David Emery Online

General Upcoming

You may, or may not, have heard of a site called Upcoming.org. They’ve been around for a bit, so naturally they’re owned by Yahoo! but it’s a nice little site.

It’s yet another “Social Network”, “User Generated Content” based site (it ticks all the buzzword boxes), which enables you to add events to the site, which people ca then say they’re coming to. Add to this a dash of MySpace in the form of “Friends” you can quickly and easily get a picture of all the many events your friends are going to. Obviously you can also add comments to each event as well, allowing a nice bit of discussion around the event to take place – check out the page for the BBC Backstage London Xmas Bash to see what I mean.

This site is great for events, but I think the model could be expanded to almost anything.

For example, you could do the same thing but for retail items. You have your friends list, and can easily see what items your friends have bought, comment on them, say you’ve got them too etc. You could very easily tie this in to a Digg style ratings model as...

More Width

Yes, it’s time for the almost-monthly post about browser width!

I know, I know – you’re all thrilled.

Over on 456 Berea St, Roger Johansson has posted an interesting roundup of the current thinking on fluid vs fixed width sites. His conclusion is the same as mine – namely that fluid width sites are the way to go, but optimising them for a specific size makes a lot of sense.

What really gets me is that we’re still having this debate.

There are very few legitimate reasons for using a fixed width site, the main one being concerns over the line length on a fluid width site; obviously as the site gets wider, the line length gets longer which is bad for readability. This is can easily be countered by using max-width, larger font sizes and so on but is really quite faulty thinking – if the solution is a fixed width site that’s sized for 1024×768 then if you’re window is any smaller then that then the line isn’t readable at all, which is obviously much worse.

The reason for the debate then?

Laziness.

Plain and simple. I’m guilty of it (you can find a fair few fixed width sites in my portfolio), make...

Questions

Stop.

What are you doing?

Is it good?

Really?

Be honest.

If no, why?

And don’t say it’s not your fault. It is. Even if the problem is nothing to do with you.

If yes, are you sure?

Would everyone agree?

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Still good?

Why is it good then, not great?

Optional Privacy Invasion

The latest “fad” circulating round the internet is Twitter. The site itself is pretty simple – you send short little messages to the site, which then appear on the site and get sent to all you friends. It works quite nicely as something between IRC, MySpace messaging, a forum and IM.

It’s yet another optional break down in privacy; you can choose to make your twitters private, but I’m not sure if anyone does, and pretty much everybody using it charts the majority of the minutiae of their life. You can see what people have for breakfast, when they get to work, whether they’re doing work or messing round on the internet – the works.

Yes, it can be incredibly boring – I’m sure most people reading could think of nothing worse.

However, when it’s people in your social group, it suddenly becomes interesting – how many times have you discussed this sort of thing with your friends? Every day, I’ll bet.

I’m still toying with adding my Twitter feed to the sidebar of this site, but interestingly I think it’s slightly too informal for the set up I have at the moment:

Licensing Stupidity

So, you’ve come up with a slightly new interface concept.

It’s not the most radical idea in the world – it builds on lots of existing UI elements – but it works pretty nicely and you’re pretty chuffed with it.

Baring in mind that people have tried and failed many times before to sue people for copying UI ideas and elements…

...what do you do?

Microsoft announce their Office User Interface Licensing program

Well done, guys. Well done.

I’m a fan of the new ribbon UI – it’s a big step forward for Office, and I applaud Microsoft for daring to try something radical on their flagship product. But this is such a traditional Microsoft move it really makes you stop and think – all the “we’ve changed – we’re nice now” PR really is just rubbish.

For a start, to use a “Ribbon” Microsoft are claiming that you have to agree to a 120 page licensing document. It contains a full set of usage guidelines, some of which you have to abide by – other wise you break the terms of the license – and some that are just recommendations.

This sounds like a good idea in theory – if all ribbon style UI elements work...

Marketing or Developing

You may or may not have seen that Carson Systems is selling it’s poster-boy web-app, Drop Send. This is made all the more interesting as they’re charting the progress of the sale on their behind the scenes blog, Bare Naked App.

