I just finished reading Designing Social Interfaces. The book is written by the creators of the Yahoo! Pattern Library. I had no knowledge of any such pattern library previous to reading this book, but I've really been exploring the idea of creating user experiences on the web that will bring in users and keep them happy (and not confused). I think a lot of this interest has to do with Canonical's current focus on design and usability.

The book is an O'Reilly book, but once it's opened, it certainly doesn't feel like an O'Reilly book. The pages are slicker than normal O'Reilly books (and I own many of them). They're also in full color. This is great for a user experience design book, since it's often hard to look at screenshots of web sites when they're in black and white.

I soon realized that I was fascinated with the book itself. When it comes to web design, there are a few staples (Don't Make Me Think comes to mind), the books don't seem to be specific enough. They usually just show good examples, but they don't show the why of the good examples. Designing User Interfaces starts with the why, which is something I can really appreciate.

As a developer, I also have a tendency to think in "design patterns." By presenting the interfaces as "patterns," it was easy for me to start thinking up my own variations of those design patterns to work with my existing experiences and products. This is probably what sealed the fate of this book. It made me excited to re-design and re-think interfaces I've implemented (including Launchpad).

I would highly recommend this book for anyone doing front end work, whether it's just implementing existing designs or creating your own designs. I've noticed that I now critique web interfaces with an eye I didn't have before I read this book.

I bought lemonade and a granola bar from a sidewalk lemonade stand yesterday. Yes, spring is here. This (hopefully) means less computery time and more outsidery time. Yes, I just made up the word "outsidery." Coining new words should be part of my curiosities this month...

As for actual things I want to explore:

• Jetpack - Last month I switched back to Firefox from Chrome because Chrome just didn't hack it for me as a web developer. One thing that Chrome had that I really liked was the extension mechanism. Basically. it was just some javascript. Jetpack is an extension that provides similar support for Firefox. After diving into Firefox extensions a few times and needing a lifeguard to get out, I thought I'd explore Jetpack to create simpler Firefox extensions.
• Android SDK - I offered to help a friend create an Android App. No pay was involved, but I have been provided a more recent Android phone to replace my Android Dev Phone, so I actually have something of an obligation to complete and app for Android as opposed to just poking around in it.

Last week, I was asked to meet with a family member for lunch. I went to venue only to find that the family member was joined by other people. Those other people wanted me to get involved in network marketing. People that aren't in network marketing often refer to network marketing as a "pyramid scheme." Yeah, one of those, you know, where you alienate your family and friends trying to get them to not only buy a product but to have them sell the product as well. I decided to decline the offer mostly because I'm a geek, not a salesman. I can't schmooze people; I'm direct and to the point.

On my bike ride home from that appointment though, I realized that I am a salesman, and I think I'm a pretty good one. The only difference is that I can only "sell" the things I truly believe in. One of those things is Free Software.

In 1999, I was a sophomore/junior in high school in a small podunk town. I don't remember a lot of my life then, but I do remember the computer lab high school. It had a T1 (lightning fast at the time) and hardly anyone at the school knew anything about computers. I guess you could say I was the man with one eye in the land of the blind.

With all that unused bandwidth, I had no choice but to start pirating software hand over fist. I stumbled over a piece of software called "Red Hat Linux" which sounded really geeky cool, and I had access to downloading all 8 cds (or whatever it was). I was such a pirate for downloading all those cds. Man, I was cool.

Installing it was a pain, eventually leading to me getting a book called "Linux for Dummies" before I really knew what to do. I played around a bit, but didn't really see the appeal of Linux over Windows. There was nothing like Visual Basic (a habit I'm ashamed to admit I developed during high school). I also wasn't a fan of the terminal.

2001 came and I found myself buying a copy of Mandrake 8.1 from Best Buy. It was sexier than Red Hat, and seemed to have everything I wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my sound card to work, and every time I wanted to install something that wasn't an rpm from the cd, I had to go build all sorts of dependencies from source. It was hopeless, but I trudged on for the geek cred.

That same year, I discovered Debian because someone else I knew was using it. Debian was cool, because it had this apt-get thing that would help you install things magically. At this point, I took off. Installing things was so easy that I was always trying out new software. I was showing it to other people. I'd see people using a piece of Windows software and start talking about the Free version I got from apt, and how much better it was.

As time past, I started seeing the benefit of Free Software in everything. I started talking to people about how they needed to embrace this idea of Free Software. There was light in my eyes when I told people they didn't need to be slaves to software vendors; they had choice in how their computer worked.

Over the years, I've helped many people convert their lifestyles to use more Free Software in some capacity, whether it be through the use of OpenOffice, or the big jump to Linux. It's been rewarding and eductional for me, and it's even better when those that I've helped turn around to help others.

So, if I put this blog post to cheesy music on a DVD, sat you down and made you watch it, would you join the Free Software Pyramid Scheme? What if I promised you that if you worked as hard as I did, you would make as much money as I have convincing people to use Free Software?