I walked into an unfamiliar toilet recently. You’ve probably done the same, looking around to find the stalls, work out whether the driers are near the sinks, if there’s soap available. I was completely taken aback when I saw this monstrosity of a sink. It’s well known that we Brits love our separate hot and…
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For years, my email address was registered with our electricity supplier. I got the monthly bills sent to me. My wife’s email was used for the water supplier. This made sense when we were a young couple with separate finances – but now we’re a smug an old married couple, with a joint bank account,…
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Back when I used to help people design mobile phone apps, I would talk about the platonic ideal of an app. It’s quite simple and effective. You press the button in the middle of your screen – and it makes everything better! You push that button and a taxi arrives, or a pizza is delivered,…
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Twenty One. I have 21 accounts which use Two-Factor Authentication. I use the Authy app to manage them all, but it is still a pain to scroll through and find the exact 2FA token I need. Encouraged by my friend Tom Morris’s blog post, I picked up a YubiKey NEO for £50. It implements the…
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I’m incredibly disappointed with “Doctor” Emmett Brown. His forays into time-travel could have extremely profound consequences for the space/time continuum. Worse than that, his time machine has a crap user interface. In this clip from “Back To The Future” we get a brief glimpse at the controls for setting the destination date: Ok, we can…
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I love the TV Show True Blood. I really only watch it for the insightful social commentary and tasteful depictions of interspecies erotica. And the User Interface mistakes, obviously. During the recent episode “I Found You”, the Jessica (the Vampire) places a phone call to Sookie (a sort of telepathic fairy… it doesn’t really matter…)…
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I love Android, I really do. I’m chuffed to bits with the Galaxy Nexus I won recently. I’ve had a dozen Android phones before that – stretching all the way back to the HTC Magic. But it’s getting obvious that Android has a serious design problem – even with the gorgeous new “Holo” theme for…
Continue reading →I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently. I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles. — Greg Parker (@gparker) February 22, 2012 When I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days)…
Continue reading →I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft. Both my original Xboxes now run Linux, I’ve converted my laptop and computers to Ubuntu, and I generally laugh in the face of Microsoft’s increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant. So it was with great mirth that I went along to a BizSpark event a few weeks ago.…
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This is a necropost – resurrected from one of my ancient USENET posts. Some web-browsers use “Stop Loading” icons that were represented with USA stop signs. To anyone else in the world, that’s just a red octagon. Similarly the spell-check button in MS products is a tick over an “ABC”. I don’t know what the…
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