bad UI in real life written by: Lee Richmond posted on: 22 July 2009
I kind of stole this idea from the guys at Less Everything, but I just wanted to share my thoughts as I have stumbled across what I believe to be a bad UI design in real life.
The culprit is the Sony Ericsson K810i mobile phone, on the whole this phone is very good, very stylish, a good sized screen,crystal clear sound when making voice calls, it does everything you would expect from a mobile phone.
However the problem I have with it is that the buttons are just too small and fiddly, the key pad is the perfect size but sadly it is spoiled by the tiny and fiddly silver buttons they have used in place of something more standard and much easier to use, unfortunately these buttons would be fine if you have thin fingers but for someone like me who has pork sausages for fingers I found I tend to spend more time deleting spelling mistakes in text messages or retyping numbers all because I've inadvertently hit two buttons instead of one.
I'm all for making things pretty for the user whether it be a website, or a piece of electrical hardware, but if its not usable by the majority then the design is pointless.
the gecko mobile evolves. written by: Lee Richmond posted on: 10 June 2009
I Think you may have guessed what this post is about,
After 5 years of happy motoring I decided it was time to upgrade from Roxxxy (My Vauxhall Corsa, pictured below):
for this:
His name is Prowl, and he is a 1992 Toyota MR2 SW20 N/A Rev2, I got him in exchange for little Roxxxy off a friend, as he needed a small runabout for the cold winter days, when his bikes are off the road, and I have always been a fan of my Japanese cars so this was too good an opportunity to miss.
This is going to be my project car, so keep your eyes peeled for updates from me on progress.
application of the moment written by: Lee Richmond posted on: 06 May 2009
I know this has been about for some time now, but one of my favourite applications at the moment is Spotify (www.spotify.com) for those of you who don’t know what it is, its an application that gives you the freedom to listen to any song you want when ever or where ever you want. All you do is register for a Spotify account, these cost anything from Free to £9.99 per month, then you download and install the application, and away you go free streaming music direct to your computer.
It works in a similar way to most common music players such as iTunes, and has a lot of cool features such as a list of all your most recent searches, you can set up playlist’s and even share them with friends.
Spotify is a brilliant little application, and it’s so simple to use, however there are a few minor drawbacks, for instance if you sign up to a free account you get adverts playing between songs every half hour or so, but personally as the adverts do not tend to come up that often I personally don’t find this to be much of an issue, the only other real problem I have with it at the moment is that it only currently works on Windows or Mac OS X, and they have yet to develop the application for the Linux platform, there are ways to get the Windows version working using Wine (winehq.og) but this can be quite tricky depending on your system.
I already love this application and happily recommend it to any of my friends, music lovers every where should definitely give it a try.
I Dropped IE6! written by: Lee Richmond posted on: 12 April 2009
That's right as a developer I have decided it is time to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 in my work, there are a lot of reasons for this, a side from the fact that Microsoft always seem to fall short of fully supporting web standards in favour of adding some other weird and wacky ideas, Internet Explorer 6 is 8 years old now and has been followed up with version 7 which while it still doesn't fully support web standards made a much better attempt than version 6.
Another reason is the amount of time that has to be dedicated to making applications look and function properly on IE6, if anything I would personally say I have spent more time trying to make things work with this browser than any other and it has got to the point now where I personally feel like I am flogging a dead horse.
It's time for Microsoft to lay IE6 to rest.
its Alive! written by: Lee Richmond posted on: 02 March 2009
Yes! I have finally got my act together and finished building this website,one of the main things that prompted me to kick myself into gear was a talk that I heard on the Rails Envy podcast #66 about the emotional element of programming, and that sometimes rather than breaking the problem down into tiny bits and dealing with it that way we will see it as one big problem and for this reason we as programmers will sometimes shy away from the projects we really want to do, and this really rang true for me and actually helped me to go back and look over and deal with the issues I'd had previously and even improve on some other area's of the site.
The aim of this site is for me personally to display a portfolio of my continuing work, and to talk about some of the problems I've had and how I overcame them, and hopefully in some small way contribute to the community.
I will be adding more content to the site soon so keep checking back.
enjoy.
