Download here.

We’ve updated our iPhone and Android as well!

The post TGI Black Friday iPad App appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Browse Deals

  

  The DealCatcher iPad app allows users to browse all deals in a stream, or break them down into tags (Popular, Newest) or categories (HDTVs, Automotive, etc.).  From any point within the application, it’s easy for the  user to find the category and the deals that they are looking for.

• Deal Details

  

  Every deal is shown with its description, price, and any relevant information needed in order to complete a purchase.  From this screen the user can  also compare the deal to prices offered by other retailers using PriceGrabber data, share deals via Facebook and Twitter, and add deals to their favorites.

• Saving Favorites

  

  The DealCatcher app lets users bookmark their favorite deals for later retrieval.  We track the expiration date of deals to help keep the interface clean and to notify the user of which deals are no longer valid.  A deal can be removed from the list of favorites at any time by tapping the star at the top left.

The post DealCatcher iPad App appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Earn Rewards at Restaurants

  

  The Yavi guest app is a web and native iOS and Android application that allows users to find nearby Yavi-participating restaurants and add themselves to the wait list (if there is one).  The app also helps users track their reward points across restaurants and earn gifts from their favorite restaurants.

• Manage Your Guests

  

  Yavi also features a tablet app for restaurant hosts to manage guests who have checked in via the mobile app, and also check in new guest walk-ins. The app auto-calculates wait times based on past turnover and current seating configurations.  Yavi’s host app is built to support both iOS and Android tablets.

• Use Yavi From Anywhere

  

  In addition to the mobile components of Yavi, we’ve built user account management into the web site as well.  Even if you don’t have a smart phone you can visit Yavi.me and we will show you the closest restaurants to your location, allow you to track your visits, and get rewarded for visiting.

The post Yavi appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

The post DealCatcher, Our newest iPad app, is now available. appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

From games to restaurant reservations, “apps” for smart phones and tablets address almost every topic imaginable. But there is a dark-side to this modern miracle.

Trademark infringers have exploited the software marketplaces opened by companies like Apple and Google by offering apps with names identical or confusingly similar to well-known brands. Serial infringers are winning because they often understand the new technology and online marketplaces better than the trademark owners.

This webinar explains how infringers operate; how to successfully police trademarks in the iTunes Store, Google Play, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere; and how trademark owners can stamp out infringement and preserve their brands’ integrity.

Topics include:

· Trademark basics, what constitutes infringement, and the line between “inspiration” and “stealing”

· App development basics, including technology, standards, and procedures for approval

· Types of infringement in online marketplaces, best practices for detecting infringement, and strategies for effective trademark enforcement

The webinar concludes with a Q&A.

The post Dan Kelley to Speak about Building Brands and Protecting Trademarks in App Marketplaces appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Playing PuppyWars

  

  You can play PuppyWars in a variety of ways, even if you aren’t a dog owner.  As soon as you start up the game, you can rotate your phone to landscape orientation and begin voting on PuppyWars.  You can track other user’s dogs, see which dogs have won the most Puppy Wars, and try to hoard “Bones” to make your way up the charts.  We’ve also built in a dog adoption tool that helps you find an adoptable dog in your area.

• Adding your Puppy

  

  We wanted to make adding a dog to PuppyWars as fun as possible.  Each dog breed has its own custom illustration, just pick the one that matches your dog, add a picture, and name your puppy.  Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to challenge other puppies to a Puppy War of cuteness.  Once your dog is in PuppyWars, it’s also able to be challenged by other PuppyWars users, so keep an eye out for challengers.  May the cutest puppy win!

• Integrated Pet Adoption

  

  The feature in PuppyWars that we’re most proud of is the ability to find adoptable dogs in your area. By combining location detection and the Petfinder API, you can easily find nearby dogs of any breed that need a forever home.  We’ve made it simple: find the right dog for you and contact their shelter in just a few taps!  In addition to that, 5% of all Bones purchases go directly to the ASPCA.

The post PuppyWars appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

This the banner for BeardWars’ table at the East Coast Beard & Mustache Championship on March 31, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 10:45 PM.  It’s hosted at The Blockley on 38th and Chestnut in Philly.  Come by if you’re a beard owner, into people who have beards, or just curious.  More information here.

