Historically, you can look at the Pixar film making process as one of building a prototype version of each film (known as “story reels”) and then moving on to building the fully realized one. This process has continued to evolve over time, where (perhaps surprisingly) the polish of the story reels has been rising even faster than that of our final films.

The Incredibles really set a new bar for the effectiveness of story reels. I think that had to do with particular leadership in place on that film - director Brad Bird, head of story Mark Andrews and director of photography Andy Jimenez. They’re all super talented, and on The Incredibles their skills perfectly complemented each other. The reels for The Incredibles are jaw-dropping. I think they’re good enough by themselves to be a released film. Rough, 2D, black and white - and completely compelling. They really show what story reels can accomplish - getting a 3D crew to see them and just think to themselves “now I just need to not screw that up” :-).

If you were in the Pixar screening room where director Brad Bird regularly reviewed images for The Incredibles, you would have seen a cool, new tool in action — the Review Sketch tool. This tool literally allowed Bird to draw on top of a projected image using a digitizing pen. The drawings were then accessible online by other members of his team.

I don't mean to create an instructional reference like Jesse Schell’s game design lenses or The 400 Project. What I'm aiming for is less about function or theory and more about inspiration, the sort of thing that might trigger an idea or insight, or maybe not. Light enough that you can try whatever a card advises without thinking about it too much, or simply let it drift in your mind while you do other things. 

Last week, I published a piece on Gerrit and Jenkins about how I saw the future of distributed development teams. It got a fair number of views and positive comments (both off- and on-line) so I followed through with my promise to record a demo of using all the systems together.

This uses Gerrit, combined with Jenkins CI and the Gerrit Trigger Plugin. I skipped on explaining how to set this up in the video, preferring to show how it's used so to get a feel of how it all fits together. If there's interest, I might do a subsequent demo on getting started with Gerrit and Jenkins, taking about the installation steps needed. But without further ado, here's the video:

With the open source recommendation engine easyrec you can add recommendations to your website within minutes. easyrec is a web application written in Java that provides personalized recommendations using RESTful Web Services ready to be integrated in your web enabled applications. easyrec is...

“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan

Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that encouraged people to push themselves to take better photos. It was the first prism with which I looked at how a community website could subtly use game mechanics to drive behavior without building “a game.”

But at this point it feels overly clunky in too many ways. I’m curious what folks feel like is missing in their Flickr experience, but for me the next Flickr would have one huge difference and a few smaller ones.

If it’s not already on your radar, you’ll want to know about this fantastic digital clearinghouse to download free symbols: The Noun Project Started by California creative Edward Boatman — with support from Scott Thomas, Design Director of the Obama campaign — the project goal is “to collect and organize all the symbols that form our language into one easy-to-use online library that can be accessed by anyone. All the symbols on the site are completely free to download, licensed under creative commons attribution (or are already in the public domain) and can be used for design projects, architecture presentations, art pieces — just about anything.”

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

Schnelles Prototyping durch Drag&Drop, komplett klickbare Wireframes, Usability Testing und effiziente Kommunikation im Team - das sind die Möglichkeiten von pidoco°!

Tool to test designs & web pages on multiple browsers automatically