Disqus - Latest Comments for robby1066

Re: Crowd-Sourcing Same Day Delivery

Robby Macdonell — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 11:04:38 -0000

That's interesting. I wonder how something like that would compete against a service like TaskRabbit or PostMates? Looks like a little more focus on businesses, allowing retailers to say "we offer same day delivery", which seems pretty smart.

Re: Why Isn’t Heathcare Sexy?

Robby Macdonell — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 15:08:08 -0000

Ok, I’ll be contrarian here. Isn’t healthcare getting there? At least if you define it broadly enough to include wellness / fitness tech? Seems like the disruptive factor in several of your examples (Square, Uber, AirBnB, Box) is that the services became much more accessible and relatable to the average person (as well as sidestepping some of the traditional gatekeepers). That seems to be CLEARLY happening in wellness / personal health. There's an exciting story line: sensors (and the processing power to get interesting data from them) are getting so cheap and small that several of them affordably fit on a person without them looking like a complete idiot. There are success stories: companies like Fitbit, Jawbone, and Nike are building really interesting data and social platforms on top of that technology trend. And there’s a growing awareness of the fact that people can meaningfully interact with these devices in a way that doesn’t require being a doctor or an elite athlete.

Minus the breakout multi-billion dollar valuation for a single startup, that seems to fit the mold pretty well to me.

I’ll admit, I’m very much in an early-adopter bubble with this stuff. But, as I see more and more of my non-nerd / non-athlete friends trash talking each other on Facebook over who got more steps last week, I have to think that stuff is getting much closer to a really interesting tipping point.

Re: Colab: What’s Next For The Pioneers Of Nashville Coworking?

Robby Macdonell — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:11:57 -0000

Thanks, I'll check those out! Nice to see so many options. The thought of working at home in isolation all the time totally makes me cringe.

Re: Colab: What’s Next For The Pioneers Of Nashville Coworking?

Robby Macdonell — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 14:23:34 -0000

Thanks a lot! Will do!

Re: Colab: What’s Next For The Pioneers Of Nashville Coworking?

Robby Macdonell — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:17:53 -0000

Aw man! This makes me sad. I've spent a few days down there at Colab while on working vacations, and I was really impressed with what they had there. Really seemed to capture that optimistic, community vibe that I've seen other co-working spaces do poorly. I'm moving to Nashville soon and was looking forward to spending more time there. Bummer. Glad to hear they'll still be involved with other spaces, though!

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 01:37:14 -0000

Sure thing Chris. I just updated it. I had slacked off on it because I was planning on doing something more up to date, technologically-speaking, for this year. I ended up not getting around to it in time for the finals. Oh well. hopefully before the start of next season. Anyways, this version is now up to date. Go Kings!

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:08:24 -0000

Yeah, the Slug was the current logo when I made this. I didn't think to change it when I updated it after last years finals. I may do a revamp this year, and I'll get the new logo in then.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:07:04 -0000

Good point. When I made this I was giving myself a bit of a crash-course on Stanley Cup history and I got that fact screwed up. Updated!

Re: Smashvillians.com. A little project I've been working on.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:59:27 -0000

You should! I'd love to see a good aggregator for the Canucks. I really should follow them more closely, seeing as how a.) they're the closest NHL team to me, geographically, and b.) they're amazing this year.

Re: Smashvillians.com. A little project I've been working on.

Robby Macdonell — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:47:45 -0000

Thanks! Glad you like it!

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:03:50 -0000

Sure thing, go ahead and do whatever you want with it! Feel free to use the code, too, if it's helpful to you. The one thing I'd say is, if you end up just swapping out the data and using the exact same visual design I'd appreciate a link back to this post. But if you're just doing something conceptually similar then don't worry about it.

Glad you liked it! If you end up posting it somewhere I'd be interested to see it.

Re: Reflecting on recruiting.com

Robby Macdonell — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 02:02:17 -0000

They're still around and plugging away at the app we started in late '08. They're doing some pretty neat stuff with it too. I'm sure they'll have an announcement about something or other sometime soon.

p.s. apologies for the deliberate vagueness. :p

Re: http://bakeitinacake.tumblr.com/post/1127629642

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:16:59 -0000

I was afraid this was going to be too dense, but they came out perfect. Awesome mix of textures and flavors!

