Elly & I just sent the new Heddon Holistic Therapies Centre website live.
The centre itself was founded by Val Lockey, who is an amazing therapist. Since we moved up to Newcastle 18 months ago I’ve been going to Val for help with my RSI. Even with all the crazy travel I’m doing these days, she helps to keep me pain-free and so I can heartily recommend her services!
Eating your own dog food is a strategy often proposed to help companies produce better products. Using your own software exposes you to flaws that you might not otherwise find — intensive, day-to-day usage can highlight annoyances and bugs that even the most robust test scripts cannot. This makes a strategy of internal use particularly powerful to identify usability issues.
I think that what is being missed is what an opportunity eating your own dog food can be for accessibility as well. Web application developers should take a day a month, switch off all Javascript, possibly even swap into Lynx (or similar “no frills” browser) and try using their applications as normal. One could do the same from a mobile browser or different OSes.
Before, when testing was a big effort before pushing the product out the door, brief testing in each different environment was an OK (but not fantastic) strategy. With incremental development and frequent releases becoming the most popular software engineering model, kneeling and eating our own dog food should become an integral part of all our development and testing strategies.
I know that everyone else has already found and talked about Moo’s Flickr Minicards. I just wanted to heap some extra praise on the pile. I just ordered their free sample for Pro users and was SUPER impressed:
On One Map is possibly the coolest Google Maps mashup I’ve seen so far. Not that it’s the most innovative — more that it’s the most insanely useful. Looking for houses is a pain in the arse if you don’t know exactly where you want to live — you end up browsing the house descriptions first and having to branch out to find out where the place actually IS. Whereas we all know that the number one rule in househunting is “Location, location location!”.
Now I just have to resist the urge to find another house — we’ve only been in our current flat a year and 7 days!
After spending a few days deliberating between using Rails and Django for my wedding site, I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall.
However easy it would be to install all the required bits and bobs on one of my Linux boxes I have kicking around the house, I really prefer NOT to have any of them running 24/7 or accessible from the outside world. So I started looking at which framework I’d be able to run on my hosting. Unfortunately, neither seems possible.
So much for that then. Time for a new host at some point, I think, (especially as Neathosting unfortunately seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth!) but can’t really be bothered for what I’m trying to do at the moment. Any recommendations for great hosts that can support Rails/Django, anyone?
The first day of SXSWi this year was a little overwhelming. Perhaps I was still recovering from the Geeks with Guns episode; perhaps there were just that many more people here this year. Nevertheless, it was great to see so many folks coming together. There also seemed to be fewer people attached to their laptops this year — although I was an exception to this rule. For the record though, I don’t even have wireless so I really was just taking notes!
The official site for this panel can be found here and my full notes are here
This guy was fantastic and I took a lot of notes — you can find them here.
This was essentially a ubicomp panel, although not billed as such. It was definitely a lot more practically focused than many ubicomp discussions I’ve seen. The key point was that we need to be able to tie information (online) to location (offline).
The panelists essentially just discussed the various products they had created or worked on and the positives and negatives of the experience. The inability of cellphones to really pinpoint their own locations was a frequent bitch. The value of tying online information to offline places was obvious — although personally I’m not sure how you’d distinguish between the “plaque” style of info and the graffiti … or accommodate the people who sometimes WANT to look at the graffiti!
My full notes can be found here.
Most of the session time was taken up with the Secret Identity game — everyone had to think of a secret and then we all went around the room trading secrets with people. The intent was that you treated each new secret as your own. At the end, people wrote their secrets on a big green sticker and stuck it on thier backs. There was a very interesting shuffle around the room, whilst everyone tried to see everyone else’s backs!
My full notes are here.
Not to be nasty or anything, but when I first saw the new Google Maps logo a few days ago, I thought that they’d been hacked. At worst, I figured it was some stunt, associated with a national day of which I was unaware.
Still, 4 days have past and I can only assume that Google have DELIBERATELY changed their Google Maps logo to look like a turd.
UPDATE: Seems it’s just me. Not sure what’s going on, to be honest. Perhaps Firefox is having image caching issues as someone suggested.
I got this via email this morning. First of all, let me assure ALL of you that they had ZERO reason to believe that I would want to buy an Enya CD. There is nothing in my CD collection that I would class as anything remotely like Enya.
Recommendations on the whole are a great idea. Amazon’s return on investment for their reco emails must be massive — I certainly am usually prompted to buy something when one arrives. Often not what they’re recommending, but something nonetheless.
