March 2012
1 post
2 tags
Tumblr's Expectations of Content
I noticed something today that says a lot about the quality and depth-of-thought that Tumblr expects of it’s users’ content.
In the ‘dashboard’, posts to your blog on which others have left comments appear with a little number above it to denote how many of these comments have been left. Click this number and, below your post, it will display these comments....
February 2012
4 posts
John Gruber on Mountain Lion, OS X Development...
So, today was clearly an embargo-release day, as the tech news sites and blogs burst aflame with long previews of Apple’s next iteration of OS X — 10.8, “Mountain Lion” — and about Apple’s new yearly iterations of their desktop and notebook operating system. But, of all that which has been published today, I think John Gruber’s assessment is the most...
Fuck Continuity
Have you ever noticed how the ‘hover’ state of bookmarked web page icons in Google Chrome are darkened when they are part of a folder, but unchanged when they are displayed straight in the bookmarks bar?
'Good Enough' is not Good Enough
My son, beware of “good enough,”
It isn’t made of sterling stuff;
It’s something any man can do,
It marks the many from the few,
It has no merit to the eye,
It’s something any man can buy,
It’s name is but a sham and bluff,
For it is never “good enough.”
— Edgar A. Guest
1 tag
Rethinking NBA TV
The National Basketball Association is just about catching up with the wonders of the Internet. Thanks to the NBA offering access to its League Pass subscription package over the web, I can watch regular season and playoff NBA games live and on-demand, in fairly good quality, through a web browser and on an iOS or Android device.
The sport of basketball is energetic, gritty and full of finesse....
January 2012
1 post
Going Full Circle →
Ars reports on an Android UI enhancement that clearly doesn’t get it.
The user experience module includes an implementation of an Android windowing system, which offers a more desktop-like approach to multitasking with overlapping windows.
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Texture and Soul
Justin Williams:
It was certainly extra work for their millions of designers and the engineering team to craft experiences that felt unique on both platforms, but the end result is something that delights both Android and iOS users alike. With these apps that offer a completely platform-agnostic user experience and color palette, the bean counters may win by keeping a project under budget, but...
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
Steve Jobs
I am in no position to eulogise. As much as I feel like I understood Steve, as close as I feel to his passion, genius and enthusiasm when I use his products, I didn’t know the man. Still, I feel like I need to say goodbye in my own way.
It’s the combined impact of many people that has inspired me to get into the fields of technology and design. There are lots who have informed my...
July 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review
Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.
Right on cue, John Siracusa’s epic 27,000-word review of Mac OS X Lion at Ars — premium subscription recommended.
iPad 2 Plus+ Pro Series 7 Extreme
This new high-end model will be called iPad Pro, not iPad 2 Plus. Why? Well, first Apple isn’t Samsung. The company doesn’t add prefixes and suffixes except for ‘i’ and ‘Pro’.
Except for ‘touch’. Or ‘nano’. Or ‘classic’. Or ‘Air’.
I like the sound of ‘iPad Shuffle’.
2 tags
An open letter to RIM →
Let’s start an internal innovation revival with teams focused on what users will love instead of chasing “feature parity” and feature differentiation for no good reason (Adobe Flash being a major example). When was the last time we pushed out a significant new experience or feature that wasn’t already on other platforms?
An anonymous RIM employee calling out all that is wrong with the...
June 2011
1 post
4 tags
Wireless, dual-screen gaming with iOS 5 →
WiiU must be Japanese for “dead on arrival”.
On a related note, this use example kind of scatters the rumours about the Apple TV (which runs an iOS variant) getting any native app support in the near future. This is clearly how Apple wants this particular fork of its ecosystem to work together, with the TV simply being another presentation medium for the handheld devices, facilitated...
May 2011
1 post
4 tags
Hype
Hype, from Tumult software, is an app that helps you create complicated HTML5 animations.
Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.
Nobody wants HTML5 to fully replace Flash more than I (and by ‘HTML5’, I mean the entire “next generation” of...
April 2011
8 posts
4 tags
Three down; five letters; white and fluffy, lives...
If you consult any number of technology news sites, you’ll be told that updates to Apple’s meagre cloud computing offering are likely to be on the horizon. Hopefully, they’re right. MobileMe woefully lags behind Google’s and even Microsoft’s cloud-sync packages in features, price and — frankly — usability (the MobileMe web apps have been highly unresponsive and...