Download the app here!

The post The BeardWars Banner is in! appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

You can watch Dan’s talk below.  Thanks to Technically Philly for the video.

The post Dan’s Talk on Education appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Mobile development turned out to be a little more difficult than he had expected.  We worked with Fitz to teach him some of the concepts behind application development, design, and support.  We explained how to eliminate the manual processes that were in place for maintaining the data in the  application, and suggested other minor improvements.  We were there to guide and answer questions, but let Fitz learn by doing the work himself.

Fitz learned another valuable lesson when Apple rejected his first submission.  He persevered and with a few additional features (along with some navigation help) he was able to meet Apple’s high standards and pass the review process.

The story is far from over as we continue to work with Fitz on developing and improving his application.

The post Congrats to our intern appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Microsoft’s “Future Vision”:

Victor asserts that what he calls “Pictures Under Glass” interfaces lack the connection with human senses that good tools provide.  This missing connection causes users to shape themselves and their behavior around tools, rather than tools acting as an extension of the human body.

As an example, Victor discusses the haptic feedback of reading an paperback book:

“Notice how you know where you are in the book by the distribution of weight in each hand, and the thickness of the page stacks between your fingers. Turn a page, and notice how you would know if you grabbed two pages together, by how they would slip apart when you rub them against each other.”

He then compares that to playing “piano” on the iPad:

“What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.”

(This is likely the reason a predominant amount of “iPad Bands” you see on Youtube are horribly out of time.)

Though Victor’s article doesn’t offer anything in the way of an alternative to touch-screen interfaces (which he gladly admits in the beginning of his article), his argument is one that’s hard to write off.

Read his entire article here, it’s worth it.

The post A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

I downloaded the app (which has a nice minimal icon, btw), and started it up.  After I enter my Xbox Live username and password I was prompted with this wonderful alert:

With all of the news of hacked Sony Playstation Network accounts fresh in my mind, I started to freak out thinking that maybe my account (which has my PayPal info connected to it), has been compromised.  Unfortunately I have to go to xbox.com to find out what’s going on.

That’s where I found this:

Ohhhh!  The “problem” with my account is that Microsoft updated their Terms of Use and couldn’t be bothered to let you accept it in their own app. After checking the checkbox and accepting the Terms, I was finally able to log into my account.  For what it’s worth, the app actually is a pretty nice experience once you get through the sign in process.

P.S. You can friend me on XBox Live if you want but I never use it.

The post Can’t Stop Giving Terrible Feedback. appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Volunteer Dashboard

  

  The JRAid Volunteer Dashboard allows volunteers to get a quick glance at what new volunteer opportunities match their skills and which “Gigs” (volunteer opportunities) they have been recommended for by our administrators.

  JRAid allows administrators to recommend individual volunteers for specific Gigs, which gives those volunteers advanced access to the opportunity.  If a recommended volunteer requests the Gig, JRAid will kick off the volunteering process automatically — there’s no need for administrator intervention.

• Ways to Help

  

  JRAid gives potential volunteers access to information about each Gig, including a description, obfuscated client information, time requirements for completing the gig, and the ability to share the Gig via social media.

  Once a Gig has been requested by a volunteer, the administrator reviews the requests and confirms one or more of them for the opportunity.  This “unlocks” information about the Gig’s client, allowing the volunteer to have access to their address and other personal information.

  Some Gigs require multiple skills to be completed.  JRAid supports this by allowing the administrator to add multiple needed skills (and request multiple volunteers for each skill). When a volunteer views the Gig, they can choose which of their skills they would like to donate.

• Volunteer Interests

  

  Volunteers can specify the skills that they would like to donate to Gigs.  We use this information to match volunteers with volunteer opportunities and set notification preferences.

  Volunteers are given the opportunity to choose from a variety of skills, from simpler tasks — like making a friendly phone call — to more technical skills like translation or computer help.  If volunteers don’t have a lot of free time or are not available to perform a Gig, they also have the option to donate money to a specific Gig that needs a monetary donation to be completed or to JRAid as a whole.

