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Interarchy’s Icon

People seemed to enjoy my post Twitter Apps Reviewed where I rated applications based on their icons, and this go-around we’re looking at Interarchy, a Mac file transfer application I’ve been using for many years.

Anarchie

Interarchy was originally called “Anarchie” and this was the icon under classic Mac OS. The small one on the left was all you’d ever see in the Finder, as classic Mac OS didn’t scale up the size of icons at all. I’ve blow it up here for you to see the pixels. Ahhh, icons were much simpler back then…. oh, where were we?

Interarchy

In the center are two Interarchy icons. On the left is the old brown Interarchy icon. I like that one. I like it a lot. At first I thought it was because of the similarities to the old Anarchie icon, but then more I think about it, I think it’s just a well designed icon. After installing Interarchy 9 I got the silvery icon on the right. It’s still a filing cabinet, but I think it loses something. It just doesn’t look as clear and sharp as the brown one. I know brown probably isn’t hip in the shiny Apple/OS X world, but honestly the brown one stands out much more for me. I’ve got a lot more shiny looking white or silver icons than I do brown ones. Still, progress marches on, and the icon changed.

Interarchy

I was still disturbed by the new icon… so much so, that I am actually using the old one on my copy of Interarchy. I thought I should blow them up and see how they look. Well, the brown one seemed to have a size of 512px wide/high, while the silver one was only 128px wide/high. The silver one just looks to soft and fuzzy to me.

Interarchy

Here’s the brown Interarchy icon, at full size. Besides the shadow at the bottom, I think it looks pretty damn good. In fact, this may be one of my favorite icons now.

Interarchy: TNG

Back at the Interarchy web site, we see a new icon, this one definitely looking better than the fuzzy silver one, but I’m still not sure I like it as much as the brown one. Maybe it’s just me…

Sebastiaan de With is the designer who worked on a complete redesign of the Interarchy icons, and you know what, they look good. Maybe the new icon will grow on me, I’ll get used to it, and all will be forgotten. Either that or I’ll just keep using the old icon. :)

(Oh, one more thing… please don’t use plain FTP. It’s insecure. Use SFTP!)

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Ron Prodoehl Memorial Bench

Ron Prodoehl Memorial Bench

My dad was very involved with the parks department in Greenfield, and after he died in 2007 his contributions and volunteering efforts were recognized, and that pretty cool.

On July 26, 2010 there was an unveiling of the Ron Prodoehl Memorial Bench at Jim Smrz park in Greenfield, Wisconsin, and that too was pretty cool.

The park itself is not really viewable on Google Maps yet, but it’s sort of nestled in between Kimberly Avenue and 39th Street. You can take 43rd Street to Mangold Avenue and you’ll find it.

The bench appears to be made of wood, but upon closer inspection, it’s actually metal, which is another fact I found pretty cool.

If you’re in the area, stop by, take a rest on the bench, and enjoy the view.

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ROBOT

ROBOT

download the large one

(consider it cc:by)

Flamebot is a robot that has no legs, but he flies around with flames shooting out of the area where his feet would be. If he had feet. Which he doesn’t. He is very colorful though, and in honor of the rainbow of colors he represents, Flamebot salutes you, and all you do for the good of the Robot Nation.

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BADIE

BADIE

download the large one

(consider it cc:by)

It started as a box but turned into a very bad die. The 3 sides you see all have just one dot on them, and I’m pretty sure the 3 sides you don’t see do as well. Sometimes you gotta roll with it.

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Heard – a Last.fm mirror

I love Last.fm. I love music, and I love data, so it makes sense. Last.fm, for you unhep cats out there, allows you to keep a log of what you listen to by “scrobbling” your music – that is – it submits the info about the songs you listen to the Last.fm web site via various bits of software. There’s scrobbling clients that work with iTunes, and your iPod, and your iPhone, and other things that don’t start with ‘i’ or come from Apple. (Oh, I’m rasterweb at Last.fm)

It’s interesting to see what I listen to, and who my top artists are, and all that jazz that comes with logging data… charts, graphs, etc. Fun stuff!

But as you’ve seen, I’ve been on a kick lately to pull all that data back to my own site. (See Also: Scuttle rides again!, Tweet Nest: Archive Your Tweets, Data goes in, Data comes out., Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!) So I figured it was time to get the data I’ve been feeding into Last.fm since 2006 back to me, and back to my own site…. thusly “Heard” was born.

Heard

Heard is a bit of PHP code I whipped up which uses the Last.fm API to pull my scrobbled data back to my own site and stuff it into MySQL, and from there it simply displays the data. Once again, this is my insurance policy. If Last.fm goes down, disappears, loses all it’s data, or something else happens, I’ve at least got an archive of all of my listening data.

Last.fm is a great service, and they’ve provided a great API that makes doing these sorts of things possible, and I thank them for that.

So Heard is really just some hacked together code right now… I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hours on it, but it is functional, and syncs data once per hour. Once I implement all the ideas I have for ways to improve it, I’ll upgrade my version, and think about releasing some code if there is any interest in it. I’m a pretty poor PHP programmer, but I’m dangerous enough to build simple things. If someone else loves this idea and wants to run with it, let me know, and I’ll share whatever I can.

Last.fm

And yes, the design (or lack of design) of Heard is minimalist to say the least. In one part it pays homage to Last.fm’s display of data, and in another part, I didn’t want to get too caught up in the look at this point, but I do have some plans for later.

(And one more thing: Thanks goes out to Pixis Creative for doing a bit of CSS debugging for me.)

Update: The code for Heard is on GitHub. I’d love if people smarter than myself found ways to make it better.