If you don’t already use Dropbox, you should.

Besides keeping your files backed up and computers in sync, it also allows you to share files with others. You’ll never cringe at attaching huge files to emails ever again. However the links to these shared files can look kind of cryptic and unprofessional. If you’re sharing files with clients, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/918273645/file.zip just doesn’t cut it.

I decided to remap these urls to something a little more legible, professional, and just incase a link to a public file starts getting shared like crazy: an intersticial.

I added a subdomain to my website, http://box.leebyron.com to use as the base URL for these links. http://box.leebyron.com/file.zip is the goal.

There are two files in this new subdomain, .htaccess and index.php. Similar to how pretty-urls and custom 404s are implemented.

Check out these files at http://gist.github.com/326328.

I meant to publish this a long time ago, but time slipped by me. Better late than never.

In my senior year I gave a presentation to the IDSA in which I had to summarize my work in 7 minutes. I opted to speak over a video, rather than a powerpoint, since it would force me to stick to my time-limit.

It’s been too long since this presentation, and I forget my speech, so you’ll just have to imagine what it was I was babbling while this played.

The central theme was the power of using computation and data in design to create things previously impossible.

This past weekend I had the pleasure to speak at ONA09 in a panel (#ONAux) with Aron Pilhofer and Elliott Malkin of the NYT and Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. I spoke briefly about the new challenges of designing online, the importance of capturing attention, and specifically how animation and interaction can help draw viewers in to interactive graphics.

I’m happy to make public the slides I used for my talk at /else/ona09.

I made reference to The Dot and The Line, and some of my work at the NYT:

• A Map of Olympic Medals
• Winners in a Long Presidential Campaign
• A Collection of Olympic Torches

Playing with some maps this evening. It’s pretty interesting to see San Francisco by only its altitude contours.

Should have shared this here a long time ago, back in January I put together this data-driven motion graphic showing (in real time) when and where new friend connections on Facebook are made.

I’ve seen a lot of Flash libraries attempt to increase their speed in string intensive tasks by creating a custom StringBuffer class.

In many other languages, a StringBuffer is much faster than standard string concatenation. I set out to see just which method was fastest, for both the tasks of combining a handful of strings (<50) and combining a large amount of strings (>10000).

Here is the test:

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Almost two months gone by without design process updates. I’m really busy, and a lot of the things I’m busy on I just can’t show off the progress work. I’m excited about a handful of projects that are coming to fruition in the next month or two.

Until then, a teaser.
I just spent a moment tonight making this:

I’m toiling around with maps a bit lately. I just thought this was a really nice image, the world as seen only by it’s rivers.