nedrichards.com

Links for 2009-10-29 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-30T00:00:00-07:00

R.I.P. Orange Labs Cambridge (2002-2009): A Story of Opportunities Missed | Xconomy
A former life, now quite definitively finished.

big red button [Flickr]

2009-10-21T05:15:41-07:00

nedrichards posted a photo:

If you are going to have a captive portal - this is the sort of captive portal you should have.

My last.fm tube tags [Flickr]

2009-10-20T15:36:31-07:00

nedrichards posted a photo:

Lovely wall decoration [Flickr]

2009-10-19T08:46:37-07:00

nedrichards posted a photo:

www.ryanjacobsmith.com/

Links for 2009-10-02 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-03T00:00:00-07:00

Libertine Open Fonts Projekt
A surprisingly awesome open source serif typeface.

Links for 2009-10-01 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

Getting the Message
Mockup for a new GNOME shell notification system - the Moblin design team approves.

Links for 2009-09-27 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

Briefs
iPhone rapid wireframe/sketch clickthrough tool. Anything that gets stuff into your "sweaty palm" more quickly is a good thing.
Moblin 2.1 for MIDs
Video introducing the Moblin handset user experience
Moblin 2.0 Beta for Netbooks and Nettops Introduction
Video introducing Moblin for Netbooks.

A couple of presentations

2009-09-27T12:41:37Z

I’ve given a couple of presentations about designing Moblin in the last few months. Since they’re now public on the internets I can talk about them here. This is quite difficult to do since they contain a lot of video, attempting to show how we create (with our lovely hackers) the compelling motion that Clutter can deliver. So you’ll miss all that ‘behind the scenes’ excitement. The two presentations are quite similar in many ways, you’ll certainly see repeated motifs, but that’s just because we’re trying to create a family of design around Moblin (and I’m a bit lazy).

So, designing Moblin for netbooks:

Designing Moblin For Netbooks

View more documents from Nick Richards.

And designing Moblin for MIDs:

Designing Moblin For MIDs

View more documents from Nick Richards.

Both presentations have versions with speaker notes linked inside them, although, as ever they were only a very rough guide to what I actually said. If you want to know the real truth, you had to be there.

What Moblin Did Next

2009-09-27T12:00:28Z

We designed an operating system for phones too. Another awesome job from everyone in design and implementation. As ever, I’m proud to work with you all.

Links for 2009-09-03 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-04T00:00:00-07:00

Helvetical
Another pretty looking redesign of a google product. The web is great.

Links for 2009-08-24 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

InDesign Data Merge!
Like a mail merge, but for InDesign

Links for 2009-08-17 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

Disabling Join/Part messages in Colloquy

Full Screen, Like A Hurricane

2009-07-11T22:01:53Z

I’ve often been asked why the Moblin Web Browser doesn’t support full screen mode and I always answered with two points.

We had some rather more important things to get done first, like saving cookies and making Flash work.
I couldn’t work out a design to make it work without causing the rest of the application to suck.

Now, point 2 was mainly my problem and I admit that, but the solution was sitting right there in front of me embedded in our existing behaviours and until I was explaining to jimmac exactly why we couldn’t do it I couldn’t see how it should work. When the user sets full screen they’re sending a message about what they want to do. It’s a message we’re already set up to hear.

One of the design features of Moblin is the Toolbar, which hides at the top of the screen until you need it. But when you’re in full screen mode, not only do you not need it – but you’ve told us that you don’t want it at all. You’re watching a movie or making an important presentation and our values of politeness and focus mean that we really don’t want to get in the way. And this is great for the browser, it’s just what we want. So, here’s the deal. Press F11. Go on, you know you want to. This’ll get you into full screen mode. I know it’s not exactly the most discoverable thing in the world but we’ll look at that entry point in future.

The clever bit is that the toolbar is supressed in full screen mode (you can still get to it with the Home key if you really want to) so we can hijack the behaviour that users already know about and return to normal mode by popping up to the top of the screen wherapon the browser toolbar will slide down in a downright slinky fashion restoring you to normal mode. Or, alternatively you can press F11 again, but where’s the fun in that? There’s some other cool bits and pieces but that’s the main excitement.

That solves point 2, but what about point 1? Well, during my talk at GCDS Chris was otherwise engaged and followed that through with some awesome work this weekend and pushed the fix. Top man! You’ll be able to get hold of this in tested builds in a little while after it’s passed through QA but if you’re very impatient then you can build the code yourself using these handy instructions.

