Design, citizenship and the city
1 April 2008
The newly-launched WordPress 2.5 (download; release notes; changelog) has got some great improvements to the WXR import feature that lets you pull a file of posts, pages and comments exported from one WordPress installation into another:
27 March 2008
According to Westminster Council, the bulging bladders of that city’s denizens are an accident waiting to happen:
Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.
26 March 2008
Civic hackers MySociety have launched a campaign to encourage Parliament to publish its proposed new laws with semantic XML markup. This will allow people to process, transform, annotate, publish and even just read these bills in ways that make sense to them.
24 February 2008
This isn’t going to come as news to any web developer who thinks about it for more than a second. But ask yourself - how many URL fields are there in your applications’ databases that are defined as VARCHAR(255) or similar?
24 November 2007
(Back to part 1)
Getting to Less is all about helping designers decide what to keep and what to throw out of their designs. Whether you’re designing software, websites, products or cities, you need to choose what to include and what to omit. But how?
24 November 2007
Just twist and go.
No low-contrast LCD display.
No instruction booklet.
No learning curve.
No fiddly buttons.
No modes.
No batteries.
No battery cover to snap off or lose.
No battery changes.
No weedy digital beep-beep-beep.
£3 delivered.
This is simplicity. Does it really need to be any harder than this?
21 November 2007
Simplicity is becoming an increasingly important trend in design. As life becomes faster-paced and we’re deluged with more choices, more information and more stuff, users and consumers are demanding that designers do the heavy lifting of making things more focussed, easier to learn, more refined.
The question for designers is “How?” How do we know when [...]
21 November 2007
You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over the system management software that comes with the Acer Aspire 9300.
A jack has been plugged in!
A jack has been unplugged!
Do you think I don’t realise already? Who’s the one doing the plugging and unplugging?
An important usability principle is to conserve the [...]
21 November 2007
Yesterday, the chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, made a statement to Parliament that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) had lost two data discs containing the personal details of 25 million UK citizens, including in many cases their banking details.The data is the complete database of all UK families with children, and includes names, addresses, [...]