Thanks to the guys from Byte Into IT and RRR for having us on the show!

You can listen to the interview here. The interview starts at about 33:20.

And if you've never listened to Byte Into IT before, give it a listen. Plenty of geeky goodness, each week from 7-8pm on Wednesdays. On Melbourne's best radio station, RRR - 102.7fm. 

Do visit the Oatmeal if you like this. You'll find plenty more gems like these.

Source - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes

It's based on the simple idea of a daily email, sent first thing in the morning, that has your meetings and events summarised for that day, in the one place. In their words:

Sunrise combines Facebook, Google Calendar, LinkedIn and more into a nicely designed daily email.

I'd heard some good things about it during the week, and it seemed like a nice example of the slow web, an idea that we've been thinking about a lot lately. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I pressed that dirty ol' "Signup with Facebook" button, connected my account, added my Google Calendar, and I was away.

Or was I?

"Ben, you're all set! See you tomorrow morning!" was the 'success' message that I received. I was ready to login, but then informed that I couldn't until the MORNING? Mild annoyance quickly subsided, replaced with the thought of, "What a cool idea!".

By restricting my access, they've added a tonne of anticipation into the user experience. Because I can't login until tomorrow, my level of interest has skyrocketed. I can't wait to get up in the morning to check this out. Had I have been able to login immediately, I wouldn't have cared as much.

Of course, my expectations have also skyrocketed. This new app is going to have to be pretty darn good to exceed them.

But that's tomorrow's worry.

Outside of our client work, we're all always reading and sharing industry articles, and regularly attend industry conferences, meet-ups and events. We do this partly because we love it and want to keep abreast of the latest tools, techniques and technologies, and partly because we consider it part of our job to be able to pass this knowledge on to our clients and use what we learn to help produce better products for them.

Aside from consuming an enormous amount of related, industry content, we also love to try to do our bit and give back. We run a regular bi-monthly event - Melbourne Geek Night - which is an informal get-together for people who work in the web industry around Melbourne to catch-up, have a yarn, share ideas and talk about new techniques and technologies.

We also produce a weekly email newsletter, which is a regular round-up of up-to-date useful and interesting industry news and links. It's been really well received and we're had some lovely feedback from our subscribers. You can see the latest edition online here and subscribe, if you fancy, over here.

Lastly, we regularly share our thoughts, knowledge and experience through regular articles that we write, not only here on the blog, but for a number of online sources and magazines. We've been particularly productive over the last few months… 

Firstly not only contributing-to but also conceiving, curating and building UXmas - an advent calendar for UX professionals - along with the guys from UX Mastery. Both of our Ben's wrote articles for UXmas; Ben Rowe contributed a brilliant article entitled The 4 H's Of Writing Error Messages (which we were delighted to see was also picked-up and re-published by the guys behind Treehouse) and I wrote (U)X-Factor.

I've also recently started writing for UX Mastery, a brilliant online resource providing helpful, educational resources for aspiring user experience designers. I'm planning to impart my user experience design skills and knowledge through regular articles, starting with the first - How To Estimate A UX Project - which was also re-published by UX Australia in their email newsletter.

So are you in the enviable position where you get to do what you love for a living?  If not, why not?  At Thirst we're all nerds who love nothing better then getting our hands dirty, both in and out of 'work time' on the things we are passionate about. Feel free to use the comments below to let us know what you guys are doing outside your working hours on things that you love.

Every day at 8.00am (Australian EST) throughout December in the lead-up to Christmas, a bauble is opened to reveal a new gift to the UX community. It could be an article, a video, a sketch, or something else - just like a real advent calendar, you never know what you’re going to get.

It's only day three - but so far we've received an incredible amount of interest in the project worldwide. Thousands of visitors to the site, and hundreds following our @merryuxmas twitter account. 

It's been an exciting project to work on, and a chance give back to the UX community during the festive season. Working alongside our friends at UXmastery and Supereight Studio, it has also been a great collaborative effort. 

Make sure you head over to UXmas.com and let us know what you think.

Here's the back story.

We'd had the vague idea of putting together a UX-related advent calendar at Thirst Studios for a while. After a little brainstroming, we came up with the UXmas name.  We raced to check if uxmas.com was available. And it was! The pun was too good to pass up, so that's where it all began.

Turns out our friends at UXmastery had been thinking of doing something similar. We floated the idea past them, and that's when things got really interesting. UX Mastery specialise in educational content for UX Designers, and are well connected with many big names in the UX community.  So this gave us an incredible opportunity to souce content from some heavy hitters.

One problem though - it was November 23. We had just a week to pull together a website, and the content. An incredibly tight timeframe. We had to move quickly.

UX Mastery got to work leveraging their network, and within days we had well renowned  UX authors and speakers coming on board left, right and centre to donate content to our crazy idea at the drop of a hat. It was amazing.

At the same, we set to work designing and building the website. Something that we're proud of, especially considering the short time frame.

Having our friends at Supereight Studio provide the illustrations certainly helped. We knew they'd put together some great Christmas illustrations last year which would be perfect for the baubles on the home page. We gave them a call and were delighted to hear they'd be happy to let us use them.

