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So, why call it Hoptoad? From their blog...

For the academically curious, the word “hoptoad” is railroad industry slang for a derailed train. At least, it used to be when the railroad industry had slang.

Yeah, that’s not what I thought it meant either. But it turns out that Hoptoad is a particularly clever name, considering that it metaphorically signifies a Ruby on Rails application getting derailed. Maybe that will make more sense to you in a minute.

No matter how hard us web developers try and build solid applications, things go wrong. And get this, sometimes we don’t even know! Aha! The perfect solution: Exception Notifier. Now, I can get an email when any un-handled exception occurs. Perfect!

Eh, not really. Exception Notifier is a little obtrusive in the sense that it sends every single error to your email. And yes, you could setup a special account just for that, and blah-biddy-blah, but at the end of the day you’re still parsing text in an inbox. Good? Yes. Great? Maybe. Perfect? Hardly.

Enter Hoptoad. I don’t know how many of these things exist (except for this other one), but man, what a brilliant idea. Instead of sending the exceptions to your inbox (which is hardly the ideal place to read through them), it uses a web-service. And it posts to a real deal web application where its sole purpose is to merely provide an interface (and a very clean one at that) around your exceptions. It allows you to setup several projects, mark exceptions as resolved, look at a frog (er, toad), and there’s word of a few more bells and whistles on the way.

It was officially released yesterday, so go on and ride the toad (as they say). I’ve already incorporated it into Golf Trac and a few other projects of mine, so I can vouch for it’s slickness.

This definitely scratches my itch with exception notification, so thanks, Thoughtbot.

Right up until I was offered a full-time position at IRC, I was planning on grad school in the CS department. I met with several professors to help articulate a plan of action for my thesis. The most interesting of my options related to image analysis and manipulation techniques. I was reminded of what “almost was” when I watched this video of the most intelligent image resizing technology I’ve ever seen. Period. It manages to shrink (or expand) the background, while keeping the most important objects in tact (i.e. faces). It’s incredible.

I’ve watched a video about surface computing before, but I can’t seem to remember where (or if it had anything to do with Microsoft). Nonetheless, Microsoft Surface (aka “Play Table”) looks great. At this point, I can’t imagine owning it or paying for it, but I’d definitely enjoy using it. I believe it’s initially only geared toward hotels, retail establishments, restaurants, and public entertainment venues, anyway, which is cool.

Of the hundreds of possible usages, I’d have to say becoming the table top in a restaurant/bar would be at the top of my list. In one of the videos, it shows two people ordering (or re-ordering) food by just dragging their choice to the center of the table. I don’t know that I feel comfortable saying “that’s much better than relying on a waitress,” since that’s one more step closer to total automated service, which I wouldn’t like (most of the time).

If you get a minute, you should watch these three short videos and see what you think.

I’m slowly catching up on some stuff I missed while on vacation. Over lunch I read a post about an interface issue concerning touch screens: when your finger is on the screen, you can’t always necessarily see the very thing you were wanting to touch (unless it’s huge, of course). That seems like a reasonable issue, even though I don’t deal with touch screens too often. Apparently, Apple has an idea to tackle the problem by resembling an invisible interface. Meaning all of the touchy-feely stuff happens on the back of the device (they’re using an iPod in this case), while the screen on the front knows, and reacts, to your activity on the back. It seems like it could be a little awkward to use, but innovation often does seem awkward at first. It’s a cool idea nonetheless. And of all the competition, I’d bet Apple to be the company who could pull it off smoothly.

Flickr is probably my most favorite web application I’ve ever used (“most favorite” doesn’t sound right, but you get the idea). Now that I’m really getting into photography, I’m realizing more of what it can do—which results in me loving liking it more and more. Then today (or maybe yesterday), Flickr released collections and a customizable layout. A collection is nothing more than a ‘set of sets’, but this is something I’ve been wanting for a long time. Now, not only can I organize my trips and vacations into sets, but I can have a collection of sets for Trips & Vacations.

The fact that you can associate a few sets with a collection isn’t that impressive (although very beneficial), but the way they’ve implemented it is impressive. The ‘organize’ section of your photos is where you can setup collections. Just drag your sets over to the collection of your choice, and viola, it’s that simple (you can also drag/reorder your sets within the collection itself). Then you can create a mosaic for that collection, choosing a nice blend of 12 photos from any of the sets it contains (those are also draggable). I think that’s awesome, and it works really well.

