intric8

An illustration I did for the invite to Graham’s first birthday, leveraging one of my design idols, Jim Flora.

If you ever need to create a semi-decent flowchart (woo hoo!) or perform a similar white-boarding exercise with your colleagues, Google Docs now allows you to do this a bit more seamlessly with Google Drawings.

The nice thing about this is that you can chat with everyone you’ve invited to view the Drawing. That being said, the phone (or video chat) seems to be a more practical form of communication when discussing images.

In addition, Google revamped the entire Google Docs foundation, “all built with an even greater focus on speed and collaboration.” What this means is document collaborators should see edits in real-time now, which is a huge advancement for the suite.

As Google Docs relentlessly marches deeper into Microsoft Office’s territory, the smart people in Redmond seem more and more oddly out of step with their static desktop apps.

If Google were to take the same approach to data creation and syncing as, say, Evernote (offline and online), the game would already be over.

Adobe has unveiled CS5.

Question:  Will Apple create their own “Creative Suite” (just like Final Cut is the standard in video production now) and finally cut the cord from Adobe entirely?

I’m enjoying a very intriguing new EP titled “Rough Frame” by the Bay Area’s own The Art Museums, via local SF label Woodsist.

This album was apparently recorded on a Tascam 388 reel-to-reel multi-track tape recorder and mixer combo (state of the art home-recording back in the mid-80s).  The result is a thick and lush atmosphere that anyone having grown up with a monophonic sound system will fully appreciate.

The nine supplied tracks are simultaneously fresh and nostalgic, packaged nicely within the tape-hissing 8-track cassette atmospherics.  Not sure why, but it shares echoes from the mono version of Pet Sounds (and Brian Eno?), with the lonely heartbreak crooning being replaced by hipster satire at its most contemporary.

Go grab the set at Amazon’s MP3 store, or check it out on Lala.

New Media Campaigns, a small boutique Web technology studio in North Carolina, has released code for a very nice Flickr feed plug-in.

The plug-in has several options available to adjust what is displayed and is flexible enough to be used with other products (e.g. colorbox).