photo by Coleman McCormick

Biggie is a tool for making presentations that makes it easy to make presentations with big, and publish with one click. Unlike Big, Biggie does the trick of turning Markdown into slides, provided you separate slides with ---, the ‘hr’ shorthand.

I want to make Big accessible to everyone.

Style

It’s easy to switch big-themes – there’s a dropdown, and automatic preview. The themes up there are a little ugly – zero is zero – but it’s easy to contribute one!

Publish

The coolest part is that you can publish with one click, which is just standing on the shoulders of giants – it posts a Gist to GitHub and links you to its page on Mike Bostock’s bl.ocks.org.

Tech

The tech is basic; CodeMirror (browserified thanks to Max Ogden!), browserify, hbsfy for templating, marked for Markdown parsing.

This was generally written from 12-1:30am last night so is still rough around a few edges – which you can help with!

Teen Mom played our first show in months, at the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC. I’m yielding bass guitar duties to the much-more-experienced Omar, and taking up guitar again. So far I’ve avoided collecting more than one guitar and one amp for this task, but we’ll see how that lasts.

Brett did a great remix of our track I Wanna Go Out.

I talked TileMill at OpenVisConf, iD and Carto and OpenStreetMap at FOSS4G NA. My big index of presentations is growing but luckily so is the percentage of reusable slides. Used pig for these presentations (except for TileMill at OpenVisConf) and felt pretty okay with it.

Been sketching a bit, and posting sketches to my new Instagram account.

Also working on a few visualizations for an upcoming web publication.

Consumption

So many good things this month.

Martian Chronicles

• Launch by Paul Ford.
• William S Burroughs and David Bowie
• Drawing Dynamic Visualizations by the eminent Bret Victor
• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming
• Calling it Quits
• The Martian Chronicles – very early science fiction recommended by Andy; relatively bizarre structure and the future is the same, except for rockets
• Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories With Data by the eminent Jeffrey Heer.
• Everything on Handprint.com – especially the brain-melting section on colors. For a less brain-melting color article, read Charlie Lloyd’s On rainbows.

Listening:

• Snowden’s No One In Control
• Unreleased Teen Mom Tracks
• The National’s Trouble Will Find Me
• Greenland’s Evil Spring

Also

This month Father Lasch, whose site I built a long, long time ago and somehow still runs, and who was a great leader at my middle school, got in The New York Times for being a leading force for transparency and accountability in the local Catholic Church. Hats off to him.

The National Day of Civic Hacking conflicted with the aforementioned concert with Snowden, and thus I wasn’t able to attend. But, open source worked this time around – Lou Huang, Eric Mill, and Keith Ivey all made awesome improvements to the projects.

Consumption

• The Macintosh Project Selected Papers – this was the best read this month. The dialog between Jobs, Woz, and Raskin is incredible, and their ideas – whether it’s more important to be cheap or powerful, how to de-nerd computing, even how the value of computers relates to their place on the network.

We don’t think of the telephone company primarily as a manufacturer of the little $40 things with dials or pushbuttons that we have in our homes and on our desks. The implications of this proposal, at one extreme, is that Apple will be seen, in the future, not so much as a builder of hardware, but as a purveyor of a service that interpenetrates the telephone network, and provides information.

‘The Apple Computer Network’, Jeff Raskin, 11 Sept 1979

• Bezier Curves – A Primer
• An Interview With Alan Kay
• Transcript of Secret Meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
• How Selections Work by Mike Bostock
• Listening: Way Yes – Tog Pebbles

Elsewhere

I gave the first presentation about the DC Code project at Transparency Camp, to a room of people way more knowledgeable about legislation and open data than myself. In a session at the ‘unconference’, I wrote dccode.org/simple, a no-css, no-javascript version of the code, which is another experiment in accessibility and simplicity. It’s generated by a tiny node.js script

We re-released mapbox.js based on Leaflet, redesign the MapBox tour, and pulled together some important architectural changes that’ll make it easier to move faster.

iD is now the default editor on OpenStreetMap and it’s working pretty well. Lots of challenges left, and some of the more ‘fun’ performance optimizations are ahead of us. We blogged its development on /osmdev.

I wrote lodebuilder, an online tool to make a particular kind of loading background that I first used in iD and seems to be quite applicable elsewhere. (name inspiration)

I immediately used it for my mistakes.io project, which added the ability to save anonymous Gists with Cmd-S.

I polished up and gave a domain name to one of my simplest and most straightforward projects, now called debugbrowser.com. It simply documents opening developer extensions in all browsers.