i am a camera

It's been said that nothing breeds success like success. That appears to be the case for me right now. The folks at the Microsoft  Expression Studio website have taken a liking to my Vine Type redesign and are currently featuring it in their Expression Studio Gallery.

I've been slowly working my way through the Mix08 videos, which on the whole have been great. Today I watched Ben Waggoner's presentation Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight Delivery Scenarios and I was puzzled, then surprised and amazed over this slide...

• Match aspect ratio of cropped source
  • 4:3 720x480 to quarter size
    • Right: 320x240
    • Wrong: 360x240
  • 16:9 720x480 to quarter size
    • Right: 432x240
    • Wrong: 360x240

My follow-ups to South By Southwest are getting shorter and shorter each year. Mostly this is because what you read elsewhere would be repeated. The folks are the reason for attending and four days at one conference means many opportunities to meet people informally.

In Six Words

Here are my six-word synopses of the most memorable sessions and events I attended

Design is in the Details: Just throw stuff together; magic happens.
Getting Unstuck From Desktop to Device: Still many hairy mobile development challenges.
ABX Bowling / Team VCWear: Dollarsign eyes belie Andrew's genuine kindheartedness.
General Theory of Creativity: Creative magic in associating two things.
Great Design Hurts: Common request - I want a pony.
Godbit Dinner: Wonderfully talented folks all around me.
Design Eye for South By: Design rationale will follow; trust us.
Emotional By Design: Appeal to all your users' senses.
30 ways to delight your users: Users want to rock; be helpful.
Designing for Freedom Every product decision impacts user freedom.
Scalability Boot Camp: Add hardware now, software redesign later.
WASP Annual Meeting: What should we focus on now?
Video Blogging from Iraq: Entire squad watches fellow soldier's surgery.

Starting with the CS2 product line, Adobe Systems introduced a cross-program swatch format called Adobe Swatch Exchange format or ASE for short. The purpose of the swatch file format is to allow different programs to use and exchange palettes.

Kuler the online palette app generates ASE palette files as well, but the palette format purely proprietary, and is not published. Nevertheless, with some help from others who did some reverse-engineering of the format and a bit of my own studying of various binary files generated by Kuler and other Adobe apps, I've gained a very good understanding of the ASE file format.

Prompted by a blog post by Khoi Vinh, I was introduced to a little site called CommandShift3 that pits website designs against each other. Having recently rebooted the Vine Type site, I thought I'd play along. Fast forward one month.