The Flicker Blog and Podcast

Damn you YouTube and serendipitous discovery! Even if I do later discover more impressive videos, I promise not to share (or go on about them) here. Well, at least not today.

Shlomo on Later with Jools Holland being, well, utterly amazing!

OK - so half of the appeal is in the way that this has been edited, but none the less, it’s pretty amazing!

Whilst listening to the presentation mentioned in my last post, a brief mention of the development of software for the new Airbus A380 plane caused me to wonder:
Whilst travelling on a plane, which scenario would make you feel most secure?
1. The software on the plane was developed entirely by the Open Source Community.
2. The software on the plane was developed by a private company.
Discuss…

My first thought - open source software ends up being safer and more secure because those who discover/experience flaws get to fix them. Obviously, a software failure on a plane has far more devastating consequences. That said, opening up the software to the community for scrutiny may be a very effective model for eliminating or discovering bugs.

Actually… pondering the importance of software on a plane is in itself, not terribly reassuring.

A dry and lengthy (but no less interesting) presentation by Verna Allee from the 2006 Mesh Forum on how the language of traditional economics is often innapropriate for understanding or explaining contemporary online business. We often hear of intangible assets; this presentation explains the need to quantify and measure them.

Economies are usually measured, valued or understood on the basis of trading finite resources. The information/attention/knowledge/etc. economy is hugely different. Put simply, knowledge multiplies when distributed - unlike a tangible product, it does not become scarcer.

Talking about traditional accounting practices, she highlights one of the major institutional and ideological conflicts that arise - to paraphrase:
The typical HR mantra: ‘People are our greatest asset.’
A typical accounting statement: ‘People are our biggest expense.’
If a business can’t agree on where it has value, how can it grow it?

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some pleasure in the email I received from Beatport yesteday:
‘Our team wanted to let each of you know about a recent issue created by the new Flash version 9.0 for PCs (Mac users can ignore this email.) Macromedia/Adobe released a new version of Flash that is creating a log-in issue for all Beatport customers who use the Firefox web browser and the new Flash version 9.0.’

I’ve written previously, twice actually, on the awful (Flash based) user experience offered by what could, and should be, a very attractive customer proposition.

I would dearly love to know who felt that building an entire e-commerce site in Flash was a good idea? Or what business need was being met by abandoning most of the commonly used, and widely understood interaction principles - those supported by the most humble of browsers and the HTML format?

I won’t say I told you so!

An incredibly motivating, but entirely depressing talk by former US Vice President Gore on the effect that we, the human race, are having on the planet. There’s a rather lengthy and sycophantic preamble/introduction that the less patient may want to skip (10 minutes 20 seconds to be precise) but I’d recommend listening nonetheless.

He mentions a distinct possibility that within 50 years, the polar ice caps will melt completely during summertime. Despite the obvious effects that this would have on sea levels, I had not realised that the ice is also responsible for reflecting around 90% of the sun’s energy back into space. Water on the other hand, absorbs it! A Tipping Point indeed!

To think that this man so nearly became President!

A couple of links that have been doing the rounds at work - some Qualitive and Quantitive studies into the most commonly used web fonts:
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?
and
Determining the Best Online Font for Older Adults

It’s interesting to read about the methods used, and the information may help inform (or at least defend) certain design decisions that are made, but it all unravelled for me when I read that Comic Sans, was one of the most favoured fonts by the participants!

The BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype movie shows a beautiful, elegant and seductive alternative for the contemporary desktop metaphor we’ve all known and used on our PCs since the 80’s. Whilst the demonstrated interactions are not 100% intuitive or self-evident, they do appear to be easy to learn (not unlike Grafitti on PalmOS).

Despite the impressive execution of the concept, I am a little puzzled as to what problem is being solved here. It would appear (to the designers of this prototype) that in the real world, the messy, cluttered desktop, with piles of documents scattered everywhere, is desirable. In the real world, your eyes can tell you in an instant, what you are looking at - making sorting and location of objects far easier. The resolutions of displays may be going up, but in this demo, all PDFs are displayed by their icon alone. Minus a filename or preview, how do you know what you are dealing with when sorting piles of documents?

For me, the most dissapointing aspect of this is that it just extends and polishes the existing metaphor. Piles of files - aren’t they just a new way of thinking of folders? With the virtual world, are such rigid presentational groupings appropriate? Wouldn’t an interface that shows connections and dependencies automatically be more useful?

I’m sure that there’s far more to the prototype than the movie shows, and that using the interface itself, would make the merits more forthcoming. However, I do feel that it’s wrong to assume that the actual, cluttered desktop is the optimum solution to the problem.

If I were to generalise hugely, and say that people fall into two camps - those that keep their desks tidy, and those who do not, who would this interface benefit? Aren’t those who keep their desks tidy most likely to save and manage files and folders as a matter of course, and those who do not, be most likely to dump everything on their desktop? My feeling is that the less tidy amongst us, are also those who are less likely to go to the effort of sorting a messy desktop into piles. To me, it would seem that this prototype is aimed at just those people.

As promised in my last post I’m posting the response I received from Speed Touch about using their modem on an Intel based Mac:

“We don’t have a date for supporting Intel Macs - hence the recommendation to get a router.”

Given that this is the modem suppied by Talk Talk with their free broadband offer, it’s worth being aware that as an Intel Mac user, you’ll either have to obtain another modem, or play the waiting game with the drivers.

When my father went in to discuss the matter with Talk Talk, they did give him another modem from Sagem. As he’s a hundred miles away, I haven’t yet had a chance to see if this new modem fares any better. Unfortunately, the Sagem website isn’t much help either - it only states that Mac OSX is supported, and gives no further details.