Ryan Coleman: Blog - Latest Comments

Re: App I’m Loving: Paper

Richard Hayward — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:38:22 -0000

New colour mixer feature is pretty cool too! totally agree they need basic layer functionality

Re: Visually Exploring the Personal Brand – Part 2: Taking Inventory

John Matyskiel — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 15:45:16 -0000

Ryan, I really enjoyed the contents of this blog. Thanks for putting it out there.

Regarding personal brand, I think you are trying to manage it in the marketplace before defining it. Here is the original Tom Peters essay that created the concept. It was written in 1997 (and sounds like it). But the essence is "Your brand is your promise to the marketplace and to the world". The starting point is within.

John Matyskiel

http://www.fastcompany.com/...

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Hectorrafaellopez — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:20:09 -0000

hectorrafaellopez@gmail.com
@hectorrafaellopez
Estos son mis datos.

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Hectorrafaellopez — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:19:17 -0000

Hi ryan. Please use translator for me.
Me gustaria saber como haces para colocar las fotos en un post. Cuando compartes un flixel, te aparece en la pagina web de flixel y eso no es muy grato visualmente. Me gustaria saber si se puede usar el flixel y que este se vea solo, como lo tienes aqui en este post. Como lo haces ? La opcion de guardar en el carrete del iphone para que sirve ? No se guarda el movimiento que hiciste.
La aplicacion es extremadamente lenta haciendo un flixel y la opcion de compartir es limitada porque tr coloca una URL y no el flixel que hiciste.

Espero puedas ayudarme y me contestes.

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

EtotheZ — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:10:29 -0000

Yup, it's always been there - it needs a bit of tweaking because right now it zooms in on the center of the image rather than the center of the pinch-point, but in the meantime you can pan with 2 fingers to compensate

Another discoverable for ya: you can swipe left & right when viewing Flixels to view all of the related Flixels in the list you're viewing.

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

ryancoleman — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:01:09 -0000

Thx for the comment Zann! Glad you enjoyed it (& glad to see there's pinch/zoom... Was on my wish list too and hadn't discovered it yet ;) )

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

ryancoleman — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:59:23 -0000

Thx Ken!

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

ryancoleman — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:59:21 -0000

Thx Philippe! I'll figure out how to add the pinch/zoom... Hadn't uncovered it yet (has it always been there? Could have sworn I tried it before...)

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Ken Seto — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:41:04 -0000

Great post Ryan!

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Philippe LeBlanc — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:00:51 -0000

Hi Zann, There is a pinch/zoom function in the App. You use the two fingers to move around in the image once you have zoomed in. Please view the promo video for now to see it in action. Working on a demo video.

Thanks Ryan for your dedication in educating the community. Really well done, I would simply add the pinch/zoom feature in explanation.

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Markus — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:53:10 -0000

Excellent work Ryan!!!

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

EtotheZ — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:45:39 -0000

Thanks for the great writeup Ryan! While I'd planned to include a tutorial for Flixel creation, sadly it didn't make it in for v1. In the meantime, I'll try to get the boys to feature the related Flixel for this post

@Zann: pinch/zoom is already there! :)

Re: Three Simple Steps to Creating Amazing Flixels

Zann — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:33:33 -0000

Just signed up for Flixeltips yesterday, and this post is definitely helpful! Love the app, but it will definitely take some practice. Drained my iPhone battery yesterday just playing with it! Would love to see "pinch/zoom" functionality in the editing phase to allow more precise selections. Thanks again!

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

Alex Sirota — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:26:16 -0000

Great write up Ryan!

In our OTA install at home we were able to mount an antenna on a juliette balcony so no going on the roof, but I used a cheap $25 job from the computer outlet stores. I wanted to see how cheap I could get. I don't get the US channels but get just the Canadian ones (9 I think in total). I avoided wiring the antenna into our cable plant since it is a total mess (thanks Rogers) and decided to plant antennas near every TV for most flexibility and ability to rotate. I was surprised to find that the cheapest antenna possible gives you the basic Canadian channels. Even in the basement.

The Antennas Direct http://www.antennasdirect.com/ ClearStream2 I found to be an excellent indoor/outdoor antenna and may use it in the future. My son installed it at a house of someone who wanted the US channels on the 3rd floor attached to the wall, indoors and picked up most of the US channels from Thorrnhill, Ontario which is easily 100km away from Buffalo. I think only NBC wasn't available.

The OTA for us for live sporting events and maybe the odd news broadcast. Rarely for TV broadcasts. I found that Netflix in Canada has a poor selection unless you want children's shows. Not really worth the $8 per month, although the VPN options sound appealing I don't think I want to risk that sort of setup long term. And it's all about reducing cost right?

The Synology Diskstations products for network attached storage (NAS) are simply astounding. Coupling an AppleTV with the firecore.com atv flash black makes for a compelling solution as well. A more full write up on Synology (these do a tremendous amount of work including webhosting, 3rd party apps etc)

http://blog.newpathnetwork....

Here's the AppleTV/firecore setup --

http://blog.newpathnetwork....

