AIAIO: Our Blog
The pulse and reviews of Alexander Interactive
Welcome back to our OmniGraffle tutorials, run by Mike Piastro, Ai’s senior information architect. This is the third in a series of short videos designed to help users get the most out of OmniGraffle with the least amount of confusion.
Today’s video is about stencils. Watch the tutorial here.
Previous tutorials:
Part I–template setup and variables
Part II–shared layers
Ai has an active internship program. We have two in the office now, one gaining work experience, the other earning course credit (and, we hope, gaining work experience too).
Intern Cat Small is winding up her internship today, and wrote up a summary of her experience, which she shares here:
When I applied to work as a Web Design Intern at Alexander Interactive, I had no idea what I was in for. Coming from a one-man small business to a full-grown office was amazing.
I arrived for the interview early, not knowing what to expect. Katie was at the front desk, and I thought she was nice. As I waited for Jim to interview me, I glanced around and took in the atmosphere. I looked at the magazines, thinking that it was very nice of them to provide guests with material while they wait. Jim soon came out and interviewed me briefly. It was nice, and I noticed how large the office was (at least compared to my last job). I left the interview feeling hopeful and relieved. A while later, I received a response saying I was hired.
Working at Alexander Interactive for the past 3 months has been a wonderful experience. Everyone is amazingly friendly and the office has a home-away-from-home feeling to it. Instead of dreading coming to the office, I felt excited to see what my next assignment was, what bagels would be there on a certain day, and what Hamster Time would be like on another day.
I learned so much about communication, project management tools, web design, and many new phrases including ‘sync-up’ and ‘ping’. I also learned an important lesson about balancing work and fun. Many jobs are stressful, and web designing on a tight schedule often is. However, in a good environment, you can cool off and come back to your work with a new, more positive outlook.
I thank everyone at Ai for being so kind to me and hope to work there (or some place as wonderful) again in the future.
When testing a web form, it can be tedious to constantly enter in the data over and over, especially for multi page forms. Auto form fillers are good but they don’t automatically submit the page and fill out subsequent pages.
I have tried a few macro recorders and one has become my go-to for testing forms. iMacros for Firefox is a free Firefox plugin that allows you to record and play back macros.
What I like about it:
Another free macro utility (Windows only) I recently found is AutoIt. AutoIt has more coverage of things it can do since it is not dependent on a browser. The macro language is also very capable of many tasks.
A more advanced plugin that can achieve the same automation results is Selenium IDE. It is more versatile than the previously mentioned macro recorders, since it can be fine tuned to run during an automated test process directly on a server. Selenium IDE is also free and works wherever Firefox does.
Whichever you choose, the time saved by running macros can greatly improve your programming efficiency, allowing for more time for other tasks–like foosball.
Cool weather or not, Miami Beach was a great destination last week, as Ai hit the Fontainebleau Hotel for the Internet Retailer 2009 Web Design Conference. We enjoyed four three days of sessions, interviews, private consultations and networking with retailers from around the country.
As presenters, our favorite day was Thursday, when Josh Levine and I each took the stage. Josh and Action Envelope’s Seth Newman gave a smart and fun presentation on the Ai/Action relationship and the most recent site launch. It was well received and by far the best-looking presentation deck of the week.
I spent the afternoon giving live, off-the-cuff design critiques with Ethan Giffin of Groove Commerce and Betsy Emery of Tellus. We had great rapport, strong audience participation, and thighs of steel as we stayed on stage for two and a half hours.
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to talk with us and exchange ideas. We’ll see you at the Internet Retailer Conference and Expo in Boston in June.
Headed to Miami for Internet Retailer’s Web Design ’09 conference? So are we. Ai will be in full force during Monday’s website consultations, and we’ll presenting a case study and sitting on a panel in the redesign workshop. Stop by and say hello.
We’ll also be Twittering from the conference–we’re working on a local display, but you can follow #aiaio tweets here as well.
Being a web designer at Ai brings many interesting things to my plate. Today, for example, I stuck superhero bodies on 17 kindergartners’ heads.
Let me explain. Our president, Alex, volunteered to have his son’s class come for a visit to see the company and what we do. The agenda for the day was to teach the kids how a website is made, have some snacks and pizza, and partake in a couple of creative activities, which would lead to their very own website.
