September 2007 Blog Posts
The worlds biggest intellect has started blogging. His first post, an extensive rant on mobile phones. Interesting reading. The best bit though, is the sidebar titled "Design Matters" (about 3/4 of the way down) - his context is the phones, but it applies to all software: We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees...
Error messages are never a good thing to receive when you're a user; they always make you feel you've done something wrong. Case in point: Now, forgive me for being pedantic, but the heading and message don't say the same thing. The heading is correct - 503 means the service is unavailable, it's a server error. Yet the message informs me that I or my browser has done something wrong; that's right, somehow by just navigating to the web site I've caused the server to fail. I'm savvy enough to realise that this is just because the developers were...
This week I was at MixUK, the UK remix event. I was part of the community developer track (organised by Phil), hosting the micro-presentations, which are based upon Pecha Kucha - the "20 slides/20 seconds each" presentation format created in Japan a few years ago. For those of you who have done presentations, you need to know that the 20 seconds per slide isn't optional - the slides automatically flip over, meaning you have to keep up and have just enough content for each slide. It's harder than you think. I've done many, many presentations, but this was my first...
Technorati Tags: dconstruct07 Last week I attended d.Construct, a web conference focusing on design and usability. This is unlike the events I normally attend, which are pure developer events; code heavy, lots of demos, etc. d.Construct is more designer oriented, with design and experience at the forefront. Developers are, on the whole, not great designers; some have the what it takes, but mostly we don't. It's the science versus art thing, where no matter how much we try, the artistic flair just isn't present. I am, rather begrudgingly, resigned to that fate and so hold a...