Move or Copy?
28th March 2008, Design, Technology0 Comments
Great to see this old fuck up of Microsoft’s persists even through XP and make it to Vista. I’m sure I first saw this last century:
It’s wonderful to know that even with their army of coders, you can always be sure the process machine will always let you down in the most human of ways. For the record, the question gets asked when you try to drag files over a network VPN. The bottom line is you can only copy, not move.
The answers are right, the question woeful.
Going mobile
18th March 2008, Design, Javascript, Trends0 Comments
I’ve been knee deep in the web for as long as I know. Abandoning my graphics and Flash projects for the semantic web and standards driven CSS. But the proliferation of Flash Lite onto most phones has got my head turning again.
I think my first project will be to port retro classic Manic Miner onto my phone. That should teach me the ropes. More soon.
Lunchtime dilemma
21st September 2007, Design0 Comments
I’ve often toyed with doing a cartoon strip but never quite get round to it. It’s little niche sketches like this one from TypeNuts that make me want to get off my backside and do it:
Hi, I’m a mac. I can copy things too.
10th September 2007, Design, Technology, Trends0 Comments
This guy loves his iPhone because it takes design elements from the Braun ET66.
However, all of these guys are listed under the ‘rip-off’ stakes without a second thought.
The myopic Apple brand love-in rolls on.
A good commercial, minimal OS. Too much to ask?
31st January 2007, Design, Technology, Trends1 Comment
I’m a bit dissillusioned with OS directions at the moment, Unix, Windows and Mac.
I was thinking about upgrading my PC from XP to Vista the other day, but really all I want is the OS to boot up my software and then get out of the way. It seems the three big guns are hell bent on trying to do the opposite in the quest for the best consumer OS, and as ever, the end users suffer.
If Microsoft released a seriously minimal os (not just Vista Home as opposed to Vista Ultimate) that ran everything without that god damn “wow” they keep advertising, it’d sell like hotcakes. Unix is too much hard work and Mac suffers on the software front, and this is where Windows wins, but for the love of God, can’t they give us something we want for once?
Know your audience
16th November 2006, Design, Other0 Comments
Ryan Carson’s response to my last post on zero advertising got me thinking. He wonders why the advert was so unsuccessful. To me it has to be point one - “DropSend is not right for the audience.” It could be their readership is down but i checked the circulation printed inside the edition in question and it was 19,512 - I’d say if the audience was right you’d get a better return than 1 in nearly 20,000. Creative Review’s audience is designers which suits DropSend, but most are in ad agencies and the like who have subscriptions - you can buy it off the shelf but I think its mostly an industry mag.
From my early days of agencies and production rooms I remember online infrastructure was adopted extremely early. ISDN lines were installed and pretty good online links were established between printers and production rooms. These guys have been swapping large files for the best part of a decade at least.
This being the case, I’d imagine most of the readership that saw an advert selling the ability to send large files probably thought, “So what?” and flicked onto the next page.
Media Player 11
31st August 2006, Design, Music, Technology2 Comments
Well, after a very frustrating week trying to have my PC as both a bonafide recording instrument and a home jukebox I’ve finally given up on iTunes and all its various hacks. The Beta of Media Player 11 has been released and its a serious step up, and more importantly, while it doesn’t officially support ASIO drivers, its playing through mine just dandy.
If and when a proper ASIO plugin gets released all the better. If and when they release an iPod plugin I’ll be double happy but I doubt that’ll happen, so iTunes will stay there in the background for file transfer. It’s a shame, I still love iTunes, its simplicity itself but all the design and ergonomics in the world mean shit all when you can’t play a tune through it. For the record, I’m not as mad with Apple as I was with regards to the iBook fiasco as I sympathise with anyone trying to write something decent for Windows from the outside in.
Inside an iBook
26th August 2006, Design, Technology4 Comments
Funny, in my last submission, I referred to the loveliness that is the front-end of Apple products. Hello iBook. Lovely minimal snow-like laptops. Hello smug Apple adverts about Apple computers that just work. They just talk to cameras and the like, suggesting other laptops don’t. I’m not pro-windows, unix or macintosh but I get the impression most of their adverts are aimed at smug little Apple product owners who last used a PC c.98. I think its fair to say most systems now read most cameras, scanners and don’t take 10 minutes to start up unless there’s something wrong with them.
There’s no doubting OSX is a good system, but for all their posturing about talking to all sorts of devices, iBooks seem to have an awful lot of trouble talking to themselves. My mate’s first iBook screen stopped talking to its logic board. Apple offered to replace all logic boards on a bunch of model numbers. My mate’s wasn’t one of them. He bought a new iBook. Within weeks it stopped talking to its DVD/CD drive. Annoying but he persevered with it, even while the smug Apple guys shrugged their shoulders almost suggesting there was nothing wrong with the iBook, even though it couldn’t read something as basic as a bloody CD. (more…)
iTunes, Quicktime & Windows
26th August 2006, Design, Music, Technology1 Comment
Works great in general. But Apple’s typically egotistical statement when it was first released for windows that it was “the best windows app ever released” was quite wide of the mark. Particularly due to the fact that Quicktime for Windows is nowhere near the offering that Mac users experience, yet Apple insist on iTunes being tied to it. Needless, and a little bit like the behaviour of a certain Microsoft over the last decade.
So all was well, in general. However, I write music on my PC, not just download it and play it back. (more…)
Online Tees
28th July 2006, Design, Trends2 Comments
They’re everywhere. T-Shirts, I mean. I remember many moons ago I got right into T-Shirt designs but there weren’t that many about back then. I even had a pop at hand-painted designs and flogging them on Camden Market around the early 90’s. It didn’t last very long.
Back then, cool looking T-shirt designs were mostly based around retro second hand shops. That random 70’s American summer camp one, the myriad of old sports logos, a mate of mine even wore a [Freddy] Laker Airways t-shirt that somehow had a charm about it. Then came the design wave and you can’t move for hip designs. I suppose the movement of design applications and the advent of cheaper printing all contributed. (more…)
