I have recently started using a Blackberry on Verizon wireless – I was amazed at the experience shock (kind of like culture shock) I had. You take an iPhone out of the pack and it just works, no user manual needed. You take the Blackberry out (and I think most of the blame lies with …
Category Archive
for: ‘Hardware’
The Data-Driven Life
No, not a post about the exciting life I lead through this company, but rather the title of a recent NY Times article concerning how some people choose to monitor and affect aspects of their lives through logging data, and increasingly, logging that data using specialized consumer technology. I found the article, but more so …
Design (in)considerations
A slideshow of some bad design examples I’ve been collecting. My favorites are the French translation making you find a 3.17mm drill and the chair that’s not a chair..
What will the third dimension bring to data visualization?
I have just started reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information. In the first few pages he discusses how we are immersed in a three dimensional world, but our data is stuck on two dimensions, whether on the screen or on paper (3D effects on bars or charts with a third axis do not count..) The concept …
Spinning electrical sockets as an allegory for software design
While I’m not drawing thirty segment pie-charts in Excel (it’s an insider joke), I try to make my house look a little less shabby. To draw inspiration I flick through copies of “This Old House”. I came across the the item pictured in a ”new stuff” section (a.k.a., filler pulled from press releases) from 2005 . You …
Safety critical interfaces
While the blog will focus on software, I will occasionally highlight good and bad interfaces elsewhere. Take a look at this picture of my current tester (you hold it near a wire and it beeps and flashes if the wire is live). The end of the tester turns to switch it on. Do you think …
