Valhalla Island

I came across this list of client quotes on del.icio.us and ended up spending my entire UI design tutorial browsing through it. It’s a very long list and some of them aren’t as good as others so here’s a few I can really relate to. Continue reading →

Living alone is something that appeals to me. I hope that in the next few years I’ll be earning enough money to be able to do it. Computer Love pointed to a competition run by Apartment Therapy looking for the best small apartments. Last year’s winner looks brilliant. Apart from the small sleeping space I think it’d be something I’d really like. Continue reading →

I’m not what you might call a car person. I don’t like driving and I can’t think of anything worse to spend any great amount of money on. Continue reading →

I love reading SxSWi posts and I will never be sick of them.

Everything relates directly to a job and everything is a job. Design work at university has nothing to do with creating and learning to create good work but has everything to do with impressing the customer. Continue reading →

This is something that’s bothered me for a really long time. How do I go about selecting and executing Buy Now with the keyboard? Continue reading →

Logomaid stole Simplebits‘ logo and then put it in their online store for sale. Then Logomaid had the gall to threaten to sue Simplebits in the comments thread on the Flickr photo. Continue reading →

I own a laptop and only a laptop, perhaps a notebook, if you will. It comes to university with me four out of five days a week and it travels in a wetsuit like pocket in my amazing backpack. Now while this is the best backpack I’ve ever owned (it would want to be, it cost a mint) and I treat my computer with mountains of care, I worry.

This computer has all my work, my entertainment, what I do for fun, my school work, my financial records, my personal information, my photos, my videos, my music, it holds the only record of contact information for a lot of people I know. What if I dropped it? What if someone else dropped it? Bumped it coming out of the car? Spilt a drink on it? What if it was stolen? The range of dangers laptops face is huge compared to desktops. The potential for damage is a million times greater than a desktops’s.

So every now and then I get what I like to call backup anxiety. We do have a backup drive at home, a neat little network drive but it requires software only available for PC to connect which means the only way to copy to it is to share it on Windows PC and smb my way over there. This requires another computer turned on as well as sharing the drive every time the PC is restarted, it doesn’t remember if you’ve previously shared it, it’s bad software.

This means there’s no chance of scheduled backup and even manually doing it regularly is a chore. After a couple of months of not backing up I start to think about how my computer dodges death every day, I worry a lot, I rush to backup everything, I get my backup fix and I’m ok for another couple of months.

The latest Maniacal Rage impresses me.

And it’s not just because I have a crush on Garrett Murray (down at time of posting). Maybe we’ll see a redesign around these parts soon? Probably not.

It seems like ages ago now I made a really shitty website for the t-shirts I made that ended up having to be redone for other reasons anyway. I’m glad it had to be redone because it forced me to do it right this time.

Here it is, my extremely small t-shirt company, Valhalla Island. So small it only has one shirt for sale and of those, there’s not many either. It is one hell of a website though, in my usual single column style. It even has a blog, what website is complete without a blog?

It includes t-shirts upcoming which means there’ll actually be activity on the site as I come up with horrible new designs to post and have moderated by you. All the t-shirts upcoming have a ratings function and comments. I even wrote the ratings javascript, complete with AJAX, yes AJAX, A-J-A-X. And I wrote it. Did I mention I wrote it?

Well anyway, if you do buy the one shirt that is for sale it means that I’ll be able to print more and that’s good for everyone. If you have an idea for a shirt let me know too!

Again, late on the scene. About a year ago I went though a podcast stage, I tried to find something cool through the iTunes Music Store, I ended up listening to Christians telling me how to raise my children (lock them up and don’t let them out until they’re 40, too much sin in the world, it’ll scar them).

I’ve found that finding good podcasts, unless you have a lot of spare time, come by recommendation only. A couple of brilliant ones have come up recently and because things aren’t nearly as good if you can’t share them with someone, I thought I’d share them with you. There’s only three and I think each appeals to different taste.

Hi my name is Mark

My long time favourite. It’s a music podcast so if you don’t like the music you probably aren’t going to like this podcast. Although, in a 20 minute podcast typically only one or two songs are played, sometimes a song isn’t played at all. Everything else is Mark Hoppus (ex Blink 182, Plus 44) talking about being in a band, touring, recording, post production, sometimes calling friends and relatives, sometimes talking to his recording partners James Ingram and Chris Holmes. It’s always entertaining. He also interviews other bands.

I’ve found some of my now favourite bands through this podcast, Stellastarr* for one. The production value is high, as you would expect from a professional musician with his own recording studio. Each episode is a good length, around 20 minutes.

The Hivelogic Podcast

The entertainment level on these isn’t quite as high. Of the three, this is the serious one. That’s not to say they’re boring but they are highly technical. Every episode is an interview with some kind of famous web nerd. I found the interview with Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmer) to be highly interesting and inspiring. The conversation flows smoothly and production is clean. Hivelogic episodes tend to be quite long, around 50 minutes. Considering the content, I find this length perfect. If you have a short attention span it’s probably not for you.

The Garrett Murray Podcast

I have to thank Joey and Indranil for introducing me to this. The night I found out about it I listened to the latest 7, the next day I listened to the remaining 10. The problem with finding new things this way and listening from the latest to the earliest is that it tends to get worse as you go on but nonetheless, this is a very, very good podcast.

It’s a comedy podcast with two hosts, Garrett Murray and Shawn Morrison. I would guess that around two thirds is scripted and the other is just improv. There’s been many moments while listening to this podcast that I have laughed out loud and not been able to stop. They talk about a lot of things, New York, fashion, crazy people, garbage, it’s just hilarious. It’s really hard to describe how good this podcast is with words, you just have to listen to it.

