Run a simple Terminal script (copy and paste)
3) Wait a few seconds and all of your voicemails are converted to .amr files. The one trick is giving the script a minute or so to run, I kept running it over and over without waiting for it to terminate on its own. Patience!

The script you need to run is here:

pushd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup ; for I in `find . -name *.mddata -exec grep -la “#\!AMR” {} +` ; do cp $I $OLDPWD/`basename -s mddata $I`amr ; done ; popd

And make sure to click through to Eric’s original article. Thanks for the hint!

Avatar Fanbase Launch and New Press

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Two mentions for Fanbase came out in the wake of our launch of the Avatar Soundtrack Fanbase. We worked alongside Fox to launch both Fanbase Social and Fanbase Desktop for Avatar.

Check out the link on the official movie site below.

We also received two great mentions for the platform with TrendHunter.com calling Fanbase “trail blazing music promotion” and GetToTheFuture.com giving us a great review. Check it out!

Geekend 2009

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

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This year I was lucky enough to be a speaker at the first annual Geekend conference. For three days last weekend self proclaimed geeks descended up Savannah Georgia for talks about design, social networking, technology and gaming.

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The keynote speaker Friday night was Aaron Draplin from Draplin Design. He set a hilarious, open and friendly vibe that carried through for the rest of the conference. Get the full list of speakers on the Geekend Facebook page.

Saturday I gave a talk entitled “Connecting Fans With Bands” centered around how at Atlantic Records we are using design and new technology to promote our artists. My goal was to shed some light on how a designer can progress from print, to web and eventually to non-traditional devices using my story as a backdrop. I tried to make the talk one part backstory, one part examples and one part how to with some specific dos and don’ts when making the switch.

And after my talk (and more importantly) I had AMAZING BBQ at Angel’s BBQ. In an alley. Behind a church.

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All in all it was an amazing time filled with some of the best discussions about design I’ve had in years. I left energized and excited to get back to making work in NYC. I highly recommend checking out the conference next year.

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