Meggan runs The Race For Life
I don’t usually pimp this sort of thing…
My seven year old daughter is running in the Race for Life this year on 31st May and is seeking sponsorship. She lost her granny to breast cancer.
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Guns Guns Guns
Anger over ‘toy’ guns on iPhone:
John Beyer of mediawatch UK added: “In view of recent events in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, I think anything that glamorises guns and shooting is in extremely poor taste.
With all due respect, John, I don’t think anyone could reasonably make a link between these and compared to the number of gun deaths in the world, you’re really making a mountain out of a molehill. I was in San Francisco when the shootings occurred and the point was made to me that in Northern Ireland, these shootings are extraordinary, in New York, they’re “Tuesday”. Yes, symbolically, the shootings are a terrible blow to Northern Ireland and a very personal tragedy for those involved but let’s not be silly.
Or…if we are going to pursue this to the illogical extreme, let’s just ban all games and entertainment where firearms are used.
Feel better?
Accessibility as paradigm
Posts like this remind me why I never settled for something “in the meantime” for my co-working plans.
Martin Pilkington (of MCubedSoftware) wrote about The Accessible Mac:
I’ve not got a disability that limits my ability to use the computer and don’t personally know anyone with one, but I do have a strong sense that we should all be treated equal and have equal opportunities. When we can do something to help someone else and it is very cheap or very easy to do, then we should do it. Making accessible applications can be very easy and not take too much time, but can make a world of difference to some people.
Working with my Dad on the Mac highlighted some of the difficulties to me. My Dad is on the Blind persons register as well as having severe motor function loss due to nerve damage. Despite this he soldiers on, maintaining a Mac mini hooked up to a commodity LCD TV. I use BackToMyMac every now and then to guide him through some steps or fix an actual technical issue (iTunes is a PITA for blind folk) but he manages quite well with a combination of VoiceOver and holding down Control while Scrolling (which on the Mac, zooms the interface – useful tip for those of us who aren’t nearsighted too). We don’t have great haptics on computers – some engineers build a vibrating component into a tool and we call it haptic feedback. No. It’s. Not. A vibration without some sort of context is useless. We need to be thinking bigger than that – I’m faintly disappointed to learn that the new iPod Shuffle gets all of it’s text-to-speech conversions from the hosting Mac or PC and it’s not just a widget inside the tiny device. That said – Apple had Text-to-Speech working on the Newton over a decade ago (and I’ll save my rant about how cool the Routing menu was for another day). We shouldn’t rely on visuals and a vibration in a device to provide our interfaces when we have computers which are capable of much more.
The point being – my Dad isn’t even an extreme case. We have so many examples of digital ‘illiteracy’ due to poverty, ability, experience, fear and yet every day we hear about new services, new applications. There are times when I feel a little threadbare, stretched across a frame due to having so many inputs and outlets (and no, I’m not talking about InterfaceBuilder and XCode here). That feeling happens to me every couple of months, I can’t imagine what it must be like every single day to be confronted with this and not have all five senses and a brain that’s been pretty much wired into the Internet for nearly two decades.
Great design creates new data.
Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.
…
An experienced designer knows that humans do not operate solely on reason and logic. They’re heavily influenced by emotions and perceptions. Even more frustratingly, they often lie to you about their reactions because they don’t want to be seen as imperfect.
and in the comments are some more excellent soundbites
…exceptional design has ideals, integrity and vision. It listens and is informed by its users, but sometimes more importantly, it knows better.
Doug writes:
Great design creates new data. Design is creative, not reactive
Two weeks ago I met Jonathan Ive. Ive is SVP of Industrial Design at Apple. He’s credited with some of Apple’s design triumphs: the eMate, the iBook, the iMac, PowerBook G4, iPod, iPhone, Mac mini and a raft of others. He said his team is small but they’ve been working together for a very long time now – something that affords great understanding between them. Ive seems a quiet and humble bloke, but his presence and passion were able to shine through in the brief meeting – his volume increasing as he became more passionate about the subject. This bloke, from the same part of the country as David Beckham, was voted by the Daily Telegraph as being more influential than Beckham (which probably says more about how out of touch famous footballers are with the rank and file).
I love how some of the designs I like inspire strong feelings in myself and others. Exceptional design should inspire polarity of thought – you should be in love with it or hate it – it should, by it’s very name, be an exception. This is subtly different from ‘the most usable design’ of course, which should slot into your own user model so easily that you barely notice it. Great design in interfaces can also polarise but even the worst reaction should acknowledge the attention to detail in the user model. This is something that, again, Apple does well. It’s always been a medium where Apple has changed things incrementally and when they have perhaps taken a step backwards (like Mac OS X Public Beta) it was most definitely a ‘girding of our loins’, a ‘hitching of our skirts’ so we could better witness and experience the changes going forward.
Cool video, cooler music
This video is very cool – showing a sea rescue in a unique perspective.
Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
And it made me buy the Clementine EP by Washington ( Myspace link )
I don’t often talk about music (due to liking too many things to satisfy any one taste) but I love that a a mix of media has meant that I’ve bought some new music.