The Grammy Brand® site we designed just launched.

Check it out:

http://grammybrand.com

Here’s a funny and simple mock-up of an imaginary Apple product I made. Gizmodo featured it on their iPhone mock-up contest.

1. If you zoom into a particular column of text, you can double tap the lower right and upper right areas of the screen to scroll up and down. Takes a little practice.

2. Do you like to browse MobileSafari while in bed or on a couch? I know I do! If you’re like me, then you like to read while lying on your side. This poses a problem with the iPhone. Everytime you lie on your side, the accelorometers kick in and flip the screen sideways. The solution? The iPhone Safari can’t rotate upside down, so go into Landscape mode then hold the phone upside down.

Read More

I recently made some iPhone wallpapers based on the default ones that come with OSX.

Read More

Apple posted their new ads for the Apple iPhone on Sunday night. I’ve been very excited about this product ever since MWSF. I combed through the ads hoping to find any tidbits people have missed. I didn’t find anything earth-shattering but I did find some promising hints.

In the “How To” ad, I looked closely at the email screen to see how well the iPhone could help me with my work.

The first thing I noticed was that contrary to what a lot of analysts have been saying, Apple considers the iPhone to be ready for business use. The first email reads:

“Heidi Luko

Client Meeting

Just a reminder: Tuesday at 11 am, we’re meeting with Jim, Richard and Tessa in co…”

The iPhone is offering push email from Yahoo! But the fact that Apple is advertising business email use begs the question as to whether Apple is planning to offer more enterprise solutions for the iPhone such as support for Exchange.

The other email that caught my eye read:

“Meghann Haven

Results are in

Here are results for FY05, FY06, FY07. Let’s discuss at Tuesday’s meeting.”

Once again this is showing the use of the iPhone in a business/corporate situation. If you look at the screenshot of the ad, you’ll notice the paperclip icon next to the email, indicating an attachment. What’s interesting is that from reading the short synopsis of the email, which discusses the results for the Financial Years of 2005, 2006, and 2007, we can surmise that the attachment is probably in an interesting format such as .doc, .xls, .pdf or maybe even .ppt. My bet would be an Excel spreadsheet, although this is really just a guess.

Some observers have noted that a mystery app could be looming inside the iPhone. Perhaps it’s one that offers .doc or .xls support, such as an updated version of Pages or even Google Docs.

How unstoppable would an iPhone with .doc and Exchange support be?

Update: Turns out I was correct about most assumptions in this post. The iPhone can view .doc and .xls attachments. It also has exchange support via IMAP.

Update 2: Exchange support has been announced via ActiveSync.

This has to be one of the coolest videos I’ve seen in a while.

Enjoy.

I recently started some design work using my mac laptop and I’ve gotten obsessed with getting proper color rendering from Photoshop. I found this useful article which pointed me in the right direction. I’m still not completely satisified. I still notice a very miniscule color shift in Save For Web preference. The solution that seemed to work the best for me was to download this Colorsync profile for my Mac.

Here is an interesting discussion from one of Safari regarding png color shifts in the browser. Apparently Safari has a hard time rendering png’s with no color profiles.

I also started experimenting with Gamma Slamma which is basically a version of PNGCrusher for the Mac.

Update: I got myself a Huey at the Apple store today, and have been pretty happy with it so far, although I need to run more tests. I also found this cool calibration print from Smugmug.

As I was designing this blog, I ran into a problem. I wanted the site to have a flexible layout no matter how large the window size. The header image was part of the background graphic, so as the content of the site centered itself automatically, the header was always stuck on the top left of the window. The solution was then to make the header a separate image that “floated” above the background, and centered itself with the rest of the site’s content.

This presented another obstacle, as I soon realized that a simple jpg image wouldn’t suffice since it would cover the background pattern, due to its lack of transparency support. A gif image would also not work since it only supports binary transparency, making my graphic a pixelated yet transparent mess. The only viable image format would be png.

This is where my headaches began. The good folks at Microsoft fubar’d png transparency support in older versions of their ubiquitous Internet Explorer (versions 5.5 and 6.0). Thus began my 2 day journey into finding a hack that would allow me to display png’s with transparency.

I tried a javascript hack but that proved unreliable since some people disable javascript on their browsers.

I tried a WordPress Plugin, but that did absolutely nothing to my header images.

Then I experimented with a CSS hack which seemed really promising and clean. For some reason that didn’t work at all in WordPress, although I’m not sure why.

Then, finally I stumbled on a PHP solution which would be perfect since it was server-side, didn’t rely on javascript, and most important… IT WORKED!

It renders perfectly in IE 5.5, 6.0, 7.0 and all other modern browser like Firefox and Safari. There’s no workaround for IE 5.1, but considering that probably less than 1% of people use that antiquated browser, I’m not too worried about it.

According to Chip Chick:

“Jeremy Mehrle of St. Louis, Missouri has a computer collection that would have most Mac aficionados drooling uncontrollably. His basement has 74 Macs on display, with 30 of them situated at his Classic bar. Overall, his collection contains 18 different CRT based iMacs, a Next Cube, four different Apple II computers, and a 20th a Anniversary Mac. Check out flickr for more photos.”

This thing has to be seen to be believed.

This is the new Artillery Unit Blog. Hope you all enjoy it. To start off, I’d like to share this video I found. Even though this might not be the accepted view of how to visualize String Theory, I think it’s really fascinating. It’s even more interesting now that scientists are working on a new way to test String Theory.