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I’m trying out Mac OSX Lion’s Launchpad feature.

It kind of makes sense when you are using full screen apps (as I do on my 11″ Air) – as the Dock isn’t available to you any more.

But I really, really want to bind it to the left Command key – in other words – exactly where the “Windows Start” key is…

It’s no secret that the office phone is often switched off. Please just leave a voicemail and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The reason for this is because programming involves juggling a lot of information that needs to be held in your head at the same time. Programmers call this “flow”, sportsmen call it “being in the zone”, and even a thirty second interruption knocks you out of that productive state. The worst of it is that it can take fifteen to twenty minutes to return back up to speed, so that quick call actually has a very high cost.

The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.

“Do something that scares you” is what they say.

Today is one of those days I’ll look back on and say “this is where it all began” or “this is where it all went wrong”.

Regrets eh?

I’ve just got myself one of those iPhone 4s’s. I really really liked Windows Phone 7, but there’s just the odd problem with it – the keyboard is just a bit too imprecise, it’s just too easy to turn a vertical swipe into a horizontal swipe. Whereas, iOS is precise and exact. And Siri is amazing (even if lots of stuff doesn’t work in the UK yet)

But the UI does look tired. Compare Spotify on iOS to the amazing Spotify client on WP7. And the live tiles are lovely.

All of this is irrelevant to Android. The reviews of Android 4 suggest it’s fixed most of its flaws but given the size of those flaws, I’d be amazed if it comes close to WP7.

So, in UI terms (which is what is most important to me) it’s still Apple out in front. But they’re being pushed hard by Microsoft.

Update: From the sounds of this review Android still has a long way to go, new font or no new font.

When I was a teenager, I spent a while teaching my dad how to use our computer (he was given a PC for work). After several frustrating days, I went round to my friend Ben’s house. His dad was the proud owner of a brand new Mac (a Classic I think). He then proceeded to show us, the children, how it worked. And I remember wondering “what is this thing? where the adults are showing the children how to use it?”.

I can distinctly remember thinking that you can make things better, that it doesn’t have to be shit.

From then on, when I wasn’t sure how to design a user-interface, I would look to Apple.

RIP Steve Jobs.

While building stuff for clients is great, there’s nothing quite like launching something yourself.

Which is why I’m really pleased to announce the new way to buy pick ‘n’ mix sweets (like you used to get at Woolworth’s) – Click ‘n’ Mix. An ultra-simple ordering system and your bag of sweets is delivered directly to your door. Or get a subscription and stay stocked up all month.

Apple never had a huge range of different systems, so reducing the variation and streamlining its manufacturing was probably more palatable than it would be for others. The traditional PC OEMs insist on a kind of pointless diversity, which means that they sell relatively low numbers of lots of models. They have no option but to stick with less highly integrated, less efficient processes. And this impacts their entire supply chain; it’s set up to produce commodity parts assembled in standard ways, not specialized custom components.

Read the whole article about Intel’s Ultrabook initiative.

Lately there has been a fair amount of discussion as to what skills/knowledge a designer needs to know. Should a designer know HTML and CSS? Can you make a fantastic design without knowledge of the material that will be used to create the finished article?

For the most part, I’m not too bothered. Design and development are very different skills and I fully understand that you can be good at one without being good at the other. But there is one area where that doesn’t work.

Fonts.

Fonts have licensing and performance issues around them. Get it wrong and your site not only looks awful, but performs slowly and could cost you a fortune in lawsuits.

Exciting times – my other company PizzaPowered is pleased to announce the closed beta for our first software product.

Measure is a tool designed to scan your website and point out errors and potential warning signs. From broken links and missing images, to more subtle problems, like duplicate page titles or missing “alt” tags – all of which are important when looking at search engine optimisation – and just for making sure that your website is performing as well as it should.

Measure is still in closed beta at the moment, but we’re ironing out the bugs and it’s not too long till we can look forward to an official launch. If you’d like to give it a try, just get in touch.