Although it has clean lines, all the lines are all soft and beveled, in contrast to today’s predominant style of hard edges. It’s funny to see the beige and brown duotone housing as it is something that would never be produced today, however it is distinctly an Apple design as is evidenced by it’s minimal markings and functional design.

I have worked for nearly three years at LIME Marketing LLC, a relatively young marketing firm in Utah. Friday was my last day. It makes me sad to move on, but I feel good about pursuing my career as an engineer, and utilizing the degree that I studied during my higher education.

It’s hard to leave a company you like with people you are very fond of.

During my tenure at LIME, the company expanded both in knowledge and breadth of services. I, too, have had the opportunity to grow along with it. While searching for talented specialized individuals, I got to be the jack-of-all-trades and get my hands wet in many varied tasks at LIME. Examples include the following:

Audio Engineer

Working as the company audio engineer was really fun. I got to research acoustics and audio equipment, as well as set up and run a recording studio in our awesome basement.

Videographer & Video Editor

There was a time that I would record and edit promos for various clients and projects. This gave me a chance to become familiar with Final Cut Pro, and try my hand at filming, editing, and directing as well.

3D Modeler & Renderer

I worked on creating 3D figurings for an iPhone game as well as some 3D rendering in the medical field. This gave me a chance to use Maya, Blender and some other 3D tools. The demand for these services has grown so much that LIME has had to hire 4 full-time 3D experts to take on the load!

Web Developer

I do websites on my own time, but not often at work. I have had occasion when they needed a website made quickly and the other web developers were too busy and then I’d come in and help.

IT Department

It has been my duty to maintain the 30-or-so computers, 3 servers, and other various equipment we have at work. Whenever there is a network problem, or a system failure, I am the one they rely on.

And the list goes on. Each time, I had to learn new programs, and study. It gave me the chance to broaden my horizons and work to become a more valuable employee. This breadth of knowledge is not something that could normally be acquired at a larger firm. Even now with the growth we have experienced over the past few years, this type of skill building opportunity will become less likely to occur.

Farewell

I am glad for the time I have had to be at LIME. The experiences and memories have been invaluable, and I will miss the environment, creativity, stressful deadlines, and most of all, the people. I am glad that the owners of LIME as well as my colleagues felt that I was an integral part of the team. They threw me a heart-warming farewell lunch and let me know how much I would be missed. They too will be missed by me. I appreciate the time I’ve had at LIME, and wish them the best in their endeavors.

Thank you, Shawn, Wes, Chris, Deokyun, Holly, Alexis, Jessica, StephAnn, Darren, Spencer, Matthew, Kenneth, Kevin, Dan, Worth, Nick, Ben, Jennifer, Davi, Derek, Aaron, Michael, Kyle, and Natalie. You are one amazing team!

This past Sunday, I was minding my own business using Photoshop to do some painting, when out of nowhere the screen displayed a ton of video distortion (pictured above) and the computer locked up hard. I thought this might have just been some sort of fluke, however I was wary that this could be a serious issue after seeing similar symptoms with my boss’s MacPro about 6 months ago. I rebooted hopefully, and things seemed to work, but after 5 minutes, the same symptoms. The culprit? The video card (pictured below); an NVidia GeForce 8800 GT. I’ve had my computer for a little over two years, which would normally put it outside of normal warranty coverage, but since I happen to have AppleCare, I still have a few months of coverage.

Monday afternoon I called 1-800-MYAPPLE. I spoke with a very nice woman who helped me out and said she’d send me a new part. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Of course I have to send my part in in order to avoid any charges to my credit card. The next day (Today) I was surprised to find a package on my doorstep. Lo-and-behold, Apple had sent the part overnight, and I was able to install it and begin using my computer in less than 24 hours from initially calling them. Now that kind of world-class serviceis what keeps me a happy Apple customer. Thanks!

Bonus link: Check your AppleCare status!

First I created an outline of the basic shape off of a photo I took of an example product. This shape will be used for quite a few things along the way.

Next I duplicated the shape, and converted it to a gradient mesh object, then used shades of grey to do a basic shading. This layer will then be multiplied onto the artwork to give the 3D look.

i then used other shapes and gradients to do some accents like the luminosity on the right. I used that first shape I made along with the pathfinder tool and new paths to make the appearance of the seal across the top. The light areas were set to screen, and the dark areas to multiply.

I then used a paper crumple texture I found online, and masked it to the first path and applied this as a multiply as well. This makes it appear less pristine and more realistic.

Finally, I made the edges appear sealed by creating a lot of dots around the edge of the bag with the blend tool, blurring them, then finally setting their blend mode to screen at 15%.