  JRAid is continually adding new skills and interests as volunteer opportunities present themselves.

The post JRAid.org appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

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Built in collaboration with our friends at Lavahound, the app allows you to take everyday things and places and transforms them into games, stories, tours and more.

You can download the app in the App Store now!

The post Our Newest iPhone App appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

When you’re serving static images, this is a non-issue because you can resize them manually beforehand. But for systems where users may upload their own images, it’s nice to work with only the single uploaded image instead of programmatically scaling and storing off a few different-sized versions and tweaking the frontend to pull the correctly-sized version (it’s not hard to do this, just extra work/complexity that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place).

The post Firefox Image Downscaling Quality appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Contrast this to other browsers, where you’ll get – at best – a warning in the console and – at worst – a popup dialog, neither of which provide you with relevant details necessary to find the offending URL (note: I haven’t played with FF4 enough yet, maybe it also behaves nicely like Chrome).

Most of the time it’s not hard to figure out where the issue is, but sometimes things get hairy/non-obvious. For example, if you’re using the Ajax feature of fancybox in IE6, it creates an iframe element with a missing src attribute. IE6, for whatever reason, does not default this empty iframe to the protocol of the current document – instead, it’s always HTTP. Tracking this down and patching fancybox took the better part of an hour but would’ve been only a minute or two if IE were more like Chrome.

The post Mixed-mode warnings in Chrome appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Schedule More Efficiently

  

  Ready Set Work makes it easy to create and manage your schedules.  We’ve built multiple views of the calendar so you can tailor the site to your preference, be it working in month, week, or day view.  Each view gives you the same set of options for creating and managing your shifts.

  Ready Set Work allows you to schedule in different ways too.  We offer tools that allow you to schedule employees based on labor cost, job rating, and more.  You can also post “open shifts” to your schedule that allow employees to request them on their own accord.  Of course the manager retains ultimate control and can accept or reject any requests.

• Communicate More Effectively

  

  Ready Set Work helps you communicate with your employees through many avenues.  Every employee a manager adds will have a preferred method of contact, which can be set to e-mail or mobile phone.  When the manager publishes a schedule, anyone who is a part of that schedule will be notified via this contact.  To build this feature, we leveraged services offered by Twilio and Sendgrid for SMS and e-mail messaging, respectively.  Ready Set Work tracks which employees view and respond to this message to inform the manager that they know they are scheduled.

• Find the Finish Line

  

  Ready Set Work’s “Ready Status” feature lets a manager know how ready their published shifts are by aggregating a few data points about employee interaction.

  First we check to see if there are any employees that have not yet requested or viewed their schedule or if there are any open shifts that have not yet been requested by employees.  These values factors into the “unready shifts” category.  Then we check for any shift trade requests employees may have in for published shifts that haven’t yet been resolved by the manager.  Finally, we check to see if any employees have requested time off that hasn’t yet been approved or denied.

The post Ready Set Work appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• It’s Location Aware

  

  Lavahound locates you and displays “hidden” photos in your area.  Don’t have anything nearby? Hide your own photos anywhere by clicking the camera at the top of the screen.  We’ll place them on the map for you.

• Other Uses

  

  At its core, Lavahound is a game that encourages you to hide interesting, funny, or otherwise notable photos anywhere you go, but the opportunities it presents are limitless.  Businesses, communities, artists, and pretty much anyone else, could use Lavahound to promote themselves by creating visual tours.

• Coming Soon

  

  In a soon-to-be-released update to the app, look for Lavahound U.  Built for Universities, Lavahound U can enhance any University’s current marketing and community efforts by delivering an engaging way to connect with visitors, students and alums.

The post Lavahound appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Yorn Dashboard

  

  The Yorn dashboard give you a bird’s eye view of all the feedback you’ve received. Slice and dice your responses – break them down by how they rated you (0 to 10) or if they requested a followup via an anonymous Yorn-provided email address. See comments and ratings grouped by the unique device that provided it (e.g. someone’s iPhone or Blackberry) See a dynamic chart that breaks down your ratings so you know at a glance what people are thinking.

