February Update

It's been a while since I posted here!

One of my aims this year is to set up my own publishing platform - and currently with a full time job my free moments are becoming less and less frequent. However, this doesn't mean that I don't want a new website!

Anyway, if you're interested, there's a whole list of design, mac, tech, code links that I've built up over the past year or so. Enjoy.

http://www.daringfireball.net/
http://www.shawnblanc.net/
http://www.bokardo.com/
http://www.andyrutledge.com/
http://www.codinghorror.com/
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/
http://www.subtraction.com/
http://www.graphpaper.com/
http://www.meyerweb.com/
http://www.456bereastreet.com/
http://www.zuschlogin.com/
http://www.ilovetypography.com/
http://www.warpedvisions.org/
http://www.theocacao.com/
http://www.lonelysandwich.com/
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/
http://www.davidseah.com/
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew
http://www.ideasonideas.com/
http://www.perezfox.com/
http://www.johnsonbanks.co.uk/thoughtfortheweek
http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com/
http://www.seansperte.com/
http://www.37signals.com/svn

Happy 50

50 posts already. Wow.

UXT has been a great exercise for me, in terms of publishing web content. It's also been an experiment to see how capable Blogger is as an application - and it has some great innovations, for sure.

Of particular note is the autosaving of posts, with expandable 'labels' (or tags) section, and generally a good, clean UI throughout. However this platform isn't really where I want UXT to be in the future - it has limitations that I think could hold back what I want to share with the world.

I've tried out many blogging platforms locally, and I'm not satisfied enough with any of them to start a 'serious' website tailored to my needs. So, I'm writing my own.

I will also stop posting article links on a regular basis, as I feel that there is an imbalance between what I have written and what I have linked to. I may or may not continue to post my own thoughts here... but watch this space.

Hopefully I'll have a new publishing system out there early next year. Thanks for reading.

Redesigning eBay's Registration

Obviously, it's all about the little things - and how they can make a big difference. (via)

The Sad State of Digital Software Distribution

Good post by Jeff.

Your reading level?

I'm a genius! No, really! Check for yourself.



I don't believe it, personally. What's your reading level? (via)

Applications or Actions 2: Duplicate my functionality?

It's very hard to create an application that has all of the features that all of us want, without anything we don't want. In fact, you'd have to make it so simple that it could only support one feature.

So instead what we have are many applications all doing the same thing, but differently. Why? Why do we need 20 different media players on our systems? Because each one has functionality that we need, we like, or that does something peculiar we might need every so often.

Currently on the Mac I have a few media applications - system ones such as iTunes, DVD Player and Quicktime, then ones I installed like VLC, and Windows Media Player. What bugs me about this is that I effectively have 4 video players - when all I want to do is just play video.

VLC is great and is a much better replacement for me than Quicktime - it handles QT movies efficiently and is supposed to handle WMV effectively too, but it doesn't. That's where WMP comes in, but that's useless for me as it can only play 1 video at a time (no playlist queue), and it breaks one of the best parts of OS X as well - closing the video window quits the program. Which is silly - if I want a browser running but I have nothing to look up yet, I should be able to hide it until I do need it.

I'm going off topic here. OK, then next there is DVD Player which I can only use for DVDs. I think I prefer it's interface to the rest, but again, DVDs only.

4 applications, each doing different tasks, but each doing the same task overall. VLC is the only one that does playlist management, WMP the only one doing WMV files, DVD player playing only DVDs, and poor QT, shunned but I still need it on my system!

What I need is one interface that can manage playlists of video, can play DVDs and WMVs too, and has a nice UI that's clean and easy to use. I'm sure this is what other people would want too - although perhaps with a different featureset. This is where application fragments come in.

Having 4 applications to achieve the same end result doesn't seem to be the best way any more.

Ask 37signals: How has open source helped or hindered?

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure.

Nice read.

Applications or Actions?

So, what do I mean by an action? An action can be something that involves storing data, formatting it or publishing it. Naturally, applications have long supported these actions - but what irks me is that I need more than one application to complete a task.

For example, say I wanted to set up a new website about my cat. My workflow would usually be this:

1. Find a picture in my iPhoto library.
2. Open Photoshop to crop and resize. Then save for the web.
3. Launch TextWrangler and churn out some nice semantic XHTML.
4. Open Cyberduck and FTP my XHTML and JPG up to the web.
5. Open Firefox just to check it all works.
6. Use Mail to email everyone I know to tell them about my new site.

