Product marketing pep talk for Google by Seth Godin

Posted by admin in Marketing on April 8th, 2010

Lovely video – couple of years old now – but still relevant.

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Beardyman hologram

Posted by admin in Amusement, Music on March 20th, 2010

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Sticky running 1000 miles for the MNDA

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on March 16th, 2010

Please forgive this re-/cross-/multiple-posting/email but I have a cause…

Here’s a call for support for Johnny “Sticky” Budden: Parkour Traceur/free runner extraordinaire…

He’s speeding 1,000 miles on foot across and around the length of the UK and on to Paris in one month to raise money and awareness for the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

30+ consecutive marathons+ using Parkour.

What is Parkour? It’s that crazy-looking discipline/sport/art-of-motion. Taking running jumps across the tall/scary bits of the [often urban] environment because it’s the most efficient way to get from A to B. So those 1,000 miles will be foot-propelled but not necessarily on foot. Crikey.

[Update: Because this wasn't enough he is going to start with an attempted 100 mile ultra marathon... that's reckoned to be over 24 hours running.]

Patrick Joyce (@patrickoptimist) currently on the MNDA home-page...

Motor Neurone Disease = MND (= ALS in the States) = a bitch. Stephen Hawking has it but it’s typically fatal within 2–5 years.

Why do I care?

MND has struck my very good friend Patrick Joyce. Pat the most generous fun-loving cr-ea-ti-ve powerhouse and all-round champion. You’d never want for a better friend. MND is a bitch, life’s a bitch but Pat is an “incurable optimist” {} and this little setback isn’t bringing him down.

Get to the website stickyparkour.com and poke about a bit but get to that link that says “SPONSOR ME“…  (we’ll shoot the designers another day) or go straight to his page at JustGiving. But do CLICK THROUGH – there’s woefully little cash support for a task of this size.

Better still: you groupies, adrenaline junkies and long legged marathon runners out there… find Johnny and join in for a bit…

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sorry

Posted by admin in Web design & development on March 1st, 2010

My apologies to Manpreet Singh whom I had assumed to be claiming credit for a site I have designed and developed in his online CV…

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Support Driven Development

Posted by admin in Web design & development on February 19th, 2010

Please excuse this wanton copy-paste

The article is good in its entirety but this is the best bit of this ThinkVitamin article Kevin Hale of Wufoo talks UX, Funding, Startups and API integration…

Because we’re a small team that desires to stay a small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats in our company and that includes manning the inbox and doing customer support every single week. One of the interesting side effects of having a company where everyone has to answer support emails, is that everyone has a stake in making sure application is as easy to use as possible. We actually call this approach to designing software Support Driven Development and it’s been really great for us.

The priorities and desire for simplicity and clarity are actually the result of people wanting to make their weekly support interactions as few and positive as possible. Getting a feature into Wufoo that adds unnecessary complexity is a big no-no in our company. In fact, we make adding any element to the interface the hardest thing possible in our design process. Every button, every word, every link, every switch is scrutinized to make sure it’s absolutely necessary and won’t generate a future support request.

Additionally, users are also really bad at both explaining what they need and what other people need. It’s just part of human nature to justify biases rather than consider needs objectively from the vantage point of what’s good for the community and the future of the app itself. This is not to say you shouldn’t bother with your users (or your designer’s intuition) when you’re building your product or considering new features.

I sincerely believe that users are the key (and intuition does help), but you have to realize that user interface studies have shown time and again that what you have to trust is what the users DO and not what they SAY, which is why getting an interface out there quickly and used in an observable way is crucial. After that, it’s all just successful iterations based on feedback from those on the ground.

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On Advertising and Flash-in-the-Pan

Posted by admin in Web design & development on February 19th, 2010

There’s two massive teacupstorms out there at the moment about Flash and HTML5. Adobe is trying to sabotage HTML5 goes one wind. Flash is dead long live Canvas (or rather Squirrel cheats on Flash with iPad) goes another. [Please excuse the gratuitous CSSquirrel comic links]

“Whatever” says I. As long as there are people who need to make things go whiz-bang then – authoring tools like Adobe’s Flash – and people that know how to use them will stay in demand.

