Andy Beaumont

While working on a project with Richard Amos about a year ago we were pondering the static linear nature of breadcrumbs and wondering why they should always be so. The breadcrumb serves two purposes; firstly it gives users a sense of where they are in a site’s structure, helping them to never feel lost or disoriented. Which leads to the second purpose, to always provide them with a path home. The first of these is done entirely visually, you don’t need to click on the breadcrumb or interact with it in any way in order to help orient yourself.

The F8 play/pause media key on the keyboard now launches iTunes and starts playing music, meaning you can’t use this key to play and pause music in any other application that you might want to use. Stupid.

Clicking on the volume control in the menubar, I now have to move my mouse down so that the pointer is over the slider in order to be able to use the mouse’s scrollwheel to change the volume. In Leopard I could click and then scroll without having to move the mouse.

My friend Ben hit the nail on the head. …the majority of iPhone/iPad/mobile users probably don’t even know what “multitasking” is. They can probably only think about the one application they’re running at that very moment. Multitasking to these people would mean running out of processor power and memory, not realising it’s because they have 3 apps churning away doing their thing and only noticing the impact to the experience of the one app they’re focussing on right then.

Sometimes I need to output PDFs of a wireframe produced in OmniGraffle in two versions, one with annotations and one without. Luckily I habitually put all annotations on their own layer, so all that’s needed is a simple AppleScript to tell OmniGraffle to toggle the printable and visible nature of every layer named “Annotation”. A bit of googling turned up this forum post which does most of the work, I just needed to add in the printable property.

Feel free to come back here in a couple of weeks and tell me I was wrong, but my gut instinct on this whole tablet thing is that the speculation so far mostly ignores one key ingredient, and that is that Apple will be wanting to completely change the game in some area or other. That area isn’t going to be tablet computing as the only people who bought a tablet PC in the last 8 years were sales reps.

Here’s an interesting article from Michael Gartenberg about the future of Nokia. He touches on some of the things that I talked about in a previous post but completely misses out the experience of using a modern Nokia phone which I still believe is their biggest failing. There’s no point in producing great hardware if the actual experience of using that hardware is poor due to creaky operating systems. Just look at HTC’s Windows Mobile phones.

I love BERG

If you ever wondered what a computer mouse designed by committee might look like, wonder no longer, for the people at OpenOffice seem to have done just that. Behold: the 18 button OpenOffice Mouse. It would appear that in designing this mouse two key factors have been completely ignored: Users also have a keyboard Users also have a screen Some choice quotes from the press release... "You can do far more with this mouse than most people are likely to realize at first,"

You may have noticed that Flickr’s new face tagging feature has broken the ability to drag your own photos off a Flickr page to your desktop, or even to right click and save an image. Never fear, just drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and hit it when you need to get at your Flickr photo. Remember kids, only use this on your own photos. Stealing other people’s pictures is strongly discouraged.