P’unk Avenue
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- 1168 E. Passyunk Aveneue
- Philadelphia PA 19147
- Phone: 215 755 1330
- hello@punkave.com
South by Southwestward
So I decided to submit a panel to SXSW this year. I'm not the most vocal/outspoken/social member of P'unk Ave, but I rank amongst the most opinionated. As the lead designer here I touch nearly all of our work,…
Replacing Twitter: A Modest Proposal
Everybody loved Twitter, then they started pushing the other birds out of the nest, now folks are mad. Yeah, well, that's what happens when you put all your eggs in one nest. That you do not own. So let me…
Nice Touch
It rained all day yesterday in Philadelphia. Walking down the steps into the 10th & Locust Hi-Speed Line (PATCO), I noticed an embedded piece of diamond plate metal in the floor below the first step. I thought, "Wow, what…
Chalkboard Doppelganger?
This weekend, I was having breakfast while flipping through an old issue of This Old House magazine and came across the picture below of the chalkboard calendar. I thought it was cool how they did represented the different blocks of…
A Modest Proposal to Return the Delaware Waterfront to People
Last night at Ignite Philly 6, I talked about an idea that may seem radical at first glance, but I really do think is a very reasonable and dare-I-say modest proposal. I would like to remove I-95 from the…
Google's new "App Inventor" is a game-changer
There are now 10,000 Android developers, as opposed to 40,000 for the iPhone. And Google is gearing up to release App Inventor, a tool for nontechnical Android app developers that is strikingly similar to the Scratch programming environment for…
Apostrophe 1.0!
We have labored long and hard to prepare for the 1.0 release of Apostrophe. As we said before, it has been stable and in use for a long time now, but we wanted to mark a moment in time with…
Oh So Close!
We have decided to push back the release of Apostrophe 1.0 until tomorrow. We are truly in the home stretch. Just hitting a few bugs, finishing up documentation and adding some instructional content to the demo site. To tide…
punkave.com is way cooler now!
Not to toot our horn or nothin, but we've just launched a new site for ourselves. At 6:05pm on the last business day of the year we've cobbled our children some new shoes. It was a lot of fun making…
Give PNG a Chance
When I led the PNG working group and edited the first ten drafts of the PNG file format specification, I hoped that PNG image files would swiftly replace GIFs. I was wrong about that. Netscape, which had offered nary…
How to open Google Calendar (or any URL) on your Mac at scheduled times of day
We make heavy use of Google Calendar here at work. Unfortunately I rarely remember to look at it unless an alert has specifically been set up to get my attention. This morning I set up my Mac to open Google…
My Play History
For several years, I taught a Game Design course in the Multimedia department at UArts. To give this course more intellectual heft, I would say that play is essential to humans. I went so far as to say that…
Designing While Intoxicated
To put a weary metaphor to rest, I will do my best to never again refer to absorbing the internet as drinking from a fire hose. At first I was reluctant to use Google Reader. Alex and John convinced…
Ticket System Poetry
Sometimes in the middle of a work flow, I experience a moment of that is more akin to reading poetry. This is a perfect example. I opened a ticket asking John to add a formatting bar to the rich text…
To Have And To Hold
ZINES! What purpose do they serve now that everything is a blog? You actually have to go to a drop point to get a copy. It might even cost money. It doesn't alert you when new content is available.…
Of Our Time
I am very thankful that colonial era architecture exists in Philadelphia. The materials, the scale of the rooms, and the original lack of indoor plumbing tell a story. These buildings embody an historical spirit that you can feel when…
A few tenets of Metabolism, maybe one tenet of Essentialism
In 1977 the Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris. The design of a museum had not previously been approached with such an inverted set of goals: accommodate the public first, then consider the art. The museum was an immediate success…
Will 2009 liberate us from Internet Explorer 6?
This is my inaugural post and I am writing about this topic because it has been on my mind a bunch lately. Really, when will this browser die? Will 2009 be the year developers slam their coffees down and say,…
Holiday Punctuation
The year-end holidays are always a good time to spread some cheer. Last year, we silk-screened on coffee bags and worked with local roasters, Old City Coffee, for our gift. This year we took the opportunity to work with…