Category: technology

• PanicGoods
  I've been building websites a very long time so it's not often that a site flabbergasts me. But Panic's new t-shirt shop is just extraordinary… drag'n'drop shopping, gorgeous icons and just fantastic simplicity. Amazing.
• Steve Friedl's “So you want to be a consultant…?
  A very personal and thought-provoking look at being a lone consultant. Interesting for free-agents new and old.
• Voting System Perfomance Rating
  David Chaum has been contributing to e-voting technology a very, very long time. Working with other more recent e-voting names such as Avi Rubin, Warren Slocum and Ted Selker; Chaum is setting up standardised tests for evaluating e-voting systems. It's a free-market solution to the US government agencies' failure to properly regulate voting technology. It's a welcome but not ideal development. Site

Here's a great graphical representation of Apple's strategy to widen its market share…

I'm so flabbergasted by the pile of new stuff from Apple I just don't know what to say… Apple seem absolutely focussed on making the Mac experience accessible to as many people as possible.

iWork and iLife both will definitely be on my to buy list for this month.

In other news the nascent Brighton Issues Forum had a very useful meeting with Steven Clift last night.

Interesting times.

Last week I managed to finally get me a Blackberry. They're much harder to get hold of then one might think… Anyway eBay came through for me and I settled down to learn the ins and outs of this extraordinary device. The interface is not of iPod simplicity but it is very good when put next to my last experiences of Palm and Symbian interfaces. There really is no good need for a touchscreen in simple PIM applications.

Unfortunately Research in Motion (creators of all things Blackberry) do not support the Mac. So I had to buy some 3rd party software, PocketMac to get synchronisation working. It works great but it felt like going back 10 years when I realised I had to use a docking station and a Windows PC to update any software on the device. Why is syncing still such a fragmented higgledy-piggledy affair? I thought SyncML would sort this mess out but no, we still need to use the software equivalents of duct tape and string to get data in and out of these devices. We should should demand much more from the suppliers.

Here's a bunch of links I've been meaning to post for ages…

• Stop juggling! How do we deal with the demands of modern-day life? The “Information, Silence and Sanctuary” conference in Seattle explored the issues. The organiser, David Levy, is a fascinating guy – I met him in Brighton last year. More…

• Cute Mac t-shirts by Susan Kare (of Mac icon fame)

• The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser. You want it to be useful, but it isn't. It just looks cool. If site mapping rocks your boat check out this rather dated Cybergeography site. Also see the OPTE Project which has some incredible Internet maps.

• If you think that most people abuse PowerPoint then see Gettysburg done in PowerPoint, then Edward Tufte's book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint before reading this article in LinuxUser magazine [PDF] which reveals PowerPoint's origins with Whitfield Diffie and the Mac.

I got horribly lost in London today. I was accompanying a client to a pitch and admittedly our target was absurdly tucked away but… if I'd had a GPS enabled phone we wouldn't have walked in a huge circle!

I'm also sorely tempted by one of those 3G cards for my PowerBook (well the Vodafone one as they're the only ones to support Macs). GPRS via Bluetooth is ok, but rather slow. 3G data would make those delayed trains a bit more bearable but I'm not sure the Brighton area coverage is any good…

Like the election result this is totally unbelievable… Colour laser printers add microscopic traceable numbers to each print they deliver. This 'feature' is aimed at preventing counterfeiting. I just wonder what other kinds of printers, scanners, photocopiers have such undisclosed tracking systems?

Article on IT World via EDRI-gram

In other news an independent audit of the Irish e-voting system will be undertaken. It's not clear what will happen with the results or what kind of tests will actually be done. Still it shows how far the pressure has made the Irish government go to try and shore up confidence in e-voting.

Article in The Times via EDRI-gram

Now that's useful check out Dimensionizer a free plugin for MacOS X. It provides a contextual menu in the finder with an images dimensions… perfect!

• Jeffrey Veen: Making A Better Open Source CMS
  Some excellent insights into the challenges of developing usable content management systems.
• Joe Kraus: Potty Talk
  Meeting Bill Gates at the urinal – talk about performance anxiety! (A great blog on entrepreneurship by the way)
• Danah Boyd: Supporting the Mac is required for social computing
  The driving forces behind many technical changes are Mac users… so if you lock them out you're likely to miss out!

BoingBoing points to an incredible Quicktime VR panorama of 2002's 'Tribute in Light' to the victims of 9/11. Rotate upwards from people blurring by to see the shafts of light disappearing into the clouds.

The site [panoramas.dk][pdk] is truly packed with similar Virtual Reality wonders… I've just had a great time there viewing all sorts of incredible interactive imagery. It's like living in the future.