The excited and curious children kids settled in the conference room with hot chocolate and heard a brief introduction about websites in general and clients. Then they were taken on a tour through the office, to learn how a website is made with quick stops at the desks of people from each department.
Then it was website making time. We had them draw their own postage stamp designs on a piece of paper that could be sold on a website. After they were done, I came in to show them the “ecommerce” website I had designed for them that would soon showcase their art. Everything was in place in my Photoshop file except for one thing, which I needed their help to finish. On the homepage were 3 rows of kids’ heads (which I had cut out from their school pictures) floating in space without bodies. We had an assortment of bodies for them to choose from to attach to their heads. We had Batman, Cinderella, The Hulk, Snow White, Spiderman, and others. Excitement filled the room and “OMG! That’s me!” was screamed about 20 times before the teacher had to calm everyone down. The kids picked their new bodies, I dragged the bodies to their heads, and the new image was uploaded to our server.
Nick, our front-end engineer, then showed how the HTML can be changed and modified. Using Firefox’s plugin, Firebug, he showed the kids how it’s possible to change text colors, font sizes and background colors very easily. When Nick finished, the stamps had been scanned and uploaded behind the scenes and were live for Nick to show them in the gallery. The website also featured video clips from the day that we had taken during the activities, including an inspiring performance of the kids’ school song.
The day took a lot of planning and was executed perfectly by all involved. The results: Some very happy kids and pizza for all–including a pleased but exhausted Ai team.
Ai senior information architect Mike Piastro created a series of short videos explaining the ins and outs of OmniGraffle.
This is the second in the series. It discusses shared layers and the benefits of using them. Click here to view.
Previous tutorials:
Part I–template setup and variables
The Ai bake-off was a huge success.
Ten entries and a few thousand calories later, developer Sean’s “Crack the Code Cheesecake” took top honors, followed by a hotly debated second-place showing by, of all things, a bacon dish and fender Ashley’s “Depressive Cupcakes.” True to our friendly competitive spirit, an active debate is raging as to whether the bacon (sweet but not baked) is more or less appropriate an entry than Brazilian empanadas (baked but not sweet).
The agency bake-off idea is proving popular: someone just bought agencybakeoff.com and registered the Twitter account. Ai’s expert bake staff accept all challenges.
We love to have fun friendly competition. We’ve done bowling, pool and even paintball outings. Now we’re competing to identify ideas.
Recently our lead blogger David Wertheimer headed up a competition that will in turn get this blog rolling with content. The way it works is that if at any time during the day (even in client meetings, since it makes for a good conversation starter) you hear someone mention something blogworthy, you simply call out “Blog Post” and earn a point in the game, with a second point going to whoever writes the post. We also are having a baking competition tomorrow.
I feel like these competitions are good but they do raise some concern. I’ve done some research on competition in the workplace and have found some interesting observations.
Jody Urquhart advises companies not to create undue competition among individuals:
Urquhart says that when employees have the notion that surpassing others is more important than doing a good job, they lose focus and start putting out low-quality work. She says that organizations can achieve so much more when they channel the same energy that drives competition into work that requires collaboration and shared objectives. “Cooperation should be valued over competition” writes Urquhart, “because teams are far more powerful than individuals.
In a world of no-holds-barred competition, those who rise to the top are the most ruthless, the most driven, and — all too often — those with the weakest consciences. Who rises to the top? The most able and honorable competitor, or the cheater? Can you tell until it’s too late? Does the rash of top executive prosecutions tell you anything about the results of a “winner takes all” outlook?
How do you feel about workplace competition?
Today marks the launch of Ai’s blog on Movable Type, version 4.23. We’ve migrated from Blogger, which has been a sufficient but quirky host, to a locally installed open-source blog platform. Ai is a fan of open-source platform and we’re delighted to use open-source MT.
Using MT, we hope to expand our blog’s performance in numerous ways, one of which is to open our blog (at least for a little while) to the entire company. For the next few months we hope to have a diverse slate of bloggers contributing thoughts and ideas from Ai. Look for more items on coding, design, best practices and the like. And, of course, food.