I thought it would take me ages to get used to not having a keyboard on my HTC Sensation that I bought back in October, it has limited some of the things I’ll do on my phone – but that’s not necessary a bad thing!

I took my phone out of my pocket in the office last Thursday only to notice some dust on the screen, perfectly normal I’ll just wipe it off… Except it won’t come off and some careful tilting of the device with white wallpaper up shows that the dust is in fact under the screen!

I could open it up and clean it but that would invalidate the warranty. So I contacted Expansys who I bought it from to explain the situation and ask whether it was covered under warranty – with the obvious (at least in my mind!) implication that I’d like it fixed as this is a sealed unit I don’t expect dust to be on the inside! I got this reply:

Please be reassure that your phone is till cover by warranty.

That’s nice (and quite an irritatingly short response!), but how do I go about getting it fixed? A couple of emails later I have the phone number for HTC.

I’m expecting the worst given my email exchange so far with Expansys, it could not have gone more smoothly!

They’re sending a UPS courier to collect the phone (minus battery, SIM, back cover, SD) and it will be factory reset for data protection as soon as it gets there (I’ve done it myself anyway).  They’ll check it’s covered under warranty and fix and return in 7-10 working days, if it’s not covered under warranty they’ll advise a repair price via email, I can then opt to have it repaired or not (if I opt to not have it repaired they’ll return it to me for a fee!).

That all sounds reasonably fair, I did query the 7-10 working days based on this article on The Register. They were quite happy to admit they’d had major problems (and even asked if I’d seen the TV programme about it!) but discussed the fact they’d changed service centre’s and turnaround time was circa 10 working days now.

So, my phone is boxed and ready to be collected – and I have my trusty Motorola Milestone back out… I’m just hoping I don’t get too addicted to having a keyboard again! If I do HTC better release the HTC myTouch 4G slide or equivalent over here quick smart!

Update 18th January 2012

My phone was collected on the Tuesday as blogged about and I had it back on Monday, with what looks like a new screen! I had to take the photo above of the box as I was so impressed with the box!

Parts Replaced (according to the returns sheet):

Sub-Assy to 82H Lamination, LCM+Touch Window, GENERI

Conductive Fabric, PCB to chassis, PYD

Chassis Pre-Assy, TW-LCD-Chassis,AUO,PGS,Generic Co

If anyone can tell me what the above means I’d be very grateful!

Related Posts

• HTC Touch Pro (or No!) on Orange
• Playing with my Orange SPV M700 / HTC Trinity (Part 1 of X)

Having installed the WhatsApp app, I half expected all my old messages to just come down from “the cloud”, no such luck!

It took me half an hour of googling to work out how to restore the WhatsApp Chat backups! So here it is for anyone else who’s interested…

WhatsApp takes regular backups of your messages and chat history and copies them to your SD card (in /sdcard/WhatsApp/) you need to copy this  directory from your old phone your new one.

However, it’s not quite as simple as that – it won’t work once WhatsApp is installed!

So here’s how we did it:

1. Uninstall WhatsApp on the new phone (if you’ve installed it).
2. Copy the directory and it’s contents (/sdcard/WhatsApp) to your new phone in the same location.
3. Reinstall WhatsApp
4. Walk through the setup procedure, in the last step it will ask you if you want to restore a backup

Related Posts

• Problems Syncing and Adding 2nd Google Account on Android
• Tethering Android Droid/Milestone without Root!
• 50 Android Games!
• The Backup Saga is Over! MyXerver!
• Backup Space – The minefield just got bigger!

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Normally I have a bit of a thing against developers conferences, because they often discuss code (which is a pain if you haven’t written it yourself and is out of context in my opinion) or they discuss technologies that are so far in the future it will be two years before you can actually use them in the real world….

However, this was different! Not a line of code in sight, an informal atmosphere and only a sprinkling of tomorrows web… I feel having attended the conference I might get back to channelling my inner geek (particularly after Rob Hawkes presentation on WebSockets in HTML5!).