1 tag
How did dinosaurs have sex? - Slate Magazine →
Safe for work. Unfortunately.
2 tags
Berners-Lee says Internet access is a 'human...
Quoth Tim Berners-Lee:
“Access to the Web is now a human right. It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”
Putting aside his haphazard reasoning, relating whether or not you...
Webstock '11: John Gruber - The Gap Theory of UI... →
Great talk from John Gruber - I wish my DSL line would stay active long enough for me to watch it in its entirety, though. (BT Broadband, at least in my area, is a great case against cloud computing.)
2 tags
Parsons The New School for Design →
Run your mouse over the boundary for their solid red header. It’s simple, it’s flash, but it’s fucking beautiful.
Now if only they could implement that with HTML5.
1 tag
Amazon scrounges a further Kindle price-drop by...
[Amazon] was set to announce Tuesday that the new Kindle with Special Offers will cost $114 - $25 less than the currently lowest-priced Kindle - and include advertisements on the bottom of the device’s home page and on its screen savers. Seattle-based Amazon will start shipping the newest Kindle on May 3, and it will also be sold in Target and Best Buy stores on that date.
An...
Tumbling
It dawned on me, yesterday, as I turned 22, that my custom, homegrown publishing system sucked.
Tumblr’s is better, so here I am. The move took but a few hours, although would have been much quicker had the RSS-import tool not been buggy as hell. I guess the manual copy-and-paste approach did allow me to throw away my retarded ramblings of yester-year.
Anyway, let’s write.
January 2011
1 post
The business card web page; now with 99% less...
At EddMorgan.com there lives a small, single-page website that I maintain. A ‘business card website’ seems to be the term commonly appropriated to pages such as these, and rightly so. They are meant to be a single location to which you can send people that offers basic details about yourself, such as how to get in contact with you, or what you actually do for a living — similar to the physical...
December 2010
1 post
HealthVault and IronRuby sitting in a tree
If you take a look back at my previous articles on IronRuby, you’ll soon detect a running theme: IronRuby does pretty much everything you can do with traditional .NET development. I’m not even comfortable with the implication that IronRuby isn’t traditional .NET development – it’s just another language atop the CLR, like C#.
Over the past year, I’ve also become increasingly captivated by...
August 2010
3 posts
Review: HTML5 Live from SitePoint
For the past 2 weeks, flu be damned, I’ve been taking the HTML 5 Live online course from SitePoint. Lasting a fortnight sans weekends, the point of it was to learn what HTML 5 means to web developers and how to actually use it.
I’ve always been very interested in the possibilities of online learning, probably due to an insatiable need to broaden my mind and a frustration at public schools and...
I love the smell of anti-static packaging in the...
It’s been many moons since I’ve got my hands dirty with thermal paste and actually built a computer from scratch. It’s something I used to do very frequently in my school days but over the past few years I have, for myriad reasons, neglected this age-old geek pastime.
So last week, no doubt as a result of my recent competitive PC gaming kick (I’ll be competing at WiredOut III in Reading next week...
How the BBC Criminalises the Poor
From the recently published ASI report, Global Player or Subsidy Junkie? Decision Time for the BBC; a quote that really stood out to me:
“I have for 20 years had the difficult task of sentencing TV licence defaulters, followed some months later by the often hopeless task of fine enforcement. Unlike other offenders, TV licence evaders are predominantly female, many of them benefit recipients with...
July 2010
6 posts
Microsoft and The Metro Design Philosophy
Even if you’re not planning any forays into Windows Phone 7 application development, anyone at all interested in the science of design will find a lot of value in reading over at least the first part of the recently published Windows Phone 7 UI and Interaction Design Guide. It really goes into the detail behind what the Metro design language — that I’ve become so intrigued with as of late — means...
Stop Refactoring your Damn Tests
A Ruby developer writing about testing? And writing about how he thinks it should be done!? What a shocking turn of events!
Test code exists to achieve, most importantly, two things. Firstly, to serve as an automated, low-level quality assurance. It’s used to passively weed out bugs and performance bottlenecks in your actual implementation so your team can feel a little more confident in their...
Is Ruby on Windows failing when dealing with IPv6?
