Blog — Page 14
These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
My mobile phone contract has well and truly hit the “18-month itch” stage – although I still have six months until an upgrade is due, I can’t help but look at adverts and scan gadget blogs and think “ooh, I want one of those”. I could go for an iPhone,...
With my recent acquisition of a Bluetooth keyboard added to the PowerSkin, my phone has completed its transition from thin, attractive polycarbonate slate to the monstrous assault on product design you see before you. Or so I would have said in the dim and technologically distant days of 2010. But...
Today’s union meeting, the latest in a series that have been held every few weeks since January, was more than I could face. I skipped it to eat lunch and tackle an interesting software problem instead. It’s not that I don’t want my voice to be heard; to take part...
Here’s some initial design ideas for a location-aware chat app that, as far as I am aware, has significant new features over and above existing mobile chat apps (iMessage, WhatsApp, BBM etc.) and existing location-based functionality in apps (FourSquare, Facebook check-ins, Google Places). Background The inspiration for this idea came,...
As a twenty-six-year-old software engineer – I shan’t use the word “programmer”, for obvious reasons – who’s only ever really had one job, I probably ought to refrain from posting an opinion on this post: Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer But I will anyway. It’s true, every single word of...
There have been a lot of rants around the internet of late about “skeuomorphism” in software, largely targeted at the latest versions of Apple’s operating systems. They’ve almost all been negative, possibly because designers hating on the concept are the only ones who felt sufficiently incensed that they looked up...
Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows 8, is now available in “Consumer Preview” form – a release designed to let potential customers know what to expect from it when it launches in around six months’ time. It’s probably a very good idea to give it six months to soak in, because...
For those looking for a quick introduction to laying out Graphical User Interface components using Java’s Swing technology, this guide may prove helpful. (But probably not.) Swing Components all have a few common properties that affect how they are laid out on the GUI. These are: alignmentX and alignmentY do...
Dear Sid Meier, Where did it all go so wrong?! Figure 1. EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH FACEBOOK Yours sincerely, Ian
Occasionally, I read a piece of writing that sums up my thoughts so well, so exactly, that I sit and try to blog something comparable and just fail. Try as I might, I can’t outdo the original. I’m not sure what Pastebin.com’s retention policy is, so just in case, here...