New stuff over at waltzer.net

Hey kids, I have finally updated waltzer.net, turned it into a blog. Its a bit plain at the moment but I'll styley it up over the next few weeks I hope.

waltzer.net

Dancing pixel characters ripped off... kinda

Check out the Crazy Mix Challenge on the following page (go to ENTRE and look at the last panel)
http://www.publicisnet.fr/

Does it remind you of anything I did a few years ago?!
http://www.waltzerdesign.com/fun09.html

Firefox scrollbar dissapearance

One thing I'll say for Internet Explorer is that the scrollbar stays put, so if you are on a short page, then click to a long page, the design doesn't jump about the page, which is what happens in Firefox.

Luckily enough there is a solution: lob this into your css file:

html {overflow: -moz-scrollbars-vertical;}

Sorted.

Reverse Grafitti

Brian told me about this kind of thing recently: Instead of using paint to do grafitti, this guy actually cleans the wall in the shape of text and images. Technically it's not vandalism because you are cleaning the wall/path/road but has led to a lot of legal controversy in Leeds where this guy Moose works.

Aritcle on NPR

Moose's website

My cameras are worthless now!

I have just been pricing some of my film camera and darkroom equipment on eBay, turns out it's practically worthless, a combination of being old and not being digital. Kinda sad. In fact I feel very deflated. I set up a darkroom in my storage room in the apartment, at some expense, a few years back when I studied Photography at Griffith College. It served me well at the time, but I haven't used it since.

A century of news photography

The Irish Independent donated its entire collection of images to the National Photographic Archive last year. Now the Archive are displaying highlights of the collection as "A century of news photography: Irish Independent Centenary (1905 – 2005)". The photographs are of immense historical interest, from the destruction of O'Connell Street during the Civil War to Veronica Gueirn and beyond. If you are in the Dublin area the National Photographic Archive is in Temple Bar, Meeting House Square.

The problems with e-learning concepts

I have been doing a bit of work in the e-learning filed again, and the age old problems have cropped up again: How do you illustrate something NOT happening? How do you portray a SERVICE or other non-pysical concept? How do you make buildings look like they are not floating in mid air?

To make something NOT happen, we used to just draw it happening, and put a "NO" sign through it, like the no parking sign, but without the P.

But yesterday I took a different approach - I drew it about to happen, then withdrew it. Worked quite well!

We hit these problems in SmartForce back in the day and now they are coming back to haunt me!

Pocket watches are back!

Ask someone the time nowadays and more often than not, they will reach into their pocket for their phone. We have gone back to the days of pocket watches!

Ulster Bank: another logo lost

As companies merge and buy out each other, we lose the old diverse logos that once were rife on our streets, in favour of bland, corporate multinational logos.

On 24 October 2005 Ulster Bank dropped the National Westminister Bank cheveron logo it had used since 1970, and switched to using the Royal Bank of Scotland symbol, with the Royal Band of Scotland logo type replaced by the words "Ulster Bank" in the same font.

Read more about logo retirement:
Logo Graveyard
Society for the Conservation of Urban Visual Heritage

Deep linking tool idea

Yesterday I came across a cool design for a can of cider, the word Cider being written sideways so that the Ci appeared like a wink and smile. To show anyone this I would have to say to go to amore.se/ and follow this path: "Click Here" - "More" - "discipline" - "Brand Packaging" - "Cider"

Quite an effort to both compose and follow. What if there was a plug-in for Firefox that recorded my last 10 click co-ordinates and packaged the relevant ones so that I could send a pseudo-URL of that location to someone else. The software could click through the flash website and arrive at the intended "location." The button might be time dependent, appearing on the screen for a second or longer after the first button, so we also record the time between clicks.

The syntax could be something like deeplinkerproject.com/ redirect=site.com/ otherRealUrls/// xcoord,ycoord,seconds/ xcoord,ycoord
eg: www.deeplinkproject.com/ ?redirect=www.amore.se/// 200,400,0/150,420,1/100,320
The deeplinker website interpreters this and sends out the link. No need for the recipient to even have the software on their machine.

Would my girlfriend understand this?

My friend and her flatmate spent two hours last night trying to assemble a flat packed chest of drawers. Despite the instructions and tools being available to them, they were unable to assemble it.

Another friend got her cable TV connected and couldn't tune in the channels.

And recently I tried to programme my video to record a television show and failed miserably.

It seems that bad instructions or no instructions, coupled with a lack of intuitiveness, makes for a very poor user experience. I would take intuitiveness over instructions any day, that's why I design standard compliant websites with best practice usability. Nobody wants to stop in their tracks and read how something works, it should just work.

I've been developing the front end of a large recruitment website the last 10 months or so. I'm constantly faced with scenarios which are unique to this field, and we try to design them so they are as usable as possible. So sometimes I have to ask myself "Would my mother understand this?" or "would my (non-IT) girlfriend understand this?" - or any non technical friend or course! If the answer is no, then it's back to the drawing board.

It's all too easy to overestimate users' ability when you are a computer professional. What comes natural to me can be alien to others. I remember telling my dad how to drag and drop files to move them, until then he'd been opening each file and saving to the other location. (And when he was showing my grandparents a computer they thought the most amazing thing was that the pointer could be moved by the mouse. How do you explain Blogging or Wikipedia or Photoshop or Google to someone like that? - but that's a different story!)

So all you developers and designers reading, lets commit to making software, web sites and other user interfaces as simple and understandable as we can.

Wireless networks rock!

I've been using Apple's Airport wireless router for nearly a year now, but today we added a Windows laptop and a PC to the network. It wasn't the easiest task in the world, but now we have three machines with full broadband access, no cables trailing around the house, no switches or hubs, and nobody hogging my laptop. It wasn't all that expensive either - the Airport Base Station was about €130, wireless network card was €30, and the two laptops had wireless network cards pre-installed.