Today, I ran across a potentially show-stopping bug — or perhaps non-feature — in Ruby for Windows and it seems to be (although I don’t believe it) down to Ruby’s inability to handle IPv6.
I presented a question on StackOverflow about it, but thought I’d mirror it here just in case anyone has any ideas. So, without further ado:
So I’ve got a tool that I built in Ruby that uses net/http to make...
The beauty of the delayed, accumulative task
For a while now, my much-beloved RememberTheMilk have adopted a classic user-interface detail, the genius of which I’m sure has been overlooked by many. They are certainly not the first — nor will they be the last — to do apply this, so I guess this is more of a celebration of user experience innovation rather than of RTM themselves, but their app does provide a perfect example that the user is...
Ruby Game of Life in WPF
A new Ruby Challenge for Newbies has been issued over at RubyLearning by Elise Huard — whom I had the pleasure of hearing talk about evaluating the quality of Rails applications at the Scottish Ruby Conference earlier this year. This challenge, called The Game of Life involves implementing John Conway’s famous Game of Life automaton in Ruby. To explain what it is, let’s quote the Wikipedia...
Ross Rubin: The Kin's Seven Deadly Sins
A lot of the criticsm of Microsoft’s social-centric mobile phones has been qualified with “although I’m not part of the Kin’s target market…”. Perhaps it is for this same reason that I was wrong to think the Kin phones were going to be popular among their younger audience.
Either way, Ross Rubin over at Engadget has itemised the reasons he can give for Microsoft bowing out of the handset show...
June 2010
1 post
On Apple's Recent Adieu from Aesthetic Perfection
It seems to me, through hearing countless anecdotes and general whispering, that Apple CEO Steve Jobs expects nothing less than perfection in the fruit of his company — at least in the aesthetic sense.
Looking back at the progression of the design of something like the iPod or the iMac, one can assume his perception of what ‘perfect’ is has evolved in a iterative fashion as his design team...
April 2010
1 post
iPhone OS 4.0: What I Hope to See on Thursday
Hot on the heals of Microsoft’s announcement to journalists declaring that it’s Time to Share, Apple has just sent out an invite to a sneak-peak of iPhone OS 4.0.
Let me start by saying that I in no way think that the iPhone OS announcement is more important than what Microsoft are unveiling. The remarkably cool Microsoft invitation package just doesn’t give any specifics about what’s happening...
March 2010
1 post
Out and About at the Scottish Ruby Conference 2010
Yesterday I returned from an action-packed long-weekend in Edinburgh for the 2010 Scottish Ruby Conference. These are just my thoughts on the event.
Marred only by a persisting backache, the result of typical Travelodge hospitality; and mostly predictably chilly weather, SRC was the most fun and inspirational experience I’ve had in a long time. There was a wide array of high quality talks, and...
February 2010
2 posts
Windows Phone Series 7 Announced, Makes me Feel...
I couldn’t go a whole day without jotting down some thoughts about the bomb dropped on the tech industry yesterday by the mobile team at Microsoft.
Microsoft yesterday unveiled the latest version of Windows Mobile – or should I say, Windows Phone – named, in typical confusing Microsoft product versioning fashion, Windows Phone 7 Series. With the exception of the needlessly verbose name, Windows...
So... iPad, eh?
Let’s face it, in terms of generating hype this thing is a beast. Although product names, specifications and use case propositions have changed, if you date them all the way back, the rumours say the iPad has been in development for at least the past 8 years. On the morning of January 27th, I don’t think there was a self respecting tech-lover out there (from either the Apple loving or hating...
January 2010
1 post
Islam4UK and Something that Pissed me Off Today
Now it must be said that I’m no Muslim — in fact I am a very adamant atheist — and certainly don’t support or share the views of the Islamic extremist group Islam4UK. However, I saw something today that kind of made both my head and my heart feel sick. A friend of mine joined a Facebook group named Petition to get Islam4UK Banned.
The group Islam4UK is known for it’s staunch support of things...
July 2009
1 post
Give Me Task Management or Give Me Death
I’d like to take this time to vent my frustration at the lack of a task management application that doesn’t suck at some thing or another.
The battle has been narrowed down to two contenders. Things and RememberTheMilk. The latter is a highly effective, globally synchronised todo list that is based entirely in a browser (which sucks) while the former has absolutely no useable syncing, but a...