Ok, so I have been reading all about the MacBook Air, just like most of the tech world, and I just don’t get it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a Mac hater by any means. The iMac revolutionized how computers looked (thank God!), and I have been drooling over the iPhone since I saw the first pictures leaked onto the web (I would have one if it wasn’t for the $200 cancellation fee from my current carrier). I also think the iPod is inspired and a great little device (although I will admit I got a Zune 2 for my wife, but it was a tough choice).

Before MacWorld I was as excited as the next guy to see what Jobs and company were going to come up with next, but the more I read about the Air the more I get confused.

From a design/ui perspective I get it. Its sleek and sexy and has that cool “apple” look to it. Where I stop drinking the Kool-Aid is when I think about it from a business perspective. Who is the market for this thing?

I know there are the mac addicts…chalk up a few thousand sold. Then you have the first adopters who just have to have anything with a power button. There are a few more thousand. But outside of that, whats the point?

Is there really a large audience looking to spend $1,800 on a laptop that has less functionality than one half that cost just because it fits in a manilla folder? I understand that road warriors needs a lightweight device because they are always on the move, but its not like you can’t find a great laptop (even a mac) that weighs 3 or 4 pounds for a lot cheaper.

Now if it were cheaper…say under $1,000, then that might make it more drool-worthy. Or heck…maybe even if it were actually smaller (like a UMPC) or maybe a sexy tablet (now we’re talkin’). I would be in heaven to have a tablet with the look and functionality of an iPhone on steroids. Mmmmm….tasty.

But as it stands now you get a fragile device (imagine dropping that little thing?) with a funky touchpad that costs almost two grand (for the cheap one).

Am I missing something?

As luck would have it…I am an idiot. I prove that little fact over and over (just about daily really), but this was a case of just not paying attention. You see, while I was building my little CMS app I chose the name simpleCMS without paying attention to who else might be using that name because it fit. Big mistake.

As I got closer to completion I did a bit of searching for other apps with that name. What did I find? Apparently simpleCMS is quite a popular name. So is simplyCMS, and just about any other variation of the name. I shouldn’t really be surprised. Its not like the world of CMS applications is a small one or anything.

I was a bit disappointed at first. Partly at my own stupidity, but also because I thought the name summed up my little app perfectly. So I began the gut-wrenching process of finding a new name that summed up what I was trying to build.

After several days of hunting and swearing the word novella popped into my head.
Easy to remember? Check.
Easy to spell? Check.
At least tangentially related? Check.

A novella is a book that is shorter than a novel and longer than a short story. As such they are not a complex as a full sized novel. It works as a nice parallel to my app when it is compared to the big daddies like wordpress and the like. Those apps do more, but are more complex and therefore a bit harder to wrap your head around.

So there you have it…

With that said, I hope to release novella in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

A while back I built a very simple CMS system using .NET for a client. That little tool became very useful and I have been able to use it over and over for various clients.

As I have worked with it, it has slowly improved, a few new features here, a little bit of polish there…and *poof*…simpleCMS was born.

The goal of simpleCMS is…well…simple. It is built for developers to give to their clients so they can have easily managed content. Its not for blogging (yet) nor does it have all the bells and whistles that some of the bigger guys out there have. However, the features it does have work well and it will be easy to deploy and even easier to rebrand for your own companies.

Best of all…it will be free. Free to use, free to customize, free to do whatever.

In the next few weeks I will be releasing it under my new DevMade brand which will contain all of the tools that I and my company, Visionary Online, release to the community. When it is available I hope all you freelancers and web designers/developers give it a shot. If you do, please tell me what you think of it.

Nick Hand is a graphic and web designer who lives in Alaska. When it came time to design his new portfolio he wanted to use some slick effects to make it stand out a bit. He ran across the side scrolling effect that I detailed in several articles and liked it enough to use it.

The final product is very creative and utilizes the effect very well I think. I was proud to help him through some of the stickier spots he ran into while implementing it.

If anyone else needs help with any of the articles that I have on the site, please feel free to contact me. I love seeing my tutorials “at work”, so if you use one, let me know and I will give you a little link love.

Great job Nick!

So the last few weeks have been crazy busy. I have been completely swamped with client work, and while that is a good problem to have, it does take away time to do other stuff (like blogging!).

One of the things I have been working on deals with handling large blobs of data. Its a bit of a tangent since it has absolutely nothing to do with UI, but I figured that since there are a lot of developers reading this site, it might be helpful.

