May 2012
2 posts
The War on Drugs →
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Jeremy Hunt and the Murdochs: how minister oiled... →
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April 2012
12 posts
Leveson inquiry: the dark heart of this strange... →
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The day James and Rebekah revealed the arrogant... →
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City of Fear [longform.org] →
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Semantic Versioning 2.0.0-rc.1 →
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Anders Breivik is a terrorist, so we should treat... →
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He is called Mick Jagger →
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http://bit.ly/HBOJPu →
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Very Very Much →
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How to Organise a Meeting
welcometotechnology:
Hello.
Did you know that you can check somebody’s availability for a meeting slot before you book it in and expect them to be there?
In iCal, click on Available Meeting Times…
And it will show you this window…
…which will let you know the availability of everybody in your invitee list. You can even click the “Next Available Time” button in the top right hand...
The Devil at 37,000 Feet [longform.org] →
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This Tech Bubble Is Different - BusinessWeek →
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3 tags
Google Glass
Glass, powered by Android
INT. DAY. EARLY MORNING. FIRST PERSON.
You wake up, put on your Google Glass and look out the window.
Some graphics pop up showing today's weather.
An alert pops up over the top...
[in vision gfx]"Weather has unexpectedly quit, would you like to
restart weather?"
You walk to the kitchen and pick up a box of Frosties.
[ivg] "Click here to meet lonely cougars in...
October 2011
1 post
Unedited from the desk of Jonty Sharples: Gabriele... →
jontysharples:
I’ve always had the greatest respect for Gabriele Skelton; they appeared to be sat a notch above most recruiters. That is until this morning.
Hello Jonty Visionary guru Steve Jobs believed that “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma –…
September 2011
1 post
Peer Fear is the Mind-Killer!
jimunwin:
The fear of failure stops many people creating. But there are ways to still their trembling hand and better yet they may already be doing lots of creative things without realising. So, how can you help a potential artist over the final few hurdles to sharing their work?
This story starts in a conversation with a writer friend of mine. We were talking about his currently stalled book,...
July 2011
2 posts
7 tags
Quick and easy wireflows in OmniGraffle
1) select your whole page layout, then choose Edit->Copy As->PDF
2) paste onto your wireflows page.
3) set a fill colour of white, a one pixel border of mid grey, and optionally a drop shadow
You might at this point be thinking “but Andy, now I’ve pasted it as a PDF item I can’t edit it if the design changes?!” but you’d be wrong. Double clicking the pasted...
2 tags
June 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Hey Luddite!: How to name folders →
welcometotechnology:
Do you use a file server in your place of work? Do you put numbers at the start of your folder names? Do other people at your place of work also use that file server? Well this handy hint will show you how people in the 21st century use something as ancient as the alphabet to find things!
Your…
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April 2011
1 post
4 tags
Dear Adobe
WTF does this even mean?
Holy tablet-revolution Batman! Today also sees Adobe extend the creative process beyond the desktop by helping integrate tablet devices into creative workflows. The new Adobe Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) enables developers to build tablet applications that interact with Photoshop from Android, BlackBerry PlayBook and iOS devices. Adobe also announced...
September 2010
1 post
3 tags
What's Wrong With iTunes
Recently I’ve tweeted a couple of times about wanting to see iTunes killed off, and both times I’ve received replies asking why. It’s not possible to explain what’s wrong with iTunes in 140 characters so I’ve moved it here.
Apple mostly follow the Unix philosophy - write programs that do one thing and do it well. If you look at Mail, Address Book and iCal they all...
July 2010
1 post
3 tags
Dear Nokia
I told you so.
April 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Predictions
#1 Within a year Adobe will have released some software geared towards authoring HTML5 / Canvas animation. #2 It will have a terrible, buggy interface that makes you want to kill.
4 tags
Deleting Unwanted Calendars from the iPhone
For future reference, this is a royal pain in the arse.
Solution here.
March 2010
3 posts
7 tags
Scotch Egg Navigation
While working on a project with Richard Amos about a year ago we were pondering the static linear nature of breadcrumbs and wondering why they should always be so. The breadcrumb serves two purposes; firstly it gives users a sense of where they are in a site’s structure, helping them to never feel lost or disoriented. Which leads to the second purpose, to always provide them with a path...
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Stupid changes in Snow Leopard #2
The F8 play/pause media key on the keyboard now launches iTunes and starts playing music, meaning you can’t use this key to play and pause music in any other application that you might want to use. Stupid.
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Stupid changes in Snow Leopard #1
Clicking on the volume control in the menubar, I now have to move my mouse down so that the pointer is over the slider in order to be able to use the mouse’s scrollwheel to change the volume. In Leopard I could click and then scroll without having to move the mouse.