• Mobile Optimized

  

  Yorn was built for the ground up to support multiple device-specific user interfaces. If you’re presenting to a group of people, audience members who give you feedback probably have a wide variety of cell phones. We have custom mobile experiences for high-end devices like the latest iOS and Android phones, middle-of-the-road like Blackberry, and low-end like WAP-only phones. We also support feedback via SMS. We also have tailored iPad and Laptop/Desktop experiences, so however someone visits your Yorn, they’ll be able to quickly and easily leave feedback.

• Live Wall

  

  When we say live, we mean it. You can visit a special URL for your Yorn – your “live wall” – that shows comments people give you in a large, easy-to-read format. This is perfect for projecting onto a big screen during a presentation or on a computer monitor in your workplace. If someone leaves feedback, their comments will be pushed to the wall almost immediately – no page load required. Of course you can turn on the ability to moderate any feedback, so there is no worry about getting spammed or showing inappropriate comments. If someone asks a question or leaves interesting feedback, you can spotlight their comment as shown above. This is also live – when you spotlight something, it will appear nearly instantly. Remove the spotlight and the comment goes back to “just a regular comment”.

The post Yorn appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• What It’s All About

  

  Conceived out of a somewhat selfish need to keep up on local shows and with the cooperation of the folks at R5 Productions, the idea for an iPhone app came to life in late March of 2010. Four weeks later, and the application is available in the iTunes store.

• What It Does

  

  As R5 event attendees ourselves, we’ve built into the app everything that we would want to make the show-going experience an easy one. Using the app, we can browse and search through all upcoming shows, see what’s been booked most recently, and bookmark shows that we don’t want to forget about. We’ve even made it easy to buy tickets through Ticketfly inside of the app and to get directions to the venues.

• Happy Users and Customers

  

  As time has gone by, many new venues have come on board and we’ve helped them get up and running with their own branded apps. We’re proud to be working with The Knitting Factory, The Troubadour, Bimbo’s 365, and others to connect you to the bands you want to see at the venues near you. We’ve also built out a server-side WordPress plugin in PHP to support branded, Mobile-friendly versions of Venue websites in case you don’t have an iPhone.

The post Ticketfly iPhone Application appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• The Process

  

  We worked together with a small team of Project Managers at Intuit to define a set of features, design the UI, and build and launch the product.

  Billing Manager is our baby. From the initial sketches to user testing to deployment, we’re excited by its growth, and are happy to share it with its thousands of registered users.

• A Payments Bonanza

  

  One of the nicest features of Billing Manager is the ability for businesses to easily collect payment for invoices online.  With a Billing Manager account, a user can sign up for Intuit Merchant Services and, using Intuit’s single sign-in platform, online payments will automatically be enabled on all sent invoices (of course it’s an option for each invoice.)

  Payment can be collected in many ways.  If enabled on invoices, recipients will be prompted to pay via credit card or eCheck.  The payment is then transferred to the sender’s Intuit Merchant Services account.  Invoicers can also record payments on their own inside of the Billing Manager Application (shown above).

• On the iPhone

  

  Back in the early, non-SDK days of the iPhone, we saw Billing Manager as the perfect opportunity to explore new technology and test the limits of the device. Billing Manager for the iPhone is an iPhone-formatted web application which allows Billing Manager users to manage invoices, view their contacts, and even charge credit cards to accept payments.

  Billing Manager for the iPhone was selected as a featured productivity application on Apple.com.

  To view your Billing Manager account on your iPhone, all you have to do is visit www.billingmanager.com using your iPhone’s browser.*

The post Billing Manager appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• The Process

  

  In the fall of 2009, DealCatcher approached us with the idea of creating an iPhone application to serve up their exclusive Black Friday content. With a tight deadline looming, we set to work.

  It took only a few weeks to go from pencil sketches to a completed product. Our application was released on November 19th to critical success – in just a few days’ time, TGI Black Friday became the highest-rated Black Friday app in the App Store.

  Despite the tight deadline, there are no known bugs in the application. Getting it right the first time is critically important for survival in the App Store ecosystem, and we were able to deliver.

