When I say, "Presentation matters", you might scoff, believing this to be so obvious, it doesn't bear mentioning. But, in fact, it does.
As design professionals we grow accustomed to developing ideas and reviewing work in progress. We “see” the comp or the rough idea in our mind’s eye for the finished work it will become. And at times we mistakenly project our comfort level onto others, assuming they can also see through the reality of work in progress to envision the finished product as we “see” it.
The truth is, no matter how carefully you position the work as “not finished”, “in-progress”, etc., people form opinions based on what you show them; not what you tell them it will be.
Presentation matters.
This is not to say that everything we share must be work complete or for that matter that good design and elaborate presentations will elevate bad ideas. Neither are true. I am suggesting, however, that we must consider the sophistication of the audience and that a hasty or ill-prepared presentation can absolutely hurt a good idea, obscure real talent and undermine credibility.
One of the most vivid examples of this principle came about while I was leading a team designing a set-top box application. The lead developer had just completed some core functionality and was pretty excited to share it with the rest of the team. He called us all together for an ad hoc demo at his workstation. The application interface consisted of what we affectionately refer to as “programmer art”, a euphemism for stand-in graphics which rarely resemble “art”.
The demo went smoothly and it definitely represented technical progress, but it was clear to me the developer was disappointed with the understated response he received. After the team dispersed, I asked the developer if we could drop in the UI assets the graphics team had been designing. He shared that he thought it was a bit early, so but could easily do so if I insisted. I did.
The next morning, we all gathered around the developer's workstation once again and he walked us through the same demo from the day before, but this time with the ready-for-prime-time user interface assets.
After the demo the team was literally squealing with delight. “Awesome, dude! You rock!” High fives all around. When everyone got back to work, my lead developer seemed even more befuddled than he was the day before.
When I enquired, he said, “I don’t get it. This is the exact same demo I shared yesterday to a lukewarm response.” I smiled and said, “Actually, it’s not.”
Challenged by my comment, he raised his voice a bit, saying, "Yes, it is. All I changed were the graphics.”
To which I responded. "And, that’s why it was a different demo."
In other words, Presentation matters.
_________________________________________________________________
Steve Lomas is a digital media and marketing consultant specializing in developing new products and services from concept to launch.
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me
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This is a little different post for me. It started with a personal encounter that peaked my curiosity and caused me to do some digging and pondering...
I don’t know if you have noticed, but over the past 24 months, competition has been heating up among some major players hoping to own your mobile in-box. To date, those players include Dropbox, a relative newcomer to the email client business, and arch rivals, Google and Microsoft. More about their motives and what prompted me to write this article after a brief history of the race being run.
First out of the blocks was Dropbox, in February of 2013, with their innovative email client, Mailbox. The promise of Mailbox was to help users quickly manage email in order to attain empty in-box nirvana via swipe-based email sorting and filtering:
This UI innovation, truly allows users to burn through vast quantities of email quickly and efficiently, clearing their inbox in minutes.
Unfortunately, Mailbox only works with Google mail, so if you are an Exchange user, you are out of luck.
In October of 2014, Google responded with Inbox. Google was careful to state that Inbox is not a replacement for Gmail or the Gmail mobile app; just an alternative. Much like they had done with the roll-out of Gmail in 2004, the Inbox app was introduced by invitation only, and that is still the case as of this writing. The invitation also grants you access to a desktop version of Inbox accessible at inbox.google.com.
There are many things to like about Google’s Inbox app. Inbox is colorful and modern, leveraging user avatars and attachment previews to really bring your inbox to life. It incorporates the best of Mailbox such as swipe-based email sorting and filtering, but it leap-frogs Mailbox by adding some new concepts like reminders, collections and pins. Not surprisingly, its search capabilities are excellent.
As an avid Mailbox user, I quickly adapted to Inbox and it soon became my default email browser -- for Google mail. That’s right; just like Mailbox, Inbox only supports Gmail. ;-(
The most recent contender to join the race is Microsoft, releasing its Outlook for iOS and Android this past January. This is a surprisingly good app, providing a robust bundle of useful features. The new Outlook app integrates, email, file management, contacts and calendaring into a single app.
It goes without saying that a mobile version of Outlook better provide robust support for exchange users -- and this app doesn’t disappoint. What you may not expect, which this app also provides, is robust support for other email platforms including Google.
One of the most useful mobile features in the Outlook app, is the ability to attach files from multiple cloud sources including OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.net, as well as local files. Its the only app of the three that can do that.
Outlook for iOS and Android also incorporates a version swipe-based email sorting and filtering, although it doesn’t seem to be quite as responsive as the competition.
Microsoft has clearly thrown down the gauntlet by offering cross platform functionality that surpasses both Dropbox and Google; but don't count either company down and out just yet. I suspect we will see updated functionality from both in the future.
So all of this this begs the question: why are these companies competing rigorously to provide the best FREE email client?
Premise: Perhaps it has something to do with advertising dollars? Ya think? ;-)
Consider this personal story recounting my wife’s experience last week.
We have an 18 month granddaughter; cute as a bug. Our daughter emailed my wife a picture of her little girl sporting some new OshKosh overalls. All our kids wore Oshkosh when they were little, so my daughter’s message was something like, “Does this outfit bring back memories?”
Within an hour of receiving that email, which did not mention Oshkosh by name, only a photograph of a little girl wearing Oshkosh and a vague mention of her outfit, my wife started seeing Oshkosh ads in her Gmail!
She brought this to my attention, saying, “Certainly this must have been a coincidence, right?” Not necessarily. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise.
We know that Google has been data-mining Gmail for years in order to present user-targeted advertising in Gmail. In fact they have a patent for the technology (Read: The Natural History of Gmail Data Mining and Google does scan all emails...).
Given the computational horsepower of the Google data centers and Google’s cutting edge advancements in AI and its purchase of Deep Mind, it is easy to believe that Google is data mining our images for information. A bit unnerving, but plausible and highly likely. In fact, there is an annual global image recognition competition called ImageNet, which Google won in 2014. We are seeing similar technology being used by Facebook to identify our friends by face recognition, why not branded overalls?
