Performancing Metrics

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Next LAN Party

So, Digital Fruit's next LAN party is scheduled for a tentative November 15.  Its a tuesday, and I would like to remind people to bring their own surge protectors and network cables along with the usual computer and peripherals.  Cover charge is $5, so have it ready at the door.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Suggestions for Funding

I'm printing a quick one here to see if anyone has any suggestions on how to procure funding for some of the current projects we're working on?  I'm looking to start a Kick Starter page for the Epic RPG project, but this situation won't work on all of our projects.

Any suggestions you readers have are greatly appreciated, and I thank you in advance.  We always value your input.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Project Headshot

So I'm up this late working with local artist Mel Taylor on Project Headshot, his latest musical colaboration.

With a mixture of rock, metal, jazz and blues, it looks to be an impressive show of musical force.  Digital Fruit will be working closely on the development of this project, and we'll be posting updates as the project progresses.  So check back often.


Sunday, October 23, 2011

Mobile Blogging

So, I'm testing out the new Blogger Android mobile app and seeing how well it works for mobile tech posting.  So far I'm rather impressed.  Its simple.  And I mean its really simple.  When you load it up all that comes up is a two button menu, title and content boxes, and publish, save and delete buttons.  Just te bare essentials for writing posts on the go.
Its quick, simple, and effective.  Everything it needs to be, so I give it four out of four fruit.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Why Does Time Escape?

I've been musing for the last fifteen minutes over where time flies.  It always seems like I start off strong on the new year with this blog writing thing, and then it takes several serious dips over the course of the year.

Though after several minutes of deliberation, I've come to the clear conclusion that it is because of summer, fall and holiday events, it is nice to note that I do get some time to myself in the winter, one of my favorite seasons.  Work has been good here at Digital Fruit lately, though our 2011 cellphone numbers still haven't gotten compiled, and for no other reason then I've been letting other things be more important.  Like earning money.

And with all of the work I have been doing, I've gotten a couple of new ideas for things to develop for Digital Fruit's website.  We now have plans to set up a streaming radio system, something like Pandora or Last.fm  and we hope to have the first working version up soon.  unlike Pandora or Last.fm, though, Digital Fruit will be working towards dishing out local content in a geographic recognition system.  Depending on where your computer pings in the server from, the system will try and stream music from your genre of choice done by local bands that submit the work to us for approval.  Once we get the details hammered out, we hope that this will be an awesome addition to our web offerings.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Kind of Ticked off

Honestly, when you do something nobody likes, its not usually a good idea to continue down that path.  But OS designers seem to just keep plugging away, deteriorating good designs in the search of something new.  New is not a guarantee of better.

And as shocking as it may be to people that know me, I'm actually ranting today on my personal operating system of choice, Ubuntu.

For almost a year-and-a-half now, I've been an avid user of Ubuntu, and have sung its praise from the roof tops.  But now I'm complaining.  I went and up-graded my system to ver. 11.10.  I didn't know that this was the release that was officially killing support for Gnome 2, so I was forced into using Unity, Ubuntu's new desktop.

The problem I'm having with it, and the problem that will soon plague Windows 8, and possibly even Mac systems, is the move to completely touch-centric UI.  And with Unity, it shows.  Everything has been shifted, re-arranged, and altered, and the problem is, it isn't quick or easy to get around with a mouse.  Now, if there were obvious plans to move everything to tablets, and this would satisfy the computing needs of everyone, I could see the need for these kind of changes.  But there are no such plans!  Tablets suck as full form factor computers, and have very limited options in terms of hardware.  The desktop is still the major hardware platform of choice.  Most people still use a mouse and keyboard.  So now, in stead of my computing experience being easy and efficient, I'm stuck relearning a clunky interface.  (For those Linux fans that are saying to themselves, 'just switch to Gnome 3', Gnome 3 is at best, unfinished, and I will not say what I think about it.  In a head-to-head, I actually prefer Unity, its designed more like the other modern OSes out on the market.)

I'm hoping there are enough complaints about this that the Ubuntu developers take notice, because if they don't I'm tempted to do something stupid enough as to try and develop my own desktop, because I don't see much of a future in the other to major OSes either.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Web Comics

So, I've noticed over time that web-comics, no matter how horrible the particular comic may be, always have really slick designs for their sites.

And I mean always.  I've seen comics before that look like they were scribbled by toddlers in daycare, and they have a site that looks like it was designed by a professional flash programmer.  And I realize that some of them use things like Frontpage and templates, but you would think at least one of them would have a terrible interface.  But nope, never.

It really makes me wonder if the artist coming up with these comics think that just by using a sweet-looking site design, they guarantee their site's popularity.