What do user-interface designers do to indicate function when everything becomes a button? I saw this on a train recently:
I like the little icon. But for how many more generations will it be meaningful? And what will the little picture show after that? The mind boggles…
There’s often a temptation for coders to come up with the cleverest solution to a problem, one which accomplishes the greatest amount in the fewest lines of code, for example, or takes advantage of the most obscure features of the programming language. Such solutions may be intellectually very satisfying, but are often not ideal for other reasons. I really like this quote from Brian Kernighan, which I heard for the first time last week:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
How do you interact with a screen on a device without putting finger-marks on it?
You make the frame touch-sensitive, according to a recent Apple patent.
Many people are speculating that the diagrams give a good idea of what the next iPod might look like…
For a few years now, the majority of computers sold have been laptops. It’s not surprising; I’m not sure what I’d do without mine.
But one downside is that laptop-sized hard disks are much less robust than their desktop equivalents. The manufacturers often quote an expected life of just a small number of years. And as more and more people are storing very valuable data – like the family photos – on these little devices, the potential for heartbreak is getting ever larger.
This is why I always have at least two complete recent backups on external hard disks, and why I make sure that they’re full-size desktop drives. I don’t carry them around with me, either, which probably increases their lifespan dramatically! If you’re a Mac user, treat yourself to a copy of the excellent SuperDuper software and £100-worth of external firewire hard disk, and you won’t regret it.
But if all else fails and you have a failing laptop disk and you really need to get your data off it, you might be able to help it along with a little reorientation…
Perhaps you need a Clocky…
Rose pointed me at a nice article about some kids in Humberside trying to bring back some water voles that were relocated to Devon when building work threatened their habitat.
Keisha, 10, said: “I’m worried the water voles will be extinct in Goole because if they move to Devon they might die because they won’t know their way round.”
The building developers have apparently relented and are returning the voles to Humberside, to the satisfaction of all concerned. Except, I rather suspect, the voles themselves…
Guy Kawasaki is a fun and interesting guy, and I enjoyed the recent interview with him on the excellent Venture Voice podcast. Excerpt:
When you see a company, what do you look for? Is it the entrepreneur, the market analysis?
Well, this is the question that every VC gets asked and every VC answers consistently by saying, “We’re looking for a proven team, with proven technology, and with a proven business model”.
And that’s a load of crap.
Because, frankly, if you look at the huge successes, I would say for those three parameters, usually the huge successes are zero-for-three. Maybe one-for-three.
And I would say that about Apple, I would say that about Google, about Cisco, and Yahoo. They were not three-for-three there.
So I could more easily build a case that you should look for an unproven team with unproven technology in an unproven market, cause that’s the billion dollar deal!
We watched “The Spanish Prisoner” last night. I’ve been a fan of David Mamet’s since seeing, buying and watching several times his version of The Winslow Boy. The Spanish Prisoner comes halfway between that and The Usual Suspects! Both recommended, if you don’t know them.
Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, stars in both films, with a somewhat less flattering coiffure than shown here. Her acting style (or perhaps it’s more his directing style) is a little unusual, but I think she’s great.
My Nokia E61 has a keyboard and a little joystick thingy. It doesn’t have a touchscreen. This can be restricting for some applications but it has a major advantage, as Steve Litchfield points out: Screens without a touchscreen in front of them are much more readable in sunlight. He has some photos to illustrate this.
Product placement is getting more subtle, and you can do it yourself.
A company called PayPerPost will pay bloggers to write articles about particular topics and link to particular advertisers’ sites.
I hereby promise that Status-Q will never stoop so low!
Toni Schneider signed up and reported back. Extract:
I opened an account, scanned their offers from advertisers and picked one more or less at random. It was from a site called WeddingStrategies. They offered me $10 for writing a blog post about them with at least 300 words. Their instructions included “title needs to include keyword wedding or weddings, PR3 please, no business blogs, no mention of PayPerPost.†That last bit certainly was revealing.
‘PR3’, in case you don’t know (I didn’t) is a measure of your popularity on Google’s Page Rank algorithm. You can check it here. This blog is PR6, I gather – perhaps I should be trying to profit from that!
Firefox 2 is out. Can’t say I really notice much difference, but I thought 1.5 was just fine, so I’m not upset.
On the Mac, though, it still doesn’t deal with RSS feeds as nicely as Safari, so it won’t quite displace my default browser yet.
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