Loving the highly iPhone friendly mobile version of the NZ Herald. It’s an especially good experience over GPRS.
Not loving the new Delicious design. Way too much visual noise. What used to take a few key clicks (tagging new bookmarks) now takes a few additional clumsy key clicks and mouse clicks.
I’m putting together some hands-on workshops, focused on improving online experiences. I’ve created a new site for this little project - please head over to Skyrize.com for all the details.
The first one is Rapid Prototyping in Flash (no experience with Flash necessary). We’ll also be covering many aspects of interaction design. It’s happening on 31 July from 7-9pm. The workshop is for designers, developers, project managers, biz dev and marketing people.
It should be a lot of fun. Be sure to register early, because registration is limited to 10 people, so everyone has quality hands-on time.
It’s always made me crazy that phone experiences aren’t better integrated with the desktop. On the desktop you have the space to manipulate large data sets and UI elements very easily and quickly.
There have been feeble, wretched attempts made by Nokia and Sony. I’m disappointed with the integration Apple has offered so far with the iPhone via iTunes. It’s extremely limited and frustrating. The new Mobile Me interface seems promising, but I’m not holding my breath that it’s what I want.
In the video below, Google demos the type of customisation that I’m looking for. At about 3:30 they show how you to customise the phone experience through a desktop interface. Just drag-and-drop content and UI widgets to your phone. Finally somebody has done it right!
I’ve previously mentioned my antipathy for OSX. It’s been two years since I made a go at switching to a Mac. I can’t say anything major has changed with the Mac since then. What has changed?
But perhaps the biggest factor: my iPhone. The iPhone has really made me lust for more. More luscious details. More speed. More fun.
It’s now been about 5 weeks since getting my hands on Darryl’s old iMac 24″. That’s 3 weeks more than I endured last go round! Many of my previous gripes still linger. Like the inability to maximize app windows. Font rendering. On the 160 dpi iPhone type is stunningly gorgeous. Font rendering on the 72 dpi Mac is a sad imitation, often resulting in butchered illegible type that makes my eyes bleed. I really don’t understand how type purists delude themselves so relentlessly.
Lucky for me, I have a couple Mac die-hards sitting nearby who have been showing me all the secret five fingered key commands, hidden settings and special software that makes working with a Mac tolerable.
So far, the best thing about being on the Mac is…
Overall, I’m happy with the Mac experience. I certainly don’t think it’s flawless. But the speed, the lickable graphics (in spite of the type rendering) and the hardware win me over. I admit that it’s starting to make my eyes hurt whenever I go back to using Windows.
There does seem to be an interesting correlation between the increasing number of iPhones and Macs at Xero. Everyone seems to be switching. Even Grant switched.
With the abject failure of Vista, the mainstream switch-to-Apple tipping point is truly upon us. Jobs is well on his way to resurrecting Apple from the dead, while Microsoft have dug their own grave.
Fifty or a hundred years from now I suspect history will smile broadly on Jobs as a monumental business and cultural icon, while reflecting on Bill Gates as a one-time antagonist in the Steve Jobs story.
The night before the Webstock halfbaked challenge I got a hellish fever (it turned out to be tonsillitis). I was up all night with the chills. In my feverish delusional state I somehow had the hallucinatory inspiration to put together a presentation for my halfbaked team to show on my behalf, which for some strange reason they never did show.
You probably need to be fully baked (or feverishly delusional) to appreciate it. Click on the movie, then use the keyboard left and right arrow keys to go through the frames.
I’m pretty certain this could have swayed the vote in our favor.
Watch this video of the physics game software Phun (then go download Phun and have a blast playing with it!!).
Also, check out this video showing Crayon Physics.
And Crayon Physics for the iPhone.
You can install Crayon Physics for iPhone by adding http://iphone.r4m0n.net/repos as a source to Installer.app.
Finally, have a look at Moovl. It’s in Java, which I refuse to install, but the intro video provides a good overview of the concept.
Doesn’t it inspire you to dream up cool possibilities for games and learning tools?! Have you seen other games or apps that you find completely fun and inspiring?
As a side note, that’s a cool use of Google Presentations. It took me a long time to notice the “audience” and chat features.
Awesome robots courtesy of Verb
Thanks to a few truly dedicated people (I’m looking at you Mike and Tash) Wellington just played host to a geek orgy of supreme quality. First rate speakers, venue, schwag, branding, web site, and perhaps most importantly coffee…mmm…people’s coffee.