Today I was hit with a fine example of flash advertising. Not groundbreaking – but well crafed – and aimed at me – web designer-developer who’s been on the lookout for hosting. It points at a pan-european German based web host called Strato. If my trial month with WebFusion doesn’t go well I might give them a go. But so far I’ve got to say I like WebFusion and their support… TBC

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Cloud enabled local web development using Dropbox et al

Posted by admin in Technology, Web design & development on February 6th, 2010

or I *sync* my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro with Dropbox and Gmail

Cloud enabled local web development? That’s an oxymoron — right? Explain. I prefer to develop/design using MAMP as it’s quicker and doesn’t rely on a sketchy internet connection. While I have a main powerhouse of a Mac Pro under my desk I also use a very capable little MacBook Pro.*

Anyway

I was on the road today – and finally felt the full advantage of getting myself fully into The Cloud.

The main issue? Synchronising my digital self across more than one computer. Storage and email are the main issues…

While according to some Apple’s dot Mac/MobileMe may well be the current cream of cloud subscription services in North America – out here in backwater Europe performance is sh*te. Particularly iDisk. While Apple’s webmail is good – it’s trying too hard to be a desktop application and failing.

For storage I can’t recommend Dropbox enough and for e-mail there’s Gmail…

Dropbox

Now I’ve got my Sites folder (and  a few salient folders of Work In Progress) in Amazon’s S3 cloud via Dropbox. The free service is great (2GB) and the paid versions (50/100GB) are not expensive…

  • It’s easy.
  • It’s speedy. One of the technical features of the system is that files are stored as blobs of hashed deltas (wikipedia says it betterer )… popular files are recognized and appear online without having to be transferred – for example some reference books and software libraries that uploaded very smartly.
  • It’s nimble. As the thing works with deltas and blobs it’s also quick to mirror things when you’ve just been making minor edits or rearranging things.
  • 30 days of versioning for all your files - TimeMachine in the Cloud!

Syncing external folders (e.g. ~/Sites ) across multiple machines with Dropbox

Thanks to this post I found the answer…

[NB - your short user name needs to be the same on all your Macs! If not then go here and read part three "The Full Monty"...]

The steps to synchronising your ~/Sites folder (or any folder that you don’t want to move into the Dropbox watched folder ) between two or more Macs are:

  1. temporarily turn off Dropbox on both machines
  2. make your first sync manually between them (use a direct connection – or load up a USB stick/external HD)
  3. create symlinks into your Dropbox folder on both machines. Create the symlink by typing a command into a Terminal window… it goes a little something like this: ln -s  /path/to/folder/name_desired_folder ~/Dropbox/desired-folder
  4. then restart Dropbox on both machines

Now I’m coding on the go with hassle-free syncing and backup. That is nice.

Email

Well I’ve become a Gmail man. It may not be pretty but Gmail has threaded conversations done properly and labels. Took me a while to get used to threaded conversations [takes me a while to get most things!] but now I find them indispensable. Gmail’s generally very good at keeping quoted text out of your face making the threads very readable. Obviously threaded conversations aren’t so useful if people veer off-track or forsake the reply button in favour of the new message. Offline access was not robust in Safari and now it’s not an option as Mac OS 10.6 won’t have it.  So I still use Mail.app as a backup.

Still on MobileMe/dotMac

The missing links… I’m still on Mobile Me and using it for Address Book, Calendar and Keychain synching. [My FTP favourites too thank's to Panic's Mobile Me implementation in their FTP app Transmit]. Tied into this is Apple’s iSync application which is keeping my mobiles in step. Until Google’s address book improves drastically I’m not considering a move.

*Not just for the occasional bit Road Warrior stuff but also we do sometimes vacate this town for more than a couple of days plus mains power is also a bit of an issue round here! Sometime I need to use my laptop in the office (I do have a UPS but it doesn’t last very long with the beast.)

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