a man suprglu-ed to the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office

Apple got so carried away with the launching of the new iPhone 2.0 that didn’t take into account the lenght of the headers in some languages. Bad CSS.

Snapshot taken with Safari on Mac OS Leopard.

Two days and a keynote to Steve Jobs’ “one more thing” thing at the WWDC which means it’s mega-rumor time!

Here’s mine (via wmacphail): an iWatch, a watch with a multitouch screen which hooks wirelessly to your iPhone or MacBook.

Here’s the beast:

We’ve all uploaded a test web site for a customer to review in a hidden directory. More so, we’ve all created the infamous index2.html.

But I bet that if you were developing a site for the launching of the iPhone in Spain, a gadget that gets a huge media and hackers attention, you’d be extra cautious about uploading any testing site, especially if they were no official news about the Telefonica-Apple deal.

Well, you probably understand it. Telefonica, the 4th largest telecom in the world, don’t!

ErneX, a colleague of mine at WeAreMortensen.com didn’t even have to use his hacking skills. He just tried a few URLs until iphone.movistar.es/index2.html (not active anymore) hit jackpot. Obviously he twittered it.

The result? After one hour more than 24.000 people registered in the microsite and the news got featured in es.appleblog.com from there to engadget.es then engadget.com and from there to all weblogs and newspapers.

How many web publishing courses can you attend for Telefonica’s last year 8.906 Milion € benefits?

Things, OmniFocus, Anxiety they’re all neat applications that can help you to Get Things Done (GTD).

But I just realized that the real GTD is having no internet access. Stranded near St. Tropez with my Mac and no internet connexion I did more actual work in a couple of hours than in a whole online working day. How?

• No email
• No Skype (huge time consumer)
• No Twitter
• No Safari
• No Google Reader
• No Wikipedia to fill my knowledge voids
• No bittorrent
• No iTunes (my music library sits in an external drive)
• No phone calls (don’t like roaming costs)
• No application or system upgrades to download and install
• No new features to check on the upgrades

This allowed me to:

• Go running on the woods
• Restart Douglas Coupland’s J-Pod on the beach
• Watch Rossi win the italian Grand Prix
• Write this post while I’m offline in the terrace of my appartment
• Take a long walk in Port Grimaud
• Have a Boullabaisse for dinner

In any case if you’re serious about GTD, a part from staying offline, consider getting Things, the simplest and yet more powerful GTD app for the Mac.

I’m writing this on a lobby before a meeting with a client. Thanks to MarsEdit, a nifty desktop blogging app, I can write this while I’m offline and worry later about publishing this post.

Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.

But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.

With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.

My experience with TextMate:

• Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
• Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
• No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
• Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
• I didn’t get any further

TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.

At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.

You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.

So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.

My Experience with MarsEdit:

• Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
• I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
• No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
• A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
• Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
• Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
• Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
• Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
• Easily republish same content to another blog
• Spellcheck as you type
• Applescript support
• Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
• Growl! integration

I use MarsEdit to post to:
ganyet.com
iosephdurgell.org
RAC1.org/elmon
wearemortensen.com/blog

Don’t miss Southpark’s season 12 episode 6 “Over Logging” about the effects of losing your connection to the internet at home. Remember last time your beloved internet provider left you out in the blank and you had to check your Facebook and IM your pals? Well, you get the feeling.

Funny to see that this episode comes out shortly after Soutpark decided to put all their episodes online with no geographic restrictions. You can’t check this episode online yet due to contractual issues but it will be available in June. If you can’t wait, you know the drill.

Incidentally all the browsers featured in the computers in Southpark are Mac OS Safari showing a distressing “You are not connected to the internet message” (The TV station though shows an IE not found page).

Check the full Southpark online episodes guide here.

An excellent mashup, or a geo-localized short story written on Google maps bubbles by writer Charles Cummings. I’m halfway through it and about to fly to Edimburgh. Don’t tell me the end!

Visit the 21 Steps website

La Banda Municipal del Polo Norte has recorded a demo CD with 5 tracks and a nice sleeve design which features a bear. Its title “Iros Despidiendo de Todo” which would roughly translate for “Say Goodbye To Everything”, reminds me of Dougas Adams’ So Long And Thanks For The Fish form the Hitch Hicker’s Guide To The Galaxy saga. I’m still working out the connexions between the two.

And by the way, any band that features me in their acknowledgements if of course the best band in the world.

See them tonight in la Sala Monasterio

Read about the concert I saw by La Banda here.

Do The Test is the perfect online campaign (yes, viral of course) to raise awarness for cyclist’s accidents in the streets of London.

In a nutshell: while you are concentrating on driving you can become blind to events that you would normally notice. This “inattention blindness” is in most cases the reason why motorists collide with cyclists.

Never heard of “inattention blindness”? Try yours at Do The Test or watch this video very carefully.

Now you can answer the question: why would this video never work on TV?

The campaign is sponsored by Transport for London

I wrote a while ago about a couple of tv ads “inspired” either by online projects or videoclips available on YouTube.

Well, history repeats. A couple of weeks ago I found a gem on YouTube called Daft Hands, where a couple of hands with text on it danced to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (over 16 Million views as I’m writing this). The video spawned dozens of replies of people with text all over the body dancing to the tune.

My surprise was when a week ago I saw a commercial on TV by Spanish telecom Telefónica, where two hands with the terms of a special offer danced to a copycat of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

Talking about Web 2.0 changing traditional media!

