blog: common thoughts

Boring though it may be, when one little piece of electronic equipment is your toolbox, your palette, your bomb disposal kit, your holy grail… well, it’s fairly important. So, having painstakingly made the decision 6 months ago not to go with an Apple I have been wonderfully impressed with my Sony Vaio S3HP. [The Apple vs Windows thing btw was a lengthy decision… as director of a user experience company should I be using the platform that everyone desires to be more like or the platform that the majority use?]

I’ll not bore you with the specs or how rock-solid it’s been or how easy it was to set-up or what else came in the box or blah, blah, blah. Suffice to say, this is the first time I’ve bought and truly enjoyed a Windows & hardware solution that out of the box felt quick, slick, powerful and like a complete package. Even the boot-up Vaio jingle is just right.

I’ve been quite impressed with the first edition of the Guardian ‘Berliner’. Well, in fact, my initial impressed status was in the last Saturday edition of the broadsheet actually, in which there was a 4-page demo version of the Berliner containing info about how the fonts had been designed, the general design/layout, how much www.guardian.co.uk would be playing a role in the printed paper’s content, etc. It was impressive not only to see that the Guardian have paid so much attention to the design [which hopefully most publications of this scale do] but more that they thought we’d like to know about it.

The actual printed edition the following Monday was equally impressive… the design is fresh yet somehow traditional, conveying somehow a sense of the web relationship in it’s layout and style. The colour photos throughout are great and the general quality and breadth of content feels more like something of a weekly journal. Let’s hope this standard is maintained beyond week one and that it’s not just pushing the best to the front for showcase week.

I usually hate this sort of pre-packaged development environment stuff as I want to get to the core of the engine and configure it as I want. However, having just set this up for a colleague [designer] on his WinXP box I was very impressed, and might even use it myself in future.

I’ve been highly impressed by Open Office 1.9.1xxx RC3. Considering it’s still only a ‘release candidate’ it is a very stable and complete package. At first of course it inevitably feels a little alien to the majority, reared for so long on MS Office, but once the switch is made the differences soon disappear.

And then they re-appear. In a good way. For instance, little touches like being able to amend the standard colour palette in OOo is a great feature… I added our brand colours to the palette in Writer and named the colours accordingly and the palette is automatically updated across the suite of products. This in itself has created consistency across documents of different formats that might not have occured using MS Office. The styles palette in OOo is used equally consistently. All the advanced features that perhaps have pushed MS Office ahead in the past are now well implemented and stable such as tables, image handling, charting, etc.

Even better, on the odd occasion when things do go wrong in this release candidate it crashes and resumes very gracefully. Once the error reporting is completed I’ve not yet had an occasion where my document wasn’t fully recovered. Add to this the apps now present ‘proper’ Win32 interfaces and the ease of use moving documents between our Windows and Linux boxes and it suddenly feels like all bases are covered.

Overall this looks like an excellent competitor to MS Office and one that we’ll be sticking with.

I’m impressed with the new ‘missed call’ feature on the Orange network. Last year they added a feature whereby if someone called but didn’t leave an answerphone message whilst your phone was turned off they’d notify you by text message when you turned the phone back on that someone had called. Now however this feature has been enhanced so that the text message looks like it came from the number the person was calling from, meaning that assuming the number is in your address book it looks as though the text message is from the person who called, and reads to the effect of “This person called but was unable to reach you at 12:35pm”. Simple but very effective.

Maybe it’s just me been snoozing but has the Trebuchet font made a comeback of late? Bizarrely, the thing that made me realise it was when we installed WordPress [this blog engine] and as a result I was asked to do a design for integrating the blog into our site. The default WordPress template is actually very good with a bold but fresh looking header to the page and standard layout, but what struck me was the striking appearance of the Trebuchet font being used. Maybe it’s just that the font see’s much more prominence in current advertising [recently, Apple and Three spring to mind as having big marketing drives containing prominent use of a font that is very similar] but it suddenly looked very fresh and appealing… and kind of, well, current!

Searchbox focus in Firefox = Ctrl+K
I was sick of doing “New Tab, Search Google” in Firefox but have just found the probably well-known keyboard shortcut to transfer focus into the Google box, meaning that instead of Ctrl+T followed by mouse into Google Box you can now just do Ctrl+T, Ctrl+K.

How many times do designers grumble about having to get everything ‘pixel perfect’? [Or more often than not, techies grumble about having to code the designs given to them to the same pixel perfection as the designer crafted them]. Well, the next time it feels a chore, have a think before grumbling… as part of a new method involved in the long search to ‘measure gravity’, scientists are using equipment that measures to one thousand billion billionth’s of a metre! Better get it in the draft CSS3 spec quick.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1635009,00.html

Not meaning to tread on Techy Geek’s toes but there’s a great guide to CSS shorthand on Dustin Diaz’s blog at http://www.dustindiaz.com/css-shorthand/

For people who don’t use CSS every day and therefore forget bits of it inbetween this is a cool reference page.

An interesting article on mozilla.org regarding Googles usability testing/recommendations for tabbed browsing [specifically in Firefox but applicable to other scenarios]…
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009210.html

This has of course sparked the debate “Why are Google interested in better Firefox usability? Is gBrowser just around the corner?”.