• Now for Android!

  

  The iPhone application was such a success that we were approached to port it to Android for the 2010 season. Again, no problem – in just a couple of weeks we were live in the Android Marketplace. Users loved it, and we’re excited about Android’s growing popularity. You can look forward to an even better version of the app when Black Friday 2011 rolls around.

• In the Wild

  

  Both the iPhone and Android versions of the app were critically acclaimed, getting visibility in the tech blogosphere and mainstream news sites. In 2010, the iPhone version was the #2 overall free application in the App Store, receiving hundreds of thousands of downloads per day, and the Android version had tens of thousands of satisfied users with likely many more to come as Android phones become commonplace. We expect both applications to repeat their successes in 2011.

The post TGI Black Friday Mobile Apps appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Connect Java to Facebook

  

  Facebook doesn’t offer an official Java API client. That’s where RestFB steps in – it’s simple to connect your Java application to the full power of the Facebook API. RestFB is actively maintained, easy to use, and has a vibrant user community.

  With thousands of downloads, RestFB is the go-to Facebook API client solution if you’re a Java developer.

• Easily Read and Write Data

  

  Want to pull in a friend’s feed? How about publish a picture to it? Or maybe fire off a set of custom FQL queries to pull back some complex data? All of these are no problem with RestFB.

  RestFB even has you covered if you want to use older, pre-Graph API functionality – some things just aren’t possible yet with the Graph API, so it’s good to know that you can go down to the metal of the Old REST API to get the job done.

• Walk the Social Graph

  

  With RestFB, the full power of the Facebook APIs are at your fingertips. Unlike some of the other API clients out there, it’s designed from the ground up to take care of the mundane business of JSON marshaling and HTTP request handling while giving you a minimal veneer over the API.

  If you can read the Facebook API docs and understand the JSON the API returns, you can be up and running with RestFB very quickly.

The post RestFB appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Find a Wedding

  

  Finding a wedding gallery is easy.  You just need to know the last name of the bride or groom and the month the event took place.  If you enter everything correctly, you’ll see a list of possible matches which will take to you that wedding’s gallery.

• Browse Photos

  

  The gallery view is built to support both portrait and landscape photos in all browsers.  You can view nine images per page and move forwards and backwards in the page count.  If you want to get to a specific page, we’ve included a drop down to help.

• Share Your Favorites

  

  The Pros’ mobile web gallery will let you to connect to Facebook and Twitter to share photos with your friends and family.  If you want to send a link to a photo to an individual, just press the e-mail button and the app will open your device’s e-mail application and pre-fill the message.

The post The Pros Mobile Web Application appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Localization

  

  One of the nicest features of VZNavigator, is that it can use your browsing location to offer you the best prices on gas, let you know what movies are playing near you, and show you a list of family-friendly events and concerts.

• Flexible Interaction

  

  One of the biggest obstacles in redesigning VZNavigator was the design flexibility that would be required to show varying types of information within a limited space.  We were able to make the space to the left of each map work for everything from driving directions, to gas prices, to points of interest.

• Integrated Experiences

  

  In addition to redesigning the chrome around the VZNavigator map window, we were asked to redesign controls, pins, bubbles, and other elements that would be integrated into the maps.  Unfortunately the map controls we built into the prototype were not used, but many of the other elements remain in the final product.

The post VZNavigator appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Don’t Repeat Yourself

  

  Unfortunately, we can’t get around every legal hurdle — users still need to physically sign a form to become a credit card processor — but we make everything as easy as possible.

  Once potential merchants have filled in their information on the website and submitted their initial registration electronically, they can download a formal contract PDF that’s created on-the-fly and prepopulated with all of their data – no need to rewrite any information they’ve already provided or fill out confusing forms. Users can simply sign, attach a voided check, and fax it in. That was easy!

• Everyone Makes Mistakes

  

  It’s understandable for users to have questions when they’re asked to provide financial information. Sometimes they’re not sure what’s being asked or are not certain they’ve got the right answer. So we’ve built in special functionality that lets Intuit Support representatives help folks who need a hand getting everything filled out correctly.

