Thinkcage

Forbes recently posted a list of America’s Most Wired Cities. According to the article, the formula for ranking includes the number of internet users in the city, the number of broadband providers, and the number of wireless access points. Unsurprisingly Seattle topped this list, but it was the inclusion of Minneapolis that caught my attention (emphasis mine):

The surprise of the list is Minneapolis, which improved its standing from No. 11 to No. 7, beating New York and Portland, Ore., among others. Minneapolis’ secret? A particularly broad range of service providers, including a number of neighborhoods with 20 different access options for high-speed Internet.

Twenty options! In my neighborhood, I have two: the local cable company and an unreliable rural wireless provider. Most people in the Oklahoma City metro area probably have 2-3 options. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be able to choose amongst providers and actually have recourse should their service not meet expectations. Here’s hoping the new administration will bring back the focus on providing broadband internet access to all.

Google Mail’s web interface has tons of great features missing from even older and more established desktop mail applications. One of my favorites is the way it handles email attachments. Clicking “View all attachments” will do just that opening them in a new browser tab all together rather than downloading them to your computer and relying on the user to both find and open the images. This option is only visible when the attachments are images. Smart!

Similarly, with non-viewable attachments (such as the ZIP archives in my example) GMail offers a “Download all attachments” link. This packages all of the files into a single ZIP archive and downloads them all at once. What is more, GMail manages to intelligently name the new ZIP file based on its contents. Really smart!

I loved the tilt-shift effect when it was making the rounds on photos awhile back, but the effect is even more stunning in video. Still I can’t help but love the irony that move makers have probably spent millions of dollars and hours trying to make special effects miniatures NOT look small only to have this come along and make real footage look fake.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Sometimes the very best ideas are so natural they don’t seem like ideas at all. That is, they seem so obvious, that it makes you wonder why the idea hasn’t always existed or how we got so far away from it. Such is the case with this laptop, the HP Pavilion dv6929wm Entertainment Notebook PC which ships and sits on retail shelves inside a laptop bag. Not a cardboard box, tons of styrofoam, baggies, and twist-ties, but actually the computer and all of its accessories are inside a laptop bag designed for the dual purpose. And the bag is made of recycled materials, too.

The product was created by HP as an answer to Walmart’s design challenge, challenge which asked electronics manufacturers to produce a product that would reduce environmental impact. HP’s solution won the top prize in reducing 97% of the typical waste from laptop packaging. It really is a shame that more products don’t ship in similar “packages”. How many things, especially electronics, do we buy and then buy a bag, cover, or other protection for? I’d love to see this trickle into other products. When did we become a nation that needs everything we buy to hermetically sealed?

This morning I will be once again making the trip south to Austin, TX for the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive conference. 

SXSW is actually three conferences in one, covering Interactive, Music, and Film during SXSW Week, March 7 – 16, 2008. SXSW Interactive is really the premier event for people working in the web industry. The conference features nearly five full days and offers panels, keynotes, a trade show, and other events featuring the top minds in the field. SXSW covers a wide range of topics from business development on the web to social networking to technology, design, and even tactical topics like HTML and CSS. In years past, SXSW has been a favorite launching point for new “Web 2.0″ applications. Nearly anyone working on the web can benefit from something at this conference, even if it is only for the opportunities to network. And like many conferences, some of the best information is found in the form of meeting and sharing ideas with the smart people you meet throughout the week.

I’m looking forward to panels on design, social networking, CMS systems, and web startups. Speakers include: Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, Jason Santa Maria, Kathy Sierra, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jimmy Wales with keynotes by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, community artist Frank Warren, and futurist Jane McGonigal.

This year, I’ll be heading down to SXSW with Element Fusion senior designer, Dustin Evans. While in Austin, we’ll be looking to line-up meetings with customers, partners, and new friends. If you’d like to meet us at SXSW, you can find us in the online registrant directory. Or leave your contact information below and we can provide email, phone, twitter, or other ways to reach us while at the conference. Hope to see you there!

Oh and did I metion that Mashable rocks?

A friend is just getting started with PHP. Like me, he’s not a coder by nature so I thought giving him the benefits of what I’d learned might help. I also thought it might help other people out there so I’m offering it here as a free download.

The PHP sites that I have built in the past – it’s been awhile – all were of the simple database read/write variety. So once I had cobbled together a simple set of db connection, add, edit, remove, list, view scripts I had a quick framework to start my projects. That’s what this set is. It has all the basic scripts you need to make a simple site with fairly verbose comments indicating what the various parts do. I left the SQL queries in there, but you’ll have to make your own based upon your application. Maybe in the future I’ll add a MySql script and instructions for setting this up as a working app – that might make a more valid example. Still if you’re reasonably experience in some other scripting language, this should be enough for you to figure out what it’s doing and how to make it do what you want. I’m primarily a designer, so “coding” for me often consists of finding basic scripts, putting them together, and hacking together an application. If you work that way, this is the file for you.

Happy coding!

Download my PHP Starter Kit.