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Dave Shea's mezzoblue

Now BoardingNovember 24

Before committing this past Friday evening to a flight down the west coast, I spent a bit of time preparing to try out something that I'd been curious about for a while. Could I get through US immigration and airport security both without a paper boarding pass?

Of course these days it's becoming more common to check in for a flight from a browser window and print out your own boarding pass before leaving for the airport, but I've been wondering why the printing part is necessary. I've heard reports of varying success from others who have attempted going purely electronically, so I made sure to have a paper backup in my bag for this one. Just in case.

At Home

There's an iPhone application called AirSharing that acts as a basic file server as well as a document viewer for a lot of common file formats, all on your phone. I managed to grab a free copy during a promo months back and though I hadn't yet put it to use, this seemed like the best way to get a nicely-formatted boarding pass onto my phone's large screen.

At the end of the web check-in you're asked to print your boarding pass, which I did, but I also "printed" a second time to PDF. For those not familiar, OS X has a built-in PDF generator that acts as a virtual printer; anything that you can p

New in ChalkworkNovember 3

The pixel factory sitting on my desktop has been busy this fall. I have not one but three new Chalkwork sets to announce today (discounting the weekend heads-up on Twitter, of course).

Chalkwork Flags

First up, a set that was quietly launched back in September but not really announced at the time, Chalkwork Flags. Just prior to this summer's Olympics I was working on a project that required a small set of flag icons, so I spent the rest of the games cranking out my own set of every sovereign nation on the planet.

I'll admit, these flag icons were the most fun I've had creating icons so far. Having existing source material with many common elements and a pre-defined style and palette made the design decision-making a lot easier, so they came together awfully quickly, which was a nice change of pace.

Chalkwork Editing Controls

Next, just finished last week is

WDN09October 30

It's that time again, but things are a little different. Web Directions North returns for another year of conferencing and skiing in early February, but it's now taking place in Denver, Colorado. And I'm not involved. Well I am, kind of, but...

One day I intend to sit down and write up the trials and tribulations, the things I've learned, and some of the fantastic experiences I've had over the past few years as one of the primary organizers of what, by almost all accounts, was a fantastic set of web conferences. Suffice it to say that building WDN with John, Maxine, and Derek was one of the highlights of my professional career thus far.

But it was also a lot of work. So much work. After the first year in 2007 I had suspicions, then the frenzy of activity leading up to the second year in early 2008 really confirmed it: running an event of this size is a full time job, and it's not the sort of work I want to be doing long term. Though it turns out I'm actually quite good at event planning (who knew?), that alone didn't feel like enough reason to ignore the stress of making ticket sales or the difficulty in turning away long term clients for a few months out of every year. So, I had an honest talk with the others, wished them luck, and decided to bow out for future years.

ShutterOctober 15

Here's an idea. Take a great product with one glaringly flawed feature, put together an application that exploits the awfulness of that feature in a few brilliantly simple ways, and then sell it for a few bucks.

Something like a month ago, a $5 app called CameraBag hit the iPhone app store. I read the description, took the risk and bought it. I turns out it's no more complicated than a few pre-built filters that will take a typically crappy photo with the iPhone's camera (or let you choose one from your library) and make it look as if it were taken from one of a variety of classic low-quality cameras. You've got your Lomo, Holga, 1970's faded and yellowing print, high-contrast B&W, infrared, and a few more (though you'll find the first two as "Lolo" and "Helga" in the menu, for trademarks reasons naturally).

It's basic, it's slow (the filters take a while to render), the already-low iPhone image quality doesn't hold up at large sizes after the filter, and it's nothing I couldn't do on my own in Photoshop. But I love it for being so simple, and doing such a good job at making lemonade out of the iPhone's lemon. It turns one of the phone's most obvious flaws into a desirable feature. Almost.

I put CameraBag to the test on my way out for lunch in Vancouver's Chinatown last week. Here are some selected photos from the full set

ZoomOctober 7

Somehow over the last year or two we've landed in a situation where most browsers now default to full page zoom instead of traditional text-resizing.

Opera has long used zoom instead of text scaling; as of IE7 Internet Explorer uses zoom to replace the older resizing method; Firefox 3 now defaults to zoom as well. Safari is really the only holdout at this point (and I suppose Chrome by extension, since they both run the same WebKit rendering engine) but, oh look, it's coming soon to a future release.

Now it's true that Firefox and Internet Explorer still offer the ability to scale text as they always have, but a user has to look for it; if there's anything we've learned from that latter browser it's that users aren't inclined to change default choices on their computers, so I think it's safe to assume most users will employ the newer method, if at all.

The implications on a designer are fairly dramatic; page zoom is an attempt to continue accurately rendering the page as it was designed, whereas text scaling simply reflows the text, often causing serious layout problems. With full page zoom, the responsibility for ensuring page integrity and legibility is moved out of the designer's hands, and placed fully on the browser. With text resizing, the designer needs to be conscientious of the ways their layout will break at different text sizes, and compensate accordingly.

So, personal prefe