All three of us had overlap in our musical tastes (we all dig Daft Punk, for example) but with very broad deviations. I dug a lot of punk and art rock. Erik had a passion for film soundtracks and rare, vinyl-only recordings. And Peter enjoyed video game soundtracks.

I hated video game soundtracks. They seemed to lack any context whatsoever, naked without the gameplay they were composed to support. Experiencing them on their own felt pretentious, incomplete, a mere novelty. Put simply, I just didn’t get it.

Peter and I attended Video Games Live at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall this past Saturday, and I think it changed my mind.

Any reader of this blog knows how big a fan I am of live shows. Many of the bands I love today didn’t come alive for me until I saw them perform. You can’t know how textural Will Sergeant’s guitar playing really is until you’ve seen Echo and the Bunnymen live. Ray Davies’ pure craftsmanship, certainly audible in Kinks recordings, somehow ignites when performed to an enthusiastic and energized crowd. There’s something about the experience of music that is inherently visceral, perhaps even vital.

In Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne suggests that we’re hard-wired to feel this way:

In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn’t take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that’s not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

[...]

We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

At Video Games Live, I experienced the history of gaming in sight and sound with the aid of the Oregon Symphony and Pacific Youth Choir, conducted by Jack Wall (Myst, Mass Effect) and hosted by Tommy Tallarico (Earthworm Jim, Metroid Prime). As I sat among my fellow geeks, cheering at the site of Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka, the opening title of the NES Metroid, footage of Ralph Baer testing an early version of Pong in 1968 and Martin Leung playing the Super Mario Bros. theme blind-folded, I realized what we all were really responding to.

It was the experience of these games, the fun and adventure they provided, and the soundtrack that is intrinsically linked to our memories. This music, thoughtfully composed and lovingly executed, is no more shallow than any other genre strengthened by the energy of a live performance.

Needless to say, the show was a wonderfully geeky good time.

I invited my frequent co-conspirator Peter Wooley to the service. After a few messages between us, we went to work designing and implementing an alternate icon treatment with a special notification state to let you know when new messages are available, collaborating via Dropbox.

In short order, we completed the latest addition to the favicon alerts family of user scripts, Brizzly Favicon Alerts!

Used in combination with the Faviconize Tab extension, you can easily keeps tabs on new messages in Brizzly with less screen real estate than usual.

This feature is hard to enjoy if you aren’t a Brizzly user just yet. While invites aren’t as scarce as Google Wave, I’d be happy to provide one to the first five readers who comment on this post and sound off on how much you like (or dislike) the visual refresh.

Install Brizzly Favicon Alerts 1.0

Despite the recent trend toward highly dimensional identities, I still believe in high-contrast, graphic marks that retain versatility regardless of media. When I see my designs sewn into cloth or laser-cut from aluminum, I’m extremely happy with that choice. As much as I enjoy watching traditional media’s implosion, there’s something to be said for symbols rendered in a tactile fashion.

Thanks to David Martschinske for sharing.

River (Google Wave) is a prodigy, exceedingly gifted in nearly every respect, consistently one-upping her older yet still talented sibling Simon (Gmail). As striking as her abilities are, they are only experienced through a fog of schizophrenia and instability. While Simon lacks any of River’s psychic  insight, he is nonetheless remarkable and ultimately more reliable.

Okay, maybe I’m stretching the metaphor a bit. My point is that Wave has really cool moments, but they’re fleeting in this early state. While I haven’t experienced the rampant bugs reported by other users, I have noticed that the interface leaves a lot to be desired (it’s shockingly similar to Microsoft Outlook,  neglecting the emphasis on conversation Gmail achieved), and things become cacophonous when a conversation has many participants.

What I dig about Wave are the live conversations, the ability to structure those conversations in any order you please, and the freedom that plugins give the service. What’s wonderful about these high points is that they aren’t unique to Google’s implementation of the Wave platform. Remember, Wave is an open source creation aimed at replacing email as a standard, with Google’s offering the inaugural product. Regardless of the current user experience, one can’t deny the capabilities of the service, which any group of enterprising designers and developers could leverage into something truly wonderful.

That’s not to say we should necessarily write off Google’s interface at this early stage of development. Sure, it’s a little loopy, but who knows? It might kick email’s butt after all.

While Microsoft’s Courier concept is fascinating for its application of touch to a decidedly alternative computing experience, 10/GUI seeks to redefine our desktop interactions. I was pleased to see its creator, R. Clayton Miller, thoughtfully address the issue of arm and neck fatigue (a problem cartoonists like myself know all too well). His solution also counters the challenges of the user’s fingers obscuring the point of interaction, something today’s mobile devices sidestep with clumsy fly-up keypress confirmations.

