Daniel Schutzsmith's Barbarian Blog

Monday Link Love (February 9th)

daniel@barbariangroup.com(Daniel Schutzsmith) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:12:17 -0500

Creepy kids funk out with their eyebrows for Cadbury.
Do you use email? Then you must not be a Millenial because they don’t use email evidently.
Michael Beirut shares his career story with the NY Times.
Helvetica print ad as seen in 1966 – gorgeous.
MIT students make something cool.
Layer Tennis is back and the first match was a beauty.
Milton Glaser shares his thoughts on plagiarism and Shepard Fairey with Print Magazine.
The Presidential Inauguration as seen in newspapers all over the world.
This is sure to make any parent cringe but it is really funny. I’m sure David is OK. Oh and yes David, this is real life.
A new site chronicling the work and life of the legendary Paul Rand.

I Miss the Old Internet Sometimes

daniel@barbariangroup.com(Daniel Schutzsmith) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:05:39 -0500

TripIt Facebook Hack

daniel@barbariangroup.com(Daniel Schutzsmith) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:42:27 -0500

I joined TripIt (my profile) a few months back and have been really impressed. Over that time I’ve gotten many of my friends to drink the TripIt kool-aid. The beauty of TripIt to me is that it prints wonderfully, integrates easily into my LinkedIn profile, and is really a nice travel app that doesn’t let its UI get in the way of doing what I want. But it does have its faults.

Specifically, the biggest fault to me is that it does not yet, after 2 years, have a Facebook App so your friends can see your travel plans. So like a traveler in the desert in search of water, I set my sights on finding some possible way to get my travel plans into Facebook for my friends to see.

There was plenty of talk across the web and even on Facebook as to why TripIt should have a Facebook App, but absolutely nothing on if they had a secret one in development or even have any plans at all to make one.

Then, like an oasis in the distance, I found this blog post right under my nose, at TripIt’s own website! The commenter says that they figured out a work around by actually using TripIt’s competitor, Dopplr, and importing in the calendar from his TripIt ical feed. Ingenious!

From the TripIt homepage, click on the iCal link and copy the iCal address.
Add TripIt as an external calendar on Dopplr:
http://www.dopplr.com/account/sources
Add the Dopplr FaceBook app to your FaceBook profile:
http://apps.facebook.com/dopplr_wherenext/

I set it up and it works perfectly. I find it quite amusing that users are resorting to using the competitors tools against them so they can enjoy TripIt more. I so wish I had thought of that first!

Link Love for February 2nd, 2009

daniel@barbariangroup.com(Daniel Schutzsmith) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:09:32 -0500

I get a lot of links sent to me throughout the day and I’ve realized that I often bookmark them and completely forget to share. So to try and be a better blogger I’ll be putting together a post every Monday of the previous weeks links that I thought deserve some attention. Enjoy!

Dave Shea states the obvious (which we’ve all overlooked) and points out that CSS Sprite Optimization is here and should be on every web designer’s mind to increase site load time.
iPhone Art is a gallery of photographs captured with a two megapixel iPhone camera.
Mad Magazine is going quarterly. Cracked magazine shares its empathy in the most sarcastic fashion possible.
Did you ever want to know who is on twitter? Don’t worry, Sasha Frere-Jones will tell ya.
Designers such as Armin Vit, Stefan Bucher, and the like, provided their alternative super bowl logos to the New York Times.
Prior to contrary belief, Twitter was born out of an idea meant to help Odeo separate themselves from their competition.
Michael Bierut gives us all a peek at his notebooks through the last three decades. An awesomely impressive feat!
Smart History is like that art history class you took in college but without the noisy slide projector and no nauseating snoring from the gen-ed kids.
What are you good at? Seth Godin sheds some light on the subject.
Adobe CEO Narayen says Flash on iPhone is a Challenge.

Facebook Toolbar for Firefox

daniel@barbariangroup.com(Daniel Schutzsmith) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:37:13 -0500

Quite a few people have been asking me how I get any work done since they see me conversing on Facebook so much throughout the day. The truth is that I have a secret. I use this wicked awesome Facebook Toolbar for Firefox.

The toolbar is great because it gives me quick updates via its iconography if I have new messages, friend invites, group invites, or event invites. It also lets me update my status easily without having to even open the Facebook website. You can also use the toolbar to search or for its quick links to various sections of your profile that you might want to go, but I don’t seem to use either of those features very much. Instead, one of the most widely used features for me is one that you don’t even see in the toolbar….it’s the Growl notifications.

Growl is a great little app that “lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen” (sorry PC lovers). The beauty of it is that my day is already filled with tons of other tasks like writing emails, making phone calls, taking meetings, and writing proposals. This means I get very little time to keep up on what is going on in my social sphere. With the Facebook Toolbar and Growl working together, I literally get short little glimpses into who is doing what throughout my day. If I see something appropriate to me, then I might make a comment in Facebook, if it is not, then I’ve wasted no time. Also, do take into consideration that I don’t just sit at my computer waiting to see what updates come in. I use this Facebook/Growl setup much more like a person would use Twitter – focus on what you see at that specific moment in time.

So how did I get it to work? It can all get a little bit confusing, so here are the exact steps I followed to make it work beautifully.

download Growl, open the disc image, and install the Growl.mpkg
inside that same disc image, go into the Exras folder, then the growlnotify folder, and read the directions in install.txt (you’ll need to use terminal and the command line to install it but don’t worry, it’s super simple – let me know if you have troubles)
download Facebook Toolbar for Firefox
restart Firefox
in Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons (this will open up the pref screen for all of your add-ons)
in the Extension Tab, find the Facebook Toolbar and click on Preferences
at the bottom you’ll notice it says “Growl Settings”, check the box next to “Show Facebook Notifications…”
leave the location of Growl Notify as is.
click OK and enjoy!

So there you have it. The secret is out of the bag. If you got stuck or my directions are messed up just leave me a comment and I’ll fix. Happy Facebooking!