currybetdotnet Application design archive

Take-away facts and quotes from the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona - Day 2
At the weekend I was in Barcelona for the Euro IA summit, and so, whilst trying not to blog my every move for a change, I thought I would post my key take-away facts and quotes from the conference. I covered day one yesterday. Stanisław Skórka I started the second day of the conference listening to Stanisław Skórka talking about the bridge between the librarian and information architect professions. I don't envy any of the speakers having to present in...

Read the full post - Published September 27, 2007 in Application design, Greece, Usability, Web

Take-away facts and quotes from the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona - Day 1
Last weekend I was in Barcelona for the Euro IA Summit, and I made a solemn vow to my wife and myself that I was actually going to concentrate on doing stuff rather than spending my time and energy blogging about doing stuff. However, it did seem rather churlish not to at the very least post my favourite take-away facts and quotes from the conference itself. Ricardo Baeza-Yates Ricardo is the director of Yahoo! Research Labs in Spain and Chile,...

Read the full post - Published September 26, 2007 in Application design, Usability, Web

5 quick usability wins for the BBC iPlayer beta trial installation process
Having spent two of the last three weeks sitting very near to the iPlayer development team in the BBC's Future Media and Technology department in White City, I'm aware that there is no shortage of people telling them what they ought to have done with the product. And that is both outside and inside the BBC. From the Open Source Consortium's 'rip it up and use video codec DIRAC instead' vote, to Guardian journalists patiently explaining to commentators on their...

Read the full post - Published August 6, 2007 in Application design, BBC, Product review, Television, Usability, iPlayer

BBCi Toolbar for Internet Explorer - 2002 style
One of the things that has interested me in recently putting together OpenSearch plugins and Google Toolbar custom buttons for BBC and newspaper related searches, is the change in the nature of web development they represent over the last few years. I've been able to make all of these, with no official permission, in just a few hours, by stringing some XML together into a bunch of text files. They all seem to work fine so far. By contrast, one...

Read the full post - Published July 20, 2007 in Application design, BBC, Microsoft

'Cancel' just doesn't seem to mean 'Cancel' for iTunes 7.2 on Windows
I've mentioned before that I haven't exactly been seeing eye-to-eye with iTunes 7.2 on my PC. It keeps getting upset and sparking Windows error dialogue messages if I run it without my iPod attached first, and won't quit without warning me every single time that iSproggler is using the iTunes scripting interface, am I sure I want to quit? More seriously though, I don't like the way that Apple do not follow the standard Windows OS conventions with some of...

Read the full post - Published July 13, 2007 in Apple, Application design, Microsoft, Music, Usability

Facebook could do with short nickname URLs
One of my friends in an IM conversation the other day pointed out that in barely three weeks Facebook has gone from being something you didn't want to join as it was full of spotty teensomethings, to something where the serious boss of your boss of your boss of your boss now has a profile. The thing I've really liked about it is that it isn't just the usual round of suspects in my social group who are online there....

Read the full post - Published June 19, 2007 in Application design

The curse of annoying Windows XP speech bubble system alert pop-ups
Whenever I write complaining about some aspect of Microsoft's Windows OS, I usually get a couple of people pointing out that I should use something a bit more Linux-y. I have tried out a couple of flavours of Linux desktop, but so far I haven't found anything that does the trick for me. More importantly, the ubiquity of Windows in the business world means I'm pretty much stuck with it in order to do my work. Which doesn't stop me...

Read the full post - Published June 14, 2007 in Application design, Microsoft

Google Talk's latest update doesn't behave gracefully offline
I've griped before about software programs silently updating themselves on my laptop, and then not behaving gracefully when they find I live in an almost always offline world at the moment, and yet again Google Talk is a prime culprit. Last time it updated itself without asking my consent, the Norton software and the Google software on my machine just would not play nicely until one of them got a chance to go online again. That time the honours were...

Read the full post - Published October 19, 2006 in Application design, Google

Living in an almost-always-off world
I'd like to think that if I've learned one thing from living in a house without an internet connection, it is that in the future any application designs I work upon will be more graceful about being offline than the set currently installed on my laptop. The thing that most grates is the way that going online alters the state of my laptop, as applications silently phone home and reconfigure themsleves, and then gripe at me when they can't get...

Read the full post - Published September 11, 2006 in Application design

Engineering parallels at the Science Museum
I was in London's Science Museum yesterday, and couldn't help noticing that there some parallels and lessons to be learnt for our own times and developments in new media technologies. Throughout the modern debate on computer software patents we have been assured by those in support of them that patents allow companies to innovate and help technological development. That view doesn't seem to be shared by the Science Museum's caption writer for their energy section. Talking about the rise of...

Read the full post - Published August 2, 2006 in Application design

Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage

Published June 16, 2006 in Application design, Articles, BBC

The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move - part three

Published April 19, 2006 in Application design

The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move - part two

Published April 18, 2006 in Application design

The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move

Published April 17, 2006 in Application design

When Oyster Card fails think "Thanks for the uptime"

Published March 12, 2005 in Application design, London Underground, Politics, Transport

Microsoft Research Paper on software re-design

Published October 3, 2004 in Application design, Microsoft

BBC Four A-Z-o-tron

Published September 10, 2004 in Application design, BBC

The Vanity Experiment on "designing task based interaction flow"

Published March 3, 2004 in Application design