Here’s a nice video where you can see both and judge for yourself. First the commercial and next the original version.

Here’s a link to Daft Hands on YouTube.
Marvel yourself at Telefónica’s website (the 4th telecom in the world). God!

Here’s the presentation to the students of the “Design and Web Programming” course of the ” <target="_blanka href="http://www.cea.es/">Confederación de Empresarios de Andalucía.

You can download the pdf in Spanish here.

You can see last year’s presentation here.

Looking for some info on Google Maps API, I stumbled on this project where German artist Aram Bartholl plays with the Google satellite by placing physical Google Maps markers on the ground.

Here’s a picture:

Check Bartholl’s other projects where he explores the interactions between the web and the physical world.

www.datenform.de - Aram Bartholl’s website

I watched this documentary late last night. I just wanted to watch the beginning and let it for today but it turned out to be impossible to stop.

The film deals with copyrights, copylefts, intellectual property and how the net is changing well established business models while allowing for reach and creativity for the rest of us.

In the documentary you’ll find:

• Danger Mouse talking about his highly successful The Grey Album where he mashed Jay-Z Black Album with Beatles White Album (thus The Grey Album). It violated all kinds of copyrights but it’s a masterpiece. Obviously it was downloaded by millions, earning Danger Mouse just credibility and respect. Fancy a torrent?

Here’s the video with John Lennon breakdancing to Ringo Star’s DJing.

• Musician Girl Talk. He performs live with a laptop mixing and mashing every conceivable sample creating new real time songs. He would be willing to pay the billions he should, according to current copyright laws, for using the original songs, but even if he had the money it would take him no less than 50 years to get all the permissions from the owners.
• The Brazilian DJs from the Techno Brega scene in the north of Brazil (a kind of Techno Kitsch, don’t try at home). They mix and remix whatever they listen on the radio and download from the net, Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy this time. After that they distrubute their CDs for free expecting to attract fans to their live acts, a business model that is catching up in the traditional music industry.
• Larry Lessig, author of Free Culture and creator of the Creative Commons licensing model, talking about the need to protect intellectual property but also on how too restrictive copyright laws hinder creativity and access to culture by everybody.
• The guys from Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well you know them.

Funny at the end when Girl Talk remixes Gnarls Barkley’s (Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse) remix of Crazy done by the Brazilian Techno Brega DJ, and turns it into something completely new. You could see him rocking the house with this small sample and his laptop.

Check the trailer at the Creative Commons website
Watch the movie online
Download Good Copy Bad Copy from The Pirate Bay

Brilliant acting from the guys of Improveverywhere.com with 200 people freezing for 5 minutes in NY Grand Central Station.

Their motto “we cause scenes”. Judge for yourself.

Yesterday 185.000 views and today 630.000. Going viral. I’ll talk about it Thursday on the radio.

Check their other actions in Improveverywhere.com.

Via Criterion I discover Piclens, a new plugin for Firefox (Mac & Win) and Safari that allows you to browse images on the web full screen with an advanced cinematic interface. It just blew me away when I fired it up while in my Flickr account.

Heres one of my Flickr sets seen with Piclens.

Do yourself a favor and download this beauty.

Once you have it up and running try it with the just created group to save Flickr from Microsoft.

Extremely creative and yet simple video of two hands dancing to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. All in one take and no editing.

13,5 million views and counting.

Here’s the error Twitter spits out right now.

Cool design as long as you don’t see it too often.

Al igual que disponemos de algunas herramientas que nos permiten conocer las noticias y contenidos más destacados en la blogosfera, ya sea a nivel general o para algunas temáticas en concreto, para Twitter, este sistema de microblogging que poco a poco se va haciendo más popular, tenemos un memetracker específico para él.

Tweetmeme, desarrollado por el mismo equipo de Fav.or.it, un sistema de comentarios para blogs aún en beta cerrada, rastrea la información cada cinco minutos de los tweets que comparten los usuarios a sus grupos de amigos, de manera que nos crea una portada principal con los tweets más destacados, y junto a éstos, los tweets relacionados.

Además, en muchos de los tweets es normal encontrar enlaces a distintos tipos de contenidos, con lo que nos permitirá, mediante pestañas, filtrarlos. Para ello disponemos de las pestañas: Blogs, Imágenes, Vídeos y Audio.

Sería interesante juntar algunos de estos servicios con el propio Twitter, ya que estos servicios complementarios cubren las carencias del propio Twitter, como la de un buen buscador integrado, estadísticas, y otros servicios que dan valor al propio Twitter.

Vía | Download Squad
Enlace | Tweetmeme

Dado el éxito de Twitter, resulta extraño que no haya aparecido algún script que nos permita montar nuestro propio clon de este servicio. Los chicos de Automattic, encargados del desarrollo de Wordpress, que están que no paran, han creado un tema para este gestor de blogs que le otorga funcionalidades similares.

Lo han llamado Prologue y permite implementar sobre Wordpress un Twitter para un número reducido de usuarios. Los usuarios registrados como editores en el blog pueden enviar sus mensajes cortos directamente desde la página, a través de un pequeño cuadro de texto situado en la parte superior.

Cada uno de los mensajes enviados es una entrada en toda regla, por lo que dispone de su propia página con comentarios. Es decir, no deja de ser un blog con un tema que facilita la tarea de montar un sistema similar a Twitter. Ideal para grupos de amigos o compañeros de trabajo.

Vía | Twitter de Andrés Milleiro.
Más información | Wordpress.
Enlace | Prologue.