The great fire of FoxLand
On Monday morning at 3.20am I was woken by the Fire Brigade – there had been a fire in our Hampstead office. While none of our work has been destroyed there is a lot of debris and soot everywhere. Therefore, there has been a couple of days of slight disruption and we have moved into temporary office space in Bounds Green. Happily yesterday’s earthquake did not destroy the new place. Just so you know, we are now fully back to work and the disturbance has been minimal.
28 February, 2008
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes
“Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand”. Read Jakob Neilsen’s Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes.
Context and designing applications
While we work on complex web applications, such as for CBD/TPdb or Faculty of 1000, we have to consider the balance of ease-0f-use and creating context for users so that they can understand what they are looking at. Cathy Shive discusses ‘Computer Administrative Debris’ in applications (found via John Gruber).
Obama vs. Clinton, a question of design
The New York Times (login required) compares the relative website design of US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to the debacle between Macs and PCs.
You are reading this right now
The U.S. is going through a period of concern about literacy in the young, but it is not all as it seems. Steven Johnson in The Guardian talks about how many people are reading more than ever.
Microsoft vs. Yahoo! vs. News International… vs. Google
Things have moved incredibly quickly since Friday morning when, in heavy-handed fashion, Microsoft announced they wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Not only has it led News International to scramble around to get an offer in, Google has weighed in presumptuously offering help (Google clearly see themselves as the ‘good guys’, even now) and all-in-all very few people relish the idea of the internet institution getting swallowed up by the still-powerful but unloved Microsoft machine.
The deal throws an enormous amount of questions in to the air – questions the legion of voices on the web have been attempting to answer over the last few days. Just one example: the two companies have profoundly different ways of using technology. Yahoo! is a firm supporter of open-source, whether it is through their use of PHP/FreeBSD/Linux or the sharing of their own technologies, while Microsoft use their own proprietary software. When Microsoft bought Hotmail the switch over from open-source to Microsoft technologies was a long and painful process. Will the same happen again for Yahoo!’s multitude of products, a much more complex switch-over?
What is most depressing about it all is that this does not feel like an exciting deal that will lead to new innovation and business ideas, but is instead two companies struggling to understand and deal with their ongoing lacklustre performance on the web. This is a situation that will excite Wall Street, but few other people. That said, Yahoo!, with a new CEO, a restructured organisation, and still huge amounts of design and engineering talent have a very good chance of recovery – which would not be realised if they bow to the pressure to sell.
4 February, 2008
The internet is not a cloud
The internet is often thought as being a vast virtual ‘cloud’ that spans the world, built primarily by software. It is then somehow a surprise when you are reminded just how physical the infrastructure the internet is built on actually is. Whether it is by the recent news that a single cable in the Mediterranean broke so Asia and the Middle East had to do without their MySpace fixes, or maps such as this that show just how we are all connected.