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popup walk through guide from BBC News
October 2004 Archives
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BBC project to encourage movie making, has some tutorial materials too
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small changes in ID cards proposals, new compulsary separate card at 35 quid plus passport at probably the same cost
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Cal Henderson's presentation on Flickr architecture, covers PHP and lots more internals
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A comment from CAl Henderson's flickr presentation, interesting commentry in the comments about the trade offs of speed vs code complexity
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very sad news, he inspired a lot of great music
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barcode scanning software for your books and dvds etc that lets you create a disk based library of your content, looks fabulous
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idea capuring and development application, kind of a mixture of omnigraffle, omnioutliner and bbedit, plus more maybe tinderbox and ispring
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getting pdftohtml to compile on macosx, look for the post from 04-27-2003, 02:54 PM
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I've been hunting for this ground rule for Apple development for ages -- no code updates can slow down a system component, unless the coder is able to optimize another part of the same system component to maintain the status quo or better see stingerman'
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handy web safe colour viewer, can even be downloaded locally
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useful list and overview of 200 odd techniques
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how design can be used to help direct the worlds energies for the better, related to the long now ideas from Stewart Brand
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using a single word and number to draw attention to information, with a detailed investigation of why
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Some basic cognitive psychology looking at attention span and memory from 1956, essentially we can remember 7 plus or minus 2 things
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Recent research paper on Synaesthesia, the reason the w3c logo is green
Apple have released the much rumoured iPod Photo, available from the Apple Store. I think it is a lovely product, even the slideshow on TV is beautifully designed, showing the battery live onscreen too. I love the 5x5 display for preview too, the control wheel looks like a great interface for that, which I'll hopefully get to play with at the London Apple Store opening, in November.
Basics are a 2 inch 65 thousand colour screen and integration with iPhoto libraries via iTunes in a new version 4.7. 40 and 60GB version are available, which should satisfy most people. Also the battery life is longer at 15 hours, it'll even drive the TV and play music for a slideshow for 5 hours. It ships with all the cables you might expect, including the standard earbud headphones, though I think you might want a better set.
The cost is reasonable, but I think it is a pity that you need to go to a third party to get the Belkin media reader to actually get photos onto the device in the wild. The sync from iPhoto will solve a lot of the use cases, but there is still a need for a phototainer type device in an iPod form factor.
Some other notes, Chicago has gone as the typeface, it is now Myriad, like everything else. No video support, so no iMovie preview, but hardware DV codecs probably burn battery life. No bluetooth either, so all those scenarios for music sharing are stymied, plus the integration possibilites with a future Airport Express and immediate sync to stero from headphones is a missed opportunity, original syncing idea from Tom.
Apple seem to be taking the iPod on a gradual journey, adding functionality whilst not radically changing the device. In keeping with the just say no philosophy espoused by Jobs the iPod is focused on playing music. The additional features are optional and I'm glad to see the original iPod remaining on sale. It has moved quite a long way from the 5GB music only device of a few years ago, yet it remains pretty much the same device, which is quite a good achievement. I should do a feature comparison to show what has been added, but not now.
The iPod still remains a playback only device from Apple, you need your own Mac or PC to get information onto it. I cannot see it morphing into the iPhone or other two way smart phone devices. I'm a second generation 20G owner and this has me quite tempted, there is sufficient new functionality that if I had a digital SLR I'd definitely want one. Actually the best thing I did for my musical entertainment recently was get some decent headphones...
Some American comments on the coming election, now a week away. Starting with the amusing and angry William Gibson, who signed off from writing to return to writing books in September, only to return in October with avengence.
He notes James Wolcott, of Vanity Fair, in particular this post on what might have happened if there was no insurgency. Also he mentions Media Matters for America a campaign organisation to correct media spin in the US, particularly the neocon bias.
On a similar vein, Seymour Hersh in Salon makes silghtly more depressing reading. Lifting the mood a little, Hunter S Thompson in Rolling Stone is a robust read on Bush and those face to face debates and the whole political game of getting into the White House.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?
If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2. Rolling Stone, October 2004
Finally, I liked this cartoon commenting on the aspect of religion by Kirk Anderson, via agit properties, who make funny political t-shirts.
I'm still angry about the war on Iraq and about American policies towards the climate and multi-lateralism, I hope a Kerry victory will make some small change to the direction the world is headed for the sake of the USA and the rest of us.
A while ago I linklogged the google / hire only good matches meme, from about a month ago. It seemed like such an obvious idea that I was sure I'd heard it before. On reading folklore.org on the early history of the mac, I found a reference to Steve Jobs and how to hire "insanely great staff". So, it has a long history.
Though further reading of the folklore site draws many parallels with now in a different light. The early mac team wished to remain small and build interesting things, resenting the influence of managers and not wanting to loose the intensity of the first phase of development.
I can see this happening around me at the moment, in work, with friends and beyond - the small and light approach of
Steve Jobs seems to have solved the problem for himself, Just say no in Product design (third business week link, hmm). He gets his VPs to do the product management and run the company, whilst he concentrates on making the best new products. Luckily, for him, there seem to be enough good people who like the other roles.
