Category: design-and-ideas

When someone told me the new ipod shuffle only works with its original headphones I thought they meant in the same way most phones have some proprietary adapter. Not that the device is totally useless without the headphones due to all the controls being on the headphones. Yes its small and has 4gig but how long will the headphones last? If your anything like me headphones last from a weekend to 6 months. I actually bought a pair of headphones in Dixons while heading out to Las Vegas and they were broken the day I came back. I did get some super-glue and fix them but trust me there not very attractive. And its not only that. I also find myself switching headphones, so when I'm playing with my pacemaker device, I will use the in the ear if I got nothing else, but much prefer a couple of over the ear dj headphones. When riding on the scooter, obviously over the ear headphones won't work. When doing something like running I use my bluetooth over the ears and back headphones. So the concept or even reality of only being able to use one set of headphones is insane. Even Sony and other make controlers for there devices but still allow you to plugin your own headphones after the controler. I hate to say it and I'm sure some apple fanboy will comment that i'm wrong, How can anyone buy into Steve Jobs vision of the world where you only use one pair of headphones with your music player? I'm not typical user sure, but still what incase you want to plug this device into a car stereo or friends system for a party? I'm sorry but this just shows that Apple are more interested in making devices which are made of puppets that people.

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I saw this film documentary at mix09 one night. After the showing the director Gary Hustwit opened questions and answers from a developer focused crowd. I did express my opitions to the crowd and Gary. The film left me a little feeling uneasy at the notion of hero worshipping the designers behind some of the products and services. In essence the film feel like two halves. First half is about the process and aesthetics of design, so obvious examples like Apple come up. But much more interestingly is part 2 which is more about the affect of design on culture and society. I think Miles once described designers as the whore of capitalism, and after watching a good part of the first half you can see how that kind of fits in place. Ben Darlow (kapowaz) thinks I'm full of crap and I need to check my baggage at the door. Yes I did cringe when Jonathan Ive was talking about the process of making the new mac book but to be fair its been talked about to death and its like me jabbering on about the beauty of XSLT. Sometimes you just don't really want to hear it. Actually its that kind of inward looking, which I struggle to get and be part of when I was studying design at university.

Anyway, its not all bad, actually later in the film it gets really good. Some of the oldskool designers admit they didn't have the environmental impact as a thought in there mind when designing, now thats simply not possible and although that makes things very difficult its a creative constraint. There was also a small part about customisation and personalisation. Its one of those things which I think is the most interesting part of design. Designing to enable others to hack and customise. I wasn't the only one who picked up this point. During further questioning, the point was made that the person buying the product should have ownership of the product, and that means if they choose to paint it a different colour or customise it, they should be able to, or at least not feel like they ruined someone's design. The site which was mentioned was ikeahacker, which although Ikea suggest you use something a certain way in a certain context in the showrooms and catalogue. Gets completely turned on its head.

So generally the film is a good one, its easy to get wrapped up in design and think about the pure aesthetics but design is so much more that just pretty shapes and paint jobs. And later in the film, this is explored in more detail. Garry says this is a 2nd of trilogy, so I'm looking forward to hearing what subject he will cover for the third and final one.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto has a great rule about advertising.

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

But afterwards theres the rule which follows.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

Well be this a Samsung advert or not, its certainly taken number 75 and run with it. If only all products were this good and the advertising was this clever.

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I tried to run Twirl (a microblogging client) and I get this error. I attempt to run snackr and I get the same error. I try and force a update using the latest version of the Air framework and I get the same dialog, and I remember exactly why I switched from Windows to Ubuntu.

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in fusion rollercoaster from the ground from Ian Forrester on Vimeo.

I resized the Blip.TV version down from 1280 x 720 to 640 x 360 to match the Flickr version, but otherwise I've done nothing to the quality or videos. Vimeo also won't let you embed the HD version, so your looking at the lower quality version stretched

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When I first saw the Beetham Tower or the Deansgate tower I quickly liked Manchester. It says a lot about where Manchester is and where its going. It was great to see Vertical City cover it, a shock because I never really thought of it as anything special compared to the rest of the worlds skyscrapers. Lovely looking and almost affordable to live in but nothing like 1 Canada Square or 375 Park Avenue. I think you can catch up with the whole thing on 4OD if you missed it.

As the tallest residential skyscraper in the UK, Manchester's distinctive Beetham Tower is turning heads and dividing opinion.

Heading up a new generation of skyscrapers that are regenerating Britain's post-industrial cities, Beetham is at the heart of a battle between traditionalists and modernists.

Despite producing some of the world's leading architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Britain isn't exactly enamoured with skyscrapers.

And this reluctance to embrace the high-rise even extends to the country's future king, Prince Charles.

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The reality of the same information on multiple devices and platforms is starting to become a reality. But there's always a edge case. Take for example Notes. I use Tomboy Notes on my Ubuntu Laptop because its lightweight, fast, wiki based and saves in little linked XML files (great data portability). And rather that get sucked into using Outlook notes again or even one note, I've switched to using Evernote on everything else (thanks Nicole for the heads up on this service) including my windows mobile phones and the ipod touch. But does Evernote have a Linux client? No. Instead I'm forced to use the web version which is no good when I'm in a meeting room with no connection. What the notes world needs is for Tomboynotes to support Evernote's API and i'm not the only one saying this…

Use the Evernote API (http://www.evernote.com/about/developer/api/) to sync Tomboy notes –> Evernote, and possibly Evernote –> Tomboy (though obviously images, etc. wouldn't sync into Tomboy…perhaps include a link to the note online in that case?)

I was thinking this would be the perfect reason to use something like Conduit if it supported the Evernote API. Its all a pipe dream, in the end I broke down and cheated by installed Evernote under wine. Boy its ugly and gets on my nervious, I really would like a native version or better still the sync option.

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So its the very eve of 2009 and I've been thinking what should I be doing for 2009. But before that a review of how well I've done in 2008 seems like a good idea. You can find the full post from Jan 2008 here.

1. Finally go to Tokyo
   
   Well this never happened, but only partly due to the divorce and moving to Manchester
2. Not to do another BarCampLondon unless the BBC is the venue
   
   Ah I remember this, I had just finished the amazing barcamp at Google and vowed not to do one again. To be fair, I've helped with 4 others but not actually done or organised them. Even better other people have stepped up and done barcamp in there own way. Which was one of my aims for 2008. Will there be a BBC BarCamp? Well there's been a internal mini BeebCamp but full BarCamp? We shall see, maybe it might make the 2009 list.
3. Work on something very different but cutting edge this year
   So this did happen, I worked on a ARG with a variety of people but the project fell through when core parts of the team had a professional disagreement. We tried to carry on regardless but it was not possible to move forward as planned. We still have a excellent idea and story, plus I've been talking to new people about joining some of the original team. So I think this might get picked up in 2009.
4. Dataportability
   Well I've almost cut myself off from the data portability group all together. Not out of choice or anything like that, I just didn't have the time and as things started to change and shift over the year, it became apparent that people were thinking about data portability more that ever before due to the efforts earlier on. I'm not saying its over, theres tons more to be done but also theres a bunch of other issues which need addressing. I'm hoping i'll get the time to pull some of this stuff into work, where I can have the most impact.
5. Small Routines
   So actually this did happen, but not in a ideal way. Currently I'm sleeping very late and getting up late. During the night is when I do most of my blogging and reading. I don't know what it is but I seem to be more open to learning and taking it all in at 1am. I do still listen to podcasts while around the flat including in the shower. But what I need to do now is shift the time back by 3-4 hours. So I go to bed by 1am but get all my blogging and reading done between 9pm – 1am. Then I'd get up about 9am and not feel so tired. In regards to the RSS reading for example, the ipod is helping a lot (i should write a blog about it).
6. Play a team sport
   Yep I started playing Handball in Manchester, but it was a ton of running about and seriously my body couldn't handle the dynamic pace of the students I was playing with. So I gave it up when I learned about a Volleyball team in Manchester. Its still very energetic and I'm playing with students and people in there prime years but my previous experience helps a lot and i'm not a bad setter at all. Theres a few tournaments coming up including a few beach ones in summer, so who knows what might happen.
7. Geekdinners and Geekvenues
   Well I got to the bottom of geekdinner.co.uk. It was hosted on Photo Matt's server somewhere and he wiped it or something and now its all gone! Yes I know crazy but don't worry we have flickr pictures, blog posts and our memories to remind us of the good times. I also handed over the job of organising geekdinners to Cristiano Betta who I believed would take it forward while I move to Manchester. And I wasn't wrong, he's done a great job, scoping out a new venue and new speakers for the events. He's also tied the geekdinners closer to the girl geekdinners which is great. Geekvenues is still floating on somewhere, should think about that some more.
8. Start learning Python
   Yep started, setup my environment and done Hello world and a couple other tiny projects. Micheal Sparks has leant me a couple books which are really useful including the Joel Spolsky book who I listen to on the Stack overflow podcast anyway. I also started playing with PovRay again and dropped learning AIR for now.
9. Use the technologies around me better
   Yep this is happening, I'm also becoming more choosy and selling stuff which doesn't fit. So for example this year the Wii and Netbook went, not because I don't like them, but because they didn't quite fit into my life. I'm also switching some of my services. So I still use plaxo and now I have two Windows mobile phones, its become even more essential that I can sync between them over the air not just when I get to a Windows PC. I'm going to stop using delicious and switch to evernote. The lack of Linux support is frustrating but on the other hand its supported on my ipod touch and windows mobiles.
10. Go to more comedy clubs
    This has happened, I'm 5mins walk from the Comedy Store in Manchester and I have been a few times on off nights. I plan to go more often and actually if I had been a bit quicker recently. Would have been off to Jesters in Bristol tonight for a night of comedy over new years instead clubbing it. So yes comedy is happening more often. Maybe I should spend less time in the cinema and more time in the comedy clubs?

Technorati Tags: newyear, resolutions

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Imran sent me a link to this readwriteweb entry about the iphone being Apple's netbook. Although I'm totally buying the reason of wifi usage here's what they say…

Steve Jobs once said that the iPhone is Apple's netbook, and this usage data does lend some credence to this. Most of these WiFi requests probably come from people using the iPhone on their couch at home or in a coffee shop, and often, these users might be quickly checking their email or the weather from their phone instead of booting up their netbooks or laptops.

I got to say I'm also selling my Acer Netbook because I now have a ipod touch. The Netbook was too much for what I needed. I just wanted a device to read rss and ebooks. It was cool having the netbook because I could run RSS Owl on it but it was over kill in size and most of the time it sat in my bedroom because there wasn't enough room to carry both my laptop and netbook. Miles expressed a simular thought about his Nokia N800 internet tablet now he owns a iphone.

In other related news Windows Mobile falls behind iPhone in latest mobile-market numbers

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At the recent speeddating event I went on, people always ask what you do. I always have problems explaining what I do without using up at least 30secs of the 180secs. So I've recently found it easier to say I'm a BBC internet evangelist. Its not ideal but most people I speak to have a better idea of what I do because of the wording.

Christian wrote a excellent blog post about justifying the work we do. Theres some really good parts I would like to quote.

As an evangelist/advocate the hardest job is to tell people exactly what your impact was. A lot of what you do is planting mental seeds and inspiring people to work differently – that can’t be measured in hard figures. Other companies measure the success of an event for example by how many business cards were collected and have a department that follows these up by contacting people. I don’t like this much, first of all because a lot of the people I meet don’t have business cards but follow me on twitter instead and secondly because they gave me the card and not the company.

If you enjoy free information, swag, being able to directly reach internal experts and being able to network with a select group of like-minded people:

• please leave comments on the blogs/announcement pages of the events (in our case the YDN blog and upcoming – a lot of people only look there and don’t have time to scrounge the web for all the info.
• Use tags we provide at events to tag your photos, blog posts, tweets, videos…
• Tell us about cool implementations and changes in your company based on what we talked about – we are happy to feature those and send you link love and there is nothing cooler than telling the world how someone else but us have done something cool with our stuff
• If you sign up for an event – show up (or send a colleague). I am getting terribly sick of spending a lot of money to hire locations and have 150 sign up to the event in the first 10 minutes – effectively blocking out people that should be there – and then 20 show up! This is wasted time and money – and in the current climate that is not a clever thing to do.

I love my job and I am doing quite extensive work to make the IT industry understand that tech evangelism is not a waste of money but that there is a massive need for it. Marketing and PR departments just cannot reach geeks and internal geeks have neither the drive or the opportunities to talk to the world about the great things they do. I am very sure that innovation and change in IT is not coming from top down but from people who dare to talk to the right people to initiate change. As I put it in my talk at accessibility 2.0 geeks that care are the drivers of innovation and I don’t want to lose the opportunities we have right now.

Yes exactly this why I have had such a hard time with the PR and Marketing departments of the BBC. Luckily most of the time they have ignored Backstage but with the events we attracted a lot of attention. As most people know, I tried to educate our lovely PR lady Sarah by forcing her to read the Cluetrain Manifesto. That only works so far though, Christian is right the evangelist create opportunities at a grass roots level. I like to think PR and marketing is all about control while being an tech evangelist isn't, actually the opposite. We tend to tell it as it is and answer the tricky questions. But this is all about measuring success and yes its all about the stories. The stories when things grow from a small seed to something large and interesting. I guess being humans, we like stories. Stories put things in perspective for ourselves. Maybe this translates into a slide on a managers powerpoint between the hard figures of other projects. Or even a example for how successful a project or division is doing but at a much lower level, the links are tighter, stronger and true that ever before. Theres no way to measure these more human like attributes such as trust yet, but the day there is, I bet ever company will come around to the fact that evangelist are good long-term business sense.

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