Dropbox is reported to have a “Deep Learning” team which is another way of saying “Data mining” team. I can only presume that Microsoft has or is developing similar technologies.
The aggregated user data and anonymous matchmaking between advertisers and users made possible by mining our email in-boxes is clearly valuable to advertisers, and thus potentially lucrative to the company that corners the “free email app” market.
The only way to do that is to provide the best user experience. So good for users on one level, but at what cost? If you don’t like the concept of Big Brother holding hands with Big Data, you can always choose to stop using these email apps, but that isn't a very attractive option for most of us.
In the case of Google, the company at least provides users the opportunity to monitor and manage personal Google privacy settings via Google Dashboard.
I am not aware of anything similar to this dashboard from Dropbox or Microsoft. If I am mistaken, please correct me. Of course all these companies have asked for and received our permission to do these things -- when we hastily click accept when presented with their verbose policy and privacy agreements.
To my mind, at some level, agreeing to allow these companies to mine our data in exchange for free and ever improving tools and services is somewhat analogous to concept of commercial television -- it's the cost of admission -- but potentially far more consequential than having to sit through the soap ads.
What do you think? Does any of this bother you or is it simply the cost of our digital society?
Share your thoughts.
Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
Product Design & Development Consultant
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me
In Part Two of this series, I outlined five, broad categories that pretty much sum up all the project management tools required by a professional services group:
While Agilix Professional Services was established as a Google Apps for Work shop, we needed to supplement the Google suite with other tools or various purposed. Using the above list as a structural construct, let’s discuss how we supplemented Google Apps.
Our primary meeting tool at Agilix is Citrix GoToMeeting (GTM). From my experience, GTM is by far, the most stable and reliable of all the major meeting tools, including WebX, Adobe Connect, Bluejeans, Skype and Google Hangouts. This is especially true of long meetings. We have frequently kept a bridge open throughout the day and sometimes into the evening -- jamming to meet a deadline or resolve a production issue -- six, eight even ten hours without any degradation of audio or video clarity!
As good as GTM is, it may not be the right choice for certain certain corporate IT environments, due to GTM’s requirement for frequent automated updates. Many corporate users do not have local admin rights and therefore, cannot approve the installation of software updates, leaving them frustrated and locked out of the interactive aspects of the meeting.
For this reason, we also maintain a few shared licenses to WebX, in support of certain customers that can not use GoToMeeting. WebX does not share this quirk and therefore seems to play better in the corporate IT world, but its VOIP quality is not as good as GoToMeeting.
Internally, team members also use Skype, Google Hangouts and Google Chat for ad hoc collaboration between two or three peers.
In this day and age, telephone communication doesn’t necessarily mean a phone is involved and your telephone number doesn’t have to relate to your location. I use skype for my desktop telephone calls. Both Skype and Google Voice offer virtual telephone numbers for VOIP communication.
Areas where we typically supplement Google Apps for artifact creation include:
MS Office
There's no getting around it, you have to be prepared to read, write and add comments to the MS Office docs. This is especially true of contracts where the use of track changes is universally accepted as S.O.P.
As I mentioned in the last installment of this series, Google does a pretty good job reading and converting MS Office documents as well as publishing in the MS Office formats.
Adobe Acrobat - PDF Format
PDF has long since become the publish standard format for business world-wide. Acrobat, Adobe's PDF authoring and reader application is such an important tool and yet seemingly underrated and often overlooked. I use it pretty much daily for a variety of reasons leveraging its rich feature set.
MyBalsamiq, the cloud-based version of Balsamiq was the original group standard, but lately we have been moving toward Axure more and more.
We use a little known gem, Diagram Creator, created by Chipp Walters. Diagram Creator offers a natural language interface for quickly building logical diagrams. Diagram Creator is not hard to use, but like most software, it takes practice to master its subtleties. For that reason, some members of the team rely on Gliffy, an Industry standard charting program, fashioned after Microsoft Visio. Gliffy offers plug-ins for GoogleDocs and Jira. For simple workflows, used in presentations, we often use the Google drawing tools available in Google Slides.
Adobe Creative Suite is still the standard for serious professionals.
Early on, we adopted Apple Keynote for authoring sales and marketing presentations. Keynote offers much more powerful and more elegant authoring capabilities compared PowerPoint or Google Slides and robust publishing options including Powerpoint, PDF, HTML, JPEGS, and Video output with direct sharing to many social media sites such as Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube.
For the purposes of this article, I am lumping resource planning, task management and tracking work completed together as sub components of Resource Management. To manage these functions we used a combination of Google Spreadsheets, Wrike, and Jira Agile.
Of the three applications mentioned for resource management, Google Spreadsheets is probably the most widely known and understood. Using a series of related Google Spreadsheets and Google Script we created a project management platform that allowed our internal Producers to lookup, cost and allocate resources to their various projects and rollup actuals in realtime to an executive dashboard.
Wrike is a relative new and evolving tool. Wrike bills itself as a project management platform, but I feel it is more accurate to describe it as a task management platform. Wrike is is a bit of an acquired taste, but once you master its metaphor, it can highly effective.
Wrike is built on a tasks and folders construct. Folders may contain a combination of tasks and sub-folders. Tasks may include sub-tasks and interdependencies with other tasks. The real power of Wrike is the ease with which you can create complicated folder/task structures to create process templates that can be quickly and easily cloned at the start of a new preserving interdependencies and even individual task assignments,
Key factors for our choosing Wrike included its native support for both Google Docs and Microsoft Office Documents, tight integration with both Gmail and Outlook, threaded discussions around any task, robust reporting, personalized dashboards, watch lists and notification management.
Common Uses For Wrike:
Jira Agile is an agile methodology project management extension for the popular Jira issue/bug tracking system from Atlassian. Since it was designed for agile development, Jira Agile provides many useful management tools including:
As previously mentioned, we Agilix Professional Services standardized on Google Drive for shared storage and file sharing. It comes with Google Apps and the cost of storage is hard to beat.
For code repositories, we have used XP-Dev and Beanstalk (cloud instances of Reversion) but recently standardized on a self hosted Git Hub server.