With all the  layers combined, it makes the packaging look a bit more realistic, albeit not photorealistic. I had to do this in a budgeted amount of time, and therefore couldn’t afford to get much more realistic.

So now, any graphic can be used by masking it to the first path and placing it behind all the blending layers for an instant mockup. Here is a fake sample product design I whipped up in 2 minutes to demonstrate since an NDA prevents me from revealing the product I was really working.

#!/bin/bash

for f in $1/* ; do
o=`basename $f`
if file $f | grep Unicode ; then
cp $f $2
else
iconv -f MACROMAN -t UTF-8 $f >$2/$o
fi
done

I went further and added options,  a debug mode, verbose mode, and the like, and even a man page! The syntax is:

# roman_to_utf8 [options] <input> <output>

The input and output can be either directories or individual files.

#!/bin/bash

usage() {
echo Usage: $0 "[-v | --verbose] [-d | --debug] [-e | --encoding <encoding>] <input> <output>"
exit 1
}

VERBOSE=false
ENCODING=MACROMAN
DEBUG=false

while true; do
case $1 in
-v | --verbose) VERBOSE=true;;
-d | --debug) DEBUG=true;;
-*) echo "Bad option $1"; usage;;
*) break;;
esac
shift
done

SOURCE="$1"
DESTINATION="$2"

if [ $DEBUG = true ]; then
echo VERBOSE = $VERBOSE
echo SOURCE = $SOURCE
echo DESTINATION = "$DESTINATION"
echo ENCODING = "$ENCODING"
exit
fi

if [ "x$SOURCE" = x -o "x$DESTINATION" = x ]; then
usage;
fi

convert() {
INPUT="$1"
OUTPUT="$2"
FILENAME=`basename "$INPUT"`
if file "$INPUT" | grep Unicode ; then
cp "$INPUT" "$OUTPUT"
$VERBOSE && echo "Successfully copied $FILENAME"
else
iconv -s -f $ENCODING -t UTF-8 "$INPUT" >"$OUTPUT/$FILENAME"
$VERBOSE && echo "Successfully converted $FILENAME"
fi
}

if [ -d "$SOURCE" ]; then
for INPUT in "$SOURCE"/* ; do
convert "$INPUT" "$DESTINATION"
done
else
convert "$SOURCE" "$DESTINATION"
fi

exit

Please excuse the poor tabbing due to wordpress. In any case, it worked and saved me a ton of time. All you need to do is copy this script into a file and make it executable. Enjoy!

As previously stated, Chromium has proven to be an excellent browser. It is minimal, functional, fast, expandable. The only issue I could find with it was it’s lack of conformity with the rest of Mac OS X in terms of handling selections in the location bar. The developers of Chromium decided to follow the convention of single click selects all in the location bar, following the cue of Internet Explorer. This however is contrary to the functionality of similar text fields in pretty much every other place in the Mac OS, including that of Safari. This incongruity was beyond my ability to cope, rendering the browser useless to me.

I pleaded my case, along with many others, at the Chromium developer forums, however they said it was a non-issue, and marked the bug as “WontFix.” So, I decided to make my own version with this deliberate behavior remedied. So I downloaded the source. 6.4 GB later I located the 6 offending lines of code, spent 1.5 hours making a cool Mac-themed icon, and spent 2.5 hours compiling on all 8 processors. The outcome? Success! Now, I will offer this for download, and as long as it continues to be usable and a good browser, Chromium  may very well replace FireFox for the first time in 10 years as my browser of choice.

Time Machine has been one of my favorite features about the Mac. It was the most anticipated feature for me when waiting for the release of Mac OS X 10.5. It has saved my behind a few times from disk failure with nary a single lost file. Apple describes Time Machine as follows:

Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard drive. Just connect the drive and assign it to Time Machine and you’re a step closer to enjoying peace of mind. Time Machine will automatically back up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on a given day — so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.

Recently I have been switching to backing all my computers up to my server and had questions about using sparse bundles and backing up over the network. Unable to find a complete set of instructions, I have decided to share what I have learned.

Backing up with sparse bundles

What is a sparse bundle? Its a type of disk image that can have a maximum size set, but only takes up as much space as it needs to on the physical disk. Time Machine is a notorious hog of disk space. It will utilize as much as it can for backing up your files, which can be nice. Sometimes though, it can be undesirable. The beauty about backing up to sparse bundles is that if you have a large disk you are backing up to, say 2 TB, and your drive on your computer is only 200 GB, you can make a sparse bundle that is 500 GB to back up to and basically reserve the remaining 1.5 TB of the backup disk for other uses.