All in about $100 for the antenna and cabling/grounding/accessories, $150 for the AppleTV setup and $250 for the NAS and 1TB hard drive I had lying around. So $500 or so for a 1 TV setup.

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

ryancoleman — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:10:15 -0000

Yeah - we're using a similar service for US/UK sites but it's DNS based so there's no need for VPNs etc & it doesn't impact our access to Canadian sites/content - it just automatically routes us based on what the site is looking for.
For now I've just flipped our PS3 & one of the laptops onto it & leave everything else routed normally - been working great so far. Phone we just have the most stripped down home line possible - we use our cells way more than our home phone now.

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

Coleman Rob01 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:39:26 -0000

Something to consider to enhance your experience with Netflix and other subscriptions. I subscribe to vpnmaster which for $3.95/month I get a US, UK, DE and CA ip addresses. I then flashed a couple of Netgear WNR3500L routers I have with dd-wrt vpn firmware (Turns your $60 router into a $400 router) and setup vpn tunnels to the US and UK. Now either through PC's or our PlayStation we enjoy the UK and US Netflix catalogues. If you want to do this, don't buy a Boxee (Been there, returned that) as its firmware seems to be tied to the country it was bought in (PlayStation doesn't seem to care.. thank god) and would only show the Canadian catalogue. On another similar note, we dumped out home phone for ITPvoip.com.
1 Line 500min north american long distance $9.99/month no tax (US company) month to month contract. I opted for the 19.99 plan, 2 lines (2 numbers) 1000 min north american long distance. I checked a year of Rogers bill and we've never gone over 750 min/month.

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

ryancoleman — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:17:27 -0000

Thank Neil, TV fool is a great resource & I used it in the early stages (found through digitalhome). We got a pretty good number of our channels definitely all the greens.
Ryan

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

ryancoleman — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:59:27 -0000

yeah - the only thing I'm considering adding is a Boxee Box to our setup to make accessing TV shows easier although Serviio has some capabilities that have mitigated that concern for now.

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

Jason Williams — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:54:17 -0000

We abandoned cable a few years ago and couldn't be more pleased. Rather than pay the ridiculous subscription amount from the cable company, we now use a combination of the antenna (free HD networks) and a Roku box (TV internet app box). Through the Roku we have subscriptions to Hulu ($7.99) and Netflix ($8.99). The kids get all their favorite shows and movies through Netflix and mommy still gets all her taped network shows on Hulu. One drawback of the antenna system is no digital recorder/Tivo. Hulu takes care of that. Long story short, we cut our almost $100 cable bill in less than half by just paying for internet and a few online sibscriptions.

Re: Cutting the Cord: Saying Goodbye to Cable

neilio — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:25:32 -0000

Nice work - we went 100% OTA and web services in June and haven't looked back. One resource I'd recommend for people who want to know what channels they might be capable of receiving is TV Fool - http://tvfool.com/.
You can enter your address and the site will serve up some nice graphs and tables showing you what channels should technically be available from location. I ran our address before we put the antenna up and compared afterwards and we were getting almost all but 2 of the channels TV Fool predicted. (YMMV).

Re: Unconsciously Killing User Experience in the Enterprise

Virpi Oinonen — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:00:31 -0000

In their book "Made to stick" Dan and Chip Heath refer to unconscious competence as "the curse of knowledge". There' a great example of this in the chapter where they talk about an experiment that involved people tapping out the tune of a well known song. Someone has written about it here:http://blog.isiteasy.com/th...

Re: Idea: Combine Broadcasters, Social Media & Photosynth to capture live events.

Saleem — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:46:34 -0000

I had a similar idea the first time I saw the technology demonstrated. I even wrote a formal project proposal to develop an immersive news tool. Maybe I'll get to build it one day.

Re: Unconsciously Killing User Experience in the Enterprise

ryancoleman — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:24:20 -0000

Agreed that there's a bigger problem going on that needs to be addressed - I think that kind of change won't happen though until the baby steps I started outlining above start to get sorted though. If people would just be more aware/conscious of the experience big improvements would get made quite easily.

Love that XKCD comic.... was painfully familiar with that situation when I was working in the translation space with Clay Tablet - talk about a standards happy industry.

Re: Unconsciously Killing User Experience in the Enterprise

dpjanes — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:45:00 -0000

Weirdly reminding me of this http://xkcd.com/927/.

The fact that this always happens indicates that there's a systemic meta problem happening - that SMEs maybe shouldn't be tasked with solving problems (directly) or having the power to declare a problem solved. Rather, they should be a resource used in the creation of the solution and -- beyond the points you mention above -- the ability to make the declaration of "the problem is solved" actually should involve at the end of the process, umm, the problem being solved -- including no dread feelings.

Re: Change Don’t Cost a Thing

ryancoleman — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:19:33 -0000

Thanks Joe - love your point about the personal relationships... Such a key component to getting stuff done in a big organization - not nearly enough time is spent by many to get to know folks outside their respective teams and that small effort would pay huge dividends in the long run.
- Ryan