I’ve been writing a series of articles for Philweavers.net, a local web-designer community, that focuses on the various lessons I’ve learned over the past month with my new Macbook Pro. Due to the nature of the venue, the essays are written from a web-designer’s perspective, but I touch on several foundational concepts as well. Check them out here:

The Big Switch: Introduction. Mac from a Windows user’s perspective. Talks about basic concepts like the file-system, installing/uninstalling applications, organizing your desktop, etc.
The Big Switch: Designer Tips and Tricks. Discusses various shortcuts and utilities available in the standard MacOS that go a long way towards making a web-designer’s life a little less stressful. Touches very briefly on the concept of PDF-based desktop rendering (via Quartz).
The Big Switch: A Touch of Windows. Compares the three major options for getting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (and other Windows apps as well) working on your Mac. This article has yet to be published on Philweavers, but you can check it out already on my personal blog.

Social interface design is becoming very important in the current development of the web. We are really only now discovering that our old assumptions are not always correct. As the web matures we start seeing that we have to look at our users differently. Its not just an individual but a whole ecosystem around that individual that needs to be considered.

Bokardo has a great post with gives a very clear idea of the changing landscape…

Gone are the days of traditional usability testing. Almost all testing assumes that 1) people want to use your software and 2) people use your software alone. Each of these things is becoming less true every day. There’s so much software! A much bigger problem, at this point in time, is how to get people and the social groups of which they are a part interested and keep them interested in your software.

You’re not convincing just one person, you’re convincing one person and all their friends.

We’re inching ever closer to a real live beta with the mobiuslive music social network project and I’m personally having a lot of fun with the final set of modules, i.e., the playlist manager and Flash jukebox. As you can probably tell from their names, the playlist manager allows users to “star” their favorite tracks around the site similar to the way you would represent a given email’s importance in GMail.

(The icons on the right side mean “Has Video”, “Has Lyrics”, “Is a Favorite”, “Buy This Track” and “Preview This Track,” respectively.) Marking a track in this manner appends it to your personal playlist, which you can then manage via a funky little drag-and-drop interface built using the scriptaculous javascript library, shown below:

You can add tracks manually using a simple form below the list (although obviously these will not necessarily be playable by the jukebox). In either case, any item you add to this list can be dragged and dropped for sorting, regardless of whether it exists within the mobiuslive library or not.

The jukebox application itself is based on the very excellent XSPF playlist specification and web music player.

To get everything to work together, we created a dynamic XML file that pulls the relevant user tracks from the database, formats it according to the XSPF specification and feeds it back into the Flash player. I had to spend a little time tweaking the player itself to be a bit more in-line wiith the mobiuslive look, but other than that, it was a fairly straightforward process.