I was particularly looking forward to sessions by Cal Henderson (slides galore), Tom Coates (notes and old slides) and Michael Lopp (notes and more notes). Each delivered a superb presentation. I was hoping for a few radical new ideas to completely rock my world, but it was predominantly a refresher course on “the web as platform”. Which was still excellent and inspiring.
Tom Coates’ sneak peek of Fire Eagle was pretty interesting (tho what’s up with the lame name?). Fire Eagle aggregates and broadcasts geo-data, so other apps can retrieve or publish your geolocation at any given moment. The implications of this concept were nicely amplified by Nigel Parker’s 8×5 session on privacy and pervasive online tracking - some kids (his…doh, mine too) have been online since they were in the womb, while other people are implanting RFID tags under their skin, and a few people currently broadcast their geolocation via GPS.
The fireside chat with Sam and Rowan was fun. Rowan roasted Sam with a hilarious video from the nascent days of TradeMe, when Sam was just a young pup. They waxed nostalgic, but also dissected the TradeMe deal starting with how Sam struggled to get investment funding and then buggered off on his OE just when it started to break even. Upon his return the business started taking off. He got serious buyout offers from Yahoo and Telecom, but upped the ante and ultimately landed the Fairfax deal.
My world did get unexpectedly rocked by Amy Hoy. Her session was about coercing people through design and language (excellent notes from her session here). For somebody in advertising, this might have been a basic refresher. However, Amy made it especially relevant and compelling by presenting great offline and online comparisons. For instance, I’ve always wondered why Amazon presents people with an overwhelming and chaotic array of information and options on every page. Where’s the usability and good design in that, right? It’s intentionally that way. For the same reason that malls (and casinos, for that matter) are designed with burrowed interiors: to get you wandering around, somewhat lost. It’s there to keep you busy and distracted, because it’s well known that the more time you spend in a store, the more money you spend.
On the downside, many of the sessions were tediously academic. Too many bullets points. Too much bleating and pontificating on theory. There was a frustrating absence of demos and real world case studies from the trenches. It should be an absolute requirement to show demos, which must include a breakdown of the design/dev/business decisions that lead up to the finished work.
Simon Willison was the only person I saw who did a real world demo with live code, showing Django in action. It was interesting and impressive, but not where my head is at these days. His session on OpenID was excellent and it definitely caught my interest, but it still didn’t leave me with huge confidence in the OpenID standard, as it currently stands.
Another serious downer was the Wifi situation. It was utterly disgraceful and humiliating to watch so many prominent visitors from across the globe unable to get a working internet connection. At a web conference. It’s like having a world conference on electricity and we don’t have enough power to keep the lights on. How bad does it need to get in this city and in this country before internet connectivity becomes an angry-mob-inducing crisis? (as I’m writing this my TelstraClear connection has been down for hours – now’s good, huh?)
As always, there were sessions I was frustrated I couldn’t attend. I heard from many people that Mike Lopp’s session on design management was fascinating. Sadly, it’s also one of the few that will not be made available online. Damnit! Apparently, he described how Apple creates 10 different pixel perfect prototypes for each new piece of functionality in their software! I can’t say I buy into that approach. I know how much time it takes to finesse every little gradient, drop shadow and icon. I appreciate how important those details are in the final product, but when you’re exploring new ideas you tend to lose the plot when you focus on fine tuned pixel pushing. Worst of all, you get way too precious with your design, since you’ve invested so much time and energy.
Nothing could have capped things off more perfectly than the happy coincidence of Phoenix Foundation playing in Frank Kitts park. It was a beautiful night, the buzz of the crowd was blissful and the band rocked hard. It was purely intoxicating.
To finish things off here’s a short, but brilliant clip from the show…
During the 2000 U.S. presidential election I joked that if George Bush were elected I’d leave the country. In 2001, we emigrated to New Zealand. When people ask me why I moved to New Zealand I only half jokingly explain that I’m a political refugee.
My engagement with U.S. politics is tending to diminish the longer I’m an expat. Especially after the last fiasco of an election, I’m observing things as an outsider.
Nevertheless, watching this election it’s occurred to me that in some ways 2008 is looking a bit like 1968. America is in the middle of an unconscionable war, meanwhile there are echoes of Bobby Kennedy in the air. Let’s hope that the parallels end there.
Apart from Obama, the leading candidates are the same old charlatans. Puppets. Pandering megalomaniacs, power whores whose only interest is getting their head on the pedestal. Hillary is perhaps the worst of them all.
That’s why I’m really glad that Lessig made this video, it is required viewing…
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