After the warnings of a potential storm from the event organisers, the cold, dark start to the day did nothing to quell the excitement that had permeated every facet of my being. This was a long time coming.
They laughed at me when I say my holiday is a ’5 day web conference’, but as Andy McMillan (@goodonpaper) readily admits, it has taken on the shape of a festival, with the caliber of the attendees rivalling that of the speakers. If Simon Collison’s upcoming New Adventures conference has an all-star cast, this has an all-star audience. Read the rest of this entry »
Yet again, Robert (@sanchothefat) makes a good point. He vents his frustration on Twitter over the Mac’s inability to Cut and Paste files and folders, like you can on Windows. The folks at Apple argue that it’s because they’d rather users didn’t confuse the cutting and pasting of text with files. Some others argue that files may get lost if one forgets to paste the cut file. Though, this never happens since nothing happens to the file until the user performs the paste command. OSX creators and users prefer to think of the operation as a Move. Read the rest of this entry »
After moving apartment (again) and being without broadband until it gets activated, I was in desperate need of some internet access. My life as a freelancer kind of depends on this…
I was faced with the following possibilities:
- Spend all my days in Starbucks making the most of my rewards card and either bankrupting myself or dying from over-caffienation.
- ‘Drop by’ friends and acquaintances offices/homes and consume their Internets – I don’t have many of these. Could be a problem.
- Rent a hotdesk at one or two known locations around the city. ~£17 a day is, however, what nightmares are made of.
Fortunately, thanks to Mr @jonthebeef and his recent trip to Japan, I learnt about the wondrous MiFi, which is simply a portable WiFi hotspot that connects to a 3G or even faster high speed internet HSDPA (You don’t want to know what that stands for. Trust me). Read the rest of this entry »
Short blog post today.
Reading @jake74′s excellent post http://www.systemerror.co.uk/2010/02/05/html5-video/ about the <video> tag only served to re-ignite my frustrations over its implementation. I love the implications of the tag, but the codec situation along with differing opinions from the browser vendors is stifling what could be something very useful for us developers.
Am I the only one seeing another Linux-like outcome arising from this? Many different approaches to the same problem preventing one from ever truly taking hold, and so dooming it to the provinces of the hardcore developers, with only the users truly suffering.
Have we already killed it? I hope not.
Browsing the iTunes App store today, I’m reminded how much the interface has improved in so short a time. One hefty re-design and a handful of minor improvements dotted around the place have made it a joy to use. But my favourite aspect, oddly, is the increase in sideways scrolling elements.
Windows users may not share my enthusiasm for such frivolities, as their mice often involve ‘scroll wheels’ that limit such side-to-side motions, leaving them to uncover the wonders of a scroll bar. But interacting with them using my lovely new Magic Mouse has made it trivial. Brushing a finger sideways over the mouse is just as comfortable as scrolling up and down. Even in my days of using the Mighty Mouse, and its somewhat unreliable nipple, the action became nearly second nature. Now I barely realise I’m doing it. Read the rest of this entry »
Apologies for using a ‘featured’ theme from wordpress. At some point I’ll try and sort out something a little more personal. Not that I’m a designer…
As the title suggests, this is not the beginning, as many moons ago I set up a blog on blogger to vent about my old job. It wasn’t flexible enough for what I plan to do with this blog, so here we are. Poor souls…