Of course, the site would be nothing without the contributions from our amazing authors, who were obliging enough to submit their content to us at only a few days' notice. For this we are extremely grateful. We can't tell you who the upcoming contributors are just yet, but you're in for a treat. Plenty of treats, in fact!

On the reading list for this week:

• Take me to a useless website, please - an incredible collection of utterly useless websites.
   
• Hey, web designers and developers - Be careful who you build for.
   
• 7 tactics lean startups need to build great products.
   
• Now you can buy your own Wiggles car - with proceeds going to the 'SIDS and Kids' charity.
   
• Some good advice about Pruning, to make room for new things in your business.
   
• Complex ideas with simple graphics - some great examples from the world’s best information designers.
   
• It's difficult to be unimpressed by Google's new project - it lets you interactively explore the Milky Way.
   
• Should we bring back the 40-hour work week? Or would you rather not work 9-5 at all?
   
• A great podcast from one of the founders of Airbnb. A truly inspirational startup story.
   
• Something we could use in the office - Tea Round App rapidly settles thirst-based arguments by deciding who makes the tea.

Site of the week ...

We are utterly gobsmacked by the new airbnb website, featuring their new "Neighbourhoods".

There's no better example of why "content is king" than this re-design. Featuring gorgeous full-screen imagery and captivating copywriting, the Airbnb team have painstakingly captured the essence of so many local communities.

This is what a website should look like. Check it out.

Catch you next week.

• User experience is not just about your website.
   
• If You Want To Be The Donald Trump Of Startups, Learn To Code.
   
• Are You Making It Hard For Customers To Buy From You?
   
• How web agencies need to compete against the "I Can Do It Myself” client.
   
• Some inspiration for when you next find yourself without a bottle opener.
   
• Good Riddance Paypal - Elliot Jay Stocks speaks his mind on the frustrations of dealing with PayPal.
   
• Why UX is really just good marketing.
   
• Two photo galleries - One showing Mobile Phone evolution over the years. The other of Braun products that 'inspired' Apple's product design.
   
• Speaking of Apple, TechCrunch asks, "Do You Need To Be A Jerk To Be A Successful Entrepreneur?"
   
• The top responsive web design problems ... and how to avoid them.
   

Site of the week:

This week, Penguin Books Penguin in the UK went looking for a new commiunity manager to join their team. But rather than posting a boring old job ad, they've opted instead for a single-page-website called "Impress a Penguin".
 

This site tells a simple, creative tale of how the Penguin is looking for book lovers to surround himself with. It's a great example of how the web can be the perfect storytelling medium. See it for yourself. 

We’ve released this accessory to anyone who wants to use/contribute to it. It can be found here (currently in beta)

Installation:

1. Download and extract the ‘thirst_ee_intro’ folder
2. Place ‘thirst_ee_intro’ into ‘system/expressionengine/third_party’
3. Log into your expressionengine back end, navigate to Add-Ons > Accessories and click the install link next to ‘Getting started’.

Customisation:

Thirst EE Intro behaves like a fully featured website, it has its own javascript and css as well as a folder for each of the help areas.

The file structure is as follows:

• thirst_ee_intro/
• areas/
• css/
• images/
• javascript/
• config.php

Config.php

The config file lets you define a number of options that can be changed per project. The options are:

show_support : Whether or not to show support details
support_email : The email address you would like clients to contact you on
support_phone : The phone number you would like clients to contact you on
support_business : The name of your business
show_links : Whether or not to show the “Useful links” section
useful_links(array): A key/value array of useful links. The key is the resource name, the value it’s URL
images_path : The path of your images folder. 

Help areas

Any files added into the “areas” folder will be read in and added to the Getting Started menu. To prescribe the order in which pages will show, just number them in the order you want.

eg.

• 01-add_an_entry.html
• 02-edit_an_entry.html

Hiding draft content

You may use an ‘_’ or ‘.’ before a filename to hide it from the menu. This is great if you want to keep all of your documentation in the one place and selectively show/hide certain files.

eg.

• _draft_file.html

Content Formating

Content is formatted in HTML with one special tag, {{IMAGE_PATH}} that lets you customise the location of your images folder (see config.php).

We have provided a template (in ‘areas/_template.html’) that will make it easier to build each content area. Only the areas in capital letters should be changed and the attribute ‘data-target’ on the first anchor and ID on the first div should be the same.

eg.

<a class="btn" href="#" data-target="#modal-name" data-toggle="modal">AREA NAME</a>
<div class="modal hide" id="modal-name" style="display:none"> 

CSS / Javascript

We have included the ‘Modal’ module from twitter’s bootstrap as well as its CSS to make things a little bit easier. Both the ‘css/style.css’ and ‘javascript/script.js’ are included by default so feel free to add in any extra interaction.

It’s definitely worth a read and the short videos (on average 3 mins in length) make for inspirational watching.

Oh and choosing a favourite invention is like choosing a favourite child, you do, but you just don’t tell them. We love the pizza boxes.

Source: DFP:BLOG
Images: David Friedman

It's a round-up of the interesting, the weird & the wonderful articles, posts and other titbits that we've found online. We thought you might like it too.

From now on we'll be posting our Thirst Quenchers here on the blog. But feel free to sign up to receive Thirst Quenchers in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon.