cathy jones : freelance user experience architect
- holgatastic!
I just bought a new camera - terribly old fashioned - it uses real film! It’s made by lomo and is one of their cheapest, most cheerful cameras - the holga 135 (you can get one from £18). Went out experimenting with it in the bank holiday sunshine on the pier and am very pleased with the results. There are more here if you’re interested.
I used mostly fujji 200 sensia slide film, then got them cross proceed at jessops. As it doesn’t have a flash in built, I lost loads of the first few reels completely - they just didn’t come out as they were underexposed (and I have managed to keep the lens cap on far too often too!). Am learning fast!
It’s so easy to use - it’s made from cheap plastic and looks like a kid’s toy. I’m particularly enjoying the double exposure feature - you can take multiple pictures on the same photo for some interesting effects (the waltzers above are double exposed). Colours are lush and the contrast beautiful - would thoroughly recommend them if you like playing with picture taking..
- 2 new sites
Am very pleased as I managed to launch 2 new sites I have designed and built this week. The first, www.stephenarmstrong.co.uk is for a voice over artist friend of mine. It actually has Wordpress behind it, even though he is not using the blog part yet. Having Wordpress behind it though means that he can update the copy on the page himself should he want to.
The second is for a children’s book illustrator friend: www.guyparkerrees.com. We had fun creating the little animations for the homepage and this site is actually hooked up to Amazon’s affiliate program so that he can make a little money from his book sales.
I have decided to scale back my website making activities for the rest of this year as I want to concentrate on IA. I originally only started making small sites so that I could learn how to code and later transfer these skills to be able to wireframe straight into html. Am hoping I’ve now hit this point and the practice will stand me in good stead. Time will tell I guess! I am so looking forward to the day I put Visio in the bin for good.
- Flickr: When favorites don’t stay favourite
I love Flickr and think they do a marvellous job, but I ran into a rare obfuscated interaction when on the site recently.
I was experimenting with sets for the first time and decided to create a set of my favourite pictures. Then I made this set private, mistakenly thinking that the set itself would be private, but the pictures would remain public. What actually happened was that all of the pictures themselves became private. As this wasn’t what I intended, I switched the set back to public. But then I realised that where other members had favorited some of these pictures in the past, the act of making the set public, then private, then public again wiped this status. Boo…
So I’d like to see Flickr make the implications of the ‘make set private’ functionality clearer to a user that they are aware they are affecting the contents of a set rather than the set configuration.
Secondly, I’d strongly recommend that if a user does carry out this behaviour, Flickr retains and reinstates where they have been favorited by other users (and comments too if they are affected in the same way).
- pokerfacing through the web
I am NOT a poker professional by any stretch of the imagination, so I take no responsibility for the advice I’m giving here! I am very much a novice and this is novice advice. Here are some things that have been useful to me whilst playing online:
- 1. sit and watch a couple of hands first - see who is dominating the table and see who is quiet - who has the least and most money
- 2. use the timer bar to your advantage - you can sometimes delay a little when you know you have the winning hand to draw your opponents in
- 3. don’t rise to any flaming - it will put you off - switch it off
- 4. back down if you are bluffing and someone is aggressively raising you - it probably means that they know they have the strongest hand on the table - don’t be afraid to fold
- 5. use the player notes functionality to record patterns of play and behaviour - if you bump into them again, you’ll have an advantage in knowing their habits and method of play
- 6. Be patient. This is the most important of them all for me - and the hardest to do :S
Has anyone else got any advice they’d like to share?
- feed me now!
I’m totally hooked on feeds. But even though I love them, I want more from them!
I’ve recently been looking at property and flight sites, running searches which I’ve fairly tightly customised for my requirements. Whilst many sites allow you to save a search for running again another time or having results emailed to you once a day, what I am increasingly missing whenever I’m on results pages is the shiny orange feed button.
Feeds are very much being seen currently as permanent, regular things - staples/meals - and indeed they are still mostly - the blogs in my feed reader are places and voices with whom I’m happy to have a long term relationship with. But there are instances in life, such as looking for a flat or flight, where you want to gobble up a particular feed, or snack, for a short while, then discard when it’s no longer relevant in your life. I think the time has arrived for us to become cleverer at shaping our diets and dining habits!
So… to a fairly non-techy person like myself, it seems so obvious, that I’m guessing there are technical reasons why sites are not offering rss feeds from customised searches as standard. Or maybe they are and I’m being completely naive or just haven’t seen them? I wonder if the stockmarket is doing anything like this? That would seem the obvious industry with the appetite from it’s users.
Interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.
- scrabulous, scrabble and facebook
It appears that Hasbro who make the board game Scrabble are asking Facebook to remove the scrabulous app from the site as it is infringing their copyright. This is an interesting situation.
Facebook are actually in quite a good position. They have not yet publicly commented on the matter, but it is widely known and displayed on their website that 3rd party apps (which this clearly is) are nothing to do with them. But they do host the platform that it is running on. It is probably in their interests to pass the buck over to the app developers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla in India and set a precedent, but equally, I bet they’d quite like to keep scrabulous as it is lovely sticky content that keeps users coming back to the site to get their fix. This in turn, keeps users returning to the hub of Facebook and tending their social interactions.
Really not sure why Hasbro are getting their knickers in a twist over this. Surely the sensible thing would be to talk to Rajat and Jayant and either buy their business (if it’s for sale), or do a deal with them to sell board games from the scrabulous pages. At the moment, the sponsored ads on these pages are pretty scattergun in their approach, but more importantly, Hasbro are nowhere to be seen. Why are they not in this space? They’d sell loads. They should see it as another channel for them and a potentially rich seam, rather than as a threat. They could offer prizes and sponsorship as well as advertise.
Much of this depends on what Rajat and Jayant are motivated by. If it’s money, then surely everyone involved can only win. If they aren’t motivated by money and they take it down, then potentially everyone loses - Hasbro, Facebook and us users.
And what about us users? Where does this leave the scrabulous addicts (over half a million of us daily)? Well, the scrabulous pages are currently promising ‘Amazing new features coming soon! Stay tuned :)’ so Rajat and Jayant seem optimistic. If however, this turns out the way Hasbro are pushing for it to go at the moment and scrabulous disappears from our Facebooks forever, expect to see many a ’scrabulous withdrawal self help group’ appearing not long after.