Whilst listening to some music from iTunes, of course.

For this simple task I need 6 applications, plus 1 background process. Each of these programs has features that I need for my project - but I am not using enough of each program to justify launching the full blown functionality of that application.

iTunes is a comprehensive music management application. I don't need the library functions whilst building my website - just stick an album into the playlist and off it goes. iPhoto has my entire photo library on hand, but all I need to see is the pictures of my cat. Photoshop has just about everything I'll ever need to enhance images, but all I need to do is a little cropping. TextWrangler has great functionality, but I'm just writing some bog standard XHTML.

I'm being spoiled with all the features that these applications give to me - but I don't need them.

My contention is, why do we need vast applications when most of the time we're only going to use 20% of their features? What would be more useful is application fragments.

A fragment could consist of a text editor, or a cropping tool, or a layering engine, or a character map, or a database. When I boot the machine, it would go into a mode where I could say:

"Hey Macintosh. Today, I'd love to put on some Radiohead - The Bends, I think. Can you find for me some pictures of my cat? I'd like to crop these pictures, then write a website for them. Then, I'd like to email all my friends to tell them about my new website. That'd be grand."

Using Spotlight, Macintosh could find The Bends out of my music library and spin it in the background. Then, it would find all of my pictures tagged with 'cat', and display them in a nice grid interface. I could double click on one and it would organise a cropping tool, with a nice resize mode. Once I was done there, it would launch a text editing mode with syntax highlighting so I could finish the XHTML quickly.

I would be using elements of all of these programs - syntax highlighting, web rendering, mailing, cropping, searching, playing media - but the experience would be seamless. The underlying technology would support the action I was doing - building a website - rather than flicking between applications.

There's hope for this kind of implementation yet - the iLife suite seamlessly manages media effortlessly. Making a movie, for example - iMovie can draw media from your photo/music databases without launching iTunes/iPhoto first. This is the kind of stuff I'd want to see.

ALA #248

Two high quality articles, served up fresh.

Solve for the moment.

A good user experience is all about good … moments.

The Art Of Hyperlinking

A guide on how to hyperlink properly. I'd also add to the list:

Use the title attribute of an anchor so that it is clear to what you are linking to. Usually the site title and article title are enough, but if you haven't stated the article content in your document, then provide a sentence or two as well.

What Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers

An interesting article - software and restaurants aren't so different after all.

Loncheria

A heart warming read. Business can't be all about the money, can it?

Let them eat cake.

It amazes me somewhat that when a good solution does crop up, it's not implemented across websites that should be using it.

One of my pet peeves about some websites is that their articles spread over a number of pages - I know why this is, it's to break up the content into easily manageable chunks - like what is done with printed media. But folks, this is the web. I don't want to have to click 10 times just to read an article - that's 10 times I have to download the associated banners. Straightforward printing is also near impossible on these multipage articles - and 'print-friendly' pages are worthless when we have CSS to provide that functionality.

So why aren't these sites providing the content in one page and breaking it up using javascript? It's perfectly accessible, it's quick and printer-friendly pages are a thing of the past. It still amazes me that 3 years after the article was written, we have webmasters keen to spread content out over multiple pages - especially as broadband connections have become more ubiquitous.

Generic Commands.

In application design, there's a tension between power and simplicity: Users want the ability to get a lot done, but they don't want to take the time to learn lots of complicated features.

• One way to address this dilemma is to use progressive disclosure — that is, to show users only the most important options until they ask for the advanced features.


• Another good approach is to use generic commands, which remain the same across many different contexts and thus reduce complexity.

Nice reads.

Creating customer loyalty.

Even though I'm already a loyal Amazon customer, the repeated great experiences
keep strengthening that loyalty. Small things count[...]They could've
gotten an extra $3.99 shipping cost out of me, but instead they refused to let
me pay extra.

Perhaps it's not about this sale. Perhaps it's about the next one. Nice post.

Enough with the lists.

You heard the man.

Bad graphs

Something I never even considered until today. Though, I've never used a 3d chart before.

Why Enterprise Software Sucks

This is why. (via)

Magic Shop

Apple employees help sell $4,000 worth of product per square foot per month. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond. […] Gap started employee orientation on the wrong foot by showing us a video about the perils of employee theft. Starbucks handed out Orwellian handbooks telling us to “Be Authentic.” Such approaches produce cynicism and engender a fake sense of belonging, if any at all. Apple treated us like adults.

They know how to do things right. (via)