If you know me or if you read my blog, you know that I have been a huge fan of Threadless since I first found out about it in 2005. For a while, Threadless was pretty much the only thing I wrote about on this blog.

Last year, I developed an unofficial mobile app for browsing and sharing cool Threadless designs on the iPhone and iPad. This caught the attention of Threadless and I got to visit their sweet office!

I had the chance to visit again for the Threadless Family Reunion and an interview of sorts, and I was offered a job! I am happy to announce that I will join Threadless at the beginning of October.

I am really looking forward to making Threadless even more awesome (and now from the inside as opposed to hacking together an API for myself)!

Item 1: The Choir of Antarctica

Item 2: Piano Skyline

Item 3: The Pianist

Are there any that I missed? Lemme know in the comments!

I knew that I wanted a grid-y layout as opposed to the list-y one of the iPhone/iPod, which was partly the reason why I hadn’t done the iPad version yet. Lists on iOS are easy because they’re given to you for free. Grids are a whole other beast. Luckily, I ran into a framework (AQGridView) on GitHub that does grid layouts in a tableview-y sort of paradigm. The framework was still a little beta (or alpha) as I had to go in and change a few things that were crashing, but it did succeed in making my job a lot easier overall. I’d like to try contributing to that code to improve it, but I guess that’s another post altogether.

After getting the grid stuff working, I decided to use a modal pop up view to display the images and sharing options all in one view. Since the iPad has much more screen real estate, it’s easy to design things without running into space issues. You don’t, however, want to just stick a billion buttons in because you can. I think this design does a good job of showing enough stuff to the user, but not too much stuff too soon.

I still have some bugs to fix, mainly with memory management due to the grid view stuff. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on this blog!

Hopefully the iPad app continues the mission of the iPhone app, which is to provide a really easy and fun way to browse and share awesome Threadless designs! I may have been an early iPad doubter, but I really believe that it’s a great device for consuming content. Even on my iPad 1, the designs and colors just pop on the app. At least I think so. But you don’t have to take my word for it!

Get the app if you don’t have it already!

I saw this new shirt on Threadless and was surprised it hadn’t already done! Birds have probably known about Twitter for much longer than we have (early bird adopters). I like the fact that the Twitter interface has been recreated in a bird speech bubble, but I have a feeling the shirt will be outdated pretty soon (like when Twitter decides to come out with New New Twitter).

Get Tweet before it’s outdated!

Last week I took a train out to visit Chicago for a meeting with my favorite company, Threadless! Since I wrote that app I’ve been in contact with the founder et al, and they thought it would be cool for me to check out their offices. I won’t talk about what discussions went on (I’m being held by a “frieNd-DA“), but I can say that the Threadless office is mega sweet!

I got to hang out with some of the developers on Threadless and talked about the site and other random stuff (like t-shirt quality through the ages). I pointed out something that actually ended up being a bug that one of the dudes fixed almost immediately! Talk about transparency. At some point we were talking about how the Threadless t-shirt models are picked. Ivan (super nice guy) mentioned that the photographer might be looking for someone to model a shirt. He ended up replying and I got to model a brand new Threadless shirt in the cold, cold December Chicago air. The shirt’s called …To The Birds. Buy it today!

The Threadless office itself is pretty nice. They moved in relatively recently so it still looks a little bare. Apparently they have big plans for decorating. I was, once again, super star struck by seeing people who I feel I know very well through their pictures on the Threadless site. I met the beard guy, Red the dog (I think it’s a Shiba Inu) and other assorted celebrities. One of the developers I met was the guy in the Mr Tee photo and another was Mario in another shirt (I couldn’t figure out which one). Oh, and I said hi to Colleen and Kristen, who I first met at SXSW!

They let me go down to the warehouse and pick out some shirts to take home. It kind of took all the willpower in my being not to clean them out (they probably would not have let me). I got Upso, Mister Mittens and Houndstooth. I also got a cool I ♥ Threadless shirt that they don’t really sell anymore. Limited edition!

This is probably already obvious, but Threadless is an awesome place with some awesome people making awesome things (mostly shirts). I had a blast meeting the people behind it and I hope I can come back again really soon!

It’s no secret that I’ve been a huge fan of Threadless since I discovered it back in 2005 (see these blog posts for proof). I really love the fact that the community provides designs and decides which ones will be printed. The company is really only there to provide the machinery to make shirts and fulfill orders! I wanted to contribute to the community by making an unofficial Threadless app (and maybe get a little store credit to feed my t-shirt needs).

My main reasoning for writing a native Threadless app is that I found it pretty hard to browse shirts, even in a fully fledged web browser let alone an iPhone browser. The Threadless site is by no means bad, but it’s hard to see what designs look like when the images are small and on models. I prefer viewing the actual design. So I built an app that makes it easy to 1) browse and find cool shirts and 2) share them with your friends.

In order to do this, I needed to get a database of shirts on Threadless. It’s kind of unfortunate that Threadless doesn’t have an API. At all. Threadless does, however, has a few feeds of shirts: one for shirts that are in stock and another for the weekly additions. I parsed this list of shirts and saved them in an App Engine database along with some other metadata like image urls, category info, etc. I also figured out a way to get the list of all Threadless shirts, including the ones that aren’t currently in stock. What this means is that the ♥s Threadless app will help you find more shirts than even the official website can. You can filter by category, color and run fulltext searches on the entire shirt database.

