View from the Potting Shed

Not sure why I’ve never noticed this before. When assigning a priority to a Task within Microsoft Outlook 2003 you can click on the priority box and select from a fly-out context-menu one of three options: Low, Normal or High.
But why didn’t the developers adopt a kind of natural mapping approach to the location […]

I knew there was a reason that I liked Nokia and Lenovo so much: they’re greener than almost every other big-name electronics firms out there. But they still have a way to go.
I picked up this story back in April on the PC Pro website: Lenovo out in front in green race. It’s sat in […]

Last night my conceptual model of how my favourite RSS reader, FeedDemon, works when synchronizing with NewsGator online changed.
Conceptual models
In Donald A. Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things he writes about the importance of conceptual models:
A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions. Without a good model we operate […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Screenshot of web code, as viewed in the excellent Firebug add-on for Mozilla Firefox.
These last couple of weeks I’ve spent much of time, both at home and work, puzzling over a coding project I’m currently working on at the University; which is partly why my blogging activity has been more intermittent than usual.
Baseline browsers
For this […]