capcloud | Martin Polley: Archive

Apr 22nd

491 notes

Progress?

So anyway, I haven’t done much on my webapp lately, but now I’ve decided to pull my finger out. I originally started playing around with Google AppEngine for the back-end, but I realized a couple of things. First, I’m not going to get very far, nor learn very much, just by copying and tweaking Google’s example code. Second, using AppEngine ties you in to Google. You...

Dec 27th

1 note

Bookmarklet, Part II

That bookmarklet is shaping up quite nicely. Shame it doesn’t actually do anything yet :)

Oct 15th

Bookmarklets

Woot! I made my first bookmarklet that actually works! It’s small and doesn’t do much, but it does something.

Oct 12th

Making

I want to make something. I have an idea and I want to bring it to fruition. To design it, then build it. All on my own. Right now, I can’t do it. Not all of it. There are too many things I don’t know yet. But I know enough to get started. I can design it. I can code the front end. I trust that I’ll be able to figure out the Javascript. I don’t have a clue about the back...

Sep 26th

martinpolley.com

I finally got round to registering martinpolley.com. For now, it just redirects here. Maybe I’ll do something interesting with it at some point. Let’s just say that I’m not holding my breath…

Aug 24th

The Power of Personalization (or not…)

My wife recently got a new phone. She said she didn’t really need an iPhone, so she went for an LG Cookie Plus. It’s a nice looking phone, with a decent-sized touch screen and quite a slim casing. I played around with a bit and found it incredibly frustrating. The touch screen isn’t as responsive as the iPhone’s. Swiping is as likely to move something as it is to do what...

May 9th

Do Tools Matter?

Michael Angeles has an interesting post over at konigi.com about how our tools are not important. “Don’t let anyone tell you that the tools you choose are wrong or inappropriate. Find the right design and keep winning.” This got retweeted a lot. I read it and found myself agreeing. I even retweeted it myself. But since then I have been thinking about this a fair bit. And now...

Mar 14th

Jan 31st

1 note

Dec 12th

7 notes

Forex Trading

A friend of mine asked me to post a link for him. If you’re even remotely interested in Forex Trading, you should check it out.

Nov 1st

Sir Ken Robinson Gets Animated (RSA)

I’m a big fan of Sir Ken.

Oct 17th

Dodgems

I’m pretty chuffed with the way this photo turned out.

Oct 17th

1 note

Oct 14th

44,360 notes

The Importance of Vision

I just listened to an old episode of The Conversation, where Dan is talking to Garrett Dimon, Cameron Moll, and Faruk Ates about how you know when an application or design is done. Garrett Dimon said something that particularly stuck with me. He talked about the importance of having a vision for what the thing is going to be like two years from now. You use this to help decide what new features...

Oct 13th

Sep 15th

1 note

1 tag

Don't Touch the Controls!

One of the dubious benefits of having a leased car is getting to drive a different car whenever it has to go to the garage for something. (This time, a cracked windshield.) The one car I actually enjoyed was a Prius. All the others were meh, including the Toyota Corolla that I have at the moment. One of the more annoying things about this car is the gearbox. Automatic transmission has been...

Sep 13th

This is just a test to see if I screwed up my blog -> Twitter thing…

Sep 6th

Better vs Familiar

While reading #1 here (which recommends using familiar user interface paradigms for learnability), I couldn’t help thinking about Loewy’s MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable) and this from Dieter Rams: Things which are different simply in order to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different. We need to strike a...

Aug 14th

Sensible Defaults to Save Energy

Our new office building has dimmable lights that each person can control for their own cubicle. Originally, you could set the dim level anywhere from 30% to 100%. Every morning, the lights would be reset to 100% brightness. But recently they changed the defaults. Now you can set the dim level from 0% (off) to 100%. And the default (which the lights reset to every morning) is 0%. So now when...

Aug 5th

My iPod Is Ignoring Me (and I Like It)

I just noticed that sometimes, my iPod Nano ignores my commands. The play/pause button plays or pauses when you press it. A long press of the same button turns the iPod off. But what if my press is not quite long enough? Well it turns out that the iPod is designed to ignore my ambiguous command, rather than risk doing the wrong thing. Did I mean “pause”? Or did I mean...

Aug 4th

Best Place for Tabs

Yesterday I downloaded a beta build of Firefox so that I could play with Tab Candy. I am very impressed, and can’t wait until some of the other features that Aza Raskin showed in his demo video are implemented. One side effect of using this version of FF is that the tabs are back at the top. (I use the Tree Style Tabs extension, which lets me stack the tabs at the side instead.) And...

Jul 27th

Dusty Digital Albums

I was thinking about how we relate to our music. And specifically how this has changed with the move from physical media (vinyl, tapes, CDs) to digital music that has no physical manifestation. In the old days (eight, ten years ago) you would have CDs on shelves. Maybe some old tapes and vinyl albums in a box somewhere too. Your CDs might have been organized alphabetically. Or maybe by genre....

Jul 20th

Jun 12th

Divvy

Finally someone has created an application for Mac OS X that lets you manage windows properly. Well worth the $14. (It’s just a shame that this sort of functionality isn’t baked into the OS.)

