ParaNorman expires

A little red ticket badge showed up next to my movies section in iTunes this morning and immediately grabbed my attention. It reminded me that our rental of ParaNorman was expiring: a fact that's echoed beneath the title itself in my iTunes library. 

With iTunes expiring rental windows, it's nice to see that Apple has incorporated some extended visual feedback of the process into iTunes 11.

This comes in particularly hand when you've started watching a movie and have a small child erupt in a tantrum revolving around their bedtime. An hour later, when you've all calmed down you've probably completely forgotten you were even watching something in the first place. 

Into Now makes Friends from the get go

Your friend is into what now?

Here's a nice  example of how a little bit of dummy text can really compliment a product's core functionality.

When you sign up for Into Now (a Shazam type application for television), the name field placeholder is everybody's favourite Friend, Chandler Bing.

That's some good statistical analysis and data reconfiguration right there.

Rdio makes digital hoarding easy

I've been using Rdio to stream music for what seems like years now, even though it's only been a matter of months. Although 90% of my music listening happens through the streaming service, I do still like to own a copy of the music I listen to repeatedly.

Part of this is to support the artists  since streaming royalties are so low, and part is…well, I'm old.

What I love about Rdio is just how easy it is to take a playlist, buy it with one click and have those songs download and import automatically into iTunes. In this case, I finally bit the bullet on buying the 50 or so stupid pop songs that have been on constant rotation for the last few months. 

I regret nothing! Ok, maybe I regret that Justin Bieber song that snuck its way onto the list for my daughter's sake.

It looks like you're writing a letter...or trying to fix your XBox

I started having a few issues with XBox Live recently so I jumped online to see what could be causing the problem. As usual, the first suggestion was to give the console a little more room to breath. What set these directions apart was the illustration that accompanied them.

In an illustrations that's the child of an airplane instruction manual and an Ikea Catalogue, there sat a framed picture of Clippy; the much maligned Microsoft Office assistant from days past.

They do remove him in the properly ventilated version, but I'm sure it took about ten times of telling him to fuck off before they managed it.

Broker's Gin takes bottle caps literally

My good friend and booze connoisseur Steve put me on to Broker's Gin a while back. I pretty much knew I was going to like it the moment I saw the tiny plastic bowler hat atop the bottle. It's a little gimmicky, but there's just enough class lent to it from the style of hat that it comes off charming.

We have a fine collection of the head gear built up now that we like to torture the cats with and my daughter uses to dress up her toys.

So is it really the World's Best Gin? I can't really say, but I'm always in such a good mood when I uncap the bottle that it tastes that way to me.

Treat yourself to a Broker's Promise this summer and I think you'll agree.

That's a Halo of a media buy

Back in November when Halo 4 launched, I took the day off...as is tradition. When I booted up my XBox in the morning and dropped in the disk I was greeted with a rather Halo-heavy dashboard.

For the first time that I can remember, Microsoft had taken over all of its own marketing and advertising space to create a striking mosaic of Master Chief himself.

For a die-hard Halo nut like myself it was great fan-service that made me even more excited to crawl back into that Spartan armor and pick up where I'd left off in the last game.

VLC gets festive

Does this hat make me look fat?

I woke up this morning to a nice little surprise when I opened VLC for the first time in a while.

The icon for the video player had a cute little Santa hat perched on top of the usual orange and white pylon. It's a nice little nod to the season and something I've never seen before. To be honest, I didn't know you could push out a time-based update to an application icon. 

Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

A little reconstruction

It's been a while since this blog has been refreshed, or updated on a regular basis for that matter. 

With the recent release of Squarespace 6, I've decided to upgrade to their new platform and with that I have to say goodbye to my lovely old site design. Either that or learn advanced HTML in a rather fevered fashion. So I've chosen what I think is a pretty nifty little template and screwed around with it a bit to make it my own.

I've streamlined the design to be a little more blog like and a lot less Photoshop dependent. The former is a matter of bringing the design up to today's web standards, the latter is to encourage me to quickly shoot off a post without having to find just the right creative commons image and quirky headline to accompany it. 

Also, the site looks hella good on mobile now.

I'm still experimenting, so things might get tweaked, or even thrown out the window along the way, so please bear with me.

I hope you like it, and that you'll take a little pleasure with me along the way as I share more of the little things that make me smile.

FitBit has fun keeping you active

I've recently started using a FitBit tracker to help motivate me to get more active in my life. 

The simple little device clips onto my belt and is virtuously unnoticable during my day-to-day business.

Aside from being an extrememly well designed device, the companion iPhone app is equally thoughtful in execution.

Since FitBit is all about putting fun into staying healthy, there's a few nice touches along the way to remind you of that fact. My favourite is the empty state for logged activities showing a little dude lying down and drinking a beer.

Cute, motivational and effective.

click to embiggen

LUMA writes some fine drinks

On a recent trip to the Bell TIFF Lightbox we stopped in for a cocktail at LUMA, their inhouse bar. 

Any movie house that has a cocktail lounge built into it is already on the right track; one that creates its cocktail list based loosely on the films they show pushes it even further in the right direction.

The Amélie immediately caught my attention (probably because it's one of my favourite movies) as did the Beetlejuiced. But we settled on a delicious Rum Diary instead.

I can only hope that these cocktails will rotate on a regular basis, bringing new twists to an already great menu.

click to embiggen