Most of us are familiar with the concept of password vaults to a manage our personal passwords. IT organizations have similar needs; in fact, even more so. From my experience, this is rarely managed well at most small to medium sized companies. LastPass offers an enterprise version of their popular personal password management software, that is powerful, but spendy. Ironically, for $12/year, the personal professional version of LastPass works great for group password management. One of the coolest features of LastPass is you can share credentials with another LastPass user without ever exposing the username or password. If that individual leaves or no longer needs access, you can simply delete access with a click of a mouse -- without having to update credentials or notify anyone. Likewise, if you decide to update credentials you can do so without impacting anyone's virtual access! Very slick.
As noted, the most obvious area where Google Apps comes up short, is accounting. Spreadsheets are useful for budgeting and tracking actuals, but they are no replacement for a dedicated accounting system. At Agilix we used a combination of Google Spreadsheets, Freshbooks and Quickbooks.
As mentioned above, Agilix uses Google Spreadsheets for budgeting, tracking actuals and forecasting.
Agilix uses Freshbooks for timekeeping, team timesheet reporting and to quickly calculate T&M invoice for clients. If you are wondering why we didn’t use the timekeeping capabilities of Jira Tempo, Wrike or Quickbooks. In the case of the latter, Freshbooks is simply superior in every aspect of collecting time sheets from a distributed team. As for Jira and Wrike, both offer decent timekeeping capabilities but neither program was used by the entire staff. Jira was exclusively the dev teams and Wrike was more, design, PMO and management. This we settled on Freshbooks for ubiquitous timekeeping, company-wide.
Agilix uses Quickbooks for its corporate accounting and for generating invoices to its professional services invoices to clients.
As you may rightly surmise from the patchwork quilt that comprises this toolbox, in my opinion there really isn’t a unified, end-to-end enterprise project management tool suite suitable for small and medium sized businesses; and by suitable, I mean affordable.
If I am wrong about this, I'd love to learn otherwise. Please share a comment, or contact me directly, with your thoughts.
Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
Professional Services Consultant
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me
In this installment, starting with the basics, I will discuss the collection of tools we employed to manage Agilix Professional Services.
Agilix is an ed-tech company based out of Orem, UT, and the professional services team is essentially a product team for hire, creating custom solutions for large educational publishers in the ed-tech industry. As the company name implies, Agilix prides itself on being, “agile”; as in fleet of foot. So, nimble process, flat hierarchies, and lean UX are all important to Agilix -- and that meant choosing a flexible toolset. Since we created the group from scratch, we had the luxury of starting with a clean slate. We were essentially a startup within Agilix, with our own infrastructure and culture. And like all startups, we were cash conscious. Our toolset decisions were driven by these realities.
Agilix specifics aside, the requirements of enterprise project management are pretty similar across industries and the toolsets can be organized into five, broad categories:
Call us religious zealots, or fanboys, I really don’t care. Agilix Professional Services was established as a Google Apps shop. Given the selection criteria I shared in Part One of this Series on Tools of the Trade, it isn’t hard to understand how we landed on this decision.
For $5 a user per month, consider the value proposition of Google Apps for Work:
Taken together, the Google feature set addresses most all of the functionality outlined in the five major categories above: collaboration, artifact creation, resource management, IT management and accounting -- okay, accounting is a bit of a stretch, but spreadsheets do have a role. ;-)
In other words, you can practically run an entire enterprise on Google Apps alone!
If you are a Microsoft shop, you can still integrate Google Apps into your Exchange environment to reap the benefits of both platforms. Google offers various articles about how to implement this.
Let me highlight a few areas where Google Apps shine.
Google Docs Collaboration
Before Google Docs, few people, if any, considered the notion of real time, multi-author collaboration in a single computer document. Google Docs collaboration is brilliant! Once you experience the productivity boost of working together in real time, it is painful to even consider reverting to the old school practice of circulating documents for input, one author at a time, each adding their initials to the filename. So 2006!
Authoring vs. Publishing
One of the great things about Google Docs is its ability to read other formats for preview or conversion to native Google documents. Likewise, Google Docs offers a wide variety of publishing formats, including Microsoft Formats (.docx, .xlsx and pptx), Open Document Format (.odt), Rich Text Format (.rtf), PDF Document (.pdf), Plain Text (.txt) and Web Page (.html).
My standard process is to author in Google Docs and publish in whatever format the client needs. If a publishing format isn’t specified, PDF is our default publishing format. Once a document is published, especially if it is an editable format, be sure to communicate clearly to your team where any updates are to be authored; typically, I recommend maintaining the original authoring source doc, to prevent later confusion.
SSO User Management
It's not surprising that Google user management offers SSO (single sign-on) across the Google suite, but many 3rd party systems, including Wrike and Jira, also offer SSO integration with Google Apps. What this means is if you create a user in Google, they are also created in Jira and Wrike, for example. We chose not to employ this feature at Agilix, in order to have more control over user licensing management.
Shared Storage
When Google Drive first came out it seemed buggy and unreliable; especially on the iOS platform. For this reason we experimented with Dropbox and Box.net, but ultimately, we standardized on Google Drive. One thing than many people overlook is the the native reversion capabilities of Google Drive. If you want to update a file on Google Drive without losing its version history, right click on the file to be updated and you will see a dialog that allows you to upload a new version.
Hassle-Free IT
One huge benefit of any cloud-based solution, is hassle-free IT.
24 x 7 Phone Support - Included
No provider can promise there won’t be glitches, from time to time, and Google was no exception. The difference is the quality of support, and in this department, Google was best of breed: quick access, short hold times, excellent CSRs and over the top follow-up, both email and by telephone!
These are just a few highlight. If you want to learn more, you can visit the Google Apps for Work homepage.
Having made the case for the power and excellent value of Google Apps as a foundational toolset, we still found the need to supplement the Google suite in various ways for various reasons, which I will share in the next installment of this series.
If you have any comments about this series or your experience using Google Apps or other project management tools, please share them below or with me directly.
Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me
Sat in on a great webinar today, "2015 Guide to Using Linkedin", presented by Dave Delaney and Brad Farris. Definitely worth while if they present it again. Shout out to Dave Delaney -- Thanks for the invite.
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.
