This talk from Google IO 2014 is about a redesign, that of Google Maps - but to me it feels like the process behind a really good design for any sort of complex dynamic system. Lovely to see the working being shown and some really interesting examples of the ‘double the hypothesis to get a reaction to see if you’re moving in the correct direction’ technique as well as the wide variety of locations tested and visualised. »
Nine years ago I drew some diagrams attempting to reverse engineer the coffee, milk and foam proportions available in the beverages served at Eat. I’m not going to pretend that this was particularly original work but when walking past one of their branches the other day I noticed some uncannily familiar design. Actually pretty decent communication, well done. Avoid the actual drinks there though. »
A few years ago I worked with a number of my former colleagues to create Pinpoint, a quick hack that made it easier for us to give presentations that didn’t suck. Now that I’m at Collabora I have a couple of presentations to make and using pinpoint was a natural choice. I’ve been updating our internal templates to use our shiny new brand and wanted to use some newer features that weren’t available in Fedora’s version of pinpoint. »
I was reading Maciej Cegłowski’s excellent talk, ‘The Internet With A Human Face’ and aside from it’s persuasive argument found something interesting in the tension between his argument rooted in American reality and his German audience. I’ve also recently been reading ‘Concretopia’, a book about the post war rebuilding of Britain and realised that there, in the gap between the wars was the suburbia he wasn’t aware of. I am of course talking of Metroland, where I grew up. »
Yesterday I resigned from Lumi, ending my startup journey for a while. I’ll be starting a new job working for Collabora in a month. I’m really looking forward to be back working on open source software and the new challenge. This’ll be my first job without ‘Designer’ in the title for about 10 years. Although I’ve been doing lots of solution definition, product/project managing and suchlike this’ll be the first time it actually says that on a business card (we didn’t have job titles or business cards at Lumi, it was that sort of place). »
Sheep per capita in the UK (0.49), Australia (3.32), New Zealand (7.49) and Wales (10.2). All based on 2009 data. »
Alt-rock band The Cooper Temple Clause formed a kabbadi team in 2001 and were, at one stage, ranked seventh in the British domestic standings. A learning. »
People note that designing for touch screens requires you to have much larger tap targets, because tapping is less precise than clicking — your finger is way bigger than a mouse pointer. They conclude that this creates user interfaces that are inherently bad for desktop PCs, because desktop PCs use mice. But if you’ve ever seen normal people use computers, squinting at the screen to position the mouse cursor just exactly over the icon, and then carefully clicking it to make sure that they don’t accidentally move the mouse while clicking and initiate a drag, you’ll probably agree that desktops can really benefit from larger click targets, too. »
This morning: a little sun, a crisp snap in the air, dry. It must be time for the first ride of the year. Over the past few weeks of relentless rain, cold and drizzle I’d been looking mournfully outside, waiting for the weather to break a little and thinking that I was ‘running behind’ last year, which was a good one in the saddle for me. I know you can say that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. »
I’m not going to go into too much detail in a public forum but I’m delighted to say that my wife and I are going to have a baby. Priorities are shifting, standard middle-class life trajectory is ongoing. »