I am primarily looking for freelance Interaction Architecture projects, but will consider web design/development work as well.

If you have an opportunity that you need some help on, please feel free to drop me a line: derekkehler@gmail.com

You Suck at Photoshop #1: Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects

You Suck at Photoshop #3: Clone Stamp and Manual Cloning

We launched ScrnShots this morning at 10:00 am PST. So, far the traffic has been encouraging, people seem to be really into it, so that’s good.

ScrnShots is a community where you can upload, tag and share your screenshots. Greg Bell and I just started full time on this project last week, and it’s very exciting for us to have a product that is actually out there and available to the public.

If you wanna signup for an account you can do it here.

We also just got blogged about on Web Worker Daily, which is also very exciting!

Spread the news!

Thank you to everyone who has blogged about it already, and to those of you who have been participating in the private beta. We really appreciate the feedback and the input.

We’re really pumped to see how the community is going to grow in the next few weeks!

Greg Bell and I have decided to start our own company. Our primary focus for the next 3-4 months is a social community called, ScrnShots. ScrnShots is a place for people to upload, tag and share screenshots of inspirational design, usability or anything else of interest.

Everything still seems quite unrealistic at this point, but I’m sure that the long hours will bring a touch of reality with them.

Stay tuned, as I will be updating this blog regularly with interesting tidbits of acquired knowledge and grumblings.

Overall, it has been a good experience. Since most of my experience up until six weeks ago, consisted of working with teams of 6 people or less, I would have to say that the biggest lesson learned was communication among a bigger team.

In a group of 5 people, you can get away with verbal communication. But, when you throw an extra ten people into the mix, mistakes are easily made. Documentation becomes KEY. At Engine we use Basecamp for all our project management, todos, milestones, etc. However, even basecamp isn’t detailed enough to keep track of everything, and so for little bugs, fixes, or edits related to a project, we use Mantis.

Also just general communication among your team, is different too. With a small team, you can’t help but be involved in everyone’s projects. With a bigger team, you have to purposely ask people for feedback, make sure everything is going as planned, because time is easily wasted if you’re not aware of what everyone else is doing, and any twists that the project has taken.

Lesson Learned: Communication is good – Communication with Documentation is better

And for those of you who have had a hard time adapting to the 21st century, there’s also “The Internet for Dummies”… back to basics

“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.”

Many google searches later, I kind of guessed that it might be because I was using windows hosting. I switched it over to linux hosting, and nothing happened, so I gave up.

I came back a full 24 hours later, and voila! magic! it just worked!

So what I figure, is that Windows hosting and PHP5 are incompatible for some reason. By simply switching to Linux, everything JUST WORKS.

Let me know what you think!!!

It’s not nearly as exciting as the release of the MacBook Air about a month ago, but exciting none-the-less

“The MacBook Pro features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors (running at up to 2.6GHz with 6MB of shared L2 cache), larger hard drives (up to 300GB), and 2GB of memory standard in most models. They also include the latest NVIDIA graphics processors — with up to 512MB of video memory — and an innovative Multi-Touch trackpad, first introduced in MacBook Air.”

“The three new models of the MacBook feature faster processors and hard drives: sleek white 2.1 GHz and 2.4 GHz models with 120GB or 160GB 5400 rpm hard drives and a stunning black 2.4 GHz model with a massive 250GB 5400 rpm hard drive. The 2.4 GHz MacBook ships with 2GB of memory standard, expandable up to 4GB across the line.”

“Available immediately, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models start at just $1,099 and $1,999, respectively.”

If you’re looking for a MacBook or MacBook Pro, now is a good time to get one. The new models come with leopard, and they’re a lot faster than previous models. With this being the 3rd generation of the intel macs, I’m expecting them to be a bit more reliable.

One of the biggest problems that I’ve had with my MacBook Pro is overheating, hopefully that’s been fixed in this version.