What? That’s right, DW is potentially teaming up with Speed Club this summer to aid in the production of a feature length documentary! We are traveling along side of two friends as the journey across the US on choppers! 4000 miles of never ending road, days of HD video, and a huge chopper rally in Southern California. We are very excited to dig into this project but note, we said “potentially.”

Unfortunately, funding for this project has somewhat dried up in the last few weeks. We are reaching out to any and all our visitors to please review their request and make a contribution in any way possible. Keep in mind, everyone who makes a contribution gets something in return. Whether it’s getting you name listed on the site, getting a free copy of the DVD, or a free T-Shirt, EVERYONE IS A WINNER! Click here to review the project in its entirety and to find out how you can contribute.

While we still believe HTML/JS developers have lapped Adobe and flash in terms of efficiency and delivery viewports, this video from Adobe shows a glimmer of hope. This prototype “Wallaby” application converts Flash to HTML5, keeping animations and graphics, but losing some things like blending modes and other fancy special effects. Hmm… Very Interesting!

A start for Adobe. We’ll probably have to wait until CS6 to see this implemented. We also speculate that this is a re-working of the previously anticipated Flash to App converter that was to be part of the CS5 suite (now available since Apple lifted third party bans on dev). Can we beta Wallaby? It might be energizing to see old flash projects on my iPhone.

Last week we launched a new application called “Baby Loves Music”. That same week we received our first Cease and Desist letter from Baby Loves Everything to stop all infringing acts of the name Baby Loves Music, as they claim common law ownership over the name.

After some digging at the US Patent and Trademark Office, we found that a patent for the name Baby Loves Music was listed, but dead. We feel we are outside the definitions of goods and services, but none-the-less (even though the patent is dead) we are not here to bust anyone’s chops.

We have designed a solution to this issue, and it is as follows: We have changed the name of the application “Baby Loves Music” to “Baby’s First Music”. We have changed all instances of the name across websites and iTunes. A update to the application has been approved for sale, and all owners of the application will receive a push notification of the update’s availability.

We wish the owners of the “Baby Loves..” line of products would accept our sincere apologies if they feel we have infringed on any trademarks (living or dead), and want you to know that in no way did we wish to profit from or harm your brand. We also wish to state that Dirk+Weiss has no affiliation with the name Baby Loves Music, or company Baby Loves Everything, LLC.

Thank you to everyone for your cooperation!

View all the documents related to this event >>

This Pecha Kucha presentation from Scott Thomas, designer of the Obama website, talks about how the need for change did not stop at a new president. The need for change, and the spread of Obama’s campaign across the web and social media is now widely accepted as one of the main catalysts for his election to office.

Scott Thomas is also part of The Post Family.

20 slides, timed for 20 second up-time on the screen. Efficient! We love this presentation format, as it keeps content rich, and audiences engaged. Loose the bore, and the bullets.

We feel that Tumblr has at least three huge factors in it’s favor. Tumblr is our favorite non-install based blogging system, and we think it even beats out the freebee blogs at WordPress.com.

It’s ridiculously easy to set up.
We have this saying at Dirk+Weiss when it comes to usability. We say that the interfaces we choose to use and make should be easy enough for Grandma and her Grandkids alike. If for some reason, no pre-fab solution will do the trick, we’ll just go and write something from scratch (yes we do that too). Tumblr is that easy to set up. Provide an email address, password and tumblr url name and you’re good to go.

Themes look like modern websites, and are just plain pretty.
All designers have a guilty pleasure of liking things that are aesthetically pleasing. Luckily, Tumblr does this well. Their installable themes are nice to look at and function well, and thus end users feel comfortable sticking around.

The Goodie Bag
For us, Tumblr really shines under the hood. For such a quick setup, you get access to some slick posing features that would make even the most inexperienced blogger relax. The thing we always seem to hear from new bloggers is, “Will I have time to even do this?” and “What do you mean try to post every day!?”. Tumblr gives every blog a unique e-mail address where photos, text, quotes, audio or video can be sent. There is also connections to your Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms for easy blog promotion.

All three of these bits, we feel makes Tumblr a hands down winner of the free blogging platforms.