EclecticGuy

This falls in the “this eclecticguy is crazy” department! Or, maybe not! I’ve been furling fly fishing leaders for a number of years and have known about these twisting engines. Darrel Martin has photos of a reproduction engine and a woodcut of an old engine in his book “The Fly-Fisher’s Craft: The Art and History“. I did a little research and called Darrel to ask about his engine before designing this one. The trickiest part is the gearing. There are 3 smaller gears around a central gear that … Continue Reading

Now that I am serious about reelsmithing, I decided to design and order a hand stamp to properly mark my reels. I based the logo on my rod building logo:

There is not a lot of space on a reel for a large logo, so I ended up designing and ordering 2 stamps. One is just of the fish logo and the other my maker’s mark with my name and location. Here is a photo of the finished stamp:

The maker’s stamp is only … Continue Reading

As I mentioned in the last Shrugh post, we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback and doing some brainstorming on Shrugh. Last time I described how users respond to shrughs. This time, I have a demo that shows the simplified shrugh creation process. It also has a couple of new bells and whistles – like how Shrugh automatically finds other shrughs similar to yours based on words in your shrugh and description.

My goal is to have this idea implemented in the next week … Continue Reading

My friend and UI guru Bob and I have been thinking about Shrugh. This collaboration has been really helpful and some good stuff has come out of it. As part of the initial discussion, I created a short demo on how a user responds to a shrugh that has been posted. You can see it here (and please leave feedback at the end). (This was, of course, created with balsamiq Mockups and my technique for making an … Continue Reading

As I make progress on Shrugh, I plan to capture the experience as I go. Last week I gave a status update on the Shrugh concept demo and feedback I’ve received. I’m still getting feedback (a good thing) but I have enough already on the concept and usability (collected on this Google Form) that I am ready to start exploring implementation.

As I mentioned in the last status update, I had done some prototyping in both … Continue Reading

Well, I’ve leaked enough little teasers about Shrugh to titillate a lot of friends and gentle readers of this blog. Shrugh is a work in progress and is a personal testbed to try a lot of ideas going through my brain – like how to use the power of the crowd to guide its development. My goal is not to turn it in to a “real” company, but rather create something useful and viral. I’ve assembled enough of the concept to get the idea across and now … Continue Reading

Yesterday, I blogged about how to assemble an interactive demo from a set of balsamiq Mockups image files (or any set of image files for that matter).  Well, when I awoke this morning I realized that I should pre-load the image files on the first page (usually index.html) to make the demo more responsive. Turns out that it is really easy to do using only CSS! I’ve updated the index.html.txt and selection.css files already so you can download fresh copies to see how it is done.

The Details

 selection.css now includes a new class to set … Continue Reading

UPDATE: I posted an enhancement to this technique that pre-loads the image files to make the demo more responsive.

Several weeks ago I blogged about balsamiq Mockups. Now that I’ve really had a chance to use Mockups I am even more impressed with it! I won’t be using paper and pencil for thinking through UI designs any more!

Over the last few weeks I’ve put together a number of mockups and thought it would be really cool if I could link them together based on a … Continue Reading

Anyone that knows me knows that I L.O.V.E. Balsamic Vinegar! Well, this post has nothing to do with that passion! balsamiq is a a Micro ISV based in Italy. I have had a long-standing passion for Micro ISVs too! My first company, PiWare, which I started back in the late 70s was a Micro ISV. There were lots of us back then in the early days of personal computers. We didn’t call ourselves Micro ISVs though! I maintained PiWare until about 1989 and brought 8 products to market on Apple //, Apple // GS, and Macintosh … Continue Reading