February 2010
1 post
3 tags
Multitasking on the iPad
My friend Ben hit the nail on the head.
…the majority of iPhone/iPad/mobile users probably don’t even know what "emultitasking"e is. They can probably only think about the one application they’re running at that very moment. Multitasking to these people would mean running out of processor power and memory, not realising it’s because they have 3 apps...
January 2010
2 posts
7 tags
Toggling layers in OmniGraffle
Sometimes I need to output PDFs of a wireframe produced in OmniGraffle in two versions, one with annotations and one without. Luckily I habitually put all annotations on their own layer, so all that’s needed is a simple AppleScript to tell OmniGraffle to toggle the printable and visible nature of every layer named “Annotation”. A bit of googling turned up this forum post which...
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The Apple Tablet Prediction Game
Feel free to come back here in a couple of weeks and tell me I was wrong, but my gut instinct on this whole tablet thing is that the speculation so far mostly ignores one key ingredient, and that is that Apple will be wanting to completely change the game in some area or other. That area isn’t going to be tablet computing as the only people who bought a tablet PC in the last 8 years were...
December 2009
2 posts
9 tags
The future of Nokia
Here’s an interesting article from Michael Gartenberg about the future of Nokia. He touches on some of the things that I talked about in a previous post but completely misses out the experience of using a modern Nokia phone which I still believe is their biggest failing. There’s no point in producing great hardware if the actual experience of using that hardware is poor due to creaky...
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November 2009
2 posts
7 tags
Camel mouse
If you ever wondered what a computer mouse designed by committee might look like, wonder no longer, for the people at OpenOffice seem to have done just that. Behold: the 18 button OpenOffice Mouse.
It would appear that in designing this mouse two key factors have been completely ignored:
Users also have a keyboard
Users also have a screen
Some choice quotes from the press...
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Nickr™
You may have noticed that Flickr’s new face tagging feature has broken the ability to drag your own photos off a Flickr page to your desktop, or even to right click and save an image. Never fear, just drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and hit it when you need to get at your Flickr photo.
EDIT: Moved to this page as I don’t seem to be able to write JS into this blog.
...
October 2009
4 posts
6 tags
Breaking Windows
Talking of Windows being shit, every time I see this advert on TV I can’t help but marvel at the jerky window movement as this guy drags his windows to the edges of the screen.
a) Why is Microsoft still incapable of making an OS where window dragging happens at more than 3 frames per second?
b) Why did the ad agency that made this shitfest not simply animate the window dragging sequence...
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Mobile Metrics
AdMob have announced their Mobile Metrics report [PDF] for 2009 and it makes for some pretty interesting reading. The unstoppable rise of the iPhone OS is to be expected, but it’s nice to see this graph showing change over the last 6 months shows the 3 innovative operating systems all on the rise and everyone else in decline.
Image credit to AdMob of course
A couple of points worth...
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Dropzone
Dropzone is really nice.
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YouTube is illiterate
I’m not just talking about the users, I mean the actual system. I posted the same video to both Vimeo and YouTube and copied and pasted the video’s description to both sites. YouTube decided to change the capital letters at the start of all new sentences except the first to lowercase. Twats.
September 2009
3 posts
5 tags
Sony Heart
This giant pulsating lump of plastic appears as a stinger every time ITV football goes to a break. Given Sony’s history of releasing pointless crap that nobody wants, I wonder how many people think this thing is available right now from Dixons.
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iTunes UIWTF
With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone. But unfortunately Apple have...
6 tags
Pixelmator 1.5 released
And it looks like the best update yet. Finally Pixelmator has all the tools you’ll need to use it for web work, including slicing, export for web and an info panel (of sorts). Bye bye Photoshop. I never have to look at your stupid clunky custom interface again.
August 2009
2 posts
7 tags
Convert design evolution video
Really interesting video charting the design evolution of the iPhone app Convert by tap tap tap.
Lovely to see the iterations gone through and the design decisions being made along the way. Especially interesting is how much more usable this ends up than the pretty but woeful ConvertBot.
5 tags
Configuring CalDAV on iPhone 3.0 for Google... →
Some useful info on how to get your extra Google CalDAV calendars to show up on your iPhone.
July 2009
2 posts
5 tags
SXSW follow up
A little late posting this I know, but as a quick follow up to our panel at SXSW I’d like to thank everyone who came along and particularly the other panellists for some amazing insights and our superb moderator Liz for all her hard work. It was standing room only in our room with people being turned away at the door so the subject must still be a big issue for a lot of people. SXSW on the...
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Ethnio :: Recruiting for User Research :: Index →
Online user recruitment service.