Won a Superpig, was so delighted when I received it - a cool white one! The sound quality is just unbelievable, I've never heard my favourite tunes sound so good and so clear before! Love the way you don't have to use the remote, it's so easy to use with just a simple wave of the hand! Would recommend it to anyone who loves cool gadgets, with it's funky design it's sure to be a big seller!
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awwwww its very cute and blends in with where it is
Read original full review of SuperPig iPod and iPhone Dock.
Gillian, John and their team have just developed a micro-site for me, called Bthar Benefactors, to support a fundraising campaign aimed at encouraging Bthar donors to sign up for Standing Orders - http://www.botharbenefactors.ie.
In these difficult economic times, charities, like any other enterprise, need to have fundraising instruments that are innovative and economical. I could not be more pleased with the result and am delighted to have discovered WSI. In any company such as this, one would expect to find qualities of expertise, flexibility and efficiency, and Gillian and John have those in abundance.
However, what makes the difference for me is that they combine these with the all-too-rare traits of genuinely looking after their clients and taking that extra bit of trouble to get the small things right. Their interest in the project and willingness to refine details is, I feel, a welcome contrast to the common experience in this sector, and their friendliness and good-humoured approach makes WSI a joy to work with.
Currently we are working on a second micro-site, which will house Bthars educational material and programmes. I would not go anywhere else.
Read original full review of WSI Cork.
Very nice to have those Pig in my house.
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With UX London in full swing, this month's London Web had a usability focus. Google's George Zafirovski was in town and had agreed to give a talk on the top ten User Experience gotchas. By way of introduction George talked about the user experience design team at Google. Many people with long experience of Google's products may be surprised to hear they have any usability engineers, but there is increasing focus on usability throughout the company. There are UX teams in many of Google's offices available for to engineers and product managers for consultation, and (apparently) there are adverts for their services in the toilets. As well as being the 'fluid glue' which holds the engineers and product managers together, user experience research can also initiate products such as the recently launched mobile services in Africa.In order to assemble this talk George asked his UX colleagues at Google to nominate their own gotchas, and then compiled the top ten from their feedback:1. "I skipped the wireframes and produced hi-fi mocks instead." - By going straight to a hi-fi mockup you lock yourself in to a single solution. Better solutions can usually be found by comparing a number of approaches, and you can produce multiple lo-fi mockups in the time it takes you to produce a single hi-fi one.2. "We don't have time to test it." - You never get a second chance to make a first impression, don't spoil it by having a glaring issue which would have been quickly picked up in testing.3. "Just make it a setting." - This can lead to a cascade of UX issues, both in controlling the settings themselves and in the combinatorial explosion of possible interfaces engendered by the settings.4. "We only want to test with savvy users." - If only savvy users can use it, then you don't have a usable application. "Passengers will one day become drivers" - if you just consider the needs of the main user (the 'driver'), then the less experienced users (the 'passengers') will not choose your product even when they've gained the experitise to use it.5. "We'll let the translator worry about it." - Issues like sizes of buttons to accommodate labels and bidi need to be dealt with in the original design, the translator can't be expected to re-design your application just to make it usable in a different language.6. "We'll launch this and then figure out how people use it." - If you don't know how to use it when you launch, how will your users figure it out?7. "We'll fix this in version two." - Similar to 2, if you mess up the version one then many people will not even look at version two.8. "The target user is a late-twenties technology professional." - There's no such thing as a late-twenties technology professional. Even within that seemingly homogeneous group there is huge variety, don't kid yourself that because one late-twenties technology professional finds your application usable that anyone else will.9. "If you build it, they will come." - If it's not usable, they'll leave again.10. "Who is this for?" - Don't ask this question, assume it will be for everyone.After the talk there was a Q&A, I made some notes about the ones I found interesting. The first question referred to point 8 - do they use personas at Google? George said that they don't, they try to design for everyone rather than focus on individuals.The next question referred to a comment George had made during the talk, that Google would never compromise the user experience in order to make more money. Several people advanced the opinion that advertising decreased usability, and, since advertising is Google's primary revenue stream, there was a built in conflict of interest there. George said that people do click on the ads, so the ads are useful, and advertising is subject to usability testing the same as everything else.There was a question about what user testing tools are used at Google, George's answer was "everything." They do wireframing, paper prototyping, cognitive walkthroughs, usability studies every one to two months during development and also, because they practice dogfooding, they get period of free user testing from a pool of ~20000 users, all of whom have direct access to the bug database, before public launch.An audience member asked that, since Google is famous for releasing lean products, is that strategy not in contravention of several of the gotchas on the list? I think this question struck a chord with many of the attendees - George himself had said Google have an agile, "release early, release often" approach which seems to contradict at least six and seven off his list if not more.For the second talk, Mike Martin had been drafted in at the last minute to cover 'Growing a Social Network' in place of the originally planned 'Site Traffic kickstart'. I didn't take too many notes for this one, the basic advice is:Pick a niche or an event to focus your site around initially, people don't want to join a site with no activityProvide good (link worthy) content, and provide (and consume) APIs so that others can take advantage of itTake part in the conversation, talk about your site, your network and your content on other social networking sitesAnother good evening, interesting to see inside the UX mind of Google, a shame Mike hadn't had a bit more time to prepare his talk, but 4.5 out of 5. .... Read Original Full Review.
HTC Desire is the anti-iPhone. Blazingly fast, super screen, Android 2.1 and nice UI. But too much plastic and only h.264 video #review 4* .... Read Original Full Review.
I'm finding my 'spare writing time' increasingly used up these days, more on that in a future post, so this is going to be a much shorter review than I usually manage. There were three talks scheduled, but I only stayed for the first two as it was 10pm by the time they'd finished.The first talk was by Grapple, who have a platform which takes your HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and turns it in to a cross platform mobile app. And by cross platform they don't just mean iPhone and Android, they mean Blackberry, Palm and almost any variety of J2ME capable phone. This is a significantly larger potential market than just those phones with a well know app store. And talking of app stores, Grapple also offer consultancy services for getting your app noticed and installed by users who don't have access to an app marketplace.Unsurprisingly, one of the first questions asked was how Section 3.3.1 of Apple's most recent iPhone developer agreement affected them. Basically, Apple have decreed that only their approved languages can be used to develop iPhone apps. Since Grapple is basically executing JavaScript inside a WebKit view, they feel that they're fully compliant with section 3.3.1 and, unlike some of their competitors, won't have a problem.Next up was a talk from Plugin SEO. Although it covered some of the basics, which I'm already fairly familiar with, it was interesting to me because it didn't end at the 'create some great content' line as many SEO introductions do. We were presented with some strategies for actually creating 'great content' and then introduced to a variety of tools to monitor how well our content creation was going. The slides were the same as these, from a March MiniBar, so you can have a look for yourself.There was quite a bit of background noise, especially early on, and we might well have benefited from a more strict adherence to the schedule, but interesting talks again, and a great bunch of people with plenty to share, so 4 out of 5. .... Read Original Full Review.
I have a ipig and cant wait for the release of the super pig, i have just preordered on amzon woohooooo savageeeeeeeeee!
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