Venue: I’ve got to admit to being a little dubious about this! A cinema screen for a conference? It did work for the most part, a fantastically large screen tiered seating all made sense. Networking was restricted to loitering in cinema corridors so was quite difficult in places.

The Line Up

I’ve included what key parts I took away from the speeches and a link to their slides (if available). Videos would be great if @webdevconf release them (I don’t even know if any were taken) as my notes certainly don’t do justice to the speakers!

09:30 Neil Dennis from Strawberry Soup 

Neil discussed how his company was setup and things he wished people had told him right at the beginning. The presentation should be just above but the key thing I took from Neil’s presentation was that they started out really small in a garden shed (I’m surprised they survived that given the state of the shed in slide 6!). They sold their first site on eBay for £300 for 3 pages and have grown from there, Strawberry Soup is now a team of 15 in 3 locations in the south.

Neil went on to discuss the fact you don’t need a business plan, but was quick to add that planning is really important. Rather than some pie in the sky objectives they took some real objectives and then worked backwards with smaller goals to get there. They used just the assets they had and didn’t get venture capital or investment (much the same as I did at BetterWebSpace), and always had a months to live spreadsheet (how long they could survive if no work came in) – this was an idea I really liked but remembered quite quickly that the Business Health Check report in my KashFlow accounts already gives this and some other useful information.

One of the biggest pieces of advice that I took away was the advice not to trade services to save money. Generally it will end up costing you in the long term!

Neil advised on some projects that had gone very wrong because they pretended to know more than they did. Remember you’re the expert, you’ve been hired as such and make sure you know when to say no to a project!

The majority of Strawberry Soup’s work comes through creating mockups and pitching to companies they want to work with, they then work on a 30% up front, 30% on completion of the design and the last 40% on completion of the whole project.

Having sound backup in the form of legal and accounting (particularly when employing) was discussed, Neil mentioned gridlaw (I think that’s the right link!) according to my notes but I can’t remember the context! They also use Harvest for time tracking.

10:15 Rob Hawkes (@RobHawkes)

I’d been particularly looking forward to Rob’s presentation on Tomorrow’s Web and Future Technologies, and he certainly didn’t disappoint. I’m not going to go into too much detail here as Rob’s slides speak for themselves and so much of the HTML5 stuff is changing still at the moment.

Things that really interested me from Rob’s talk were WebSockets which will remove the need for Ajax to poll through JQuery as it will allow the browser to open a bi-directional pipe between the browser and a server. The list of uses for this is immense, multiplayer gaming (in the form of Rob’s Rawkets), realtime analytics (gaug.es). WebSockets are usable already but are in flux, if you plan on using them consider using socket.io as a fallback option.

Rob went on to discuss WebRTC (RT Audio and Video in the browser) which Mozilla already offer in a plugin form for Firefox called Rainbow. Ericsson Labs already have a demo of this working, but the key thing about this is that it will open up P2P audio and video in the browser once communication is established, a server is probably needed for connecting two parties together but then they would no longer need the server.

Other  interesting parts of all this HTML5 stuff, were the Fullscreen API (and it’s security concerns), WebSMS API, WebNFC API, Device API and the Vibrator API (this seemed to be the most popular – I can’t imagine why!) for controlling the hardware in a computer/phone. All of these are forming parts of Boot to Gecko to create a full OS.

All in all, Rob’s talk was an inspiration of what is coming tomorrow, it’s not here yet but we can get involved and start playing with it! I’m also quite tempted to buy his book: Foundation HTML5 Canvas: For Games and Entertainment

11:30 Ben Bodien (@bbodien) from Neutron Creations

Ben’s talk entitled “How I Learned to Stop Panicking and Love My Job” struck a chord with many of the attendees, whether Web Developers or not.

