Andy Beaumont

Nice article on Wired.

Taxonomy has a big advantage over folksonomy, it’s immutable and therefore prone to fewer errors. But folksonomy has a big advantage over taxonomy, it’s personal and flexible and therefore has context for the user. This is an attempt to mate the two systems producing an offspring with the best genes of each. Contextualizing Tags If we analyze the tags associated with a piece of content we can start to categorize them depending on their context.

cat in a box

It's a cat on a cat in a box. Awesome.

I recently clean re-installed OS X on my creaky old first generation TiBook and have since been on a mini mission to restock the applications folder using open source alternatives to the professional apps on my other Mac. The main benefit to this is that open source apps are so often considerably less resource hungry than their pro counterparts, meaning that the laptop that seemed to be beyond it’s life span is actually still perfectly usable.

Even if you’ve never come across the work of Patrick O’Brien through transfatty.com please take some time to read the story over at patrickobrienfoundation.org and maybe donate some money towards a worthy cause.

The disorganised nature of email has been bugging me a little recently and even more so the poor tools we currently have at our disposal to try to organise it ourselves. Sure, smart folders in Apple’s Mail.app and labels in Thunderbird go a tiny way to helping but neither of these actually solves the core issue as I see it. Scenario 1: Suppose I have a 20 message conversation about fixing a bug, midway through that conversation the focus of what bug is being worked on, what file is being worked on or even what project is being worked on takes a shift, all of a sudden the search and organise features available to me don’t cut it as they’re now infected with meta-noise.

A friend pointed me in the direction of this blog entry as a demonstration that Microsoft’s UI designers are moving in the right direction. To a point I agree, it certainly looks nicer than Windows FP even if we ignore the worrying similarities to a deviantArt hax0r’s Mac skin for Windows. What’s actually bothering me here though is the usability. This interface uses what I call “secret tabs”, notice the titles of the un-selected tabs just floating in mid air with no indication as to what they actually are.

I’ve been honoured with being interviewed by eHub about fileNice. Check it out here, and check out the other interviews here. In other news, Preloaded made it into the NMA most respected list for the fourth year in a row, this year reaching the dizzy heights of 5th. Yep, we’re the fifth most respected interactive agency in the UK. Go us! Oh, and might as well throw this one in… Google Reader, a Google RSS reader.

It's that time of year again, time to list what Macromedia have cocked up with this years Flash release. So, my trial has lasted less than a day with Flash 8 before having to revert to MX04 (which I hate). Last year's full on showstopper bug in the release version was the fact that pinning your scripts meant you would lose a whole days work when Flash failed to save the changes.

If immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m flattered. Tiny Finder is a Perl/CGI fileNice clone, so if you’ve not got PHP on your system it could be worth keeping an eye on.