Andy Beaumont

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 corner to find a slot when everyone is free.

Similar stuff is probably also possible on Windows. Welcome to technology.

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 your area", 
"It looks like you're having breakfast, best deals on BREAKFAST 
at Amazon now!" 

You swipe away the messages by waving your arms and open the 
fridge door.

[ivg]"You need permission to access to this Google Fridge. 
You can request access from the owner or choose a different 
account..."

An alert pops over the top.

[ivg]"Android Glass has encountered a problem and needs to quit."

You wait for your glasses to reboot.

[ivg] "Incoming message"

 A face pops up in your vision with a message in a speech bubble

[ivg] "Hey dude, let's hit the town tonight, just been paid so I 
got piles of cash."

An alert pops up next to the message 

[ivg] "Save $$$ on haemorrhoid cream!"

An alert pops up over the message and advert 

[ivg] "Flash Player has encountered a problem and needs to close"

And another

[ivg] "Memory running low, open the task manager to quit some 
of the running processes"

You wave your arms frantically.

EXT. DAY. FIRST PERSON.

You're walking up the street. A stranger approaches and starts 
following beside you.
					
                        STRANGER
        Hey, I heard you've got piles. I can help you with that. 
        For just $3.99 you can get some off the finest haemorrhoid 
        cream known to man.
		
                        YOU
        Leave me alone, I don't have piles.
		
                        STRANGER
        Well, how about some Frosties, I've also heard you like Frosties. 
        I can get you great deals on cereals of all kinds. People who 
        like Frosties also like milk.
		
                        YOU
        Look, leave me alone. I don't need any breakfast cereal. Stop 
        following me.
		
As the stranger continues to follow you up the street, more strangers
join. A notice appears over the head of one of them.

[ivg] "Sponsored stranger"

                        STRANGER 2
        Do you want to date a granny?
		
A notice appears over the head of another of the strangers.

[ivg] "Google preferred partner"

                        STRANGER 3
        You can meet and date other haemorrhoid sufferers in your area.
		
                        YOU (shouting)
        Fuck off.

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, and then drifted onto my own novel. This is a novel I’ve been writing for five years. A novel of which I have written four hundred words. Right now I’m not even sure where those four hundred words are.

Why such a poor effort? Well, truth be told I don’t want to write a bad book. What I should do is sit and write and for better or worse get it out of my system so I can move onto the next, better novel. What I do instead is distract myself with drawings or graphics design and perpetually postpone the work of writing. 

I would love to recount a pivotal preschool story that neatly sums up where this fear comes from, but I can’t remember anything specific. Suffice to say we all gain pleasure form the recognition of our peers and therefore dislike an absence of recognition or even worse derision. At some point we realise that pastime X does not evoke the same lovely praise as pastime Y, so we simply cut back on and eventually stop X. This feedback loop is active throughout our lives, narrowing what we try and altering what we feel capable of. We all draw and sing and take part in plays as kids but very few continue once we have left school. In fact I suspect many of us have our horizons so narrowed that we spend much our time wondering what exactly we are good at. Drinking or watching HBO box sets tends to be a common answer.

***

So. What can developers do to encourage people to overcome peer-fear. What can they do to lower the essentially self-imposed barriers people place around themselves, and encourage them to share their creative side? 

Read More

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 PDFs lets you do a linkback edit. Fucking badass.