So how do you set up sparse bundles? Well, the first step is to create one with Disk Utility.

1. Open Disk Utility
2. Select File > New Blank Disk Image
3. Set the file name to your computer name followed by an underscore and it’s primary mac address (eg: “macbook_00113bcd9e”)
4. Set the size to custom, then choose an appropriate size. It should be at least the size of your disk, and probably half again or twice as big.
5. You can set encryption on the file. This is so no others can access your data if your backup disk gets stolen, etc. 128 is probably good enough. It will be slower with 256 bit encryption.
6. Keep it partitioned as an “Apple Partition Map”
7. Select “Sparse Bundle Disk Image” as the Image Format

Now save it on whatever disk you want to use as your backup. Make sure you save it in the top-level directory of the drive. Time Machine can’t locate the sparse bundle unless its in the top-level directory.

Time Machine Error

I saw this error on my server. When I searched on Google, I couldn’t find any information about the cause or solution to the problem.

“Time Machine could not be configured. The built-in network interface could not be found.”

This error stems from the fact that Time Machine identifies the computer based on it’s built in network adapter’s mac address. Computers that have this error are either “hackintoshes” that have no built in ethernet adapter, or have damaged hardware and are using an external adapter or PCI card. In either case, I have no solution for the problem yet, but will update this post if I find it.

Scheduling

Time Machine is wonderful because of its incremental nature. It saves backups hourly. This can be a nuisance however when backing up over the network because there can be a noticeable slow down of the computer during backup. To remedy this problem, I found a program called TimeMachineScheduler that allows the interval between backups to be specified as well a times that Time Machine shouldn’t run.

Fat Boy’s Pizza and Pasta is a “family-owned, family-operated, and ‘fatboy’ approved pizzeria servicing the Ogden area with gourmet pizza and pasta.”

For the web design I wanted to do something clean but fun. I decided to use a counter-top theme with clean lines and an underlying simplicity. Let me know what you think.

If you ever find yourself in the Ogden area, you should try it out!

Employee Spotlight: Mike C

LIME employees dedicate several hours a week honing their marketing ingenuity devising innovative apps, managing projects, creating designs, crafting effective advertising, and numerous other services. Today, we spotlight an employee who models the work and success of our company. Mike C, an employee since 2007, adds a myriad of talents, skills and insights to our marketing team as a graphic designer and project manager. I had the opportunity to chat with Mike, getting to know a bit about his background.

Mike’s Faves:

Mac computers; he actually collects older Apple computers

• Computer-related projects
• The 1948 Tucker Torpedo and the 1981 Delorean DMC-12 (cars, for those of us not in the know)
• Family and watching movies with the fam
• Awesome work projects (of course)

Originally from California where  his childhood was filled with legos, computers and lots of Disneyland, Mike has great memories of growing up, many involving his father: “One summer, we built arcade cabinets as well as electronics for classic games like Pac Man and Arkanoid. Each kid in our family now has one in their home. It’s a nice memento of those special times tinkering in the garage.” From those garage days of innovation, Mike went on to graduate from Brigham Young University with an undergrad in engineering.

Awesome gaming consoles built by Mike.

I also asked Mike why he chose the field of marketing as a career and he responded, “I didn’t decide, it just sort of happened.” His favorite part about working for LIME is the versatility and diversity in the skill sets of employees as well as the projects we do here. Mike hopes to expand his knowledge and skills in graphic design as well as other aspects of marketing and management.

Curious as to what his opinions were, I asked what Mike thought about the development of iPad, iPhone and various other platforms for mobile technology. He responded, “As much as  I love computing, mobile technology almost scares me as I have seen it infiltrate my life and take up time that would otherwise be free. It’s amazing to have the power of these devices in my hand, and access to the world’s knowledge at all times, but part of me kind of longs for the simpler days when connectivity wasn’t so prominent.  On the flip side they are a blast to work with and give us more power in our hands then we have ever had before!”

Currently, Mike is working on medical applications for Orca MD™ specifically planning, layout and graphical aspects of the Orca “Decide” apps. One of his favorite projects was the first SpineDecide™ app. “We were treading new territory…I got a lot of photography experience.  It was a great app and has taken things to a whole new level!”

Along with  these numerous projects, Michael enjoys the many memories from LIME. His favorite was from this last Christmas party when Wes almost slammed 3-D artist Dan’s head into a wall in an ice skating race.

Did they really just do that?!!!

Needless to say, this will forever stick with Mike and the LIME marketing team.

We are grateful for Mike and his contributions to our marketing team. Don’t stop being awesome!