• Impersonate Feature

  

  Once a user is on the phone with a Support rep, the rep can temporarily take control of the user’s account and fix anything that may be broken. This is an interactive process – users will see a little notification in-app letting them know the rep is actively working to fix the problem. Once the rep is done, users will immediately get control back, and can put the finishing touches on their applications.

The post QuickBooks Merchant Signup appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• Track Payments

  

  It’s easy to navigate both incoming payments and payments that you’ve made to others. Get your scheduled payments at a glance and know what’s on deck. Staying on top of your finances has never been easier.

• Payment Information

  

  You can dig into individual transactions, too. Want to pull back your notes about a customer who requested payment? Need to get someone’s address or call them? No problem, everything from your PaymentNetwork account is right there at your fingertips.

• Maintain Contact List

  

  All of your PaymentNetwork contacts are available for quick access. You can browse through your transactions grouped by contact so you can quickly pull up a contact’s detailed history and stay on top of your business.

The post Intuit IPN iPhone App appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

• How Referrals Work

  

  Tell-A-Friend connects many of the social networks that users are familiar with into one application. After a few quick sign-ins, users select the contacts they wish to refer and the application does the heavy lifting in sending E-mail and Facebook Notification referrals.

  From there users can track which of their friends have received or opened the referrals and how many have become Intuit product users.

• What it Does

  

  Tell-A-Friend allows Intuit Marketing to track the conversion rates of different phrases entered into any of their applications as users click them to refer their friends.

  Tell-A-Friend administrators can track the progress of a message delivered to their users via E-mail or Facebook Notification and view how many referrals with that message have been sent, read, or converted to users.

• Headline About Services

  

  Importing your contacts from Gmail or Facebook is a simple process. We pop up a dialog that allows you to connect to either service, then show an easy to navigate list (with photos!) of your contacts. All you need to do is click to add them to your notification list. You can even mix-and-match contact sources: grab some friends from Facebook, some friends from Gmail, and manually enter anyone you’d like.

The post Intuit Tell-A-Friend appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

I had a fantastic time developing this app; it was an immensely fun experience from start to finish, and I learned a lot about Android’s intricacies along the way. We’re all very happy with the end result, so if you have an Android handset, go try it out and let us know what you think! It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it will help guide you through the feeding frenzy that is Black Friday.

I’d like to thank the fine folks over at Dealcatcher.com for once again being such awesome clients. It was a pleasure making this app for them.

Here’s a QR code for the app, scan it with your phone’s camera and you’ll be taken directly to the market.

Enjoy!

The post TGI Black Friday is back…now for Android. appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Transmogrify’s first iPad app is now available in the App Store. Special thanks to Key Ingredient for being an awesome partner in this endeavor.

Get it Here! It’s Free!

The post Key Ingredient iPad App Now Available! appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

New features:

• Improved event download speed
• event sharing on Facebook and Twitter
• band videos
• music purchase links
• a virtual lighter

The post R5 Productions iPhone App Update appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

As I was browsing the web for creative ways of handling navigation for an in-the-works iPad application, it struck me that there really is no model for interaction on the iPad. Some would claim that this lack of UI ancestry is because Apple is magically revolutionizing the way software can be designed, and that we’re now free to pursue our wildest user interface dreams. While I don’t disagree that the iPad provides a wonderful user experience, I do think that some of the design principles iPad app designers are currently using have been around for quite a while, and are readily found in Flash sites.

Because of the (admittedly warranted) bad name that Flash has for a variety of reasons, people are apt to overlook some of the very nice things that it’s capable of when in the right hands. As a result, they simply don’t look for influence within the medium. Apple seems to enjoy fanning the flame of contempt for Flash that web standards advocates started years ago, and coupled with the release of their “hot new” platform that is so rabidly and publicly anti-Flash, the avoidance of Flash design has no real hope of turning around. I want to be clear, though, that I’m not denying that Flash’s time is up, or that its usefulness — short of video — isn’t long since expired.