Over the coming weeks I'm will be posting a series of articles sharing my experience with various popular project management tools and my quest to identify and unify the best toolset for enterprise software management.
I have spent much of my career managing distributed teams to create software products. In fact, I started an interactive company in 1995 called CyberIsland Studios, which was established on a literal island in the Pacific Northwest. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, and online collaboration was was still a twinkle in the mind's eye. Managing distributed teams was relegated to phone, fax, FedEx and email. From that time forward, I have been an early adopter of pretty much every promising emerging collaboration and project management technology. Along the way, I have also created a lot of glueware to meet the needs of my teams when commercially available technologies fell short.
My most recent experience as Vice President of Professional Services at Agilix Labs has led me to realize that the perfect PM stack doesn't exist, at least not out of the box, and the many applications that market themselves as project management solutions are partial solutions at best; pieces of the pie.
To set the context for this series on enterprise project management toolsets and to round out this first post, here's my selection criteria for considering new software solutions:
Cloud-based - This is a must for distributed teams.
UX/UI Design - Is it thoughtfully designed? Easy to use? Elegant?
Interoperability - Does it play with other solutions? Is there a public API for custom integrations?
Mobile Friendly - Also a must, these days. More and more work is being done on mobile devices.
Data Ownership - Who owns the data? Can you export and/or migrate your data, if you choose?
Business Continuity - Are they running on a solid infrastructure? What is the up-time promise? How often do they back up? What is their disaster recovery window?
Financial Stability - Company Size? Years in business? Is there a user community? What do the forums tell you about the company and products?
Support - How good is their sales support? Ask a question via their website or email. The responsiveness of the sales support team likely reflects the best you can expect from customer support.
Privacy and Security Policies - It's important to know what's lurking in the birdseed. You can reserve this tedium for serious contenders only, but don’t forget to do this.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - The acquisition cost is only part of the TCO picture. What about adoption cost? Is the software easy learn? Or, at least easy to use, once you learn it? What will it take to train your team on this software? What about on-boarding new team members? What is the ongoing cost of support? All of these areas need to be considered and quantified up front.
If the software you are considering passes this checklist, there is one last critical hurdle I strongly recommend:
My Notes from Guy Kawasaki’s SXSW-edu talk:
Guy's Top 10 things he wished kids were taught and his kids believed
1) How to continue to learn
Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.
At Agilix Labs Professional Services we consolidated the typical 10-step SDLC methodology into a process called the 5D's: 1) Define, 2) Discover, 3) Design, 4) Develop and 5) Deploy.
While the first two phases are typically linear and somewhat waterfall-ish due to the nature of professional services — clients always want to know what, when and how much — the later three phases are iterative and agile. This hybrid methodology is sometime referred to as agile-fall.
Below is the presentation we created to explain the process.
Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.
Recently, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. If one can't support a personal memory or experience with a link to Wikipedia or some other online reference, that memory is simply suspect, no matter how factual. Forget about the fact that you lived it firsthand, if it's not documented on the Internet, it might as well not have happened. So the story below is one such memory and my attempt to document what little I know about one forgotten individual in the history of animation, hopefully giving credit where credit is due...
Wikipedia states, "The bouncing ball is a device used in video recordings to visually indicate the rhythm of a song, helping audiences to sing along with live or prerecorded music. As the song's lyrics are displayed on the screen, an animated ball bounces across the top of the words, landing on each syllable when it is to be sung."
It goes on to say that "The bouncing ball was invented at Fleischer Studios for the Song Car-Tunes series of animated cartoons (both Max and Dave Fleischer later claimed to have devised the idea). It was introduced in September 1925 with the film My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."Sid was in his seventies at the end of a fantastic career when I met and worked with him. Did he muddle up the facts and timelines as he relayed his story? Perhaps. But it seems just as likely, maybe more so, that I conflated the facts, missing some critical context when Sid relayed his story. We may never know the circumstances of exactly how, when, or if Sid worked with King Vidor, but I did solve the mystery about Kelly with a Green Necktie, thanks to Marianne's comment below and some dumb luck.
Here's a heads up...
If you are into contemporary music, iTunes Festival Live from the Roundhouse in London begins tomorrow: 30 days of FREE music; 60 artists!
If you have AppleTV, it shows up as a new service, like Netflix or Podcasts. If not there is an iOS app. Check it out on the App Store:
![]() | iTunes Festival LondoniTunes Category: Music Updated: Aug 31, 2012 |
iOS Applications |
Please note that you have not been added to any email lists. Copyright © 2012 Apple Inc. All rights reserved |
I had the chance to host a meeting today, using MeetingBurner. My buddy Chipp Walters had mentioned it to me. It was free to sign up, so I thought I would give it a try. I must say, I was VERY impressed!
We're launching a paid service model soon!
We're excited to announce that in early 2012, we will be launching our paid service model. But don't worry - we are going to continue offering a free account level for new users. More importantly, we are going to grandfather all of our beta users (that's you) into a free package for life, to thank you all for your support during our testing.
Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc
If you haven't already discovered this on your own, the new
Check out this application on the App Store:
![]() | Photogene² for iPhoneOmer Shoor Category: Photo & Video Updated: Nov 04, 2011 |
iTunes for Mac and Windows |
Please note that you have not been added to any email lists. Copyright © 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved |
Introduction
iOS Ditty Bag Contents
Introduction
One of my favorite things about the iPhone is the quality of the camera, and it's about to get even better with the iPhone 4s. I love experimenting with the various photography apps available from the App store. As you can see in Figure 1, I have a number of them.
One app that I have found to be a bit frustrating, is Hipstamatic (Figure 2). Don't get me wrong, it's plenty cool, with its many interchangeable lenses, film types, colored strobes and filters. But that's just it: There are so many options it's pretty much impossible to remember what settings to use to repeat your favorite results. Or, at least, so I thought.
Turns out Hipstamatic has a built in feature that, when combined with the strategy I'm about to share, can help you reference and manage your favorite settings, so you can get predictable results, every time.
First, The Strategy...
You need to create a set of Reference images. Pick a simple subject matter (a still life is ideal), and shoot multiple images usint the Hipstamatic app. Each image should have a unique combination of lens, film type, strobe and filter pack.
