Destinations, The Official Panedia Weblog

From first conception Panedia Wallpaper was made for multiple screen users. Panoramic photography looks beautiful stretched across two, three or even more screens. At wallpaper we try to straight-up cater for just about every user with 120 variations on each image, some stand alone, some which work together. No matter how many we offer there’ll always be exotic, non-standard screen setups which is why we also offer the massive original file for our paying members.

Greg P is an IT developer, web master and Dad living in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. His setup is a 24″ alumninium iMac with a vertical Samsung 740BX 17″ LCD.

The setup up close.

The setup in context.

To get them spanning correctly and at the correct orientations across the two screens Greg uses a custom Photoshop template with cropping masks of each monitor. The original wallpaper is dropped in behind, scaled and positioned as desired, cropped and exported to “left and a “right” directories with the same filename.

As an ex-dual-screen-computer-user, now a single screen 24″ iMac user this setup is exactly what I’ve been looking at trying. Greg says there’s polarisation issues with the vertical screen as it’s not made to be viewed at that orientation but it’s simply a matter of getting used to it before forgetting it’s even there.

The widescreen plus portrait screen setup makes sense. Some applications: mail, websites, documents, are more ideally suited to great horizontal space while others: image and video editing, calendars and movie watching, are suited to a widescreen landscape setup.

I’m impressed with Greg’s setup and the way he uses Panedia wallpaper but I’m jealous of his real, panoramic views of Puget Sound, Seattle and Mt Rainier from his home and office:

There’s not much that annoys me more online than having to sign up unnecessarily for free services. I went as far as to make a complete website making fun of the experience.

When we began planning Panedia Desktop Wallpaper one of the first decisions we made was paid members would be the only user that required sign up, if you want free content, you could get it without barrier. If you have an account, you are a paying customer.

At first the sign up process instinctively included email confirmation for accounts. As internet users we’re highly trained in this procedure — sign up, refresh email, click confirmation link, account activated. As a developer who’s implemented sign up systems multiple times, creating a sign up system around email confirmation wasn’t something I questioned.

Until new users weren’t getting confirmation emails.

We knew this would happen, with spam filters having no reason to trust us, users not checking spam folders, server side filters and plain human error. The best we could do was tell them to check their spam and add the question to the FAQ, I mean, we need email confirmation, right?

Wrong!

Accounts at other online services required email confirmation as a layer of protection against robots signing up for multiple free accounts. We don’t have free accounts, our barrier to robots is money.

We dropped email confirmation, removed an extra step from the cumbersome process of signing up and made our lives easier by not having to deal with lost confirmation emails.

Aaron gave me a quick introduction yesterday but I want to expand on that a bit.

I’m the guy that does… lots of things. That’s why we’re having trouble giving me a title I can put on my business cards. I’m a web designer, web developer, programmer, wordpress lover and wrangler, database designer, UI designer, tester, blogger, server admin and bug hunter, it’s hard to put a banner over all of that. For an example of what I’ve worked on so far there’s Panedia’s Wallpaper website which I created from start to finish. There’s this blog too.

As for blogging, I want to primarily write about the things I enjoy reading about at other “business” blogs — my philosophy for writing in general — write for my own taste. When it comes to business blogs, anything behind a product or service, I don’t want to be sold the product, I already like the product, that’s why I’m looking to read more about it at the blog. What I do want to read about is the process, how that product exists and what decisions were made to get there, I want to know about the things you don’t see looking in from the outside.

One of my favourite applications on the Mac, Things has a great example of a product blog. They go into great detail about the motivation and process of new features. One post that particularly stands out was on the creation of the recurring task UI. It includes screenshots of the many layouts they tried before settling on the ideal solution. It’s really interesting stuff that without a blog, you just don’t see.

Aaron and I are constantly going through this process when making decisions and planning new features for the products we work on. The process of making these decisions is extremely interesting to me and so, I’m sure, would be just as interesting to outsiders.

Elsewhere I write, link to and comment on things that interest me at Valhalla Island and I’m a huge Twitter user.