Apple’s official beef with Flash and the echo chamber that has ensued is doing something that I think could hurt the design of iPad applications, at least in the short term. This constant trash-talk from the loyalists of a company that designers consider to be the epitome of hip is encouraging those same designers to ignore some pitfalls of design that good Flash designers have already handled with finesse. Apple’s notoriously hard-line approach to protecting its intellectual property is doing nothing to help application designers develop a community of positive influence. Before the iPad was released, the only way a development shop could get their hands on one was to black out room to house it and then secure it to an immovable object. So for those of us who started working on iPad apps before the device was available, where were we to go for design influence? Where I arrived was Flash.

HTML (with some JavaScript influence) has come a long way — and I believe that it will eclipse even native device applications in the future — but experimentation with the medium is only recently gaining some momentum. Flash, however, has been a commonly used platform for unique user experiences, both good and bad, for years. While browsing recently for navigation design, I stumbled on some very nice examples of interaction using Flash. Although some of these sites commit the cardinal sins that have earned Flash its awful reputation, what they do well is find fun ways to deal with the problems that also plague iPad designers; non-linear information and navigation design, touch-like interaction (dragging, swiping, etc.), faux realism in UI elements, and animation.

I do know that time will fix this problem, and that after a few generations of iPad applications there will be a suitable ecosystem for sharing and developing influence within the iPad design community. But I’m worried that because of the constant barrage of anti-Flash writing, some perfectly acceptable — and in many cases quite good — sources of inspiration are going ignored. I’m in no way defending Flash as a platform to developers, but merely admitting that Flash is not all bad, in much the same way that iPad and iPhone applications are not all good, and that there is some value in good Flash design that could positively influence designers.

The post What the iPad Owes to Flash appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

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As a side: Tufte is doing another one-day course in Philadelphia next week. I’m going, is anyone else?

The post To Honor Mr. Tufte… appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

I installed WordPress on my MacBook Pro so that I could do a build-out of a site without needing to have hosting set up yet. Luckily, (Snow) Leopard has Apache and PHP support preinstalled, and the WordPress setup went off without a hitch (which was pretty impressive).

PHP has to be put into this folder by default for it to run on your machine: /Library/WebServer/Documents/

I’m sure there’s some way to change that, but it’s over my head. You can put things into subfolders in that folder though, and my install of WordPress is running from /Library/WebServer/Documents/wordpress/ (this is important to note for later). To view the site, I just need to go to http://localhost/wordpress/ in a browser.

I cleared my theme and started building the design from scratch when I remembered that I hadn’t yet set up “pretty” permalinks. The site is going to be page driven, with no posts, so I wanted to use this approach for links:

Which would make links that (eventually) look like this: www.website.com/contact.

After a little searching, I found some pointers from others with similar problems and followed their instructions. What I did was as follows:

1. Created an .htaccess file and dropped it into the main WordPress folder. I made that file in TextEdit, and saved it to /Library/WebServer/Documents/wordpress/. In order to see that file though, I needed to show hidden files in the Finder. To do that, I opened the Terminal and ran this:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

and then restarted the Finder in Terminal:

KillAll Finder

(Note: To hide hidden files again, just run this again but change TRUE to FALSE.)

2. I set permissions on the .htaccess so that it’s writable by WordPress. The easiest way to do this is to get info (command + i) on the newly created and unhidden .htaccess file in Finder, and change all of the settings under Sharing & Permissions to “Read & Write.” There’s also a nice tool for changing file permissions in a more FTP client-like way, called BatChmod. The most “natural” way is to do this via the Terminal, but I’m more of a GUI type of person. Here’s what the Get Info screen looks like:

After all of that, I thought I was good. I went to the Permalinks settings in the WordPress Admin and set up my custom URLs. Unfortunately, any time I changed the Permalink settings from the default setting to anything else, all of my links would change but the pages would 404. This is where the real fun started.

More searching ensued, and I stumbled onto the idea that httpd.conf (an Apache configuration file) needed to be edited to allow your .htaccess to rewrite URLs. I found this information on WordPress forum threads and blog posts like this, this, and this. Though some of these suggestions may help you solve your problems, I was still faced with a dreaded 404 error on every page.