So what do I mean by large amounts of data? Well, for the app I am building we were testing our theoretical limits for performance reasons. Imagine a grid or an Excel spreadsheet that has 700 columns (Excel itself only allows 256) and 30,000 rows. That basically equates to 1.65 million cells in the grid. Now if you compare that lump of data to what, say, Google throws around, its pretty insignificant; however, when it comes to keeping it in memory and accessing it quickly it is a bit beefy.

Most of the time you would get around this problem by paging through the data somehow, or having some sort of filter. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have this luxury. The application needed the whole kit and caboodle accessible to it at all times. With that as the challenge we went to work.

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Hey everyone, sorry for the dearth of articles the past few weeks, I have been crazy busy working on various projects. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

Anyway, Smashing Magazine has a cool article on the User Experiences of the Future.

Its worth checking out.

Some of the stuff I have talked about before (such as multitouch and Surface), but there are a few things that really are amazing that I hadn’t seen before. In particular, check out the video on Photosynth. It actually demos two technologies related to images that are just simply amazing. You combine that with the multitouch concept and man you have something cool there.

I will be sharing some of what I have been working on soon. Its a bit of a tangent, but I think it will help developers out…

Ok, these are just too cool not to mention.

Today is Halloween and to commemorate the event here are some really awesome Star Wars t-shirts that can double as a costume.

For instance…be Darth Vader.

There is Darth, R2-D2, a Stormtrooper, and Chewbacca. The only one that is missing is Boba Fett.

Happy Halloween!

For the few people out there that don’t read A List Apart, they have recently come out with their first “Web Designer Survey” results.

If you ever wanted to see how you fit in the web professional industry in terms of education, salary, etc. it is an interesting read.

Check it out

Ok so you have all seen them: “8 million tools for web development”, “5 gagillion tools that if you don’t use you are stupid”.

So of course you click on them (after all that is why people write them) and you find out that the tools are for Mac lovers, Ubuntu gurus, or some other niche that you are not a part of. You find a couple of doodads worth looking into, but overall you find yourself disappointed…again. As a .net developer it can be frustrating because it seems the blogiverse thinks you are “eat the paste special” because you don’t use Ruby.

I am here to tell you…you don’t eat glue. You may have chosen to develop .net web apps because your employer is a Microsoft shop and you don’t have a choice, or you chose it because you want an IDE that is actually useful. Either way there are a lot of tools out there for you whether you are a .net novice or ninja.

So here is your list of tools that if you don’t use them as a .net developer then you obviously are a contributor to the “Baby Seal Clubbing Foundation”.

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Have you ever read a book and once it was finished you thought “that book would have been so much better if it was 100 pages shorter”?

Some authors like to “hear their own voice” as it were and don’t know when to stop. There are a lot of web designers/developers who do the same thing. I definitely have fallen into that trap from time to time. You just get so excited by what you are working on that you add a little thing here, another piece of flair over there…before you know it, the point of the design gets lost under a pile of textures.

In recent months you have probably noticed a new trend…the minimalist look. Now when some people hear that term they think “boring”. In some cases they are spot on. If you go too far with it, it can be boring, but it doesn’t have to be. Take a look at A List Apart to see minimalism done right. Its clean, but not boring. Basically instead of using colors and textures to add interest, you make the layout do the heavy lifting of catching the user’s eye. Whitespace can be beautiful when done right.

Design Meltdown calls sites that follow this trend “super clean”. They have a four page showcase of sites built with this technique if you want to see some examples. Some are better than others obviously, but there are some great sites on that list (Protolize, mkdynamic, spacemaker).

I have found myself jumping on that train with some of the things I am building. To me it is just a completely different way of building a site. Instead of thinking of what textures, effects, and dohickies I can add to make the site stand out, I go through a mental process of stripping out everything that takes away from the core of the design. Its like cutting out those unnecessary 150 pages in a novel. Once they are gone, the narrative is crisp and flows the way it is supposed to.

In the design/development world, the final product gives the user a clear, easy way to understand and use the application. In my experience, I have found that it takes a good bit longer than I thought it would. Initially it seems easy and that having a lot of whitespace is enough, but when you take out gradients, shiny-effects, and whatnot, all you are left with is the content. How you make that interesting is what separates the proverbial “men from the boys”.

Rainfall Daffison is a “strategic design consultancy” based in Europe. Their thing is to design sites with a minimalist design and feel. They are quite passionate about it and think you should be too. They have an article that runs through 24 “moments” of minimalism” over the last decade. Its a great article that shows examples of some of the best minimalist sites out there today.

If you are thinking of how to wrap your head around minimalism, its not a bad place to start because you can see how some of the best in the business make it work.

What do you think? Have you jumped on the bandwagon, or do you think it is gonna go the way of the dodo? Did you find it easier or harder to create a super clean site?