First ever iPhone post

// January 14th, 2009 // View Comments // Apps, blogging, tech

Ok, so I thought I’d try something. I thought I’d try writing an entire post on an iPhone. I’ve downloaded an app… Think it’s ingeniously called something like “blog writer”. I can tell that my typically long-winded style and use of punctuation will be a killer here!

Surprisingly, however, this feels easy. Whether that’s the second pint talking, however, would require further experimentation.

I should say: it’s easy enough to TYPE. Thinking at the same time, I feel, will take some time. So, my devoted reader, you’re in for a treat of mindlessness…

Still, it’s as well getting used to using mobile interfaces, I think. With it being this painless to finally BE online through such a small portal leads me to think it’ll be a limited time before this is the default for simply connecting.

Now, this isn’t THAT easy… It is so very much faster to type. But, this is fine, and it’ll only get better. However, there are some things which are necessary for this to be my default:

*I need the use of all my fingers. This screen is fantastically good-and I find it very much better as an interface even than my beloved trackball. But the keyboard… It’s too slow.

*Faster app switching. This will surely improve with time, but it’s a bit of a train-of-thought killer.

*Copy/paste. I mean: Come On!

*Finally, the way to navigate among text is to hold one’s finger somewhere near the text, and drop the resulting cursor somewhere near the letter. Arrows alongside this would be very useful.

So, there you have it: my first iPhone post. Not sure I’ll rush out to to it again. But it’s possible. I need more practice with the interface, but I’m not sure if I will.

One last thought: there’s limited to no file handling. This is a mistake, I think. I would very much hate to lose this much thumb-written text now…

Aesthetics and Applications

// June 12th, 2008 // View Comments // blogging, tech

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set. It should be intuitive to interact with it somehow. I fine OS X much more intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing. Some apps written for it, however, fall far short it it’s high mark.

ecto is a blogging application for OS X, and it’s plain. It’s not minimalist-chic. It’s not “sleek”. It’s boring and plain. It also isn’t intuitive, unfortunately. It’s got loads of features, but it misses its greatest asset: the fact that it’s built on the most advanced Graphic User Interface ever developed.

Strangely, I much prefer to blog using Windows Live Writer! Its design works well, it’s interesting-looking (without being LOUD, like the rest of the intrusive Vista package) and it does what it says it will. It interacts very well with images (unlike ecto!), videos and links. It also has the ingenious feature of dowloading your site’s CSS so you can actually see how the post *should* look in situ. (Granted, this doesn’t always work…)

The point of this slightly oblique and poorly-thought-out rant, is that the point of software is to make peoples lives better. Designers completely miss that. Window’s OS designers seem to have thought: “I know, they want pretty. We’ll give ‘em pretty. It’ll be so pretty, it’ll need 3GB RAM and a high-end Graphics Card just to run… that’ll show ‘em!”

Well, it’s rubbish.

However, whoever was heading the design team for the Live suite (Writer, Mail, Messenger et al), was clearly desinging from an end-user’s perspective. Their thoughts were probably more along the lines of:

“hmm, when I blog, I like to be able to do that with images. Wouldn’t it be good if we could see how it’d look on the site before we publish? Yeah, Hey! I think people will find this useful… ooh, that looks good, too.”

I’d love to hear how you get on when designing or using software. Being me, I don’t think it stops with software design, but is actually a feature of how we live and interact. Let me know…

Zemanta

// June 4th, 2008 // View Comments // blogging, interesting, review, tech

Image via Wikipedia

I’m trying out a Zemanta blog post. What it does, apparently, is to suggest ideas for the article you’re currently writing. It’s a semantic blog suggestion feature, and it’s manifested in this instance as a firefox plugin that adds a write widget to my WordPress WYSIWYG editor. IIt updates every 300 characters, and also has ‘semantic features’. There’s an interview over at R/WW, for more information. I’m kind of trying to see what it recommends so need to fill in the 300 characters:

Well it looks like it suggests related articles, and adds a bunch of Zemanta boxes into the blog space. It also finds images from Flickr.

I could see this tool being very handy in future, though I usually blog from a client, and I don’t think this supports ScribeFire or ecto (which is rubbish, by the way.) However, there are a few problems with it:

1. It generates an unhelpful set of areas in the blog itself. So if you include a Zemanta suggestion, it pastes it where you’re typing, and you end up typing in an alt area in the code… annoying.
2. It updates every 300 characters. This is annoying because it’s not necessarily that real-time. This is an awkward interface feature. It also places your curser at the top of the post every time it updates, meaning what I just typed appeared above the opening line…

I think this kind of application, however, is prescient of the direction the Read/Write web is heading. It’s active and dynamic, and I’m sure the interface will be ironed out over time. I’m not sure what ‘semantic’ features they’re necessarily incorporating (is this just keyword-searched or is it tyingin with some RDF store somewhere?) but I like the way it’s heading.

I like the fact that it suggests images (all images in this post provided by Zemanta), but I’m not sure about the inclusion of ‘Zemanta’ presence everywhere… I’m also slightly concerned that some of the images it supplies are ‘license unknown’, meaning  you could use one and infringe on copyright. It does, however, have a link saying you can check it yourself, which shows they’re thinking ahead! It’s implementation of images is a bit of a struggle, however, in that you end up typing in the description area without the ability to click out of it. This is balanced by the fact that it automatically adds citations. It only adds a single image, though… so you can’t add a second image to the same blog post.

Now, they just need to make it a bit smoother, and stop jumping to the top of the bloody post

Semantic Metaphors

// April 29th, 2008 // View Comments // Semantic Web, blogging

I tend to live in a world of metaphor. It’s not my fault, according to Lakoff and Johnson. We all use metaphor all the time: to construct our thoughts and work out abstract concepts.

I’ve been exploring this a bit in the context of the Semantic Web over on Nodalities. Please feel free to have a look and send me some feedback on what you think about this set of ideas.

I’m a researcher…

// April 10th, 2008 // View Comments // Semantic Web, Uncategorized, blogging, tech

Well, since blogging about Talis several times, I’ve taken the plunge and accepted their gracious offer to become a researcher for their Semantic Web Platform. That means I’ll be blogging a lot about the Semantic Web and it’s cool features etc. over on one of Talis’ blogs, especially ‘Nodalities’ where you can see my first post: Hello World–really original title, that.

Hopefully all my blogging here will put me in good stead to encourage discussion and facilitate dialogue (fancy words!) over there, and I hope everyone likes what I write… we’ll see.

Photos

// April 4th, 2008 // View Comments // blogging, tech

I’ve added a lightbox photo gallery to the site, if you ever want to have a look at random images they’re there. There’s also a link in the navigation bar. I’m liking this new blog, it’s easier to use and integrates better with Windows Live Writer… except the visual styles… typical.