This time, however, the recommendation has gone seriously wrong … I’m not encouraged to buy anything. I mainly just feel insulted!!
Here’s something that’s been bugging me. Why, when I am uploading multiple exhibits of gastronomic delight to Flickr, has no-one been commenting?
Today I worked it out, after uploading a bunch of photos at the weekend. Essentially the problem is this: normally, when I upload things, I first transfer them as “Private”. This is so I can go through, update the titles, descriptions, tags, etc, without the photos appearing multiple times in my photo feed and annoying the hell out of everyone.
At the weekend, however, I accidentally uploaded everything as “Public” and then went through updating the metadata. Suddenly it’s comment city! So I suppose that there is some kind of annoying feed feature in that if you don’t initially publicise your photos, then when you do so later they aren’t included in your feed either.
Frankly, Flickr, that’s a little crap. Isn’t there a middle way?
Yesterday I ended up with a Firefox window within which all the tabs were new or nearly new web apps. I figured I’d do a quick round-up of funky stuff that had appeared in the last year or so, that I think is particularly cool:
“One login. One id. Multiple obsessive todo/tovisit/tomeet lists.
Your OCD in me is pleased. “
Every now and again it’s interesting to find a case where the user interface design has resulted in completely different views of the same features. The usability-speak for this is that particular designs afford different uses. An open door, for instance, affords walking through it. A door handle affords pushing down and pulling. This is why putting handles on doors that are intended to be pushed is so confusing for people.
Essentially, Flickr tags and Gmail labels are pretty much the same thing. You can apply several of them to one thing, it helps you describe the thing (whether it be an email or a photo) and gives you an alternative way to browse your data.
There are some interesting differences of course too. Flickr tags are more about social organisation of data than Gmail labels — arguably, you’re the only one who’s going to need to find your email, whereas you want others to happen upon your photos. The most interesting difference, however, is a very simple interface design decision.
You assign Flickr tags to a photo by typing in the tags, separated by spaces. It is freeform — there’s no need to create the tag before you apply it, or to check spelling. There are downsides to this — if you forget how you’re classifying things, you might end up with duplicates. I’m pretty sure that I have multiple labels for the same thing — motorbike, bike, motorcycle, honda. Gmail labels, on the other hand, do need to be created first and are applied using a drop-down selector.
In terms of the interface design, the difference is small — a drop-down selection widget vs a freeform text box. Yet the effect on the use is very different. Flickr tags are a very new, if a little haphazard, way of organising your data. Gmail labels are just a slightly more advanced form of folders.
I think my point is that often people think of interface design as superficial, assuming that it’s just about how “nice” the application looks. Yet I’m sure there are many other cases where the presentation of the functionality has changed not only how users experience it but the reality of how they use a particular feature.
Have you guys got some examples to share?
Since I’m primarily a web user rather than a designer, my reaction to the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition is not “Oh no ! What will happen to my tools?”, but more along the lines of a recent UserFriendly: Does the web really need more Flash & PDF??
Thanks to the increasingly successful campaign for people to design with web standards, many sites display well in all manner of browsers. I’ve been noticing recently, though, that people are really not testing on different hardware. This is most notable when the site has evidently been designed on a Mac, where the screens are bright and colour balanced.
Some examples that I’ve noticed recently include Simplebits, Stopdesign and Antenna. I was also reading an entry recently (which of course I now cannot find!) where someone had not realised until they used a Windows computer how terribly pink their image header for their blog looked.
I’m sure that many of you are reading this now on a Mac and have visited those sites and your response is “Huh? What’s the problem?” Well, you see all that text that is light against a dark background (like the whole of Antenna and the about bit of the Simplebits site) — it’s illegible. On my Linux laptop, my main desktop and my Windows laptop. Completely illegible. Even if I whack up the brightness completely, I still have to increase the font size for the text to be defined well enough to read.
I understand that one of the things that y’all love (and, if I’m being honest, I do too) about those machines is the crisp, anti-aliased prettiness that results from the screen and the rendering. But I’m sure that sometimes you are all pitching to people not on Macs, who perhaps won’t understand what the problem is. Who will think that you’re muppets, that you don’t understand colour, or that you couldn’t be bothered to test your site properly.