May 26th

Watch

This is clever stuff. /via @bruces

May 20th

iPad: Maybe Usability Isn't Everything?

When I read about Jakob Nielsen’s usability test findings on the iPad, I can’t help but think of Fred Beecher’s article from last year for Johnny Holland, The iPhone is not easy to use: a new direction for UX Design. In the article, Fred talks at length about the low usability and learnability of the iPhone and its apps. But he goes on to say that that doesn’t really...

May 11th

UCD... in the bathroom

So we just moved into a new office building. A behavior I had noticed in the old building was guys wandering into the bathroom carrying laptops (on their way from one meeting to another, presumably) and looking around (in vain) for a dry horizontal surface on which to place their laptops. In this new building, I notice that every bathroom has a shelf, which I assume is for putting your laptop on...

May 9th

And Now I Shall Tweet about this Post

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May 5th

Modern Slavery, and What We Can Do about It

I just watched this TED talk and I am stunned and shocked. Appalled. Sickened. There are 27 million slaves in the world. Twice as many slaves as there are Jews. Think about that for a minute. And it doesn’t take much to liberate someone from slavery—on average a hundred or so dollars. Go to Free the Slaves now to find out how you can help.

Apr 11th

1 tag

Rockstars?

I think this whole design rockstars argument is a bit daft. I think we need both—people who will blaze trails (rockstars) and others who will follow them (most everybody else).

Mar 30th

2 tags

Transitions and States

Wow! Buxton was right. The transitions are just as important as the states (if not more so). As I play around with jQuery (+HTML + CSS, obviously) as a prototyping tool, I’m finding that I really need to play around with the details of the transitions to make it obvious what is happening (something that it is hard to do in my head, for me at least). For example, in my prototype I have a...

Mar 24th

Software companies should hire more user experience designers and less technical writers. That way, they would need less tech writers, because the products would explain themselves. And the products would be better to boot.

Mar 23rd

Mar 2nd

Watch

Wow! I love the way they’ve used stop-motion to demonstrate their product. Nice one! http://makedo.com.au/

Feb 28th

Feb 21st

1 tag

Shouldn't it be the other way round?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have floor 0 (ground floor) at the bottom instead of the top?

Feb 10th

Flash Video vs HTML5 Video—An Experiment

I played the same YouTube video in Safari (on Mac OS X), first using YouTube’s HTML5 video player, then using their Flash player. This is what the CPU monitor looked like: Feel free to draw your own conclusions :)

Feb 4th

1 note

1 tag

Sugru—Looking Good So Far

My Sugru arrived yesterday. So this morning I set about fashioning some new feet for my aging PowerBook. I used the smallest sachet, 5 grams, but the feet only needed about 1 gram. What to do with the rest? I had a little scout around and found something that has been annoying me for ages—on my bike, my daughter’s bike seat is not attached at the back (and there’s no obvious...

Feb 2nd

iPhone and Nexus One

I’ve finally figured out why I like the iPhone better than the Nexus One. It’s because the iPhone is truly innovative, while the Nexus One is a me-too product. Google is playing catch-up. They should be playing leapfrog.

Jan 19th

Fitts's Law for Asymmetric Targets (Like Tabs)

(Originally posted on my old blog on June 29th, 2009) Since I started putting together my entry for the Mozilla Labs “Reinventing Tabs” challenge, I have been thinking about Fitts’s Law. Here’s what I have been thinking: does the shape of the click target affect the ease of acquisition? More simply put, is it easier or more difficult to acquire a rectangular target that is (say) three times...

Jan 17th

Watch

Here’s a quick example of stop-motion video that I created using Chris Neale’s excellent Animationizer.

Jan 13th

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work — Alain de...

Jan 11th

The Top Ten Essential Interaction Design Books—Dan... →

Dan Saffer shares his list of the top ten must-have books for interaction designers.

Dec 3rd

1 tag

Replication—Provide a Way for Users to Set up...

Nov 30th

1 tag

Adding Filtering Functionality to a Data Grid

Brief To enable users to filter the items that are displayed in a data grid by any criteria they choose. First Steps The first thing I did was to sit down and talk with the project’s lead developer. He said he wanted something like the search feature in the bug-tracking system that we use (which allows you to create and save complex boolean searches on multiple criteria). My initial...

Nov 30th

About me

Interaction designer masquerading as a technical writer. Dad. Husband. Etc. Brit in Israel. Johnny TV dude. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flickr Delicious last.fm Huffduffer Google Reader shared items Google profile I live here

Nov 30th

1 tag

Allocating Storage Resources to an Organizational...

Brief To enable administrator users to assign storage resources (physical disks) to organizational units. First Steps This is not a complex problem that has never been solved by anyone else before (though there are a few wrinkles that need to be taken care of). So I looked to the available design patterns to see what would work best. The interface was already in place for selecting an...

Nov 30th

1 tag

Mozilla Design Challenge Entry

Brief The brief of this design challenge was to find a creative solution to this question: “How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”. Entries were to consist of a video (around three minutes) and images of the mockup. First Steps After reading Aza Raskin’s blog post about browser tabs, I quickly saw the advantages of...

Nov 30th

Awesome New Israeli UX Site Launched →

Nov 29th