Don't worry about keeping track of the photo settings; Hipstamatic automatically records all these settings as metadata. As for the number of reference images, the more the merrier! Once you have a set of reference images, it's time to put these images to work for you... From the camera back screen, (Figure 3) locate the picture icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Clicking this icon (Figure 4), will open a gallery of "Recent Prints"; i.e., photos previously shot from within the Hipstamatic app. Locate your series of reference images. You can see mine in Figure 5. Clicking on any of your reference images will open an information screen for that image (Figure 6). Scroll down towards the bottom of the list, until you see the menu item, "Match Settings" (Figure 7). Click "Match Settings" to instantly restore all the required settings to match the look of your chosen reference image. Once I discovered this feature, Hipstamatic went from being a little used "novelty" photo app, to a serious tool in my image creation arsenal. Let me know if you find this tip helpful. Happy image making!
Steve Lomas is an interactive media veteran, designer, entrepreneur and idea mechanic. He is the founder of MojoMediaPros.
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So, yesterday was the the day... The day I referenced back in March...The day the Apple faithful have dreaded for some time...
Steve Jobs died yesterday, October 5, 2011. 1955-2011... I can't help thinking it could be me. We were the same age. I haven't felt this way, since the murder of John Lennon. A feeling of tremendous loss. And while Jobs wasn't shot by a crazed gunman, that is little consolation. Ironically, both men were linked by the name, "Apple"... Much has been said about Jobs' passion and all the cool technology he created. I have nothing to add, except to say, "Thank you!" I had the good fortune of being present, onsite for many Steve Jobs keynotes. He always made it fun. I also had the opportunity to meet him once. I was introduced by a mutual acquaintance, a former Apple employee. We had stopped at a little Palo Alto coffee shop, to grab some breakfast on our way to a meeting. Turns out, it was Steve's favorite morning spot, just blocks from his house. The guy I was with, said, "Oh, there's Steve. Would you like to meet him?" (This was shortly after Pixar's IPO -- it was Pixar, not Apple, that first made Jobs a billionaire.) And there he was, sitting at a little table by a window, minding his own business, reading the paper, and enjoying his coffee. What I remember most, was how Steve greeted my associate: warmly asking about his wife and children by name. It had been years since they had worked together. Jobs was infamous for guarding his privacy; rarely speaking about himself and his personal life.That's why I think this video link to his 2005 Stanford University commencement address is a fitting memorial. He titled it, "How to Live Before You Die".In it, he speaks of embracing mortality as a springboard to life.
Rest in peace, Steve.
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This post is for anyone with lots of apps on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. who is having a hard time keeping track of them...
Background
Recently a friend of mine mentioned how he hates Apple's IOS navigation model of flipping through page after page of icons. I replied that I didn't have any trouble finding apps on my IOS devices. I have most of my apps organized into folders and everything is on one of two two pages. So, my friend, decided to put me to the test. "Do you have a webpage screen grabbing app on your iPad?", he asked. "I don't recall," I replied, "Let's see..." One swipe, one click, and three seconds later, "Yes: Webshot. It's in my utilities folder."
"Wow! That's impressive", says my friend. He then went on to share that the real problem, was getting his head around the task of organizing hundreds of apps into folders. It just seemed like an endless time sink...
Sound familiar? Well I have a strategy for performing this task that makes it easy to organize your IOS screen life. Get Organized!2) Drag all your apps off the lower tool bar and onto the last page, including the apple apps. If your last page is full, go to the next page.
3) With and empty tool bar navigate back to the first page (Home) -- pressing the round physical button will take you there directly.
4) Now reviewing the icons on your home page, drag any two similar icons onto each other; this will create a folder. For example: if your home page included Facebook, a Twitter client and the LinkedIn app, you could drag the Twitter app onto the Facebook app, which will create a folder called "Social". You can rename it if you like. Then drag the LinkedIn app onto the Social folder. This will result in three icons inthe single folder named, "Social". Repeat this process, creating folders for any other like categories, on the page.
5) Drag the folders you created from your home screen onto the empty tool bar. The iPhone will accommodate four; the iPad, six.
6) Now, with folders in tow, navigate to all the other pages (screens) of application icons, dragging appropriate apps into the folders on the toolbar.
7) When you get to the last page, and you have grabbed all the apps that fit the folders on your tool bar, drag these folders off the toolbar, and repeat the process.
This is a really easy way to organize your apps. The big idea here, is bringing the folders to the apps, instead of trying to drag the apps from screen to screen in search of folders -- you'll likely go mad, doing that!Once you have everything organized by folder, you can use the toolbar to relocate your folders to whatever screen you desire. Most people prefer certain, "heavy use apps", to be free standing. My home page is a mixture of both icons and folders, and as I have already shared, all my apps fit on two screens!
IOS Folder Capacity8 pages x 16 folders x 12 apps/folder + 4 potential toolbar folders x 12 apps each = 1584 apps
On the iPad, you are allowed a maximum of 11 screens; each screen can accommodate 20 folders or icons, plus the toolbar which can hold a combination of six additiional icons or folders. Each folder can house a maximum of 20 apps. If every slot is dedicated to a folder, that means the iPad has a maximum capacity of 4520 apps, or until you run out of memory.
11 pages x 20 folders x 20 apps/folder + 6 potential toolbar folders x 20 apps each = 4520 apps
Folder Names
Obviously, you can name your folders any way you chose, but here is a list of potential folder names that may be useful:
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One last tip, to find an app gone AWOL...
Navigate to the the home screen and enter the find mode, by either swiping to the right or by pressing the round physical button at the bottom of your screen. Once on the find screen, type in the name of the app you are looking for. It won't take you to the app, but it will confirm it's presence and you can launch it, which is probably why you were looking for it in the first place. :-)
Now go forth and organize!
Steve Lomas is an interactive media veteran, designer, entrepreneur and idea mechanic. He is the founder of MojoMediaPros, and CyberIsland Studios.
