jeffrey

This year is pretty exciting.

From March 6^th to March 9^th my photo will be exhibited at the Art Lounge at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Woah!

Big thanks to Shannon (she’s in the photo), love you.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Popularity: 38% [?]

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They’ve added a new statue on the Wellington waterfront.

Cool, but weird.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Popularity: 30% [?]

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I present to you my latest Ponoko creation, the turtle tiki necklace:

(try to spot the turtle in the necklace)

Cool! You know you want one (it also makes a great keychain, if you don’t wear necklaces)!

I chose black and white for the colors, but you can choose any colors you’d like from the Ponoko materials catalogue.

Mention my blog in your email and the price for a two colored tiki is $20, instead of $30. A tiki with one color is $10 (any color), a tiki with two colors is $20 (solid colors only - no tints), and a tiki with three colors or tinted colors is $40.

Excellent!

Update: Sold my first necklace! Woohoo!

Update 2: My necklace is featured on Craftzine!

Popularity: 44% [?]

Popularity: 44% [?]

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I love my iPhone even though it kicks the shit out of my index finger. Here’s a screenshot of the keyboard:

I hate this keyboard on the iPhone. It makes me feel like a texting newbie.

It sucks. I suck at text messaging.

Will someone at Apple please replace the QWERTY keyboard and with a normal cellphone keypad with predictive texting:

The QWERTY keyboard was such a bad move, and here’s why:

Meet the typewriter (if you haven’t seen one, this is the keyboard’s mother, who gave birth to QWERTY). The next sentence is important, because it’s bold: The typewriter was designed for ten fingers.

Look at the picture again. Do you see the woman holding the typewriter in one hand and typing with the other hand? Of course not!

Why would Apple try to change the way an entire generation text messages, anyways? For example in Japan half the top selling books are written on mobile phones. Let me ask you a question, which side of this keypad would you prefer to use if you want to text message?¹

The left side of course! There’s less room for error.²

I wonder how many people refused to buy the iPhone because the keys are too small for their fingers. Would they have more customers if they made the buttons bigger?

Boo on you, Apple. But I still love my iPhone anyways.

_{1. The right side is futile, especially when you want to use two thumbs. Just give up and use your index finger, sadist.}

_{2. A tactile response is so important when using a full keyboard. Users are twice as slow when using an iPhone largely because they can’t feel if they’re pushing the right letter.}

Popularity: 91% [?]

Popularity: 91% [?]

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Finally, this week is the 2008 Webstock conference (the same team produces the FullCodePress competition, bless their souls).

Unlike normal web conferences, Webstock is cool. The speakers are competent, the presentations are almost perfect and the lessons are memorable. (And thankfully Webstock is not a sausage fest¹ like most web & technology conferences. Does anyone actually enjoy networking at TechEd more than networking at Webstock? But seriously, gender aside, Webstock is unique because it attracts an equal amount of designers, developers, usability gurus, etc.)

This conference is special, which is why I volunteered my time for the entire week. I’m helping the Clockwork team ensure the event runs smoothly. This is how useful I am:

“Excuse me, where’s the loo?” she asks.

The loo! Your strange word² intrigues me, colonial! “Down the hall and to the left,” I answer.

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“Is the wireless network down?” they wonder.

“Well it certainly isn’t up! I’ll find out ³ when they expect to fix it, no worries.”

So on and so forth. I do feel helpful, usually. But down to the nitty-gritty, for the first three days I attended workshops by:

• Amy Hoy, who showed me that people are oblivious. She was lovely, but her personality was more powerful than her presentation (I remember her more than the content of the workshop). She’s a fan of exposing information (e.g. display a list of links instead of using a select menu) and her vocabulary was refreshing, too. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say egregious.
• Kelly Goto, who gets shit done! (e.g. she stood on an American highway stopping truck drivers because she needed them for a usability test). She focused on iterative application development (agile development) and the importance of usability testing (painfully obvious to knowledgeable designers). Her presentation was too high-level for me, but it was appropriate for the workshop audience. I would like to see her speak about product management methodologies.
• Luke Wroblewski, who knows how to make the most of a bad conversation between a user and a form. I met Luke in 2002 because I helped produce his first book, Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. Yea, he didn’t remember me (after all, it was six years ago). His workshop on form design was excellent because it’s based on research,⁴ instead of opinion (research always makes a presentation interesting for me, because design and development practices are often expressed as opinions).
• Jill Whalen, who showed me my website through the cold, heartless eyes of the Google. Did you know that search engine bots ignore the title attribute in images or links? I didn’t. After the workshop I felt that search engine optimization is vague, and possibly fruitless.

My coworkers can expect a presentation about this juicy information next week. The workshops learned me well, they did!

A note to my readers: Hi! If you read this thinking “what the hell,” I’m sorry… (hello, family!). At least now you see the geek in me.

_{1. Sausage fest: when the number of males in an environment overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of females present. For example from the urban dictionary, He told everyone he was bringing 50 hot bitches from Arizona State to his house Saturday night. But it was just a bunch of dudes watching “The Matrix.” We blew that sausage fest right away and never went back.}

_{2. I guess it makes sense, considering loo’s rhyming word.}

_{3. The team communicates through radio headsets. The first day I felt like a member of the secret service. I said, “Mission Control we need a bucket of ice up here A.S.A.P., over.” They didn’t laugh. I did. The next day they called me “cheeky monkey.”}

_{4. This is why Kathy Sierra’s 2006 workshop was enthralling. She made sense of the research about how our brains work, and applied the findings to product design. Holy shit.}

Popularity: 36% [?]

Popularity: 36% [?]

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