They’ve revealed a few interesting tidbits, including how many users they have and their current monthly profit – $6,941.81. Not too bad for a web app in a competitive space (http://www.yousendit.com/ I think does better, based on anecdotal evidence), but nothing that special.

The other thing they’ve revealed is the minimum selling price: $900,000.

Those two figures just don’t add up, if you ask me.

For $900,000 you could easily develop and market an app to a similar position in the marketplace; better then that, though – you could develop an app that has much more potential to expand and grow then Drop Send ever does. The market for a file sending app is a small one, and it’s only going to get smaller over time as technology progresses (when broadband is ubiquitous and email/IM have better large file support). Don’t get me wrong, Drop Send is a great niche product, and there’s a lot to be said for...

Camera Software

Last weeks camera post has got me thinking about the current crop of digital cameras. There are a few features that are obviously all related to the actual physical properties; the lens, the sensor side etc. But that’s only half of the story.

The software – commonly referred to as firmware – that the camera runs is almost as important. So many features a modern camera has are completely done in software; different ISO settings, for example, or manual focusing. Something increasingly frequent, however, is the purposeful limitation of software features by the camera manufacturers.

Take, for example, the Canon Powershot G7. If you read my previous post, you’ll know that it’s my current camera of choice. However, there’s been a bit of a ruckus in the digital camera fraternity about the absence of RAW support. It’s not something I care about, but some people really do, and the common consensus is that Canon left RAW support out to drive people to its more expensive DSLR offerings.

Here’s my solution; it’s not a simple one, but the effect it would have on the digital camera market would be quite interesting:

We need an open source digital camera operating system.

It’s not beyond the realms...

Friday Links

Yes, today I’m going to commit the heinous crime of just posting of load of links – sorry! I’m just too tired to post anything more coherent…

• Three Pink Monkeys – Yet another music blog, but quite a good ‘un.

• BBC: Patient gamers buy PlayStation 3 – The US launch of the PS3 seems to have been a bit of a frenzy. As much as I’d like the Wii to wrap up the next-gen fight, I think PS3 may have it in the bag.

• Canon G7 Review on DP Review – pretty much agrees with what I said yesterday.

• Logo Development – Nice branding experiments and extension from Mr Hicks.

• Zune is Tune with a Z – I’m really trying to stay out of all the Zune bashing. Amusingly, it’s turned out to be much worse then I thought it would be. So bad, I can’t understand what Microsoft were thinking. Anyway, you know Zune is just Tune with a ‘Z’?

Current Compact Cameras

I’m in the market for a new digital camera at the moment, so I thought I’d share my recommendations with you lot so you don’t need to do the silly amount of research I’ve done. Of course, the pre-purchase experience is all part of the fun…

My current camera is a Minolta Dimage 7i and it’s served me well over the past couple of years. In fact, it still takes great pictures – especially outside in good light – but it sufers from being a bit too large, meaning that to take it anywhere requires planning and being able to put up with an extra bag.

It’s also not too hot in low light, which brings me straight on to my requirements for a new camera; it’s got to take good pictures in low light. As my regular readers will attest to, I go to quite a few gigs so taking pictures in stage-lit environment is quite a high priority. I can also probably blag some photo passes from work too, so hopefully soon the accompanying photos that go with my gig reviews may get a bit better.

Anyway, after low light performance comes portability; it really needs to be small enough...

Banking 2.0

All over the news today (over here in UK at least) was the announcement by First Direct that they’re going to start charging for current accounts. I have to say that I think this move is going to prove hugely unsuccessful – the banking market here is far to competitive to put up with this sort of move, and the average punter on the street already think that banks make far too much money as it is.

From the other side of the pond comes this story on BoingBoing. The gist of is that Bank of America, by way of seriously bad customer service to one individual (he ended up in jail!) they’ve lost over $50m of business so far by way of people closing accounts.

While being interesting footnotes in the long battle between customer and corporation, both these stories highlight a rather glaring gap in the market:

Yes, we need Banking 2.0*.

We need simple banking, that focuses on user experience over and above everything else. A few simple things are necessary; it must have a debit card that works in all shops (Maestro or Visa Debit then), it must have a good online banking system (more on this below)...