Those posts all pointed me to /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf, but what I found is that the real file that needed to be fixed was here: /private/etc/apache2/users/myusername.conf. Here’s what I needed to do:

1. Opened /private/etc/apache2/myusername.conf in a text editor.

It looked like this:

3. Copied that chunk of code and pasted it again below it. So it looks like this:

If you don’t have it already, you will also need to add “FollowSymlinks” to the Options for each entry. (Thanks Jozz!)

4. Changed the Directory and the AllowOverride settings on the second entry so that all together it looked like this:

Remember when I said the location of your WordPress install was important? This is the directory you need to enter here. The problem wasn’t that the .htaccess wasn’t creating the right links, it was that Apache wasn’t being pointed to that directory to find the .htaccess file. This was the key to getting it all working.

5. Restarted Apache. The easiest way to do that is by going into the Sharing preference pane and turning “Web Sharing” off and turning it back on again.

And finally, I had nice URLs!

It’s probably a good idea to hide all of those hidden files again at this point.

The post WordPress Permalinks 404 when Running in OS X appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

This library makes it easy to communicate with the Facebook API and, as outlined on the website, provides a minimal yet powerful and extensible interface on which to build your own Facebook applications.

So, if you’re a Java developer, give it a try and see what you think. We’d love to hear any feedback. Don’t forget to log any bug or enhancement requests in our issue tracker!

The post Announcing RestFB appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Update: reader Wendi let us know that: “the easiest way to get around the 420 maximum is to attach something to the post. A link or picture will allow your post to be as long as you want it to be.” Thanks, Wendi!

The post How Long Can a Facebook Status Update Be? appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Each user-submitted test on ABtests gives you some insight into what has worked and what hasn’t worked for other designers, and what they’ve learned from their testing.

In this example, TogetherTag tested two different home pages, one with the main call to action (a request for the user’s pet’s name) on the right, and one with the same CTA on the left.

CTA on right

CTA on left

TogetherTag claims that moving the CTA to the left increased sign-ups by 20.3%, saying “the left side of the page is read first and has a higher priority than the right. Putting the call to action in the prime spot increased conversions.”

While a lot of what you’ll see here may seem like common sense after reading usability books, ABtests may be a good reference for real-life data points when discussing design with clients.

The post Learn Something from Others’ A/B Testing appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Tired of waiting for Apple and Adobe to resolve their problems, a developer by the name of Tobey Tailor built Gordon: An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript.

The post Flash on the iPhone! appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Source: 24 Ways > Going Nuts with CSS Transitions

Here’s another awesome animation technique, which unfortunately doesn’t look so nice in a frame, this time using webkit: Spinner

Source: 24 Ways > CSS Animations

The post CSS is All Growed Up! appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

This and the javadoc-like autogenerated method documentation webpages are super-helpful, since the old documentation acquisition techniques consisted of searching the web for blog posts (most of them outdated like mine since Three20 has gone through some pretty big refactorings), reading the source, and single-stepping through everything with Xcode’s debugger.

It’s sad to see Joe Hewitt go, but I think having Three20 be more than a one-man show is a positive thing for stability and wide adoption.

The post Three20 Gets Documentation appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

Lou Zoom:

The post Oh No! appeared first on Transmogrify, LLC.

PNGCrush is a lovely little tool that optimizes your PNG files by removing ancillary chunks of data and applying various compression techniques. Your files won’t look any different to the naked eye, but their size shrinks, sometimes dramatically. Smaller size equals faster loading; faster loading equals your site, loaded completely, in front of a set of eyeballs before they grow impatient and move onto something else.

The only problem with PNGCrush is that it has no built-in recursion, so if you want to walk through an entire images folder, you’re up a creek without a paddle.

Here’s a quick workaround for cygwin-less Windows users, it will recurse a folder structure entirely, replacing each image along the way with a compressed copy.

FOR /F %%Z IN ('dir /b /s ..\your\path\*.png') DO pngcrush -brute %%~fZ tmp_img_file.png && MOVE /Y tmp_img_file.png %%~fZ

Hope that helps!

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