Archive for the 'Design' Category

O2 Xda Orbit … nearly a review

Monday, May 28th, 2007

It was my intention this evening to write a review of my O2 Xda Orbit, the mobile/cell phone / PDA / GPS / radio device that I got about a month ago.
But instead I’m spending my evening performing a hard reset and reinstalling everything, for the second time this month. And I’m not even going […]

Error’d: Psion synchronization dialog

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Ah, yes. Here’s my favourite user-unfriendly Windows dialog.
This is what you get when you try to synchronize Microsoft Outlook with a Psion 5mx using Psion’s very own PsiWin 2.3.3 and have deleted quite a few of the entries before synchronization:

For those of you who can’t read tiny, compressed images of text, it says:
Synchronizer
The […]

Error message of the week

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

The other day I transferred a short five minutes video clip from my DV camera. The bundled software saved it to MPG format, which I then tried to import into the Windows Movie Maker application that comes installed as standard on Windows XP.
Only it wouldn’t have a bar (frame?) of it, instead presenting me […]

Arial or Helvetica?

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Once there was a typeface called Helvetica.
It was extremely popular.
Later came a software company called Microsoft.
They “borrowed” Helvetica for their operating system and called it Arial.
This inferior typeface is now on millions of desktops all over the world.
Can you tell the difference between the original and the rip-off in these ten examples?
Seemingly, Arial was designed […]

Error’d: But they are ALL new features!

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

A couple of days ago I was clearing out old CD-ROMs, the ones you get free with PC magazines, and gleaning them of software that I either wanted or thought I should check out.
One application that caught my eye was AceHTML 6 Pro, a development environment for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, and PHP. This morning […]

Toddlers + paint - adults = mess + expense

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

I came across this picture again today, originally spotted on Digg.com a few months back, entitled “Why you shouldn’t leave a gallon of paint with unsupervised toddlers“.
I don’t even want to think about where they started cleaning up; I can only hope that it was emulsion. I just love the expression on the face of […]

Choosing colour schemes for your design

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Choosing colour schemes for your website design … or publication … or hair-and-nails combination … or whatever … isn’t always an easy task.
However, there are some clever colour-boffins out there who’ve created cunning tools to help you get the best out of colour combinations. Sadly, most of them are American and can’t spell the […]