And to add in a little more, you can now specify a different layout for your main photo page. You can have small pictures with sets to the right, or small pictures with collections to the right, or large pictures with sets to the right, so on and so forth. There is a total of six layout options. I personally like having smaller photos with my recent sets to the right—the default view. But when I get a new camera, I’m sure I’ll be taking pictures at least 2-4x more than I am now, so I might decide that collections to the right would be a better fit. Either way, it’s nice to have the option. Kudos to Flickr for being perfect.

Originally living in Atlantic City, NJ, I’ve seen my fair share of billboards; but never as unique as this Mustang advertisement. At first glance, I thought it was painted to match its surroundings, which would’ve been a bad way to handle a good idea. It turns out that it’s semi-transparent Lexan, so it’s blurred day, night, and in any weathered conditions—obviously a much better approach. That’s a pretty clever ad.

I hate to be one of the 50 million people who’ve mentioned the iPhone within the last 36 hours, but I’m going to anyway. Clearly, Apple has done something amazing for the mobile space. You can feel the innovation just by looking at this thing. Watching the video series on the iPhone site is impressive. But I’m really referring to this post by Jason Fried, it just happens to involve the iPhone.

Across the web, 37signals is known for innovative thinking, and it shows not only by their products, but their everyday blog posts. With the iPhone, a lot of people (including myself) got blown away by “its ability to do this and that,” (and that’s not to mention its visual appeal), and forgot about what truly matters: usability. Sure, it’s cool, but is it practical? Probably so, but while the rest of the world is wooing over this new toy, Jason Fried doesn’t lose focus. He goes straight at the core by mentioning an interface that requires you to stare at. He’s not necessarily claiming that as a flaw, but an interesting observation. But the fact that he’s looking past the bells and whistles, focusing on the usability of the iPhone (even though it’s Apple, and we’re supposed to just accept what they give us as perfect) says something about the way he thinks. He doesn’t let Apple’s reputation influence his thoughts.

Innovative thinking requires you to not be easily impressed, look past aesthetics, and find the true reasons for a product to exist; what problem(s) does it solve? Then again, if the design is talented enough to carry itself, and out-weigh usability issues, you may be in an entirely different category. And probably the same category Apple is in.

I’ve been waiting on this to show up in my account since I first read about it; it finally did. Like many other people, I have (and use) more than one email account. It can be a pain to deal with. I have my college email, work email, and two personal emails. Now, Gmail let’s me check all four emails via the Gmail interface, which I love. And when you “reply” to someone who has sent mail to one of your other addresses, it uses that address as the reply address, instead of your Gmail address (which you can optionally set as the default). I’ve already added filters to automatically label my school and work emails. I’ve had the “send from another account” thing setup for a while now, but was never able to check other accounts until today. They were quietly sneaking it in people’s accounts. Unfortunately, I guess I wasn’t downloading my email from the server in all of my years at IRC, so now I’m getting thousands of email from 2 years ago randomly showing up. It’s kind of sporatic, but once I get through all of them, it looks like this setup will be really convenient for me. They’re spam filters work really well against my junk email, too.

I think Gmail is the most efficient and effortless way to keep track of email. It’s fast, smart, reliable, and innovative. Well, I guess it’s the Gmail team who is innovative. It just works extremely well. I’ve been having some issues with Outlook goofing up on me, causing me to almost be late for a meeting or two, and ignore an email from my boss for 2 weeks. Not a good thing. Like a lot of the things I use and love, I could go on and on about Gmail and its features, just in case there’s someone who may read this post and not have or know about Gmail. But how could that be? So I won’t go into all of that.

If you have a Gmail account, and you don’t know if this service is available to you, here’s how to find out: Gmail Mail Fetcher.

BumpTop is a project that applies physics simulation to the desktop in order to resemble the real-world effects of a true desktop. Not a true computer desktop, but the top of your desk, literally. Since a workplace in the physical world generally has stacks and piles of papers and documents, BumpTop reflects that by using piling instead of filing. The piles are generally stacked chronologically since the files you most recently added go on top. However, they’ve cleverly incorporated many tricks to add files in the middle and bottom of a pile. Also, they’ve enabled ways to build “shelves” on the sides of the desktop container. You can literally throw files on a stack or over in a corner for later use. The entire desktop incorporates characteristics like mass and friction, and when thrown into another pile, the other files are displaced as expected. To show significance, you can make files bigger to stand out in the mess. What’s cool about that is they actually act like they’re bigger—bigger objects are heavier and more sluggish to move. The entire interface is “pen-centric” as they tend to call it, which gives a better feeling of realism since the file under the pen tip is the active file. You can draw loops to select files, use commands to step into different modes, open menus, etc. It’s a really, really cool innovation. Personally, it’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before. You should check it out:

• YouTube BumpTop 3D Video
• Quick overview
• Master’s Thesis
• BumpTop project site