So please, everyone, go find a public library or an internet cafe or something and look at your site on a different machine. Try also to test with a CRT and a LCD. I’m sure you’ll be amazed and perhaps appalled at the difference it can make.
Equally, the opposite does apply and if I’m blinding anyone, please let me know 
PS I know you are all really excited about Tiger, but doesn’t EVERYONE need to write multiple blogs posts about their experience?? I mean really? You’re polluting my blogosphere here 
One of the things that I love about some of the new web apps (e.g. Gmail and even the editor in Wordpress) is that the Undo shortcut WORKS (Ctrl-Z in Windows/Linux). If I paste an URL into a post I’m writing, I can Ctrl-Z and it disappears again. Similar useful things in Gmail. I’ll admit I’m not sure whether this is new, or just something that the desktopness of the Gmail UI has led me to start trying. But I digress. The point is that I wish that Undo would work in Firefox. So often I get a bit twitchy over the old Ctrl-W (close tab) shortcut and suddenly remember that I wanted to check the referrer or to read the next entry or something, just as I close the tab I’ve been reading. I really wish that I could just undo this using Ctrl-Z, rather than having to go back, view History or give up completely (for instance, if I was interested in the referrer, opening from History isn’t going to help me).
Are there plugins for this? Or is there an easy way of just doing it? Anybody else got the same pet peeve but done more to sort it out?
Based on your feedback, Elly has made various adjustments and upgrades to the site, so everything should work now. Please leave a comment and let us know if there’s anything still amiss!
Thanks 
Well, it looks like we’ve reached the 200 posts mark! I’d claim that the new look was to celebrate, but in reality it’s just because Elly was kind enough to not only move me across to Wordpress, but also to redesign the site whilst she was at it. And doesn’t it look fantastic?!?
Still somewhat under construction, but if anything really doesn’t fail gracefully please leave a comment and it’ll get sorted eventually.
I’m currently working on a small extra project to find an appropriate CMS for a small site, the key needs being that it is very simple & usable, easy to update and yet standards compliant.
I’ll probably write more about my experiences with this whole project later on, but for now I thought I’d mentioned a great site I’ve found in the course of researching : OpenSourceCMS.com. Essentially the site allows you to try out the default installs of a load of open source systems, so you can “try before you buy” (or not, as the case may be). This is brilliant, since I thought I’d need to install loads of these to try them out, which is painstaking and often means you don’t get to try the system if the install is a bit of a bitch.
Great stuff!
While we’re on the subject, do people have recommendations or experiences of any of the free to cheap CMSes out there? Ideally I am looking for something to manage a website rather than a blog, although blogging software is an option depending on how easily it can be made to behave different. I’ve already discovered some of the Wordpress as a CMS hacks, but it seems coding is needed too often in expanding the site for my needs in this instance.
I just noticed something really cool on my Gmail account — if I go into account settings, I can choose to delete the email account I have.
I think this is great. I have a number of old orphaned free email addresses (yahoo, hotmail, etc) that are still out there as spam receptors because I couldn’t find a way to delete them. There was no simple one-click (with appropriate verification) option to get rid of them. I’ve long since forgotten the passwords and even lost track of the secondary email addresses so I’ve got no way of going in there and finding out if any long lost friends are writing to me.
An easy deletion of account is exactly what is needed. Gmail rock.
Simon has a fantastic post up at the moment, all about embracing best practice for web development, rather than just continuing to evangelize about standards in isolation. I think this is great, both that he’s trying to get us all to move on the “other pieces of the puzzle” and that we are in a position to do now though. Let’s face it, most people we are going to reach for now have been reached … all the rest will rock up when they suddenly realise (3 years late, as corporations do) that the tech has moved on and they need to catch up.
The rest of the spectrum is ripe for development though — and the best way to really get people on board. The real progress with web standards was made when we could show them the benefits — engage on an emotional as well as practical level. When you’re looking at the total website and engaging them on how to make the whole damn thing fantastic, then people are going to get excited … and if we present the whole package, then they are less likely to make web standards conspicous by omission.
I’ve been piloting a similar approach at work recently as well, looking at how to present training in terms of work processes and helping people do their jobs better, rather than isolated training on a particular system or intervention. So far it’s gone down a treat and people are now living the intended vision of the systems that were previously the bane of their lives.
As some famous dude said, most real breakthroughs are to be founds in the interfaces and borders of our sciences, rather than in our core, safe working areas. [Who said this? Answers on the back of a postcard please...]
