Michael Richard Murphy

People who rely on their creative juices to make a living have always ‘collected’ inspirational items. Images, textures, toys, etc. get stored in the ‘bank’ for later use.

In the past I’ve made several unsuccessful attempts to keep track of website designs that I like. But simple bookmarking has never really worked for me. I rarely make the effort to go back and organize the bookmarks so I always end up with one giant list. Saving a URL doesn’t really take a ‘snapshot’ of the inspirational design, sites get redesigned, URLs change, etc. So my already unmanageable list can eventually be filled with designs different than those that originally inspired me or invalid URLs. There’s got to be a better way.

Matthew Smith, author of the recent Digital Web Magazine article about collecting for design was having similar problems with screen captures. So he approached a Cocoa-programming friend of his who came up with FlickScreen. FlickScreen allows for convenient uploading of screen captures directly to your Flickr account.

FlickScreen runs in your Apple menu bar. A dropdown allows you to choose between uploading a capture of your entire screen or just a specific portion of it. Users can easily enter titles, descriptions, and keywords for their captures and even put them in specific sets. It takes about 10 seconds to classify and upload a capture. All without leaving the page.

Now that my MacBook is back, my plan for the weekend is to get Ruby, Rails, and MySQL up and running using Dan Bemjamin’s tutorial at HiveLogic. I got everything running pre-hard drive crash but never had the chance to play around and learn Ruby.

Unfortunately it’s also time to buckle down and do some much needed maintenance and upgrades to some WordPress and other applications I have out in the wild.

Professionally I work in an all Mac shop but the cost keeps me in PC world at home. When I saw the Mighty Mouse gleaming at me on Apple’s front page a little while ago, I thought to myself, “I’ve got to get a Mac. Now!”

Apple’s inability to keep these popular new gadgets in stock, coupled with my semi-busy lifestyle has enabled me to nourish my obsession over the Mighty Mouse’s “coolness” for a few days now. But like a summer romance, my infatuation was short-lived.

It was my first visit to the new (only) Apple store in this area so that was a positive. Also, it’s really hard to grasp just how big the 30 inch monitor is until you see it in real life. After marveling at that for a while, I got right down to business and found the Mighty Mouse on display.

It took a few minutes to track one down since I expected it to look somewhat different than it does. Now I’m not sure why but I expected something similar in size to Microsoft’s IntelliMouse but instead it looks just like Apple’s existing single button mouse except that it is all white instead of having a clear cover. There was only one Mighty Mouse on display and the store was fairly crowded so I didn’t stick around and use it for very long but here are my general impressions.

It’s not as cool looking in real life as it is on Apple’s website. Since the side buttons are nearly invisible from the top, it looks just like a single button mouse…with a little grey “nipple” on top. Probably appealing to those who like the single button mouse. It doesn’t do it for me.

The “nipple” is kind of interesting. I didn’t get to do any horizontal scrolling but it worked well vertically. It’s pretty intuitive; it’s not a wheel but it somehow behaves like one.

Lastly, I found the side buttons awkward to use. Again, I expected something along the lines of the IntelliMouse, with side buttons that operate independently of one another. I don’t think that’s so with the Mighty Mouse. It took me a while to figure out the “squeezing” motion that brings up the dashboard and I still didn’t have the knack for it when I left. It didn’t feel natural to me to maintain the hand position required to effectively operate the buttons. I think this was a common complaint among those who commented on it when Dan discussed it on his site.

So that’s my two cents. It’s Apple. It’s cool. To me it’s sort of like watching Club Dread right after Super Troopers. It’s still good, just not that good.