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TIMOTHY BRADSTREET'S ARCHETYPE WORLD-WIDE DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE. Desperado Publishing in tandem with Amusedom, is proud to present a retrospective volume devoted to the entire career of one of today's most popular artists, Tim Bradstreet. At over 300 pages, this book offers readers and fans a chance to witness his immense and phenomenal career from the early days to the present, offering glimpses of previously never-before-seen material from his files and sketchbooks, his enormously popular comic work, art from his career in movie design and posters, his gaming illustrations, as well as beautifully reproduced images of his personal favorites with insights into his life and creative process. Eisner Award nominated illustrator ,Tim Bradstreet, was born February 16, 1967 in Cheverly, Maryland. Primarily a self-taught illustrator, he has been working professionally since graduating from high school in 1985. Forgoing institutional art instruction, Tim joined Fantasmagraphics in 1986, where he worked for two years with fellow illustrator Steve Venters. Under the guidance of Venters, Tim began illustrating role-playing games, honing his skills while pursuing his lifelong ambition to draw comics. In 1990 he hit the ground running with industry legend Tim Truman on Dragon Chiang, and never looked back.
Other great books by Timothy Bradstreet and others:
From: Pepe Moreno Dear friends, colleagues and fans, as a small personal favor, can you please join us at AMUSEDOM and help with the emancipation of artists and the arts (just click the facebook link bellow to join). AMUSEDOM is a SELF-PUBLISHING ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK. It's nonexclusive, you keep the rights to your own work and 85% of the revenue. It is secure, there are no set up fees and it's free to join.
Many of your favorite artists are already on board: Tim Bradstreet, Syd Mead, Michael Kaluta, Paco Roca, Javier Trujillo, Michael Golden, Bill Sienkiewicz, Richard Starkings, Cris Ortega, Dave Johnson, Rosanna Walls, Alvaro Pons, Bruce Jones, Tanino Liberatore, Jim Starling, Joe Jusko, Michael Netzer, Thomas Jane, J. F. Lawton, Skott Harben, Rafa Garres, Juan José Ryp, Sergio Bleda, Tony Harris, Doug Wheatley, Sean Galloway, Neil Vokes, Larry Hama and hundreds more... There's power in numbers and it's free to join. We're not a corporate site but a professional and social network of fans, independent artists, publishers and people like you. Please join... and thanks so much for your support. Pepe Moreno If you do not have a Facebook account (or do not wish to connect through Facebook), go directly to the site, take a look around and register from there. click here to go to the AMUSEDOM site |
http://www.amusedom.com/ |
Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
615.830.6451 cell
stevenflomas@gmail.com
Recently, I purchased a Samsung Series 5 Arctic White 3G Model Chromebook. For those of you who don't know, Chromebook is a notebook computer which runs Google's Chrome OS and is for the most part just a Chrome browser in a notebook. I know, it sounds rather simple and not very exciting. But, knowing how much I depend on Google for business and after doing a bit of research, I became interested enough in it to purchase one and try it out. Here's what I now think of it after using it for three days.First off, if you want to know more specifically about the Chromebook and it's features, there's an explanation HERE.Many of you know I already own and use an iPad-- so much so, it's taken over as the computer I use most daily. It replaces my laptop for many tasks including email and web browsing. Plus, it allows me to sketch ideas and diagrams, something not easily done on a notebook. Still, I have to say there are quite a few things I really like about my Chromebook.Early impressions are extremely positive. It has many of the features I really like of the iPad while also retaining much of the functionality I like in netbooks. I should mention, the Shafer Walters Group is a virtual company and we pretty much run on Google Apps, including accessing email in Gmail, creating and editing documentation in Google Docs, and with most spreadsheet work done using Google Spreadsheet. We aso like Google Presentations as a collaborative tool for creating slide presentations. We use many online tools, including Basecamp, Freshbooks, Quicken Online, Dropbox, FogBugz among others. So, it's fair to say, just like my friend Jerry Daniels, we do a whole lot of computing already 'in the cloud.' In fact, Jerry is an excellent source of new cloud apps and talks about them frequently on his blog. A cloud only device suits many of our needs well.The implementation of the Chrome browser is great. It looks and behaves exactly the same on Windows and MacOS, which was a bit of a surprise to me seeing how it's based on a Linux kernel. When I first logged in, the Chrome browser already had all my bookmarks and personal preferences setup as I had on my other Chrome installs (PC and Mac), which was a nice surprise. In fact, install was a snap and I was up and using it after a quick OS update.The Samsung Chromebook is a bit larger than netbook computers, but smaller than most notebooks. The keyboard is easy to use. It's fairly light for a notebook but still weighs twice the iPad2. The Chromebook display is much higher resolution at 1280 x 800 vs the iPad's 1024 x 768 and the Chromebook has a whopping 2GB of memory versus the iPad2's wimpy 512MB (iPad 1 is only 256MB). Both iPad and Chromebook use solid state drives, with the iPad having three configurations to choose from: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. This Chromebook only has 16GB, but does have an SSD slot along with a couple of USB ports where you can add more memory. Because the Chromebook focusses on connecting to the Internet and storage in the cloud, I don't see lack of local storage as a significant detractor.Chromebooks can be purchased from $349 to $499 (mine), the topend being a bit more expensive than one might expect. I think this price may come down as more of them are sold, still they are quite competitive when priced against current tablet models including iPad.The PositivesExtremely long battery life. No kidding. Reportedly it can run continuously for 8 hours. I've not had to recharge any more than once per day-- just like my cell phone and iPad. I also have Sony Vaio and MacBook Air laptops, and neither get even close to iPad or Chromebook in battery life.
Instant on. And instant connection to wireless. My Chromebook takes 8 seconds to boot-- from a cold start. Closing the lid puts it to sleep and it resumes from sleep instantaneously, much like my AirBook. But unlike my AirBook and more like the iPad, the wireless connection seems to be instantly connected. I've set mine to force a password login from sleep mode, something I would encourage anyone to do who owns a Chromebook or iPad.
