Bunny Blog

If you’re a UI designer of any sort, you might be looking for a swift, elegant, and why not, even web-based solution for quickly mocking up components, web pages, whatever.  Enter the Mockingbird.

What, you mean you've never used MockingbirdTube?

Mockingbird is a fast, easy interface for building and sharing wireframes.  You can add links to your wireframes for live navigational previews, quickly share with others via PDF exports or email, and live collaboration tools are apparently coming soon.

Mockingbird is currently in beta, but that ends real soon.  Mockingbird operates on a subscription-based model – perhaps a little overpriced if you’re not doing this stuff constantly – but it’s still worth a look!

Yon trim Shakespeare on the tree, indeed.  Wow, that’s probably the most esoteric reference I (or possibly anyone) have ever made.

We have a lot of assets here at Psychic Bunny and when you have tons of different people working on the same project, both off the network and on individual hard drives, it can get a bit messy sometimes. Which is the latest file? Did we make sure to back up everything?

Check out this program from Deltopia called DeltaWalker - it has a really easy compare feature for syncing drives, and tells you immediately what’s an older version, which files you’re missing, and has really easy to understand bird’s eye views. Cost? $40.

Thanks for re-confusing the issue, kiddos.

So it is May again which means that it is time for me to suggest that if you are curious about the hot new cool games and designers you’re going to hear about in the next few years, you would hedge your bets nicely to see what’s coming out of USC’s Interactive Media division this year at their graduate thesis show.

The event runs through Thursday and the gallery stays open mostly gallery hours and as in the past these are hands-on exhibitions, so you’ll get to actually try this stuff out. Of course, they’ve chosen to name their show the name we used to be using for Codename, making things a little confused again, but we forgive you guys and hope Activision leaves you alone. All the details can be found here.

Is the iPad business model a way to survive and thrive as a creative?  Or is it an evil trap?  The impetus for this post was a couple of unrelated articles I’ve read recently, so… this might be rambly.

First up is Clay Shirky’s eloquent appraisal of the global condition (and specifically the entertainment industry), The Collapse of Complex Business Models.  He manages to take a lot of threads I’ve heard before and tie them together neatly and sensibly.  One sentence summary?  People and organizations become hard-wired into a way of doing things, and when the ecosystem no longer supports that way of life, they are not only unwilling but actually incapable of changing.  As a business owner and filmmaker, this article is striking and frankly a little apocalyptic.  After all, what I do for a living is expensive – and all I really want is to be able to afford to keep doing it!  New technologies that allow us to cut costs still aren’t moving as fast as the market is bottoming out.

Enter article two, Cory Doctorow’s Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).  The premise of this one is pretty clear.  Primarily he is calling Apple (and the long trail of followers accumulating around their magic device/big iPhone) to task for creating a “walled garden” of content.  Yes, it is a path for revenue.  For people like me it’s a feasible path to that Holy Grail of actually getting paid for the work we do, but at the same time Cory’s right: it smells a lot like serfdom.  You work the fields, they dictate the terms of your existence.  The Apple bet is that if you like working the fields, you won’t notice you’ve made yourself a subject.  Evidence of this: the EFF’s analysis of the App Store Developer Agreement.

Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages … So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

That’s just one of many draconian edicts.  But guess what?  In a world with no competition, you’re stuck with it!  So what’s the way forward for creators?  Should we deal with it and line up at Apple’s teat?  Join a commune of Kickstarter creatives?  Or just start gathering canned goods and ammunition?

If you’re a living human, chances are you’ve tried to send an important document via email to your attorney, John Arai Mitchell  – only to later realize that you completely forgot the little detail of actually including the attachment!  Idiot!  No wonder he never writes you back!  He’s got better things to be doing than helping you and your slowbrain recall how the little paperclip button works!  He’s a professional law person.

Well, if you use Apple Mail, fret no more.  Attachment Scanner is a little plugin that scans your email for words that indicate that you think you’ve included an attachment… and then stops you dead in your tracks when you try to hit send!

Now, it doesn’t do the hard work of helping you add an attachment automatically or anything cool like that, but come on, how lazy are you?  This is a nice, free little tool that will give you added peace of mind and a long, healthy, equitable relationship with John Arai Mitchell… nothing more.  Enjoy!

Hey friends!  Seen these badass new Transcend HUD goggles?

That’s right, they’re ski/snowboard/whatever goggles that have a live heads-up display feeding you moment-by-moment data on your speed, direction, temperature, whatever you like.  Basically, it turns you into a living human F-16.  Pretty badass, right?  At $350, even I am tempted to buy a pair, and I’ve never been snowboarding in my entire life.  That’s how cool they are… in theory.

So how the hell do you make a promo video for something so badass that fails to actually show you an immersive simulation of what it’s like to actually wear them??

As someone who’s spent a lot of time creating exactly this kind of video, I’m really disappointed in this obvious oversight which makes me wonder… did they somehow manage to make this product not cool?

