Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

I designed some new cards for networking and personal work and had them letterpress printed. I’m currently gainfully employed, but I wanted a separate card for non-work related use. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but loved the look *and feel* of letterpress printing. My friend Ben Webster runs the amazing Mandate Press in Salt Lake, (see a sample of their beautiful work on flickr) and informed me of a killer deal they currently offer: 250 letterpressed cards for only $95.

And yes, I put my Twitter handle on my business cards.

Fonts used: Garage Gothic and Archer

— June 1st, 2009

I’ve been running a Macbook Pro machine for one year now, and first of all I’ve got to say, my switch to Mac (from Windows) has made my computing experience fantastic. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro, the final revision before the current black-bordered unibody design. It’s got a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed many slowdowns in opening and closing apps and doing simple tasks. Enough that it was becoming a huge annoyance, at times I even had to close large apps for iTunes to play music without skipping.

Being new to Mac, of course I’ve installed nearly every app I hear about to evaluate and decide if it has any use in my personal work flow. All these apps and my semi-massive iTunes library (which I can’t bring myself to store on an external drive), I was constantly battling to keep at least 10 GB of hard drive space free.

Coming from the Windows world, where it’s common practice to perform a clean install at least once a year to rid all the gunk and junk and spyware that get’s stored in unknown places and runs in the background to eat up valuable processor and RAM. When I brought up the idea of clean install to my Mac friends, I was told, it’s not necessary, that on Mac you can manually remove apps and control everything that is running. That may be true, but the fact is, I had 50+ apps installed that I had no interest in running again, and to manually remove all those (ideally using AppZapper) would take some effort.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been weighing my options and time trying to decide if it’s worth the time and effort to backup and clean install. This Friday was slow, so (in addition to my Time Machine backup) I manually backed up all my User directory files to an external drive. I performed a clean install of OS X 10.5.6, downloaded and installed my favorite apps, manually copied over preference (Application Support) files and I was up and running at 100% in less than 5 hours.

As I expected, my machine is running at lightning speeds. Apps open and close fast and everything is snappy like it should be. Clean install For The Win.

— April 25th, 2009

This is my ongoing list of personally banned restaurants. Each place has resulted in a bad experience due to poorly prepared or poor quality food that was enough to qualify for a personal lifetime ban.

1. Burger King
2. Artic Circle
3. Carl’s Jr – I caved yesterday morning and gave Carl’s a chance to deliver a decent breakfast sandwich and I really regretted it. Food poisoning. 10 hours later I was floored in pain. If you must go here, DO NOT eat the sausage. (06/13/2009)
4. Dominoes Pizza
5. Taco Bell – I loved this joint in college, but for whatever reason now, I just can’t stomach the low grade chicken and meat.
6. Cobblestone Grill (pizza) – the newest item added to the list that spurred the idea to post the actual list. I’ve had some good experiences here, but I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to something in the sauce or dough. That’s something I can live with, but my pizza on Monday was poorly prepared and under cooked, doughy pizza. (04/20/2009)

— April 24th, 2009

I’ve run into a road block in developing an application idea I’ve been toying around with for at least a year. Over the past month I’ve scoped it out and wire framed the functionality. I’ve shown it to a few friends for feedback and they all feel it’s got legs for success.

After much deliberation, I feel that the best platform for this application is a native Mac app. First of all, because I use a Mac and I would be the #1 user of this app and I feel the audience it caters to also tend to be Mac users. Second, it would need to take advantage of integrated functionality you can only get from a native app.

Adobe Air is another option, and would seem to be a nice fit, being that I’m not too shabby of a ActionScript developer myself, but there are far too many fine details that bother me about Air (which I’ll save for another blog post). Most importantly, Air feels like a web application in a native window and there’s a big reason this application is not a web app.

So begins my search for a Mac Application developer. The few I do know personally are booked out for the next few months working on iPhone apps. I received a couple referrals for others who are also busy. It seems that the iPhone Gold Rush has swept up all the Mac devs.

