Many years ago, I posted this guitar tab. Today, I came across this MP3 on this guy’s website.
CHI 2008
Back in Dublin after spending last week at CHI 2008 in Florence. I posted a few entries over on Sun’s design blog while I was there: [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4]
Main takeaways of GNOME interest, in no particular order:
- I/we really need to get the HIG moving again, preferably in a less monolithic fashion
- It will be really cool to see what sort of insight the InGimp data analysis gives us, and whether it would be feasible/worthwhile transferring the idea to GNOME.
- There still really aren’t many people working on open source usability projects, even in academia
Seven new pennies
Not liking the new British coins all that much, I have to say.
Apart from the fact they look a lot like the cardboard money that I used to have in my toy cash register many years ago, they don’t look very friendly to tourists who might have little or no English, and/or just bad eyesight. I’d have thought the first rule of currency design would be to use biggish numbers, not just (in some cases, tiny) words?
OO.o website
The new OpenOffice.org website is quite a nice piece of work—or at least, the homepage is, I haven’t dug much further yet.
Okay, so I don’t really like the box up in the top corner, either visually or functionally. But other than that, the front page does all the right things very simply, and unlike GNOME’s you don’t have to scroll past a big (albeit attractive) graphic to read the main text content. Nice job.
Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows
Not forgotten
Phil O’Donnell would have turned 36 today, the same age as me (albeit only until June). Calls for a wee dram and a re-watching of the ’91 Scottish Cup Final video tonight I think, if only to reinforce just how badly we could do with him back in our midfield at the moment…
EDIT: Coincidentally, it was also the 13th anniversary of Davie Cooper‘s untimely death a couple of days ago, too. Unbelievable that two of that cup winning team died in their 30s, while just doing their job.
Moon on a stick
In an odd twist of 90’s nostalgia fate, I had the opportunity to see (and, indeed, briefly chat to) both Stewart Lee and Richard Herring live in Dublin in the past couple of weeks… older readers on this side of the pond may remember they used to be a double act in the BBC TV shows Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (some of which are archived on Stewart’s website). More recently, Stewart Lee co-wrote Jerry Springer– The Opera.
Enjoyed both their gigs, but Stewart Lee was probably a bit more to my rib-tickling taste. Then again, he is the 41st best stand up ever.
Bejaysus and begorrah
Only just starting to watch Season 2 of Heroes, and boy are those Irish accents show-spoilingly bad. (Even on the odd occasion they get close, they’re certainly not from anywhere near Cork…)
Fish ID
Dear lazyweb. What kind of fish is this?
Media at your fingertips
Was just pondering in the shower at the weekend (as you do) about what makes, say, MacOS X feel like a more cohesive desktop than even the latest and greatest GNOME.
One thing that came to mind was its integrated management of your media– in pretty much any Mac app where you might want to insert or edit multimedia content, you can immediately access your entire music, photo or video library in a familiar-looking window and drag it over from there. It’s built into the file selection dialog, too:
Of course, Apple only really let you manage your media library with their own software: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut etc. But it did get me wondering if there was a place for a freedesktop ‘media library’ spec, that would offer our users the same sort of quick, searchable access to their media content (be it local, remote, stored on Flickr, split across three DVDs, or any combination of the above) in any application that required it. And, of course, to do what Apple doesn’t, and allow any app to manage that content, if it needs to do so.