So feel free to ask us why we don’t do things that you want, it may be that we work out how to do it right whilst we explaining why we can’t.

Talk at GCDS

2009-06-24T15:45:05Z

If you happen to be heading to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in a couple of weeks then I’d encourage you to come and see my talk on designing Moblin at midday on the 8th July. It’ll be fun.

iPlayer mobile on N95

2009-06-11T11:13:02Z

I’m delighted to say that the BBC launched iPlayer Mobile on the N95 today. It’s one of the projects I’m most proud of working on and it’s still great. So if you have a decent Nokia phone and are on the 3, Vodafone or ‘WiFi’ networks, give it a spin. Well done David Madden and the team.

Moblin 2.0 Netbook Beta

2009-05-19T16:13:06Z

Moblin is different. If there’s one phrase that sums up what I’ve been trying to do with the last six months or so it’s that. After all, all of the stuff that’s out there right now already exists. Doing the same thing again does not create a compelling reason for people to use your software.

So we set about putting our money where our mouth was and started building something. Starting today you can see where we’ve got to so far with the beta release of the Moblin 2.0 for Netbooks User Experience. Just go to moblin.org, download it, burn it onto a nearby USB stick and you can either just run it live or install it to pretty much any netbook with an Atom chip. I think you’ll like it.

During this project I’ve had the good fortune to work with a whole group of people whose immense technical skills, personal charm and good humour I respect and admire wholeheartedly. Everything that is good about or project is there because they envisioned, supported or improved it in countless ways. Most of these people will not be mentioned in press releases so I’d like to take a moment to thank as many of them as I can personally for making this last little while the most thrilling, tiring and satisfying period of my professional life. So thanks (in no particular order) to: Darren Wilson, Claire Alexander, Hylke Bons, Matthew Alum, Ross Burton, Tomas Frydrych, Mark Skarpness, Paul Cooper, Øyvind ‘Pippin’ Kolås, Michael Meeks, Srini Ragavan, Chris Lord, Neil Roberts, Rob Bragg, Cyrene Domogalla, Jason Casseza, Arjan van den Ven, Anas Nashif, all the guys and girls in PRC QA, Iain Holmes, Damien Lespiau, Josh Lock, Jussi Kukkonen, Patrick Ohly, Thomas Wood, Emmanuele Bassi, Geoff Gustafson, Robert Staudinger, Sharon Murphy and of course, Rob Bradford. Thanks guys, I really couldn’t have done it without you. It’s been fun but it doesn’t end here.

We’re going to continue iterating this platform to knock off as many of the sharp edges as possible (we’re well aware that there’s quite a few) and continue taking our design philosophy to other platforms. Now that our UI is public and properly open source we’d love to chat. I hope you enjoy it.

Love,

Nick

Mobile Design UK – 22nd April

2009-04-09T09:53:53Z

If you’re in and around London on 22nd April I’d strongly encourage you to come along to Mobile Design UK where you’ll see an array of excellent speakers. Hume! Pollitt and Demmel! oh, and some bloke called Richards talking about iPlayer mobile. On second thoughts, I’d give it a miss if I were you. Seren’s office at 55-57 Rivington St is the place to avoid on 22nd April 2009 from 1830ish.

A new danger

2009-03-17T13:23:30Z

If we, meme like, are just vectors for the continued propagation of tabs into web browsers around the internet. Then Tom Hume is the patient zero. Fight the virus. Close your tabs. Don’t share or be friendly. Look after yourselves, and each other.

Awarded

2009-02-23T10:46:42Z

Hearty congratulations to the BBC for winning “Best Mobile Music or Video Service” for iPlayer mobile and to New Bay for winning “Best Service Delivery Platform” for LifeCache 2.0 at the recent Global Mobile Awards. Gentlemen (and ladies), it was a pleasure to work with you.

How to make Google Latitude Work on your T-Mobile UK G1 (until they do a firmware update)

2009-02-10T10:45:52Z

Do you like location? Do you like mobile? Then you’ll love Google Latitude but if you have a UK G1 then the firmware upgrade to build it into the native maps client isn’t available yet. Which is obviously not ideal. So here’s the strangely manual hacky way to get it to work if you really must (I must)

set up latitude on your desktop computer.
visit http://google.com/ig on your android browser
choose ‘classic view’
select google latitude from the iGoogle sidebar
accept the gears request to use your location
profit

As you can see, the Web Wins Again.