3G so I can connect anywhere. Combined with extreme battery life, this is one of the most valuable features of this particular model. Furthermore, Verizon gives away free 100MB of transfer per month for the first two years of ownership. I used to think having a wifi hotspot was just as good, and I do have one of those as well, but my good friend Steve Lomas, convinced me otherwise after seeing him pull out his 3G iPad, check his email and put it away in 30 seconds. The darn wifi hotspot takes over two minutes just to boot, not to mention having to connect it to a laptop, iPad or iPhone. As such, I'd never use it to quickly check an email or Google an address.No auto-correction, it's replaced by good spellchecking. I find when I send emails on the iPad, I have to constantly check to see what iOS has automatically corrected and changed. I know I can turn it off, but sometimes it does come in handy, just not always. It's SO MUCH EASIER TO TYPE emails on a Chromebook than on an iPad-- and this is one of the reasons folks like my business partner, Dan Shafer, may prefer a Chromebook over iPad as an Everday Portable Computing Device (EPCD).Large trackpad with MacOS type functionality. I do admit, I mostly prefer Apple's implementation of trackpads. Two-finger scrolling and a physical click directly on the trackpad help make it easy to use. Still, dragging and dropping is somewhat difficult, just like on my MacBook Air, which IMO is better done with two fingers on opposite hands. The feel of the trackpad is very smooth and works as well as on Mac devices.Keyboard modifications make it actually easier to use. There's no caps lock key, which surprisingly to me, is not missed at all-- in fact, it's better because I don't accidently hit it when typing. It is replaced by a search key which opens a new browser tab and highlights the URL field. If you really want CAPS LOCK back, you can choose to do so in Chromebook settings. Also, the mostly useless function keys on other keyboards are replaced by much more useful keys like: forward, backward, refresh, full screen, show next window, brightness and audio volume buttons. Much better.Printing is easy to setup and just works. I was able to easily setup my Epson wired and HP wireless printers to work with the wireless Google Cloud Printing. I was a bit concerned this would be an issue, but it turns out it just worked-- not as seamlessly as Apple's AirPrint, but easy nonetheless.Multi-user accounts make this a family computer. As I mentioned before, I'm all setup on Google Apps, and so is my wife and daughter. Because I don't need to worry about viruses on the Chromebook, or any files getting damaged or lost as they're stored in the cloud, I can easily lend my Chromebook to my wife and daughter for them to use. They each use their existing Gmail account sign on and then they're good to go. So, if Christi goes out of town, she can take the Chromebook with her to check emails, bank balances, etc. and it's more secure because of the 3G access (We all know those wireless access points are not always very trustworthy!).Lost or damaged Chromebooks aren't as expensive as one might first imagine. The first thing I think about after spilling Red Bull on my notebook keyboard and watching the screen fritz is "what data have I lost?" When all the data is stored in the cloud, that question pretty much goes away. Furthermore, the Chromebook is not as expensive as my MacBook Air or Vaio, so if something does happen to it, no data is lost and it's less expensive to replace with a new one which is up and running in no time at all. This is huge, and one reason I'd like to talk my Dad into using one, as sometimes he forgets which file he left on which computer or he downloads new Windows apps which 'promise' to speed up his computer, but instead install viruses, which I later have to remove.Economic model is great for small businesses. You can 'rent' a Chromebook for between $20-30 per month for employees, and Google will take over all help desk responsibilities. This is huge, and IMO, a real gamechanger. The business administrators can configure all employees Chromebooks from one central interface. And, if your Chromebook breaks it is immediately replaced free of cost. This is huge for small businesses who can now spend less on IT and more on productivity-- assuming you have no need for standard business apps like MS Office, which many, like us, have given up in favor of Google Apps. For those diehards who absolutely need to run MS Office, there is an HTML5 remote desktop computing solution which allows Chromebooks to run remote virtual instances of Windows7 running Office and other Windows apps, but it seems counterproductive to the ease-of-use premise of Chromebook.Chromebook runs Flash with no problems-- along with several other web application frameworks. There are many web applications which try to replace desktop applications using Flash and Flex, including our very own CIGLive.com which runs flawlessly on Chromebook. For instance, Aviary.com has a bunch of really cool apps including their Phoenix image editor which mirrors much of what Photoshop can do-- and they all run in a browser using Flash. I've had no problems using these products including HTML5 apps which allow me to FTP into WordPress sites, and even edit directly the php and CSS files directly. Certainly, there are many more on the way. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for either iPad or Android.The NegativesA few keyboard issues. There is no delete key. There is a backspace key. For Mac users, this is probably no big problem as the Mac doesn't have one either. But for many of us Windows users the delete key is critical to our workflow. Hope this is fixed in newer versions. But Mac users will be disappointed with the undo,cut, copy and paste keyboard shortcuts. There is no Apple command key so you have to use the CTRL key as a modifier, which is quite a finger stretch for those trained on the easy Command-Z,X,C and V workflow.There is no Netflix. Yet. For those of you hooked on Netflix, it's rumored to be in the works, but currently there is no way to play Netflix. I suspect this is because the OS is based on Linux and for some reason, Netflix has some specific requirements which only run on MacOS and Windows and iOS.There are many applications which have no online counterparts. No decent 3D apps are available as web apps. And of course neither support for the real Photoshop and MS Office or my favorite programming language, LiveCode. We all have our 'gotta have' applications, and many of mine are just not available.No GoToMeeting or Skype. For me, these both are two of the biggest detractors right now for Chromebook. I depend on both these apps during the day, and both are supported on the iPad. Though, frankly, GTM on iPad is pretty bad-- you can't initiate a meeting nor can you do any sort of screen sharing. Google Voice does work on the Chromebook. While there are plenty of rumors, there's no word yet on when or if there will be an HTML5 or Flash version of Skype. There are some pretty decent chat clients. One is https://imo.im/No Network, No work. This is a common complaint for most reviewers of Chromebook. But, for me, it's not such a big deal. I only want to use my Chromebook when I need web access, so I purchased it with 3G built in. So, unless I'm flying somewhere, or way out in the country, web access shouldn't be much a problem-- and if I can't have Internet access, I doubt there's much I really want to do. Also, I don't think of my Chromebook as my only machine, only as possibly the one I may end up using the most.Final thoughtsFirst of all, I hope others see the value in owning a Google Chromebook. Because as more users buy them, more companies will have to take note and begin support for them.As products and operating systems become more and more complex, the simplicity of accessing and storing data on the cloud using only a browser is appealing to those who crave for a simpler and easier way to do things. This is an important step in lessening our collective dependency on older and more antiquated OS'es, which are providing less and less value to us as they become more and more complicated. Fact is, modern OS'es have been looking like the same animals, doing the same things, offering the same features. Apple's new OS named Lion now has many similar features as Windows 7, including the much needed ability to resize a window from any edge. But also, looking forward, Lion also adds some very interesting iOS features, such as implementation of fullscreen mode which does away with windows-- and acts more like a fullscreen BROWSER-- just like Chromebook already does! I expect if ChromeOS is successful, it will start to implement Android type features much like Lion has adopted iOS capabilities.I personally think Chromebook is excellent family based computer as well as perfect for many small businesses. And for myself, someone who owns a desktop PC, Mac and Windows laptop, and iPad, the Chromebook will be an interesting fit. It will be telling to see how much time I spend using it-- my guess is it will take over much of the space my iPad used to use. I enjoy the iPad because of it's instant on, super long battery life, and super fast and capable connectivity to the web-- all things make it a superb Everday Portable Computing Device. The Samsung Chromebook has all of this PLUS I can now view Flash, type emails without looking at the keys (instead of hunt-and-peck on iPad), and have an overall better browsing experience. We'll see.