Re: Reflecting on recruiting.com

Robby Macdonell — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 18:52:13 -0000

No, we ended up ditching Lobster. It got really bloated, feature-wise, and most of the people with any real technical knowledge about it left the company during the time where we were more focused on Jobster.com. We decided it would be way more realistic to start fresh, rather than deal with all the legacy issues.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:10:12 -0000

Yeah, no matter how usable you think a design is, you'll be amazed by what people miss when they actually sit down with it. As a UI designer, I feel like I should be better at it than a lot of people, and I end up being right about that stuff *maybe* 30% of the time. But like you said, that's kind of the awesome part, seeing what's wrong and hopefully fixing it.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:07:23 -0000

That's rad! One of the things about the design with the NHL data that bugged me was how the years were all sandwiched in together so close. It's cool to see it with a smaller number of years so the numbers can breathe a little more. Maybe it might look nicer to change the setup_timeline_bar function to display the four-digit year instead of the two-digit that I had to use (2006 instead of just 06)?

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:30:32 -0000

Hey thanks! Re: the logo animation, you're right. My first thought was to fade the desaturated logo with the saturated one, which I couldn't figure out how to do with pure css (I could've used jquery, but I wanted to use css transitions). But once I animated the background position, I really liked it. It calls attention to the top row in a way that a simple fade wouldn't. Although, now that I think about it, a pure CSS solution to get the fade would be to put the saturated logo in the H3 tag (where the logo currently is), and the desaturated one in the LI element that contains it, and then set the opacity of the H3 tag to 0 on hover (or vice versa). Then, something like "css-transition: opacity 0.5s linear" would probably work.

It's fun stuff, I can't wait to play around with it more.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:53:20 -0000

Still planning on it. I just hadn't gotten around to it. I want to take a pass at cleaning up the code first. Probably silly, but I feel like putting a license on code is a statement that I think its good enough to invite others to use. And I don't feel fantastic about some of the stuff in the original code.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:12:53 -0000

Well, it turns out, the guys over at FanSnap just had me do an NBA version: http://www.fansnap.com/blog...

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:57:54 -0000

wow, that graphic is cool! It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around all the info there, but I like it. I left a couple thoughts on your blog regarding interactivity.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:59:17 -0000

hrm. I didn't know that. I just tried it out, and it doesn't seem to be working. I ran some tests and it seems to work fine on background-color, but not background-position, even though it appears to support it according to http://www.opera.com/docs/s...

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:38:51 -0000

at this point, I'd be stoked just to see the Preds make it to the 2nd round of the playoffs. (sigh)

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:54:24 -0000

Wow, Atlanta? I had no idea. Thanks so much for the info! I just updated it.

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:55:13 -0000

Oh, good catch. The note shows up at the start of '95 on the timeline, but I said '93 in the note text. Fixed, Thanks!

Re: Visualizing Lord Stanley's Cup: an HTML5 experiment.

Robby Macdonell — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:52:00 -0000

Good question, actually. That *was* part of the experiment. One of my original thoughts was that with a static data set such as this, storing the data in an external source (xml, mysql, etc), seems like overkill. One of the things I was trying to accomplish was taking reasonably-well marked-up html and use it as the data source. There are a few advantages to that approach:

1. Server-side performance largely becomes a non-issue. (for example, this got on the front page of reddit.com over the weekend and I got an unexpected 15,000 visitors on Saturday. My server admin skills are pretty weak and I'm pretty sure the server would've fallen over if I had been serving anything other than a couple static files for each visit. With the current performance of javascript in the browser these days, it's getting to a point where it just makes sense to move more of the processing responsibilities to the client-side.

2. Using progressive enhancement to transform html content gives you a fallback version for non-supported browsers without doing a thing (granted, I could've done more with the CSS for IE, but at least they get the content).

3. There are probably some SEO benefits to having all the content semantically marked up, too. I don't know enough about that stuff to intelligently comment, though.