Find yourself wasting endless hours online, distracted by a constant litany of emails and pokes and pings?  Can’t stay off Facebook for long enough to keep focused on your Great American Novel?  Can’t stop compulsively checking the Bunny Blog?  Then what you need is a healthy dose of the ironically-named Freedom.

Freedom is a donationware OS X app that shuts down your network communications for a specific period of time.  Nothing short of a full reboot will revoke this shutdown.

A communication disruption can mean only one thing: productivity!

You have your choice between shutting down just your internet access or all access including your local network.  You’ll need an administrator password to make it go.

Freedom is a handy escalation from another ironically-titled app I was using for a while, SelfControl, which disables access only to a specified list of URLs.  If your only vice is espn.com or comaperiod.com, you can just block those sites.  Me, I prefer the ironclad veil of silence of Freedom.  I used to enjoy incredible productivity on airplanes, with zero distractions, but now even that is in threat.  Freedom is here to liberate me.  As a man once said, “Hell is other people.”

As another man once said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” so here’s the link!    Go get yourself some Freedom now!

I woke up this morning to discover we had been bombed by a foreign aggressor.  Before you get too alarmed – particularly if you are a certain business partner of mine currently honeymooning in Hawaii – I should disclose that the target of these attacks was this blog, and the foreign aggressor was “BestDP.com”.  This site appears to be an aggregator of reviews and an Amazon.com affiliate store, which is probably why our blog was relentlessly hammered with an unusual series of positive reviews for Amazon’s Kindle digital book-reader.

“Oh, so someone spammed your blog.  Big deal.”  That’s a rational response.  But what I found interesting was that these reviews were not the usual gibberish full of links - no, they were actual reviews apparently written by actual humans.  Now, of course, they weren’t written for this blog or in any way relevant to what we’re discussing, and it was pretty obvious they were spam by the way 14 separate reviews were posted in the span of about 4 minutes.  So it might seem hardly worth discussing – except that this indicates a real problem in our current connected culture.

Humans are generally very easily influenced.  We want to believe what others tell us.  But “others” has become a very nebulous term.  Why are all of these Kindle reviews so overwhelmingly positive?  Is it because the Kindle is a great product?  Is it because of the psychological nature of reviewing (I might go so far as to call it the inherent corruptness of reviewing) – by which we feel compelled to give passing marks to even truly flawed dreck?  I don’t own a Kindle; I can’t say.  I hear they’re rather nice, actually.  But my guess is this: it’s Christmas season and you can sell a lot more widgets if you cherry-pick reviews.  Everyone wins.

Or do they?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying: look out, folks, there’s a “scam” going around.  When anyone can be a publisher, anyone can be a con man.

YouTube has been beta-testing their new channel layouts. Eventually all YT channels will look like this, but in the meantime they’ve let some channels switch over to the new design, which I really, really like. Since we were rebranding our YouTube channel anyway, we decided to take the plunge.

So first of all, why are we rebranding our channel? Well, our YouTube channel consists mostly of original content - be it web series pilots, short films, animations, or trailers for our films. Since we now have launched an entire original content brand, we decided that it made more sense to convert the present channel rather than creating a new one. So here it is!

They allow you to upload your own banner now, fitting across the entire length of the screen, and also upload your own background.  The main design change is that now people can watch all of your videos without clicking away from your channel.

For the most part, the change-over was really easy. Sometimes the design editor wasn’t very responsive, however. I had to upload the background about three times before it actually kicked in. A lot of the font color pickers were the same way. The nice thing is that YouTube saves your previous channel, so if things really aren’t working out, you can just switch back. I haven’t tried this, however, so no promises that it works perfectly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look!

To learn more, go to this explanatory video from YouTube.

Friend Lists.

I’ve been using these for a while, but nobody seems to know what I’m talking about so I thought I’d let the word out. If you have more than 100 friends on Facebook, and you’re having trouble filtering the status updates of your very best friends from the people you met in the elevator, friend lists are AWESOME.

On your facebook homepage, look on the left column that starts with “News Feed.” You can already filter things down so that you just see “Photos” or “Links” or “Status Updates” rather than have all of them feed into your newsfeed.

Ok, now click on the “more” text at the very bottom of this column. Now more filters pop up, along with text at the very bottom that reads “Create New List.” Click that. Now you can choose which friends and fan pages will belong to that list. For instance, I’ve made one called “Comedians” where I put all my friends that have funny status updates. Now I can click on that, and only see updates of those particular people

What’s also great is that you can also use friend lists with your privacy settings. Would you rather coworkers not see your photo album from Vegas? Your privacy settings let you make certain photo albums available only to friends of friends, or only to people you’re personally friends with, or to THIS list, or to everybody except THAT list. It’s really pretty powerful.

Paris drunk in Vegas

Also, when you make new friends, you can immediately add them to pre-existing lists. So when my Aunt finally joins Facebook, I can put her on my “Relatives” list at the same time I accept her Facebook “friendship.”

Anyway, just felt most people weren’t getting the most out of this feature.