December 2007
17 posts
3 tags
Xmas Xperiences
Santa was pretty good to my family this year. Here’s a few brief gift observations. My 7-year-old daughter received Zoo Vet. Positive: She is trying to learn to read words like “anti-bacterial” and “sedative”. Negative: the game provides no support in her learning. She must constantly ask our assistance. Positive: Unlike past years, we spent very little time opening...
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Mystory
As it is Christmas Eve, and I’ll probably be up early tomorrow, I wanted a quick post for tonight. A recent thread on the IxDA discussion list was about our origins—how we came to be in the profession. This was my post:It was during my junior year of college, in the graphic design program at WVU, that my professor took a group of us to a “multimedia” design conference held at...
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I iz making ur logoz
I saw yesterday that a new version of Macware’s Logo Design Studio Pro had been released. Knowing nothing about it, I went to check it out. There are a lot of interesting products being developed for OS X these days—I thought this might be one of them. Then I read their product description. You don’t need to be a graphic artist to create a professional look… Is that right? You...
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I'm Sorry Too
I was reserving my hotel room for Interaction 08, the first IxDA conference being held in Savannah this February. I had picked the dates, selected my room preferences, done everything, in fact, aside from enter payment information. I had to check with my company’s CFO to see how he wanted me to pay for it. I came back, entered my payment information, and finally clicked the button to confirm...
3 tags
A Few Observations
Designers with formal design education often believe it to be extremely valuable and important to their own development. Self-taught designers often don’t believe a degree to have much significance. Interaction Designers with a Graphic Design background often believe Graphic Design skills to be an integral, even inseparable part of what they do. Interaction Designers without Graphic Design...
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Missed Opportunity #6: Smart Folders
A couple years ago, before the release of Mac OS X Tiger, I was designing a file library for one of my company’s products. It would be a light content repository—a place to store random files to which multiple people would have permission-controlled access. Files could be attached to documents that would then be sent through a workflow. Rather than just defining a typical folder hierarchy as...
1 tag
sdrawkcaB
I occasionally take frozen dinners to work for lunch. I appreciate that the Hungryman meals include a Duncan Hines brownie. It comes out of the microwave “freshly baked”, if you can call it that. The one problem is that the brownie takes half as long to cook as does the rest of the meal. The instructions have you take it out, then return the tray for several more minutes. This requires...
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Making Good
Back in September when Apple announce the new Ringtone feature in iTunes, I posted about my disappointment. Charging for a little music clip on top of the price of the full track and not allowing us to make ringtones out of our own sound files seemed very un-Apple. There was a lot of disgruntled questioning as to whether Apple was going rotten. I’m quite pleased to say that I just used a new...
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A Legacy of Poor Design
I’ve been singing tenor in my church choir for years. As do most churches, we have filing cabinets stuffed full of choral music. We sing a wide variety, from classical to contemporary, gospel to Handel’s Messiah—we even sang a piece in Zulu a couple months ago. It is the Christmas season, more so than any other, that a lot of old, well used music gets pulled out. It seems that all of...
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10 Print "Happy Birthday C= 64!"
20 goto 10 run I am fortunate to have a very intelligent, well read, forward-thinking man for a grandfather. When personal computers became available, he had a feeling they were going to be important. He wanted my brother and I to have access to one, so he bought a Commodore Vic-20 for my family, and one for himself. He has told the story about how he mentioned to one of the doctors he worked...
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Email Evangelism
I’ve always considered it part of my job description to be a design evangelist. I try to educate co-workers, clients, even friends and family, making them aware of the effects of both good and bad design. One simple channel for raising awareness is my email signature. Anytime I find a quote about design that resonates with me, I add it to my list of signatures. Every time I send a message,...
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Voicemailigned
Don Norman spends a good many words relating the problems with telephones in his book The Design of Everyday Things. It’s almost unfair to pick on them—it’s too easy. Luckily, I don’t receive many phone calls at my office. I use email for the majority of my communication, and I’m usually at my desk when a call does come in, so I don’t have to use the voicemail system...
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Designer's Toolbelt: OmniOutliner
The Omni Group makes a lot of outstanding applications for the Mac. OmniOutliner is a tool specifically designed for creating hierarchical outlines. It allows you to quickly create lists with one or multiple columns. It has several formatting options for the automatic numbering. Rows may have checkboxes, and every parenting row has a collaspe/expand arrow. Alternating rows may be striped....
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Robo-Guitar
Gibson recently announced a new “Robot Guitar”. No, it doesn’t play itself, but it does tune itself, automatically tightening and loosening the strings. It’s questionable as to whether or not guitarists would really find this useful—skilled guitarists can tune in their sleep—but it is certainly innovative. I must assume that Gibson did enough research to be sure there was a...
6 tags
In the Details: Nicknames
Here’s another little detail that has bugged me for a long time. Apple’s address book in Mac OS X has a field for entering nicknames. However, it didn’t have any logic behind it. In other words, I couldn’t type “Susie” into an email address field and expect to get the email address for “Susan”, my wife. I had to type “Susan” and then pick...
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Raleigh Ringers
I attended a concert by the Raleigh Ringers Saturday night. They are an internationally acclaimed handbell choir—one of the best in the world. They gave an outstanding performance, but what I am most impressed with is their vision and dedication to the art. They aren’t just playing music—they are defining the future of handbell performance. They are continuously commissioning new music...
November 2007
19 posts
3 tags
Putting the "No" in Innovation
I was just looking over the CES Award winners, and with a few exceptions, find them rather uninspiring. I am impressed with Belkin’s TuneStudio. The Looj is a good idea, but the price seems rather steep for something you’ll only use once or twice a year. The rest of the entries just fall flat. I think Apple has me truly spoiled. I look at the winners in the categories...
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All or Nothing?
Jermaine Dupri, a music producer and president of Island Urban Records, published a rant in favor of Jay-Z’s decision not to let Apple’s iTunes store sell individual tracks from his American Gangster album. Here’s my favorite bit (emphasis is mine):Soulja Boy sold almost 4 million singles and only 300,000 albums! We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and...
6 tags
In the Details: Dating
I’m quite impressed with the new “detection” capabilities in Mac OS X Leopard’s Mail application. Dates, locations, and events are detected within the body of a message such that as the cursor moves over them, they highlight with a menu outline. Click on the menu for the option to create a new event in iCal and you are presented with a little pop-up prefilled with the...
