Gavin Montague is a web developer working in Glasgow, Scotland.
Slightly late announcement: the exciting news is that I’ve moved from being codemonkey for Design Is Central to being a codemonkey for The Curious Group!
I’ve had a fantastic couple of years at Central and I’ll be forever grateful for them taking a chance on the slightly confused looking chap from upstairs.
Here’s a little tip for OS X mini-application: TextExpander.
For those who don’t know, TextExpander provides a systemwide handler which automatically explodes short ‘snippets’ into commonly used blocks of text . If that didn’t make any sense, here’s an example with my email signature. At the end of emails I type “dicsig” which magically gets replaced by :
Gavin Montague
Web Development
Design Is Central
23 Argyle Court
1103 Argyle Street
Finnieston
Glasgow
G3 8DN
http://www.designiscentral.com
+44 (0)141 847 0077
+44 (0)7XXX XXXXX
The current version of TextExpander allows snippets to be nested inside each other. One snippet can call another, which can call another and so on. Let’s look at the code behind my email signature.
%snippet:mme%
Web Development
%snippet:dicname%
%snippet:dicaddress%
%snippet:dicurl%
%snippet:dictel%
%snippet:mymob%
My email signature is really a compound snippet; it’s composed of six useful snippets (my name, company, office address, URL, telephone number and mobile) plus some fluff.
Similarly, my mobile number, skype handle and home email all combine to make up my personal email signature.
Gavin Montague
Web Design & Development
http://www.leftbrained.co.uk
+44 (0)7XXX XXXXX
Skype: gavinmontague
%snippet:mme%
Web Design & Development
%snippet:myurl%
%snippet:mymob%
Skype: %snippet:myskype%
Nested snippets make it easy to keep all your other snippets up to date.
If we move office I don’t have to update the snippets for my email signature, packing label, letterhead and so on separately;
I just update the master copy in dicaddress and I’m done. If I change my mobile number I only have to update mymob and both my email signatures are up to date.
NB: Yes, I really do have a snippet to generate my own name. The number of people who received email from “Gaivn Monaygue” before I had TextExpander is quite embarrassing.
Amongst the free t-shirts, pens and diabetes-tacular sweets that were distributed at FoWA, SpinVox were offering free accounts. I only read as far as “free” before signing up but it turns out that their mobile oriented speech-to-text services are a godsend for improving my GTD workflow. The overview is this: I divert my incoming voicemail through Spin-my-Vmail which convert my messages to text and emails them to me.
One of the ideals of GTD is to have a single in-tray: all input should flow to a single point where you can review and process it. The fewer in-trays you have means less time spent processing and less chance of missing something important. I don’t think it’s possible to get down to a single in-tray but it’s a good goal to have. SpinVox means my voicemail has effectively just become part of my e-mail. One less in-tray and with the added bonus of never having to navigate the “Dial one to listen to the next message” menus ever again.
Another service that might be of interest to GTD-ers is Spin-my-Memo which is basically identical to Spin-my-Vmail but aimed at the kind of people who use their own voicemail as a memory aid. This service has the advantage of currently being free.
The quality of SpinVox’s transcriptions are really quite impressive: I’ve only managed to trip it up once with some obscure Scottish place-names. If voicemail is an annoyance I urge you to give SpinVox a try; I’m getting it for free though so I might be biased.
Skype means you can attend a meeting without moving.
Skype also means you can attend a meeting wearing the t-shirt and shorts you put on a 5 kilometre run ago and not be asked to leave.
I’m slowly winding my way back north after Future of Web Apps with a big-ass bag of schwag and business cards. This year the overall messages seemed to be:
It was one of the most social conferences I’ve been to. The cards and stickers were a fantastic idea and made it very easy to approach people. I’d love to see the idea expanded upon in future to maybe include more ‘types’ - perhaps “I’m looking to collaborate with…”, “I’ve got something cool to show you…”, “Let me convince you why XXX rocks..” , anything that gets people speaking to each other is worthwhile.
There were some great speakers. Simon WIllison talked a mile a minute about OpenID; Mike Arrington explained why it’s not a Bubble; Tara Hunt used phrases like “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” to discuss community building and Last.fm gave an overview of their dealings with downtime, not censoring their users and Ikea furniture*. The best presentation of the two days came from an unlikely source: Ben Holmes gave us a peek into the brain of a VC and some hints about when, and when not, to take VC cash. It’s not directly relevant to me today, but a boy can dream.
Lack of wifi was a bit of a bummer - apparently it was in place but BT cocked up. I know some people, Ryan included, have mixed feelings about people tapping away on laptops during the talks. However, lack of connectivity caused problems for a couple of the speakers and I think it would have been useful for the people trying to make impromptu pitches during breaks.
"Fully Catered Lunch" != "Sandwiches"
I know that the sponsor spots are a necessary evil at these things and there were some pretty entertaining ones (Simon Wardley, in particular) but there did seem to be an awful lot of ad breaks. Even two of the non-sponsored spots (Amazon and Adobe) seemed to be pitches for their own products.
I think the worst move was making the final presentation a sponsor spot: it really made the conference end on a “meh, time to go home” note. In contrast, d.construct had Jeffery Veen telling us that we’re trailblazers and the future of the internet is in our hands. Who would you rather closed a concert - Jimmy Hendrix playing Voodoo Chile or Peter Andre reminding you to buy some Diet Coke?
Overall, I’m glad I attended but I don’t think I’ll be going down for it next year: maybe Future of Web Design will get my money instead.
*To the guy sitting behind me during Anil’s talk who decided that a conference hall was the ideal place to take a ten minute phonecall - you’re an asshole. Please die. That is all.
By way of an introduction to a post I’m going to make at some point, I’d like you to get acquainted with the little phrase above that I stole from magician and stand-up comedian extraordinaire Jerry Sadowitz. Try as I might, I can’t find the original source, so what follows is paraphrased from my failing memory. Hopefully it’ll still make sense:
So I went into my GCSE art exam and and turned the paper over. The topic was ‘fiesta’. We had five hours to paint something on that topic. The guy next to me didn’t move. Anyway, I start scribbling. Fiesta: Brazil, streamers, carnivals, seagulls. Brazil’s next to the sea, isn’t it? Definitely seagulls. The guy next to me still hasn’t picked up his brush. I think he started making roll-ups.
Four hours and fifty-five minutes later, I’ve been drawing constantly. I’ve not put my paintbrush down once. With two minutes left the guy next to me pulls a toothbrush out of his jacket, dips it in the blue paint, splatters it over his paper, stands up and leaves. I got a C, he got an A! I was there for five fucking hours drawing earlobes on seagulls and I still got a C!
The jokes didn’t make it through from memory but hopefully the point did. Drawing earlobes on seagulls: spending time on details that don’t add anything to the overall package.
More to come when I’m less sleepy.
Spurred on by the rapid approach of Future of Web Apps next week and Highland Fling in April, I finally got round to getting some business cards printed. Green side is the front, white side is the back.
I’m not sure how I missed it until now, but it seems that Scotland has finally got a web conference that’s worth a look. When April the 5th comes round I’m off to Edinburgh for Highland Fling. I can’t say I like the name seeing as (a) Edinburgh isn’t in the Highlands and (b) l hate the way this bloody country has to be so annoyingly Scottish at every opportunity*. I doubt the same conference in England be called ‘Markup & Morris Dancing’.
Onomastic gripes aside, i’m looking forward to it. The speakers are good, the topic is interesting and it’s a chance to meet local webfolk. There’s precious little in the way of meetups around here and precious few locals attend the conferences further south. So fair play to Alan White for arranging Highland Fling.
*This is the same reason i want to hit SNP spokespeople on the head with a rake. Any opportunity to cram in a pithy jock cliche, random stanza of Burns, or even a Sean Connery line or two. We get it: you’re Scottish. Move on.
A very quick variation of Galarrhea.
If disk space is at a premium, or perhaps you just want to show people the sites you’re planning on being “inspired” by, then you might like Pap This!. Galarrhea’s new sibling will capture whatever you’re currently looking at in Safari and prepare it for upload to Flickr.
I’ve got Pap This! tied to its own Quicksilver trigger for extra geeky points.
You need to upgrade your Flash Player
I’m in danger of losing my healthy cynicism and complete indifference towards my birthday. My girlfriend got me the best present I’ve ever received:
I now have a cyborg rabbit that sings Cole Porter songs in a French accent! All hail the Nabaztag!
The parent company, Violet, offer a host of free and paid services, such as traffic and weather reporting and, more importantly, API for controlling his behaviour. I’ve thrown together a quick site for sending audio messages to my rabbit but what I’m really interested in is using it as an ambient information display. There are loads of possibilities here:
I know that the obvious response to each of these possibilities is, “Just turn your bloody computer on, you big wendy” but that’s missing the point. Computers are noisy, ugly and distracting: I like the idea of an device that is quiet, good looking and blends into the background when it’s idle. Ok, the Nabaztag is only capable of sending very basic signals but the concept is solid. If you you want to see one of the high points of ambient device design then look at the Cellular Squirrel from MIT.
Firstly, Violet severely underestimated the number of new Nabaztags that would appear on Christmas morning. The servers were down over Noel and service continues to be a bit patchy. As all the input to each Nabaztag has to go through Violet servers, a lot of people spent two weeks with very expensive paperweights. Fair play to Violet, though: to say sorry they’ve suspended fees for all services until February but several of the extra features in the latest generation of Nabaztags haven’t been activated yet and the customers good will only stretches so far.
Secondly, the API is still pretty weak: only very basic behaviours can be programmed. I’d love to be able to check if a rabbit is currently online, send it ‘resting’ states and do a dozen other things that must be technically possible but aren’t publicly available. On a promising note: Violet do seem to acknowledge the weaknesses in the API and have said that they want to beef up the API in future.
The last problem, and in my opinion the more dangerous, is the number of shortcomings in the webapp from one’s litter of Nabaztags are managed.
The interface isn’t fully localized into English. There is an English language version, but it’s littered with spelling mistakes and poor grammar, and the occasional French phrase. I appreciate that Violet is a French company, but if they want to be a hit worldwide they need to acknowledge that the web speaks English. Although the snippets of French are sparse and the other mistakes don’t generally impede understanding, it does give a very sloppy impression.
The Violet designers have embraced AJAX, but most of its uses are entirely pointless. For example, the preference page triggers five AJAX requests on load just to pull in its basic elements. There’s absolutely no gain from loading the page in this way and it may, in fact, be a contributing factor to Violet’s server problems. Five extra requests per page view are bound to put a extra strain on the already taxed servers. The way it’s been built also makes the site completely inaccessible, but that’s a rant for another day.
The real killer problem in the site is a lack of good documentation. The Nabaztag has three sets of lights that cycle through three colours and move through a huge number of patterns. The lights are the primary means of reading data from your Nabaztag and here’s what the online help section says about them:
Nabaztag mainly uses the lights on his tummy and nose to tell you things. Different color animations are used to provide information.
I’m paraphrasing here but believe me: the section in its entirety doesn’t say much more. There’s no chart or movies showing common patterns, no authoritative list of your bunny’s behaviours. Most users end up on third-party forums asking about the more cryptic combinations of lights.
All in all though, I’m very pleased. The Violet servers are starting to recover from the surge of traffic and I’m dying start playing with my new toy.