Zach Beauvais

Having been inspired by Lifehacker’s workspace show and tell, I’ve decided to organise my workspace a bit.

I have a quite deep, wooden desk with drawers which tend to fill with clutter. I’ve decided to feed a powerstrip through the back of one of the drawers so I can plug in two usb hubs and my MacBook power cable there, out of the way. I’ve also managed to organise a system for filing my papers (I hate paper, it should always be on screen and searchable!) loosely based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) meme.

One thing I’ve done is to mount a powerstrip to the back of the desk, so I lose some of the trailing cables. It still amazes me, though, how many wires a single office space can generate! There’s still a cluttered feeling to the desk, and there’s nothing on it aside from computing paraphanelia.

I’m planning to put some shelves behind the monitor—the desk is very deep—on which to place external hard-drive and other necessities. I’d like to hide the cables behind it somehow, so they aren’t trailing in any way. I’ve bundled all the cabling with wire ties, and fed most leads through the monitor back, creating a funnel. The overall appearance, though, is still a bit too ad-hoc or rustic or… I don’t know.

What do you think? What would you do with this desk space?

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.

Live Writer

Right, so I’ve been blogging using Windows Live Writer for a few weeks, and have generally enjoyed it. It’s easier than logging into my CMS, and it integrates with the site theme, so what I see is actually what the post looks like.

As you can see, it’s a pretty slick interface, and I think it’s  relatively simple, so the focus is on the writing rather than the application (Windows’ biggest design fault IMHO!) There are a few exasperatives, however:

• Insert Video only works with a select set of video sources, and I even had trouble with YouTube. It’s a slick idea, but it executes poorly.
• My Site favicon appears, which is nice, but it runs over ‘View Weblog’ and falls off the bottom of the window. Surely it’s not too hard to resize or align it in a satisfactory way?
• Set-up was quick, but there’s no native support for Drupal (you have to cheat and call it WordPress or MetaWebLog). This isn’t so bad, but it does limit the options you’re given if you choose the wrong one.
• It has the ability to tag posts, but it calls them ‘Categories’. They’re Tags. It’s a Blog. And, it’s one of the things that doesn’t work if you choose the wrong set-up type.

Aside from those, it’s brilliant. I use it all the time, and it is easy to use. You just have to html-in the videos you want.