nicepaul.com

GOV.UK beta

Paul Annett — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:48:24 +0000

I joined the Cabinet Office as Creative Lead for online transactions at the Government Digital Service last year. We're doing more than redesigning a website; we're revolutionising the way government interacts with the public, making it painless for you to apply for a passport, claim benefits, register to vote, or file your tax return (well, it's all relative!) and saving a tonne of public money in the process. Read more...

Lazy web designers undermine print stylesheets

Paul Annett — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:45:26 +0000

Since the dawn of time, web designers have had the tools to provide "print stylesheets" with their websites – invisible instructions that tell a user's computer how to format the page when it's printed, rather than displayed on a screen.

A couple of things my 5 year old boy would love

Paul Annett — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:57:48 +0000

From Fuckyouverymuch and Moist Production respectively.

Many tracks fail (with no error) when importing thousands of songs into iTunes (Mac)

Paul Annett — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:33:16 +0000

I recently had a mammouth clean-up of my iTunes libraries, which basically involved bringing everything together in one new location on an external HD, and re-importing 10,098 tracks into iTunes (that’s about 59GB of music). Problem was, I ended up with a few thousand less tracks actually in iTunes than expected, no matter which obvious [...]

The Government Digital Service is hiring!

Paul Annett — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:46:11 +0000

I started work for the new Government Digital Service (GDS) earlier this year. We’re revolutionising the way citizens interact with UK Government, by creating a cross-Government family of online transactions which are easier to use than the traditional offline versions. The department (part of the Cabinet Office) is taking a refreshingly revolutionary approach, and we’re [...]

Social login + social history

Paul Annett — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:09:02 +0000

Estimated reading time: just a minute! More and more sites are using third party authentication to set up an account or sign in to their services. Typically, I’ve experienced this as “login with Facebook”, but some offer many different login options: Google, Twitter, Open ID, Windows Live… Only last week, Spotify came under fire for [...]

Looking back at old web design freelance rates

Paul Annett — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:43:35 +0000

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes I’ve been shredding some old paperwork today, including some invoices from my days as a freelance web designer (roughly 2003-2006, with a few small projects before and after that). Discussing current rates publicly is considered by some to be bad form (and besides, I’m not a freelancer these days), but [...]

How a vote against capital punishment could help get it reinstated

Paul Annett — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:37:45 +0000

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Earlier this week, the new Government Digital Service published the first user-submitted petitions on the new Directgov “e-petitions” website. The press duly made a scandal out of nothing by running headlines claiming that as a result, the Government would soon be forced to debate the return of capital punishment. In [...]

Trust these muppets with our money?

Paul Annett — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:57:33 +0000

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Two examples of banks giving me ridiculously stupid security advice. Firstly, when the original NatWest iPhone app came out but before it was well publicised, I stumbled upon it on the App store and thought I’d give it a try. It was (and continues to be) made by an unknown [...]

Uppercase, lowercase

Paul Annett — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:13:04 +0000

Did you know that the origin of the words uppercase and lowercase dates back to the early days of the printing press? Individual letters were stored in compartmentalised cases. The more commonly used ‘small’ letters were kept in the lower case, within easy reach of the typesetter. The capitals and accented letters were kept in [...]