I love japanese stuff. Design, food, technology, scenery, snow, people and engrish. Now you can recharge these batteries using your own urine! I especially love that they are named NoPoPo. Well yes, using urine is better than using PoPo. Work with what you got I say.
Archive for the 'Design' Category
So I’ve had one of the new iMacs for a couple of weeks now and it is still growing on me. This evening I decided to make a very quick video for my brother’s birthday. Sure its a crap video (my first ever), but the latest iMovie was AWESOME. So simple to use. A real education in good design. An excitingly fluid experience to create a simple movie; used GarageBand to make some country music, and uploaded to YouTube right from within iMovie. Apple could have filmed me in one shoot to make a sales tutorial. Outstanding.
My palm treo 750 synchronises over bluetooth using The Missing Sync effortlessly. Something I couldn’t get to work on the laptop running XP, even though the phone is also running Windows.
VMWare Fusion is great too, really simple, amazingly powerful. From what I’ve read it is substantially faster than Parallels which I’ve heard a lot of great things about too.
This sexy new keyboard is great too. Just makes me want to keep on typing…
Wow check out these awesome graphs from gapminder.org, “free software that visualises human development”. Fantastic way of presenting statistics. Isn’t interactivity great? It makes learning fun!
While on the topic of sustainability, have you considered your Triple Bottom Line lately?
I wrote and illustrated a story book in an evening a little while ago. It was actually a lot of fun, I enjoyed the creativity. The style of the story is inspired by my memory of a short story book I read several years ago in Unity Books. I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but I really liked the simplicity of the story and the way it drew you in with a combination of enticing wee sentences and intriguing illustrations. I hope you like my adaptation to my own scenario.
It’s actually a true story believe it or not…
My first thought as I lifted my hand up to the very-close-to-real-size image of the iPhone on my screen was “damn, that’s a big phone”. However, it is quite thin in profile and a similar weight to my little Nokia (which I’m back to using because my Sony is now switching itself off inappropriately).I’m surprised that it only comes in 4 or 8GB options, considering it’s supposed to be an iPod and a computer and a phone.
The thing I’m most excited about is the multi-touch screen… how cool… can’t wait to play with one.
The latest Unlimited magazine has an article on super vegetables. Super broccoli should be first on the shelves apparently. At 20% more expensive I’d like to know just how super they are. They claim it tastes better too. I’m curious whether every other vege producer could just buy these super vegies and use them to grow their own, saving millions on R&D. There’s probably a good scientific reason why that’s not the case…
Anyway, it got me thinking; I’m really keen on healthy food, or at least in understanding what I’m eating. I still enjoy coke, coffee, chocolate, cream and cheesecake, but I do like to know when there are nasties in my food (and then I might consider eating less of it). This has been discussed at Spikefin before, but it might be time to raise it again - perhaps we should build a standard calculator into Gobius so that we can calculate the expected nutritional value of any meal based on its ingredients. If we can already work out its weight, price, make and delivery time then it can’t be too hard to do. Hell Pizza’s website already provides standard nutritional stats which is a great start - but I believe we could take this further by providing these stats for a whole meal (including the trim latte with sugar), and to break it down by head and by adjusting the figures when we removes the cheese, or whatever. Of course this will all be more complex now that broccoli is not just broccoli.
Look how modular it is. I was able to have a prototype model working in under 5 minutes. Plug and Play. It even has a reflection. It must be Web2.0. I name it spikr.
Spikefin on Wheels.
So who has the fastest web development framework? A couple of local techos are willing to put their reputations on the line to find out… I’ve come up with the application concept, now they will race to provide the working technology. In line already we have Ben Nolan using Rails and Sam Minnee using Silverstripe. Can you beat them?
Ever found yourself floundering with too many partners to keep track of? (well, neither have I) If so, then this is the application you’ve been waiting for. Check out the competition rules. (Notice I’ve been playing with Google Docs. Works surprisingly well).
Screenshots are your friend
Follow them precisely as this will save you lots of time and tedious refinements later. It will also train the UI designer to give you exactly what you need.
Everything on the screen should visually line up with something else
Alignment is close to godliness. Well actually, it just has the same x position (to the pixel).
Consistency is King
This applies to margins, padding, colours, fonts, font sizes, font emphasis, text block locations, use of interface components (like dropdowns, checkboxes, radios etc), animation styles, button sizes… Consistent. CONSISTENT.
Use the prescribed colour palette
Colour approximations are NOT close enough. If you don’t know the correct colour, then just use something WAY OFF until you are provided with the correct colour hex number, which will be moments after the designer, manager or client sees bog standard magenta on the interface.
If the sentence or button label you are about to use is valid SQL then think again
It is difficult to think in English and in code on the same day. If the choice has been left to you, try to write something that will not insult, bore or frustrate the user, contains no “humourâ€, and then create a Trac ticket to get this wording reviewed when convenient.