i have been blessed with a google wave invite, so i have been giving it a thorough run through.  i have to say, it was a little awkward at first trying to get use to this new interface and it was abundantly obvious at how lonely it can be in a limited private beta.  there was very little to do, after quickly making the rounds through all the clicks, buttons, and menus i was immediately giving the “ok…what next?” face to my computer screen.  but!  then i found the “with:public” search options.  by typing in any interest and appending “with:public” to the search you are able to query all public waves for your search criteria.  i quickly added myself to a few waves tailored to my local community.  everyone there, 30+ people at the time of this post, was very friendly, sociable and excited about communicating with this revolutionary new communication media.  I quickly began to see the awesomeness of google wave.  seeing the public and community capabilities as well as the robots that i have been learning about and the instant collaboration.

being able to put nearly any content (pictures, video, widgets, documents, voting capabilities, the list goes on) into a wave and keep 1 wave going while you add people, remove people, private chat within a wave, etc is pretty amazing.  its pretty cool only having a few waves in your inbox and they individually grow without the overbearing barrage of messages that pollute your inbox when using email.  i see great potential for this technology and i highly recommend singing up for a wave account (it will probably take some time before you actually receive an account…and, no i don’t have any invites).

oh yeah, i almost forgot about my favorite feature!  drag and drop uploads.  you can literally grab some pictures off your desktop and drop them on the webpage and they upload to the wave…awesome.  this is one small step to the entirely cloud based os.  its coming, its only a matter of time.

how long do you think before something like google wave replaces email?

our newest partnership!

bella vita is a super cool boutique in collierville, tn.  they specialize in gifts, interior design, and what you should buy if you want people to think you have good taste.  jenn has shopped there on several occasions and a good friend of ours works there.  she hooked us up with the owner and we have put together the beginning to what we hope to be a long and fruitful relationship.

we have been tasked with several graphic design jobs.  jenn is heading things up and is putting together some really cool stuff for them.

we really do it all here at derok design…look for changes to the website to reflect our new graphic design  offerings in the coming months.

i say i have had a nice little break.  what i mean by this is that i had some down time in regards to website creation…but i am back to it this weekend!  adding more delicious looking images to monkey bread bakery, an update to whitten grey after their big launch a couple of weeks ago, and a potential new client are what will be keeping me busy.  so its back to the grind!

even though i have had a break from the codin’ that doesn’t mean i haven’t been busy doing other things.  we are really closing in on the wedding so things are getting real hectic! exciting things!

check out the portfolio page…there is a new addtion!

i have been working with the bakestress over at monkey bread bakery to get monkey business up and running.

Monkey Business is a new blog where you can keep up with monkey bread’s delicious whereabouts!

Go check it out!  I wish monkey bread bakery the best of luck with the new blog!

i recently was doing some work on monkey bread bakery and stumbled across a new flash gallery that i replaced the current one with.  i think it turned out quite nicely.  you can check out the gallery here. i got it from airtight interactive.  they have several pretty  slick flash galleries and other flash goodies for that matter that are easy to install and make for a nice effect.

there is another flash gallery that i like to use.  i have used it on itmdesign and on a few sites in the past.  the only down side to this gallery is that if you don’t let all the images on the page load before clicking on one of the images, the flash effect won’t work.  so be careful when using this one.  i can’t seem to find the original site i got this from, but here is a slight variation…here.

whitten grey is now live!

we have put in some hard work on this site and we are really excited about it.  take a look and feel free to leave comments on what you think.

well the weekend is over.  back to work tomorrow.

i’ve got quite a bit of work done on both monkey bread bakery and whitten grey.  i’ll be able to post links of my progress soon.

on a side note, the iphone walkthrough is now up on the apple site. here is a portion of it from youtube…go to iphone.com or click around on youtube for the rest of it.

i’ll be working with a couple of amazing interior and clothing designers on their new line’s website.  the cooler part about this is they happen to be family.

check out http://whittengrey.com regularly to see the progress.  right now its a coming soon splash page…but we should have new content out there as early as next week.

i’ll primarily be doing slice and flash work.  since i am working with designers they have already done the layout work…of course.  and i do have to say it looks really good.  i think with their design and my clean code this site is going to turn out amazing!

*notice the glass on the home page has been elevated to a full status due to the rush on the site creation.