I think 10/GUI is wonderful, and I sincerely hope Miller (or those industrious enough to seek him out) will explore it further and give us some real products to play with. That being said, I remain unconvinced that this type of interface would work in mainstream application.

While listening to 10/GUI’s daunting list of touch gestures required to accomplish basic operating system tasks, I was reminded of industrial designer Dennis Boyle’s account of Palm’s experience selling users on Graffiti text entry over a traditional keyboard. From Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions:

I remember that Handspring decided to put the Treo out with both a keyboard and Graffiti, because they didn’t know which one people would choose; they decided to let them vote. The result was quite clear; a large majority went for the small keyboard. [...] [The] little QWERTY keyboard, bad as it is, is such a standard that it requires no guesswork, and that attracts more users.

Despite the fact that Graffiti was a faster and more efficient method of “typing” on a mobile device, these rewards came only if the user invested enough time to overcome the obstacle of learning the standard. While I find it to be really neat, I can’t imagine gaining enough speed from 10/GUI to overcome the time and pain it would take to learn those gestures.

I’ve experienced this with my MacBook Pro’s multitouch trackpad. While simple gestures like scrolling are easy to learn, more complex maneuvers are bothersome and often unwittingly triggered as my hand brushes past while typing. While some of these features ease the frustration of not having a mouse, they are a poor substitute when used in conjunction with the keyboard, occasionally even to the detriment of my workflow.

I’m not saying we necessarily need to coddle our users, gimping innovation for the sake of complacency. What I am suggesting is that immediacy may be the greatest asset of touch computing. It is natural to select an object by touching it. I love the Courier prototype because it evolves tasks which inherently benefit from touch interaction. 10/GUI appears to require memorization prior to use, more like a musical instrument than a user interface. Put simply, I’m afraid 10/GUI will create more problems for me than it will solve.

But I really hope I’m proven wrong.

New to this release are icons for BlinkList, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress and Google Wave. The complete list:

• BlinkList
• Blogger
• Buzz
• Delicious
• Digg
• Facebook
• Feed
• Flickr
• Google
• Lala
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Mail
• MySpace
• Newsvine
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Virb
• Wave
• WordPress
• YouTube

Too good to be true! What’s the catch?

These icons are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. They’re free for you to use as long as you place an attribution link to tylersticka.com somewhere in proximity to them (such as a site footer or about/credits page).

How can I ever repay you?

If you wanted to be really awesome, you can tweet about the icons or send me a message. If you’re more of a gift-giving sort, you can make a PayPal donation or buy something from my Amazon wish list.

Download Ice Cream Social Icon Pack 1.1

The original version of the Tyler Sticka experience you’re (hopefully) enjoying this very minute was crafted without a scrap of JavaScript when viewed in a modern browser. Sickened by the amount of designer portfolios reeking of gratuitous and uninspired Flash animation, I wanted my design to stand in stark defiance, crafted only with good ol’ XHTML and CSS (delivered via WordPress, of course).

But decisions born of principal, while challenging and rewarding, are not necessarily synonymous with actual experience design decisions. There was an opportunity to use the remarkable jQuery library to make the portfolio items more immediate and visually interesting, and I’d be a fool not to take advantage of that.

You can see the effect in action by visiting any portfolio piece with multiple images, such as this one. If you take a look around, you may notice one or two other changes as well.

I’ve also added support for Google Chrome Frame, which will allow users of Internet Explorer 6 who are unable (or unwilling) to upgrade to experience the new additions without entirely disrupting their browser. That being said, I highly recommend upgrading to a modern browser (such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer 8 or Safari) whenever possible.

See? I really can’t stop tinkering.

In spite of this, I realize my wait will not end with Wave’s arrival. The service will likely taking many years to establish itself as the ubiquitous standard it aspires to be. I can’t just ditch email and twiddle my thumbs until that happens.

Here’s how I attempt to thwart email’s crappiness and continue to maintain that Merlin Mann nirvana that is Inbox Zero.

Step 1: Gmail

The setup begins with Gmail which, despite the handicap of our dilapidated email standard, still manages to rock 90% of the time.

I choose Gmail for its massive (and ever-expanding) storage capacity, the ability to send email from my personal domains, the versatility gained from “tagging” messages with labels, and the freedom to access all that cool stuff via POP3, IMAP and Google Sync for free. No competitor even begins to compare at this point and, even if they did, Gmail’s the easiest to escape from should you ever wish to switch.

In accordance with Merlin’s inbox makeover article, I immediately move every email I receive out of the inbox and into an action label after a brief skim. This protects me from workflow disruptions and insures that Gmail’s inbox and archive are used faithfully (for unsorted and archives items).