Which leads me to my real point, scaling a product from the launch team to the product management team is difficult, kind of second album territory, so you need to be brave enough to change teams. This process will also show you the weakness of your management process and documentation. The handover will make obvious what is in the heads of your staff.
For the individual, you need to understand what your contribution is and then go and find the right place to make it, rather than sitting in the same team for the life of the product. I suppose it also a realisation that one cannot excel at everything, so go and find a role where you are an A.
These thoughts sprung from a thoughtful summer plus becoming both a mentor and a mentee, as well as watching the last few years worth of projects in multimedia, advertising and online work.
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Charts the 5 year development from the Lisa
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short notes on good and bad things to do with typographic design
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reminds me of sticky steps planning techniques, take a goal and reduce it to tasks by working back from delivered result
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different take on the gadget weblog
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short article comparing taxonomy vs tagging
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short essay pointing at the utility of tagging and some future possibilities
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delightful film, beautifully shot about the summer time love story of two teenage girls in England with a darker undercurrent
I really like the sunshine at this time of year, the light comes in at a pleasant low angle, making streets feel brighter and people look more glamorous. The yellow gold colour to the light helps too. Look around and enjoy it, come November it will be bad to grey weak light and we'll need to wait until spring.
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short essay on how the internet is showing the market in the long tail, the niche products
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Steve Jobs on Apple and product focused design, interview in business week
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photos of the contents of peoples bags
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Journal of Management article on the validty of the Myers-Briggs personality test
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nice article hinting at the overlap between web product design and interaction design
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simple strings to search your site for to see what google knows that you do not
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overview of recent interviews from Bob Atkins
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the heavily used films were really dirty, they used lots of macs to do the cleaning and 378TB of storage
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interesting reading in terms of what people want
About 15 months ago I wrote about how I managed my personal todo lists, via bits of paper inside my moleskine. Since then I have taken this approach and extended it to work to do lists too. It is kind of like the 43folders idea, but expressed in a different manner around task mangement.
I have a job in which I need to satisfy the needs of a range of clients and often walk from one meeting straight into the next. Usually generating reams of notes in the process, or lots of text in SubEthaEdit etc. I guess this sounds familiar ?
So, rather than bury my tasks inside the pages of my notebook, I put them on three bits of the larger post-it pad, see photo. Why three, the first two capture what I need to get done, the third is for overspill, when I have not had time to consolidate tasks from the first two. I put the post-it sheets on the inside front cover of the A5 notebook, which I use for note-making.
There is no order to the list, it is just a list of things to do, two pages keeps things to about 20 tasks, trying to subdivide these into categories is a waste of time, things are often too fluid for this to work and there are only 20 tasks. Some prioritization is useful, an asterisk usually suffices. See Paul Hammond on why more than 20 is bad.
Why does this work? It keeps a current, easily replaceable, list of things to do in a fixed location. Thus I always have to hand the next task to complete and so avoid the endless email checking; coffee-making etc distraction tasks that many of us are prone to.
There are some drawbacks, this strategy can lead to action led, short term thinking, so a background set of tasks framing what you need to do over the course of the next month is useful. A hidden advantage is that you have a list of tasks to hand for weekly reports or other audit tasks.
I've been doing this for personal tasks for about 18 months and for work for about a month or so, it works and I feel more on top of my smaller tasks. It is a very minor life hack. Try it and see how you like it, it doesn't cost much to implement.
I was initially quite impressed with the London Film Festival website (lff), that was until I tried to buy tickets from their tickets site.
The normal website has a simple and effective planner facility, it works and you can build up a daily list of those films you want to see from the 280 available. You need to register to use it, which is fine, so that they can identify you. A small semblance of worry rises when the planner has no obvious link to buy the tickets on your plan. However the true horror is not apparent until you try to actually buy the tickets on your carefully crafted schedule.
The festival site with the programme and the ticket purchase site are built by two separate companies and there is NO integration between them, save some visual elements. Not only that, but they have different registration systems and do not clearly state this, which given the common visual look is unforgivable. You need to create a separate identity to actually buy tickets from the LFF site and you cannot import the plan you have made.
Each film must be selected again individually, also the ticket selection system tells you that you have selected to book two tickets, you click next and are told that you have selected no tickets, as the drop down at the bottom also needs to be set to two, regardless of the information onscreen.
Lastly, the registration on the non-secure site emails you a password to login with, thus at least verifying that you are who you claim to have the email address for. The secure site just emails you and takes you straight to the entry screen for your credit card details, there is no verification of identity, save billing address for your credit card.
Thus the clever and elegant planner is useless, the simple process of linking planning to purchase was obviously too complex, as they had managed to commission two companies to build their single site. Inept is the word that springs to mind.
I hope the festival does well, it was great fun last year, but they really need to try a bit harder with the website offering.
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funny (mostly) comments from people developing websites, as said by their clients
