1. ➶ Stanford offering a free Online Human-Computer Interaction course

    Consider me signed up.

    Monday January 16th, 2012

  2. ➶ Distance: long essays about design, published quarterly.

    Another terrific-sounding tech / design periodical looking for backing on Kickstarter.

    Monday January 16th, 2012

  3. ➶ Immobile Apps

    Nick Bradbury has some great points on testing mobile apps. Our flat has truly shitty cellular data, and the WiFi doesn’t extend to one level of our basement flat - and it’s painful to see so many apps that appear to simply not have been tested on GPRS.

    In developing Happening - which I recently retired from the App Store - I spent a tonne of time testing the app in the GPRS hotspot that was our previous office. The Network Link Conditioner in the iOS SDK is a great tool, but nothing emphasises the latency of GPRS like GPRS itself.

    Monday January 16th, 2012

  4. ➶ Slender

    If you’re a developer looking to manage the images used with your Xcode projects, this looks massively handy. Slender checks your projects for Retina images (and that their dimensions match the @1x images), removes images that are no-longer needed, and a lot of other useful bits.

    It’s $5 on the Mac App Store.

    Monday January 16th, 2012

  5. ➶ Netflix launches in the UK

    The catalogue is a little dated, but for £5.99 a month I’m not going to complain - especially if it ramps out with more over the coming months.

    Monday January 9th, 2012

  6. Five Years

    Beside my desk, there’s a drawer. In it are some gadgets: three Palm Pre devices, two iPods, an iPhone 3G and most treasured of all, my original iPhone. From time to time, I’ll take it out. Remind myself of its cold aluminium shell. The plastic antenna cover, the light far-less dense body compared with its seemingly-vacuum-packed 4S-branded successor. The screen that’s just a shade beneath the glass. The square switches in iOS that already feel so alien, the metal dock. The Voice Memos icon.1 The fact that the device doesn’t do folders for apps, and that for a while it didn’t even do apps.

    It’s five years to the day2 since the iPhone was first announced. Half a decade. All things considered, it’s truly amazing that for a piece of kit so seemingly old in its industry, the original iPhone still fascinates me. Over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering what it was that captivated me, when later in 2007 I was finally able to get my hands on one. All I can say is that, for a device that had so many spec-sheet shortcomings, the iPhone felt considered. It was the first mobile phone I owned that I actually loved to use. The compromise and expense of the iPhone made sense when you used it. All the small details, the finish, the joy at how it worked. How great it was to use a phone that had been tested, considered and used by the people who built it.

    In the months after its launch, I got to know my iPhone pretty well. I commuted 2 hours each way by train to the office, cursing the lack of 3G in the device on a rail route that to this day still doesn’t have 3G.

    The original iPhone was built on a different set of compromises to the competition - how it worked was (at least to begin with) more important than everything that it did. Say what you will about the empirically-lacking feature set: it all seems to have turned out pretty well.

    1. The screenshot is circa iPhone OS 2.0 alongside iOS 5.0.1 - as far back as my LittleSnapper library goes, alas. Thankfully, Florian has a grab of Apple.com back in January 2007 ↩

    2. You can grab the Macworld 2007 keynote from Apple’s Keynote feed ↩

    Monday January 9th, 2012

  7. ➶ See you at Macworld?

    I’m massively excited to be heading to Macworld in a couple of weeks time. We have a small booth in the OS X Zone (Booth 228), so if you’re in town be sure to stop by and say hello.

    Oh, and if you’re still considering going to Macworld but haven’t registered yet, we’ve got 100 Exhibit Hall passes (normally $15) available. Just visit this link to claim your pass.

    Sunday January 8th, 2012

  8. ➶ How the badly maimed BBC can stand up to parasitic Sky

    Great piece by Polly Toynbee for The Guardian.

    Tuesday January 3rd, 2012

  9. While the video game industry at large continues unabated with complex games full of real challenges the player has to overcome, subsets of the industry are getting mired in analytical psycho-manipulation, producing games that play us more than we play them.
    Faruk Ates on Gamification FatigueŸ

    Thursday December 29th, 2011

  10. ➶ Jason Hirschhorn & Paul Carr’s TOP FOURTEEN worst media/tech headline clichés of 2011

    Hilarious.

    Wednesday December 28th, 2011