Kyle posted on the excellent 37signals blog today about Basecamp’s new color picker…he says:

“We think it’s solid and it’s the best color picker we’ve used on any web application.

Clearly, Kyle hasn’t used RedPost’s color picker (designed by Jon, can be found in the Promote tab under Settings):

Ours has the option to switch from “Advanced” to “Basic” modes, giving you a bunch of swatches.

Now, Basecamp is much more robust, nicer looking, more consistently designed, non-beta software. But hey…it’s the small things, right?

Because, honestly, who would have a headshot like that, ready to go at a moment’s notice?

One total jerk, that’s who.

I’ve had the happy pleasure of watching RedPost grow first-hand during the last year and a half. My freelance design studio, Dannyprose, helped design Eric’s first business cards, briefly shared space at the first RedPost HQ (with some more-than-humbling results), and even helped Eric during RedPost’s expedition into Las Vegas for this year’s Digital Signage Expo.

It’s been a fun process - but merely fun - until yesterday. Yesterday I started as RedPost’s full time Art Director: Eric and I sat down towards the end of the day, and he told me about where RedPost was as at as product and as a company. And then he told me, as he sketched a rough user model, where that product and company are going.

I thought that I understood what RedPost was trying to do, but yesterday everything clicked together with that conversation with Eric. And it’s really exciting. It’s groundbreaking. It’s all those things that people say about their companies… but on paper, sketched out, I saw something that was really, obviously unique in the digital signage industry. I saw a plan that only one company in this industry could pull off.

And it all clicked together, it really did.

One total jerk

More recently you could have found me designing admissions material and the alumni magazine for Goshen College. I also worked with Eric and some others to develop First Fridays, downtown Goshen’s monthly block party.

During my education at Calvin College I opened the aforementioned Dannyprose: a collaborative art-project-turned-design-studio. I have also served as the art director for New World Arts, an independent theatre in downtown Goshen.

And, in case you are in the need for some A+ drivel, I also blog here and here, on a moderately regular basis.

I swapped my MacBook Pro hard drive with a Mac Mini’s hard drive, and now I’m back up and running. Half the day being gone, of course.

But how nice to have a platform (MacOS X) that can boot up on any hardware without needing to reinstall the OS. Does that work with Windows?

How cool would it be if you could buy a flash drive from RedPost, plug it into any hardware, and have a Sign up and running in 5 minutes…

MacBook Pro crapped out this morning. Won’t boot. Was in the middle of backing up to an Apple Time Capsule. Backup corrupted. Thanks Apple.

From OhGizmo:

I have to say that the RedPost Sign (beta) is certainly a fun product to use, mostly because it’s rather out of the ordinary, and can be used for a variety of purposes other than simply displaying your pictures. Of course, with a price tag of $599, it would need to have all of these functions. While that price seems a little steep, you have to factor in the price of the tiny PC, and the fact that it has a custom-build housing. Once you add it all up, you probably wouldn’t end up saving a ton of money making one yourself, unless you already had the parts lying around. If you do have the parts, then you’re welcome to download the Wicker OS from RedPost and put it on your new creation.

My responses to the review:

• While it is heavy (about 16.5 pounds), the old RedPost/Kit was like 25 pounds…and let me tell you, that 10 pounds makes a huge difference when you’re carrying one of these between buildings for demos. It also makes a big difference with hanging — you can use lower end VESA cheap Chinese-made mounts to hang your Sign, but at 25 pounds, those lower end mounts were at the edge of their weight tolerance.
• At $599, it is costly…but there’s pretty much no current equivalent on the market. Other than the Asus Eee Monitor, which doesn’t have specs or pricing officially released yet, there’s nothing quite like it. You could build your own Sign, but it would end up costing you:
  • LCD: $200
  • motherboard + memory + wifi + flash drive: $200
  • power supplies (you need two or to jury-rig one): $75
  • cables, screws, standoffs, fans, washers, misc. parts: $50
  • case: build your own from scrap metal…$10?
  • time: 20-30 hours to figure everything out
• so your total cost would be around $525…so you’re paying about $74 for 20-30 hours of your time, assuming you can work out the issues that we’ve worked out for you

We really should be selling these Signs for more, as our margins are very low, but I’d rather make money on software than on hardware. Not that we’re there yet…

The new Better World Books Goshen retail store opens this coming Monday…I spent a lot of today there working (they have AC, RedPost doesn’t and its 90° out and dripping humid) and installed a RedPost/Sign for Brad, the new owner. Here’s their Sign:

We put a poster in their playlist that pulls 5 images from the Flickr tag “books“, it looks kinda cool.

It’s good to see a big company like Apple fessing up to their mistakes and apologizing. Did big companies used to do this in the pre-blog days? Before users could loudly complain about the word “push” being used to describe a process that takes 15 minutes? I may not be old enough to know the answer to this question, but it seems to me, companies didn’t used to apologize for these sorts of things. They would just pretend they didn’t happen.

I just uploaded a new version of Wicker, our open source operating system that runs on all RedPost/Signs, last night. Big changes to the underlying OS, including:

• upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04
• upgrading to Firefox 3

It’s still a bit buggy, but stable enough for non-critical use and testing.

And some minor tweaks:

• updated network manager on/off scripts
• added more fonts
• implemented time server syncing

And (still) coming soon:

• scheduled on/off, time zone support
• local and Corktop Flash and short video clip (under 30 seconds) support

In the midst of Startup Mode, for better or for worse, I still make other commitments that I try to keep. Like this afternoon, when I attended a 2 hour Goshen Planning Commission meeting to support the commission in recommending for approval a Historic Preservation Overlay Ordinance. This ordinance has been 3 years in the making. It got through the Planning Commission (with no comment) and to City Council once before over a year ago and was killed at the last minute by a big showing of very angry downtown business owners (the city had exempted itself from the ordinance….d’oh).

Essentially, the ordinance requires building owners to rebuild façades to certain heights and to make them fit with the historic nature of the downtown. Nothing too onerous, not nearly as strict as a lot of these ordinances, and it protects land values downtown and the “urban wall” of buildings on Main Street.

After a lot more detailed, tedious work, the committee who pulled this ordinance together (which was formed in December of 2005!!) brought it back, more or less approved (or, not opposed) by the lawyers and people who were up in arms before.

It passed Planning this evening unanimously. I talked briefly and presented a petition from board members of Downtown Goshen, Inc. Finally! And good work committee! Too bad we ended up with only 4 and a half blocks protected…but it’s a start.

Of course, not before we sat through an hour long discussion of storm water drain-off, water retention, flooded front lawns, and golf course run-off in a potential subdivided property on the north side of town. Part of me (sadistically) enjoys seeing conflict play out in a process like this. The other part of me adjusts my sandals because I go a bit crazy.

(Picture from Balloon Fantasy)

Oh, and I tend to lean more “Libertarian” about these things, as in, less government regulation, but when a building burns down in a Downtown like ours, the building owner either puts in a parking lot or rebuilds a cinder block building in its place. It’s happened in small towns all around us and in Goshen too. So, as dumb as it is to tell people to build a building that looks nice and contributes to the overall public good (i.e. through higher property values), it’s necessary.

Startup mode, in many senses, is perpetual (it’s my career). In another sense, it’s measured by how much Linux OS development (read: I’m not a true hacker, maybe something like a 10% hacker) I do. Someday, I won’t do any. Then I’ll know that RedPost isn’t in startup mode anymore.