As far as the front end work went, I had to build a custom table view cell to scroll through shirts and a nested scrollview to view shirt images. The shirt view looks a lot like the native photo browser app for the iPhone. I also added features for sharing, including saving the image to your photo album, posting the design on Twitter and Facebook and emailing the shirt design as an attachment. I figure that covers most bases as far as sharing goes.

So far I’ve only designed and built the iPhone version. I think an iPad version would be neat, too, but I want to gauge the interest in the iPhone/iPod app before putting more time into this. If you like the app, let me know and write up a review for it!

Finally, here’s a video demo of the app, just for fun:

Just imagine that cup in shirt form. Anyway, the shirt colors fit the UNM colors. Pretty sweet!

Now fast forward to… now. I’m at the University of Michigan, and our colors are “Blue” and “Maize.” Our sworn enemy, Ohio State, has the colors of “Scarlet” and “Gray.” Which is basically the same as my old school’s colors. Kind of hard to disassociate with. Anyway, I’ve noticed that while walking around with my red Google shirt on, people seem to give me more dirty looks (than usual). Like I was at Meijer last week and I could’ve sworn I noticed some hostility.

I figured the Google shirt (remember, imagine the cup above as a shirt) reminds them of the Ohio State shirt:

That might just be my crazy theory, but I think it works. I’m sure from a far enough distance, the red Google shirt could look like the Ohio State shirt. And I’ve given my fair share of dirty looks to people wearing Ohio State stuff in Ann Arbor. How dare they, right?

I think it’s time I get a blue and maize Google shirt. What say you, Google?

I met a recruiter from this company called imo.im last week at the Mpowered career fair on North Campus. Basically, the event was a career fair for startup companies. For some reason, some really big companies were there as well. I think I saw NEC…

Anyway, imo.im is some sort of web-based IM client, kind of like Meebo. I even asked the recruiter something like, “I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but this company is like Meebo, right?” Anyway, it seems the claim to fame for imo.im is that they’re financed almost exclusively by one of the first 10 employees of Google. This post isn’t really about their company though. It’s about their HR!

There were a bunch of t-shirts on the table. I, being a t-shirt connoisseur, especially of the company shwag type, asked if I could have one. “But they’re reserved for interviewees,” the HR person Marissa Huang told me. She also said she could mail me one when she gets back to their headquarters, since they have a lot. I gave her my contact info and figured I’d never get the shirt. Here’s a story!

When I went to interview at Google, they said I’d get some kind of awesome bag with Google related goodies in it. Like shirts and lava lamps and whatnot. Maybe not lava lamps. Anyway, it was supposed to be in my hotel room but I never got it. After the HR person at Google asked for my address for them to mail it, I felt that I’d get the stuff for sure, but I never did. It was like adding insult to the injury of not hiring me. By the way, I’ve fully recovered and hold no ill will towards the big G. Just throwing out this story to prove a point: why would imo.im go to the trouble of sending me a shirt when I didn’t even interview with them?

But they did. And it came today. Which is why I award imo.im the official “Hung Truong Company Shwag Award Seal of Approval!” I don’t know if something can be both an award AND a seal of approval at the same time, but whatever. There was also a nice hand-written note in the package, which is unheard of as far as corporate HR goes. But imo.im is a startup, so I guess that makes them different.

Anyway, thanks, imo.im, for the t-shirt. As a bonus, I’m even not adding a rel=”nofollow” to my links to you! Rock on!

There’s another $10 sale going on at Threadless. I think the quality of Threadless shirts has kinda been waning in recent months. There’s a few fun shirts, but I’ll wait on ordering since this sale lasts until December 16th. Especially funny is this “November Was a Good Month” shirt. Going to a (sort of) library school, I think I’m starting to think more and more like a librarian. So I kind of find this shirt more interesting than I really should. But yeah, maybe I’ll hit the jackpot with a round of good shirts sometime between now and December.

Walking around the University of Michigan, I see a lot of people. And I’m really into shirts if you didn’t know already. So this combination leads to me seeing a lot of people and noticing their shirts.

A common “genre” of shirt here is a blue shirt with “maize” words that say “Michigan _______” with “Michigan” being on top, and the other word(s) being below it. So for example if you were a law student, you might wear a shirt that said “Michigan Law.” They’re basically available for all majors, minors, and anything else you might think of.

I surmised that it would be fun to have parody shirts. Ideas I thought up, along with Adam Torres (the guy who likes being mentioned in blogs) were “Michigan Culinary,” “Michigan Blacksmith,” and “Michigan Undeclared.” But then I walked around and saw someone with a “Michigan Squirrels” shirt and figured they had beaten me to the punch.

It turns out there’s a Michigan Squirrel Club that meets every Sunday at 4pm at the grad library steps. Their main mission is to feed squirrels peanuts. And they do it pretty well. There’s a squirrel call that they use to summon squirrels, and several advanced techniques like tree feeding and squirrel fishing.

I attended my first meeting today and fed some squirrels. The squirrels seem to be a bit wary at first, but after a while they became more bold, even running up to us to demand a peanut. I talked with the creator and ex-president, Jason, who is also a fellow SI student. He says people are always asking about the club, and sure enough, when we were feeding squirrels, people kept on coming up to us and talking.

I’m not sure how often I can make the squirrel club meetings, but I’d say it’s a fairly cool club. Also, not to brag, but the website is pretty damn bitchin’.