Ben brok this down into:

1. Planning
• Breakdown tasks into smaller parts not just “design a website”.
• Have targets with dates assigned them it’s easier to rectify slips earlier on.
• Write down a plan, it’s something to refer back to and see how you did. It doesn’t have to be reams of paper, just something!
• Don’t over-engineer a GANTT really isn’t necessary most of the time! So use basic flexible tools.
• Always check back on your plans and update them – they are a working document.
2. Task Management
• Track time inward vs task outward.
• Always put a time next to a task, that way if you have a spare few hours you’ll be able to see what you can achieve.
• Put tick boxes down the side, that sense of satisfaction is great, personally I prefer a big black line through the item or in the case of my workflowy lists, the fact they just disappear and the list gets shorter
3. Goals
• Have goals that focus on the longer term of who you are and where you are going.
• In the same way as a racing driver focus on the next apex and you will steer yourself towards your bigger goals automatically.
• Make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time framed).
4. Self Maintenance (and no this is not a euphemism for something else!)
• Get enough sleep
• Drink plenty of water
• Eat properly
• Take performance enhancing drugs (by this Ben means vitamins, nothing illegal!!)
• Get some Exercise.
5. Post Project Analysis
• Always do this, so you can learn from the project.
• Make a list of what made you Happy? Proud? Excited?
• Make a list of what made you Bored? Frustrated? Want to crush baby squirrels with your firsts? (Ben had since advised me on twitter that he has never hurt a squirrel!)

12:15 Elliott Kember (@ElliottKember) from Riot 

There are no slides available for Elliott’s presentation, and they probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if they were here! Elliott’s erratic style is both entertaining and educational so I’ve tried to capture some key points from his presentation titled “Ship It”.

• Learn from people, they all have experiences. Elliott has come from HTML CSS -> PHP -> CodeIgnitor -> Rails and had a reason for doing so everytime. Reasons you can learn from!
• When creating things don’t create ghost towns, use existing data. If, when you launch your site, your two users only have each other to chat to they’re going to get bored pretty easily.
• Show people, don’t tell them – you can’t put on your website “It’s cool” it’s up to the user to decide that.
• “Haters gonna hate” – there will always be people who hate what you’re doing. Live with it.
• Elliott believes you shouldn’t define what you are interested in. You should define what you aren’t interested in and then be interested in EVERYTHING else. It will make you an interesting person!
• Negotiation was something that Elliott clearly enjoys – the psychology of fear and hate that make negotiation work.
• You should always do things you hate and learn from it.
• Don’t let your current job title define you, if you’re a “PHP developer” does that stop you dabbling in HTML? Perl? Ajax?
• Getting lost is good, you’ll learn from it.
• Teach others, it will force you to learn something completely.
• Elliott also touched on the reason Riot wear hats (it involves alcohol) and Rubber Duck Programming

14:30 Paul Annett (@nicePaul)

Paul is currently Creative Lead for the Cabinet Office, primarily redesigning direct.gov.uk (and boy does it need it given some of the demo’s he showed us!). His slides aren’t available as they were primarily videos with him talking, but he covered a lot of good information from their acceptance testing. The key points are below:

• Optimise your site for the common case, hiding complexity.
•  They stop supporting a browser when less than 3% of users are using it. That means IE6 is out!
• Find the Do Quick and make that easy for users to do.
• Set clear expectations
• Don’t be subtle, in acceptance testing many users didn’t understand e.g.
• Look at what context switching a user might do and make that easy for them.
• Users tend not to scroll down, but those that do probably won’t scroll back up to find the search box!

15:45 John O’Nolan  (http://john.onolan.org/ - @johnonolan

This was the talk of the day and provoked lots of reaction and interest, “Designing Emotion –  Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience”. John’s slides are available but are not advisable to open at work (John was clearly practicing what he preaches and invoking emotion) they are available here.

John talked about how all users are fickle and that their obvious actions can easily change based on their current state of mind. Aspirational Marketing (such as the “Marlboro man”) we are now mostly immune to. Designing for emotion can earn you serious money.

You should think about what products people want, he cited that the original Apple iPod was not the best product on the market at the time. There were bigger and better MP3 players, but Apple sold it on “1,000 songs in your pocket” – anyone could understand that!

Design is not just about look and feel, but how your product will be used. Think about what people will do with your product, and design for that – look at how it will impact someone’s life. John briefly discussed the website TheFunTheory showing a video from it and discussing the fact that if you make something unexpectedly fun – people will use it.