Ideally I’d like to team up with a talented developer and build this thing as a 50 / 50 partnership. I’m certain the workload would be equal if not weighed slightly heavier on me for all the scoping, UI design, visual design, testing, ect. I’m willing to hire someone hourly, but longer term and personal commitment to this project would be much more beneficial to the success.

If anyone knows anyone who knows anyone who is an insanely talented programmer and has some knowledge of Cocoa / Objective C (or a passion to learn it), please send them my way. Ideally a local, Utah guy, but I’m willing to work with someone remotely.

I’m very confident this is a great opportunity. And on the surface it’s a pretty simple concept.

I’ve hesitated posting an ad on Authentic Jobs or a freelance board as I feel that it will be difficult to achieve the quality and long term possibilities with the project. But if I continue to have no luck, that’s my next option.

Either that or hunker down and learn Objective C and Cocoa myself.

— March 15th, 2009

I find inspiration for my work and ideas from many places. Sometimes it has nothing to do with art and design like nature and people and other times it’s found in art history and museums. But the thing that really gets me going is seeing the work of current day geniuses creating new and beautiful things by experimenting with the tools and data of available today.

I’ve been following the work of these guys for well over five years and, with the exception of JD, I’ve seen them all present live at least once at Flash conferences. I’ve noticed hey all share three traits: 1) they have a strong sense of good design and 2) they experiment extensively in Flash or similar technology 3) they are genuinely great guys.

• JD Hooge Currently the founder of an amazing studio called Gridplane creating the beautiful and useful data visualizations and navigation systems for a variety of platforms including the XBOX. I’ve been a huge fan of his work since before he was cranking out the goods at Second Story Interactive.
• Marcos Weskamp Marcos is always thinking of new and better ways to visualize and consume data. His experimental Flash projects include Flickr Graph and Newsmap among many others. Currently working for Adobe in the XD group.
• Erik Natzke Back in the day Erik had a site where he would post his Flash experiment called “toys” and soon figured out ways to use his creations to build navigation systems and amazing websites. He’s always had a drive for creating art with code. In his latest work he’s created tools and virtual paintbrushes in Flash that allow him to experiment and discover new and interesting art. I find his work to be jaw dropping beautiful (viewable on his Flickr page) and it’s even more impressive printed out (and framed). (sample)
• Yugop Probably the smartest person in the whole world. The experiments he was creating in Flash 5 years ago are still amazing. He has a beautiful style that includes rich Flash interfaces and great sound design. Always taking things to a new level.
• Jared Tarbell Jared has used his knowledge of code to assist him in creating beautiful textures and art generated in Flash and Processing. He has created so many ground breaking experiments in Flash and he’s so generous by making many of them available as open source for others to learn and expand upon.
• Nando Costa Nando has created some of the most beautiful animations I’ve ever seen. He now runs his studio called Nervo doing motion and print design you must check out. (sample)
• Robert Hodgin A Flash experimenter and designer who switched over to Processing to allow him the freedom to create larger and faster animations with code. You know that amazing default 3D iTunes Visualizer, yeah he built that. And it’s nothing compared to some of his installation work and audio analysist engine. (sample)
  While talking about Perlin noise at FITC last year he said:

  “random is boring / semi-random is sublime”

• Joshua Davis Since Flash Forward in 2002 when taught us all about easing by running around on stage (and tried to sell us a copy of his hard drive), Joshua has continually followed his passion for creating art with code. A solid eye for design and the drive to make things happen by programming his own tools in Flash to make it happen. He has a style that’s all his own and it’s so beautiful. Which by the way can now be found on a pillow case. (sample)

I could go on forever with details and projects and talks all these guys have done that give me great motivation to learn and explore my own interests. They all share a similar philosophy of giving back and helping others. They are what makes the Flash community what it is today.

— March 13th, 2009