On top of all that, the music used is delightful and it splits up the segments beautifully. Nearly every podcast falls down with music choice, Garrett Murray’s doesn’t and I love it.

The three podcasts I listen to are well produced and well edited. It’s almost impossible to listen to a podcast that isn’t and that’s the major problem I’ve had with other podcasts. This, for example, is unlistenable and is just clogging up the internet’s tubes. The quality and content of these three has inspired me to create my own podcast but that’s just another one of those things I don’t have time for.

TLDs in website names. jimwhimpey.com is my domain name, it points to my website, it is not the name of my website. I’m OK with any other variation of this, give your website a title that has no relation to your domain name at all, that’s OK.

It’s even worse when the www is included, the www doesn’t even need to be in the URL let alone the website’s title!

The other is summary RSS feeds. A lot of news websites seem to think this is really clever and I can see how it might be useful, letting you know when news is updated but it just annoys me.

I really dislike using more than one application to do one specific task. I’m using an application called Net News Wire, I read 98% of my news subscriptions inside New News Wire, I don’t want to be forced to open a web browser to finish reading what could potenitally and easily be given to me right within the the feed reader.

Although NNW, unlike NNW Lite, has a built in web browser probably for that exact reason. I don’t like that my feed reader has a built in web browser because obnoxious websites aren’t happy about me avoiding their badly designed, advertisment saturated websties.

The Multimedia lab at my university has just been upgraded with 30 or so brand new 24″ iMacs. Today I had my first User Interface design tutorial in this lab. Strangely, 90% of my class is Asian or Middle Eastern but that’s a post for another day.

When the class started everyone was asking how on earth you turned these computers on. If you’ve used an iMac even once before you’d know that the button is around the back, to the bottom left. My tutor (who barely knew which application “was for the internet”) jumped onto this, saying “oh oh, look! This is bad UI design!! No one knows even how to turn them on!!”.

I disagree. Once you learn where the button is, you will never be faced with the problem again. To learn where the button is takes a few seconds for someone to tell you, or to look on the only side you can’t immediately see.

These are desktop computers that are meant to be left on all the time. Unless you’re one of those people that thinks leaving your computer on is doing it horrible damage you will use this button maybe once a month. Does it make sense to have a button that you use so very little in a prominent position? Having the space bar on the back of the screen would be a usability flaw, the power button isn’t.

The sacrifice of 3 seconds learning to keep the finished unit design clean and uncluttered is more than a fair trade off.

Came accross this brilliant video through Andrew and 37 Signals. There’s no attribution so I don’t know who’s done it. It’s part of a speech from Pulp Fiction, in animated type.

Embedding Quicktime isn’t so easy, here’s the link.

If you haven’t already seen, there’s an extension the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. Some people are calling it an easter egg, which I don’t agree with. It’s just added functionality that’s initially hidden. It’s some extra options on top of normal editor.

Before:

After:

I get a lot of shit for using the WYSIWYG editor but for me, it’s much easier to write in flowing sentences than have it punctuated by code. It’s also much easier to proofread inside the editor. Before WYSIWYG I would publish privately and proofread in the blog format, I don’t have to do this anymore.

While more options is not necessarily better, in this case it is. These added options will be helpful, especially the format box, I used to have to swtich to code view to add a level three heading.

I haven’t read any official documentation regarding the IP laws at my university but there was a large discussion about it with participation from multiple lecturers during a lecutre about a week ago.

The policy is that anything you do at university, whether you use the university’s resources or not, is complete property of the university. This means that work you do is unable to be published, even on a website, reproduced or sold without the university’s permission. I am not able to make a pretty poster in visual communication design and then publish it here, on my blog, without breaking the law.

To reitterate, if I publish work I do, I’m breaking the law.

This is even worse when it comes to the competitions that match our assessment in VCD. One we can chose from in the Memento project, which is designing a tasteful, Australian souvenir. Now if the university thinks it’s good, saleable, marketable, whatever, they can take it, produce it and sell it with no obligation to the student that created it.

I disagree with this policy.

Logging into MySpace this morning I was greeted with this.

MySpace have (probably temporarily) plastered advertising all over the background and changed the site’s colour scheme to match the advertising. This is on top of the already huge amount of advertising that takes priority within the site’s content area.

How many high profile websites would alter their design so radically to support advertising? Myspace is shameless, they’ll do anything for money.

Having a chat to my Dad over the weekend about web browsers, he asked “Why should I use Firefox?” My Dad isn’t a technical user, I am and I know why I use Firefox (well.. Camino, sort of).

But the reasons I use Firefox are the kind of reasons that a non-technical user doesn’t care about. They’re not going to use the Web Developer toolbar or Firebug, they probably don’t want to bother with extensions at all or themes or greasemonkey or any of the bells and whistles technical users love.

You can try to explain tabs and a UI search box but they’re things that, if you haven’t experienced them, don’t strike you as ground breaking features that you’re really missing out on with Internet Explorer . You can try to explain that they’ll be seeing pages “how they’re meant to be seen”, they’re rendered according to the markup and styles, they get it right but this is almost a non-issue with people still hacking their way to support for IE. Personally, on personal websites, I don’t bother supporting IE, I haven’t ever seen this site in IE and I don’t care how it looks. If a jimwhimpey.com reader was to switch to a non-IE browser, it’d look much nicer.

Is there a compelling reason for IE users, that’s easily explained to a non-technical user, to switch  to Firefox? Or should they just upgrade to IE 7 and be done with it? Is IE 7 (or 6) more suited to non-technical users?