John moved on to how emotions work, James Lange theory was that:

This was abandoned in the 1950′s in favour of cognitive theory:

Neurobiological theory is now the more accepted view:

We know three things about emotions:

1. Emotions always have a subject.
2. Emotions are caused by things which are overtly positive or negative.
3. Emotions lead to action.

You need to be noticed, if customers don’t feel happiness they won’t come back, if they don’t feel anything – they won’t even remember you. Make your customers feel an emotion!

John went on to say for me what was the most important:

“When you consider your customer’s emotions

AND design their behaviour.

You are creating an experience.”

John touched on the customer service experience of people like Zappo’s and how they create their WOW factor and brand advocacy. He also discussed the fact that customer complaints are awesome and that you’ve provoked an emotion and reaction, if you can then turn it into a positive for that customer they will become your biggest advocate. If you do all this right your users will make money for you!

16:30 Paul Boag (BoagWorld - @BoagWorld)

Paul is one of three founders at headscape and run a web design podcast, his talk about “Getting down to business” was all about the habits of freelancers and how they need to establish good work-life balance.

Paul’s slides are here (I couldn’t find a way to embed – if you know better let me know!).

Paul talked a little about what success is, and how we define it.. I particularly liked the quote from Winston Churchill:

“Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”

We eventually go the classic “Work to live, don’t live to work”.

Paul discussed the bad habits of freelancers who work long hours and compare them to each other as a badge of honour when really they should be a badge of shame. We should all establish better working habits to take control of our working life.

There are four pressure points for businesses/freelancers:

1. Bringing in business (Sales!)
• Your work will not speak for itself, sell it!
• Work out where the next pay cheque comes from and plan to make it happen.
• Look at who you are targeting, they won’t find you – seek them out!
• You should never be too busy to market your services.
2. Dealing with clients
• We offer services to customers, not products – we need to act like it.
• Clients are not the enemy, work with them to reach an end goal and educate them along the way.
• Regularly update customers, if they want updates every hour do so.
• If you don’t keep them updated they may hate the finished product! It’s a journey to a finished product take the customer on that journey.
3. Feeling out of control
• The culture of freelancers is obsessed with hard work and long hours with endless checklists. Make time for your friends, family and of course yourself!
• Each day should have a beginning and an end. Those times are movable, but they should happen. Start the day with a list of what you are going to do and end it reviewing those items and planning tomorrow.
• If you check your email client every five minutes that’s 22,000 interruptions a year (and that accounts for holidays which you take of course?). Paul recommends we check email twice a day. I can’t see that happening for me but turning it off to get things done is something I’ve tried this week!
• He suggested a service called “AwayFind” which can alert you about certain things happening in your inbox – I plan to look at this in some detail!
• Paul suggests working in 25 minute sprints, followed by 5 minute breaks and spread those across the day to your most productive times.
4. Too much work
• There is nothing worse than turning away great work because you are already working on something mediocre!
• Hire someone to do the mundane or the things you dislike doing.
• Working with other freelancers kills your margins and nobody wants to become a project manager!
• Either hire against your weakness or clone yourself!
• Hire someone to do your admin or answer your calls.

To sum up…

All in all a fantastic event by @alexolder and one I hope to attend again in future, not a line of code in sight – but could do with some improvements on the networking side of things!

Related Posts

• No Related Post

The reason I want to do this is not to waste paper, but to send them to PDFCreator where I can use the combine function and output one large PDF for archiving.

Anyway, back to the problem in hand it just doesn’t work in Thunderbird 6. Fortunately there is a work around:

In thunderbird config editor (Tools | options | advanced | general) , to set mail.operate_on_msgs_in_collapsed_threads = false

When you get there, you will encounter a long list of scary looking attributes for your Thunderbird set up. Press on, dauntless! This is not brain surgery. Scroll down until you find mail.operate_on_msgs_in_collapsed_threads=true, highlight it and click on it. It should look exactly the same but now =false. Now get out of that area and turn off Thunderbird and turn it back on again and your individual messages should print out when you highlight them as a group and you should not get the summary printing out.

