JJ and I are proud to announce our first official desktop wallpaper. I jokingly made this for JJ yesterday and we figured why not just offer it up. It’s inspired by a ridiculous term we’ve been joking about for months…

Dynamism: Keep web sites “fresh” by periodically adding new material and features, and by updating information regularly. A dynamic site will draw more repeat visitors and garner good press coverage.

Enjoy! 1440×900,  1920×1200

Note: If you are looking for more sizes, just let me know and maybe I will just add them to the list.

Awesome time lapsed map of tweets from the New York Times. It shows the location and frequency of commonly used words during the Superbowl. This map produces amazing visuals and is impressive to see how far Twitter has come.

Charlene Li wrote up a quick post about this find and pretty much summed up everything I was thinking:

In many ways, I think this simple mashup shows the power of Twitter — it’s when you see the aggregate whole of Twitter that you begin to understand the potential for it to serve as a channel for what people are paying attention to. Take a look at the “talking about ads” stream to understand which ads resonated where — media buyers, get your orders ready!

Kickin’ the new year off with a sweet mixtape. My New Year = New Party mix tape features a bunch of remixes of some of my ’08 favs, as well as some new music that I’ve been crushing over this last week. Let me know what you think.

And as a side note, if you are looking to waste some time today, check out the WordPress Download Counter. Number of downloads have increase by 1,000 since I started writing this post. AWESOME!

I know what you are thinking… looks like screenshots of iphone apps. Actually most of these are sites designed for advanced phone browsers with a couple of apps sprinkled in here and there. Plus grabbing screenshots from my iPhone is 10 times easier than taking them from my browser. It’s all those site with smart redirects… those clever developers =)

Anyway here’s the list (from left to right, top to bottom):

• Evernote iPhone app (home screen)
• Evernote Iphone app (tips drawer) – I <3 this interaction
• Facebook mobile (similar to the iPhone app)
• ESPN.com (scores & schedules, looks to be iPhone specific)
• Brightkite iPhone app
• Google Reader mobile
• Flickr mobile (new for advanced mobile browsers)
• Leaflets, the original iPhone apps
• YouTube mobile

Want more? I started a collection over at Flickr of all my mobile inspiration. Feel free to follow along.

Anyway, this experience started me thinking… what’s obvious to me, may not be for someone else. So with that in mind, I’m starting a weekly series to show off stuff that inspires me. Even though I’m hoping to highlight more than just web sites, in this first series it is a good place to start. So without further ado, here are 5 sites I visited (more than once) this week for design inspiration.

PatternTap – Makes finding inspiration for specific elements a breeze with their collections.

Colorlouvers – A site full of color… browse by trends, palettes, and even by what other sites are already using.

FFFFOUND! – The randomness of what I may find is inspiration enough.

Design*Sponge – When design websites, I don’t always look at other websites. Design*Sponge is great home eye candy.

paper crave – I don’t just do web sites… I’ve been designing holiday cards at work and paper crave shows off a variety of inspirational print pieces.

Event Details:
PodCamp + WordCamp Hawaii
When: October 24-25, 2008
Where: Hawaii Convention Center (Honolulu, Hawaii)
PodCamp + WordCamp website | Full WordCamp Schedule

And for those of you that aren’t lucky enough to be in Hawaii this weekend, you can follow along at the Official PodCamp/WordCamp Hawaii live stream.

Twitter got a little face lift yesterday and its not that bad. I love the look of the larger type for your “following”, “followers”, “updates” count and that your latest tweet is place under the update field. They do use a lot of my design pet peeves… but that’s pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Pet peeve #1: Rounded corners… really?!? I’ve abused corners in some of my designs too, but I just don’t really understand the obsession. I know it’s very web 2.0, but the design stands up without them. I took a look in IE and it does… I almost prefer it. Maybe it’s because I’m missing the squareness of a tweet. It was sort of iconic. (Side note: It’s damn cool they are the CSS3 border-radius property for those silly corners)

Pet peeve #2: Finger tabs… or at least that’s what I’ve been calling them since my boy Shalin added them to the redesigned My eBay. In the new Twitter design, the finger tabs (right) replaced the horizontal ones that used to be above the timeline. I didn’t like the horizontal tabs either and really don’t know what the best solution would be, but those finger tabs just irk me. Maybe it’s because they look like fingers or maybe it’s because they want look like side navigation but act like tabs… something is just confusing about the whole look of them.

Pet peeve #3 Georgia Italics… that’s just gross and should never be done.

So other than that… it’s good step forward. Congrats, I know how hard it must be to please our large, vocal community. Want to see what everyone else is saying? Check out some of the reviews.

Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

Anyway… Now in it’s thrid year, WordCamp anticipated the all the new attendees by holding it at the super new UCSF campus in Mission Bay. It was the first event I’ve been to there and I can see why I see more and more conferences fitting over this space. It was unreal… you would have never know that you were surrounded by traffic, freeway entrances and warehouses. The only real hint that you were in SF was that you could see the tops of downtown buildings and AT&T Park from the courtyard. There was definitely a lot offer this year. The event was split into 2 tracks this year, one for typical users and another for developers. And since I’m a little of both, I had to separate myself between the two. It did get a little difficult to choose at times… like was I really suppose to go to a session about secure coding when Ben and his LOLcats were talking upstairs? Sorry Mark. Anyway, I saw that John Pozadzides was taping everything so hopefully that is out soon so I can catch up. There was also a Genius Bar (like Apple) to help people with their WP questions. I didn’t help out this year, but it looked to be a success so maybe next time.

Some other highlights:

• Lorelle insisting we continue to break WP – Lorelle is so amazing, I’m so glad we have someone like her in our community. I’ll do my best!
• Andy and the state of BuddyPress – I can’t wait for this to come out later this year
• Matt and the state of the Word
• Crazy Horse, 2.7 and WP user testing – I’m not really convinced eye tracking was necessary but Matt said they got a good deal and the results look great.
• Chuck Lewis, the SEO Rapper’s Exclusive WP Rap

Things wrapped up with a great party at Pete’s Tavern – Tron and Hackers on the screen, Heather and her DJ skillz, and of course my fav… free Guinness. All in all it was great to catch up with new friends and from what I remember I some how voulenteered to help out with WordCamp Hawaii so stay tuned on that one.