I prefix my action labels with an underscore so that they’ll be at the top of Gmail’s labels and any folder view in another application. They are:

_Action

For items that require some sort of action or task on my part before I can respond.

_Hold

For items I’ll want close at hand in the next week or so (login information, URLs, attachments, etc.).

_Respond

For items requiring a short message from me without any major tasks or required research.

_Waiting

For items which will likely require action once the sender has responded.

For added goodness, use Gmail’s Multiple Inboxes (enable it in Labs) to put these front and center:

I then follow Adam Pash’s lead and organize all other labels into Contexts and Projects, abbreviated to ‘C’ and ‘P’ respectively. Contexts might be something like “Events” and “Appointments,” whereas Projects refer to things like “New Web Site,” “The Big Account,” etc.

Once all your conversations are nicely organized and you’ve got a great bird’s eye view of your actionable items, Firefox users may want to install FaviconizeTab and Gmail Favicon Alerts for at-a-glance incoming mail alerts without additional applications.

Step 2: iPhone

If you set up Gmail on your iPhone using Apple’s baked-in, shiny logo button for the service, you’re missing out on the best experience.

I highly recommend using Google Sync, which gives you push mail, calendar and contacts from Google’s services. There’s nothing quite like the warm, fuzzy feeling you get having incoming messages pushed directly to that red badge on your home screen.

If you must have full multiple label goodness on your iPhone, or if you already have an Exchange ActiveSync account associated with the device, you should definitely use Gmail through mobile Safari. It does nearly everything the desktop version does (including offline support) and trumps the default mail app in numerous ways.

Step 3: Postbox

I’m somewhat of a zealot when it comes to having a local backup of my email on a hard drive. Call me skeptical, but cloud solutions are too new for me to have complete and total confidence in their archival potential. I was a happy Thunderbird user for years, but Mozilla Messaging has moved forward at a snail’s pace.

Postbox is Thunderbird with super powers. The interface is much more polished and boasts great features like tabs, attachment aggregation and social network integration. In many ways it’s the email client I wish Thunderbird was (and hopefully will be).

Setting up Gmail in Postbox is a snap. The big “archive” buttons acts as you’d expect, conversations are threaded, and the search accepts Gmail-like arguments (such as “from:Mom”).

Unlike Thunderbird, Postbox is a commercial application that’ll set you back $39.95 for a single license after a 30-day trial. Luckily, they’re nice enough to give purchasers a discount to hand out to friends, so the first ten people who purchase using this link will get ten bucks off that price. You’re welcome.

Why are we doing this again?

Because email is a beast, a sickly mutant beast that eats at your productivity and requires specialized care no matter how you access it. This is what it takes to make me happy with it. Using this setup allows me to access the same email everywhere, maintain a local backup on my home PC, and receive new email notifications no matter where I am on my iPhone. My conversations are threaded, helpfully organized and quickly searchable from anywhere.

But I still wouldn’t mind playing with Google Wave. I’ll even trade you a Typekit invite. Anyone? Update: Thanks to Ryan Williams and Chris at Studio 625 for the invites! I’ll publish a reaction to Wave soon.

A technical problem resulted in the footage starting a few minutes into my presentation. All you missed was an introduction of who I am, and of my background as a cartoonist.

I apologize for having to look down at my notes so often; I didn’t expect to be holding the microphone! Other than that, enjoy.

Multi-touch in a giant, spendy media player? Meh. Multi-touch in a field research and ideation tool? Bingo.

Many who attend my presentations will have seen my beloved Thinkpad X61 Tablet at my side, laser-etched with my logo. Ever since I gave Vista the boot and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate, I’ve been enamored with this device.

But tablet PC lovers are truly the minority. Why? Tablets are most useful in only two scenarios:

1. Visual art and design for sketching, painting and otherwise mimicking organic techniques difficult to accomplish with a mouse.
2. Research and note-taking in the field, where the user is often required to stand or move while writing.

As huge and clunky as keyboards feel, typing is much faster than handwriting. As separated as mice feel from cursor movement, common actions like dragging and selection are much easier to manage when your fingers aren’t required to literally traverse the distance. For common PC actions at the core of Windows, Mac OS X and most Linux distributions, the keyboard and mouse are the best tools for the job.

The Courier prototype is beautiful because it acknowledges these faults and attempts to craft an experience catered to those two scenarios tablet owners enjoy already, with the added immediacy of multi-touch in addition to the typical stylus. While I question how intuitive some of the gestural interactions would be in use, the idea of a touchable infinite OneNote on crack is incredibly compelling.

In short, it’s a tablet prototype I can see a business, artist or researcher investing in. I just hope they (or a competitor) can deliver.