All done and fixed (thought I’d post it here for my reference and anybody else’s that encounters this problem!).

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Syncing Contacts

Everything else was syncing fine, Calendar, Gmail… But contacts just sat there with a big red exclamation mark on it. When I tried to do a manual sync it failed with:

“sync is currently experiencing problems and will be back later”

Everything I read said to do a factory reset, something I’m loathed to do unless my phone is practically dead!

So here’s what I did to fix it (I accept no liability for you doing this – you’re on your own!):

1. Open Contacts
2. Click Menu
3. Click Import/Export
4. Export Contacts to SD
5. Open Settings->Applications->Manage Applications
6. Click Menu->Filter->All
7. Locate “Contacts Storage”
8. Click “Clear Data”
9. Do a sync again and what you last synced should come down (remember this could be a couple of months old!
10. Open Contacts
11. Click Import/Export
12. Import from SD Card
13. Import one vCard file
14. Select the backup you made earlier.
15. Go have Coffee, this took a while on my phone!
16. Sync again, to send all your contacts as they were back up to Google

Adding 2nd Google Account

Again this was becoming a problem, my phone uses my business Google account but I want my personal one on there for things like Google Plus (come say Hi if you’re on Google+). Whenever I tried to add a second account it would let me enter the username and password and tell me it could take upto five minutes:

“Signing in…
Your phone is communicating with Google servers and setting up your
account. This may take up to five minutes.”

.. and then it would eventually timeout with the message:

“Can’t establish a reliable data connection to the server.
This could be a temporary problem or your SIM card may not be provisioned
for data services. If it continues, call Customer Care.”

The most commonly recommended way to resolve this (yet again) was a factory reset, and as I’ve already said – I don’t really want to do that! A little digging lead me to this solution:

• Load the YouTube App
• Click Menu->”My Account”
• Sign in with your Google user name and password.
• Now go back to accounts and it should be there!

Related Posts

• Restoring WhatsApp Chat History – Android
• Tethering Android Droid/Milestone without Root!
• 50 Android Games!
• Is it a New Build?
• Selective Status Updates on FaceBook

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors offers a really good insight into it for anyone that hasn’t got the time to read the mountains of resources on the net.

Related Posts

• Changing WordPress Permalink Structure!

What does that mean to you?

Well, other than the fact there should be more to read here, the focus of what’s here will change a little… If I’m going to blog more, it will have to be about what’s going on in my life! This means that my blog posts will pretty much revolve around:

• Technology
• Web Scripting
• Small Business
• Baby and Parenthood

Related Posts

• No Related Post

I became a father not two weeks ago, and seeing this story made me think back to my own childhood. So I retweeted it and was surprised at the response.

From memory the first gaming consoles really started to appear when I was 10 or 11 in the  form of the NES (there were earlier consoles but games were severely restricted). We never bothered with consoles, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, we connected it up to the TV, loaded a game from tape (and hoped we’d got the volume setting correct) and played.

Except I didn’t play for long, I got bored. Paperboy, Pac Man, Horace Goes Skiing, Chess, I eventually got fed up with all of them, then I found out you could actually make this little black box of tricks do what you told it to!

I’d spend hours copying lines of code from a magazine, only to find it missing a statement somewhere that I’d somehow missed and doing my earliest debugging to get it working, learning a lot along the way! Yes I got frustrated, but I still got that thrill when it worked (the same thrill I still get today when code works – it doesn’t change).

What struck a chord with myself and my other followers is that children today are learning how to waggle a joystick/wiimote (that’s all well and good for leisure time), before being taught more about computers. The problem is that they’re being taught they learn how to use Excel and Word!

We didn’t have Excel and Word, we wrote our own word processing packages to print off on our tiny thermal printer rolls!

Where is the next generation of programmers going to come from?

photo credit: Quenerapú

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related Posts

• Cameraman taking care of the Punters and Ronaldo!
• Getting Back on the Horse!