In June of 2009, I blogged about a series of articles I wrote documenting how and why I was using Gmail as the central hub of my e-mail universe -- even for my business domains.
Here's to a SPAM-free tomorrow!
Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
www.mojomediapros.com
Forgive me if this offends anyone, but I'm gonna miss Steve Jobs if God calls him home anytime soon. Great to see him today leading Apple's iPad 2 shout out. Greatest marketer and inventor of our age...
I'm praying for you, Steve! Steve Lomas
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I have been reflecting lately on just how dramatically my day-to-day workflow has changed. The tools I rely on today, are completely different from the tools I was using, even a year ago. It used used to be...
Just in time for the HoLiDaYs... meet the iTray ! :-)
]]>Owning an iPhone and later the iPad has reinvigorated my interest in drawing, painting and fine arts photography. Apparently I'm in good company...
I found this story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131854461/in-paris-a-display-from-hockney-s-pixelated-period?sc=17&f=
- December 7, 2010
David Hockney thinks his current exhibition may be the first one that's ever been 100 percent e-mailed to a gallery. The 73-year-old artist is standing in the space in question -- the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris -- trying to talk about the works, when his iPhone rings.
"I'm right in the middle of an interview," he says, laughing. "I'm sorry -- wait a minute -- I am, actually." Then, to the reporter: "I'll turn it off."
And he does, though it might have been more fun if he hadn't: He might have made us a new artwork right on the phone -- a little vase of flowers, or a face, or a landscape.
When Hockney first got the device about two years ago, he immediately realized it was a new medium for creativity.
"Incredible little thing, really, because it was like a sketchbook and a paintbox all in one," the artist says. Better, even: "No cleaning up. No mess."
That's because he's painting with an app called Brushes -- a small virtual paintbox on the phone's screen, into which Hockney dips a finger -- or 10 -- and makes pictures.
"He started out sending out these images -- little images that he would make on his iPhone -- to his friends," says installation designer Ali Tayar. "You wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and you're trying to go back to sleep, but on your computer is one of his images," Tayar says. "That is a treat -- a 'Hi,' a little flower."
Capturing The Morning, With Light Instead Of Inks
Hockney started making these vibrant digital "paintings" early in the morning at his home in Yorkshire, England.
"From about late April to July, the sunrise would hit me in bed," he explains. But "if I'd [only] had a pencil and paper by the bed, I wouldn't have drawn a sunrise."
Black lead, white paper; not that much to get up for, really. But Hockney had his iPhone by the bed, so he could draw the sunrise on the phone, in color.
Then the sun hit a vase of flowers near the bed. Hockney painted that, too. More mornings, more paintings, until he'd made hundreds and hundreds.
"Some were drawn quite quickly," he says, "Some were drawn over two or three mornings, meaning I'd go back to them. And I sent them out -- lovely thing was, I could send them out to my friends. ... Often they were getting the sunrise that they'd missed."
As you might guess, the people on his list -- a couple of dozen or so -- said they loved receiving those early-morning e-mails.
For A Few Weeks, 'Fresh Flowers,' And Then A Sudden Fade
Then Hockney heard about the larger iPad. The artist has always carried a small sketchbook with him. Now he carries the electronic equivalent. The creative experience is different on the bigger device, he says.
"On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb," he says. "Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger."
And he really gets into it, reports curator Charlie Scheips.
"He says he sometimes gets so obsessed that when he's going, he rubs his finger on his clothes to, like, clean his finger -- as if he was using real paint."
Scheips coordinated the Paris show, a riot of non-paint paintings on luminous digital screens. One wall at the gallery is hung with 20 iPhones; a second wall carries 20 iPads. (The Berge-St. Laurent Foundation paid for all the devices -- it's not an Apple-backed effort, it says.)
All the gadgets are turned on 24 hours a day, and from time to time Hockney e-mails a new work to one of them -- a kind of artistic status update.
The show, called "Fresh Flowers," closes at the end of January. And then, installation designer Ali Tayar says, all the art will disappear.
"It's not the traditional painting," he muses. "It really doesn't exist. It's just light on a screen."
You could print a Hockney e-mail, if you were lucky enough to get one, but it would lose something in translation without that brilliant backlighting. The work only lives on these gadgets.
There's another hurdle, of course.
"We haven't figured out how to get paid," Hockney says. "At the moment it doesn't matter, but I will have to figure it out like everybody else."
Meantime, he's having fun making art with this newfangled but basically old-fashioned instrument. So are loads of other artists who are bringing back drawing this way, making works on digital devices.
Curator Scheips says Hockney has always been forward-looking -- years ago he made collages with Polaroid pictures, and used home copying machines for other works. This new phase, Scheips thinks, is just the logical next step.
But it's a big step, artistically.
"These things are all about surfaces," Scheips says. "It's all about mark-making. ... These drawings -- they may be small physically, but they're big and important in terms of his total oeuvre. And he thinks that this medium is gonna change the world." [Copyright 2010 National Public Radio]
To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews