Built for the future feedback

As most of you know, I entered the built for the future – reuseit contest. I didnt do too badly as I spent 1hour on the css and used cubicgardens css as a base. But I've now recieved feedback from the judges on why I got the marks I got. At the same time I would like to say thanks to the Judges and specially Bob Sawyer. Maybe next time I'll spend more time on the design. 

With that, here are the judges' comments:

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Too plain and bloggy (not in a good way though).
Not enough contrast on the link text colour
and I'm fairly sure Jakob would have expected the link text to be underlined. Sorry.
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The simplicity of the color scheme is nice, but I found the layout lacking in organization.
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suffers from similar problems original has -- poor separation of content.
yeah, there's the left column, but within the 2 columns,
it's tough to see where the different sections are.



(IE5/mac os9.2)
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One word: Yuck!

Although based on my favorite color, the design of this site is immature and lacks a focus on the user,
the primary message Nielsen provides those who read his work.
It needs lots of work to become anything of value to a real world user.

The site designer should also remember many people print Jakob's content and
post it on bulletin boards, outside of office cubicles, etc. This entry does not print well.

The site appears to render adequately in IE 5.1.7 for Mac OS.

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I like your choice of steel gray--very easy on the eyes, but the links do not contrast enough.
The top box is too tall and you need more leading before "news."
Your focus is on "search" -- reminds me of Google.
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An interesting take to go with light text on dark for the site,
but you have a lack of support for resolutions lower than roughly 1000px
or so which is a big usability no no.
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ouch. this doesn't layout properly in mac ie5.1.7, it is just one column.
dull colors, low contrast between link color and background.
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Too early for comments at the moment. But yeah should have done a print style sheet and spent more time on design.

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Microsoft goes for the open move

Recently Microsoft have been feeling the pressure from the open source community. They have started opening the office 2003 file formats. Then today I caught two different arcticles about related areas.
The push behind Microsoft's Office moves and Microsoft opens FAT file format. Linux and Windows co-existing? All from Microsoft?

But then again there not doing everything nicely…

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The love hate relationship of my SPV

Ok two issues are bugging me about my SPV. And these are huge issues…

The huge one for me,
It will not dial up a GPRS connection over bluetooth. What this means in english is that if I want to dial up to the internet on my ipaq or tablet aka turn the phone into a modem, over bluetooth. Forget it, it doesnt work. Orange have yet to solve the issue and my 14 day phone return is running out quickly… I'm going to scream. And now i am screaming. Microsoft you drive me nuts.

Secondly, no voice dialing. Which is not good as the new UK mobile phone law came into affect on the 1st Dec. Which makes using a SPV2 in the car pretty much not possible even with a bluetooth headset. Orange must sort out this problem soon, or there will be an external app which will solve this mess-up.

Did find this however – how to unlock the SPV.

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SPV E200 review

I wouldnt exactly call it a review, more around-up based on the SPV E200.

Its almost been a week since having the SPV2, and its good – no seriously its very good. I thought the change from ericsson to spv would be difficult if not highly challenging. Up until SPV I have bought 7 different ericsson phones. So i thought long and hard before changing to another phone and company. Anyway, the menu system isnt awarked and you dont feel lost at any point. Kelvin ensures me that the SPV 1's Windows smartphone OS was terriable compared to the 2003 remake.

Some of the grips of my orginal post such as not being able to transfer my contacts via bluetooth have been solved. For some reason it now just works. Also you can send things via bluetooth using the beam feature, which is odd. For example when you want to transfer a calender, contact or task. You say beam over infrared, wait a second then it gives you a option to beam over bluetooth too. I think in that second it checks out what devices are near by. But yes it works well. Unfortually all software I have installed only uses infrared, so i cant transfer files over bluetooth yet. And on that same point, the SPV isnt locked at all, you can install what ever you like on it. I'm tempted to put doom on it. But for now I have file explorer, pocket mvp, tetrus and a few little utils. All taken from this great site. I havent yet experiemented with other apps, but will do when i get the time.

The text input could do with a tweak, but its perfectly useable and speedy. Much faster then my old T68 when you write long text messages. Havent tried picture messaging yet, as i got few friends who have phones which support it. Theres lots of references to Orange's Video messaging service which will be running soon. And I caught this the other day, which is about how orange are going to use packet video for there video service. So I'm expecting a Packetvideo player for smartphones soon, will also have to install it on my ipaq again i guess. The question I have though, is will orange allow people to create there own content using packetvideo too? At the moment the SPV doesnt save as Mpeg4, will someone create a converter or even mpeg4 video capture tool for smartphones? Hummm, would be nice…

I have yet to play with MSN messager as I think its evil, and I usually use my ipaq for instant messaging as its input is quicker and smoother than a phone will ever be. However I did see imov have brought out a jabber client for smartphones, so i may try it out soon. I keep forgetting to setup the gprs link with my ipaq and the SPV, so I'm reminding myself to do that after i finish this post.
The battery life is a stinging issue, which plagued my 3g phone. I'm am glad to announce that the SPV with bluetooth on all the time lasts at least one day if not 1 and a bit days. So as long as you charge it everyday your fine. Without bluetooth it will last a couple days at least. Oh and lets not forget I was using the camera quite a lot and I have a 64meg MMC card inside of it all draining battery life. On that issue, the SPV also supports MMC too, which is good for me as I have a few hanging around from my ericsson mpeg3 player, cant wait to see what will happen on the SDIO horizon in regards to the smartphone platform. Imagine wifi and flash memory on one card. No need to imagine its almost already here…believe the impossible

So to sum up, its all good…So good that I dont know what to do with it next… I think a dose of real digital shoplifting isnt out of the question. Specially seeing how I can record as much as my sd or mmc card can hold. About 700+ VGA shots on a 64meg MMC card. Easily enough for a small book dont you think?

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Slashdot banning

Flicked through my feeds today, and found Slashdot had banned me from accessing there feeds. Which is odd because my aggeragater goes and gets feeds only once every hour unless its told by the feed to get it quicker than that – example being the bbc feeds. Anyway, didnt think much of it till I poped into my bloglines account, which has also been banned. Now I know bloglines only gets feeds a minimum of once a hour no matter what.

Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

So what is up with slashdot? Did anyone else get simular messages to me? If there so worried about bandwidth they should consider the standards complient layout.

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Future trends?

chris sanderson from the future laboratory – http://www.thefuturelaboratory.com. Came to college today in a lecture arranged by Fashion for the whole college. So of course I'm live blogging this as he talks

First part involved a talk about the 3 points bellow.

      Instict – follow your gut instict, always judge a book by its cover.
      Observation – be influenced, be imersed, always looking and reading
      Research – always ask and question

Yeah quite good, nothing new and product and fashion driven. He answered my question about ip quite well with mentions about ip and copyleft. Before that he made references to social software after one of my students asked about how the internet affects all what he was talking about.

All the other questions afterwards were pretty lame and more about products and branding rather than the higher level concepts. Need to check out this viewpoint magazine, sounds like wallpaper with slightly more brains.

I love the fact that he believes the GM battle is over, which drops the audience into complete slience. But he explained himself really well by explaining the fact that monsanto was setup as charity. And is retrospect, someone could have applied GM else where before moving to food. Say for example GM body parts, etc. Which is fair enough and quite smart because he also got his little comment about how people who dont want GM are old fuddie duddies.

Then he went into a slight rant about how he hated Apple and if it was up to him he would systematicly destroy his G4 and Apple the company. I have to agree with him that Apple are a very good marketing company which people desire, but the rest of it is a joke. Caused some of my interaction design students to shuffle and look around a bit.

I will need to get a copy of the pdf he was presenting, the book of light.

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Interaction bloglines

Just checked over the students bloglines aggeragater. And they are actually using it which is great news. I just need to sort out there blogs now. At the same time I found some other good feeds while searching for the interaction one.
Also found news.com's rss feeds which is very useful. And at the same time I've updated my own bloglines account so it will be the same as my feeds. Lots of work early in the morning…!

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At long last the SPV is with me

After months of messing around trying to decide what mobile to invest in next, I made the jump to a SPV E200 today.

My first impressions are mixed, I love the phone its really good looking, nice to hold and use. But theres two things bugging me. First thing the operating system windows mobile 2003 is a little too much like my pocketpc os, so I keep wanting to use my stylus with it. Minor but ignoying for me neitherless. Ok then the bluetooth doesnt seem to work as well as the SonyEricsson models. So my SonyEricsson bluetooth headset works fine with it and I've partnered with my ipaq but I cant seem to send my contacts from my ipaq to the SPV2. Seems the SPV2 doesnt support the object push profile, which is stupid because how on earth would you send a business card to a SPV2? Plus Activesync doesnt allow you to sync to the ipaq and the SPV at the same time. The other thing which bugs me a bit is the lack of file manager for the SPV, I think I need to download one from somewhere. Which brings me on to the issue of getting software for the os. Where on earth do I go to get free software for it?

On the other hand, it does everything it says on the box. The camera on the SPV is fantastic, the camcorder feature is great and it records to plain avi with pcm audio. So it will be easy to edit the footage later on, say turn it into mpeg 4 or add it to another load to create a whole movie. Plus it will record for as long as you have on your sd storage card. I have 4.33 meg left on the 8meg storage card they give you with the sd card. I can record for 1min 12secs at 176px x 144px and 42secs at 352px x 288px if needs be.

Anyway, I wont host any video files right now, but heres a shot from inside the tram on the way home from basketball training today.
on the tram home, inside of the tram taken with SPV

Quick note, there is no EXIF data saved with the picture which is minor problem. And I've investagated the video/audio codec a little deeper. Seems its saved with 8fps PVMJPG at 35kbps with the audio codec being 8bit PCM at 88kbps.

Oh yeah thanks Sam for the comment on the 3g walled garden issue on my other phone. I only saw it a moment ago.

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xml for thought

Been reading through some of the links on simonstl.com. Some interesing presentations and thoughts. I dont agree with alot of what simon talks about such as Why I Don't Like RDF and Creating Schemas While Preserving Your Sanity Looking Beyond W3C XML Schema, which explores why to abandon W3C XML Schema in favor of RELAX NG and Schematron. I do however love his playmobil style of presentations.
Other presentations are worth looking at including, Microsoft Office and XML.

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A friendly xml editor?

Been looking at xopus once again. The demos are useful as I never knew Xopus actually supported xml editing to a xml schema. Will need to try it out once again i think. Didnt know Xopus wasnt opensource, or maybe I was thinking of Bitflux. Also can someone please tell me what is bitflux's CMS popoon? It sounds like cocoon converted into cocoon. I think this says it all Popoon basiert auf Ideen von Apaches Cocoon.
More information on slides and presentations and the wiki is a reminder why I or someone needs to write a RelaxNG to Xml schema xslt.

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Picture Gallary

I spent a bit of time this weekend getting my image gallary off the ground using Cocoon's imagedirectory generater pipeline. Which works but doesnt go quite as far as I first hoped.

First up, I expected cocoon to generate image previews for me in some kind of way, dont know how it would be possible but I kinda of expected it anyway. Then I also expected the generater to support EXIF so I could pull data out of the photo, such as when it was photographed, etc. But no good. Anyway I've been looking into the area of EXIF again and come up with a bunch of links for next time I got time to look at this area in more depth.

Stuffware Photo Studio – Free and deals with all types of photo and movie metadata the best of the lot.
The specs for EXIF and the Camera file system.
Jhead's EXIF to XML complete with a whole host of useful links too.
W3c's Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP note.
OpenEXIF.
metadata extraction in java, also loving the look of Drew's photo gallary. Surely there has to be a way to intergrate this into cocoon, as its just a jar file?

Oh just a quick mention that the Stuffware Photo studio is the bomb and I'm loving it. Just wish I could find a way of cocoon reading the EXIF data and the embeded jpg thumbnail rather than me making another directory for thumbnails! Yes that really sucks bad… Made my feelings be known on the cocoon wiki

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Web standard Slash dot?

slash dot logo, news for nerds. stuff that matters

One day I would love to beable to use slashdot on my ipaq without scrolling here there and everywhere. Anyway this is written after reading the alist apart article. The challenge of changing slash is a interesting one, as there are many good opensource applications which dont do standards well, slash being one of them.
Next week: printer-friendly and handheld-friendly Slashdot with a few simple additions. – I wonder if people will catch on to the fact that the new palmtops support css now, which is ignoying as they shouldnt.

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