One of them in particular rang true for me:

“Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use.”

While many in the tech industry give lip service to “usability” too few put it into practice. And us users, who have few means to push back on bad design, end up having to find “workarounds” to clunky tools.

(more…)

The other challenge I’m having is that everytime I come in here to write something, I get distracted with “tinkering under the hood” so to speak. There are so many interesting tech-y things about having a website!

I managed to send my mother-in-law some photos of her grandchild. I set up a bulletin board for chatting with friends. I moved files around, installed and uninstalled software.

There really is nothing like tinkering with tech to procrastinate!

It seems only fair. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been finding increasingly more efficient ways of polluting the planet, why not turn some of that human ingenuity towards cleaning up the place?

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t, you know, maybe stop doing a lot of the things we do that got us into this mess. (more…)

A new pair of Sony Studio Monitor headphones will allow Kath’s hubby to listen to his iPod on the bus without having to crank up the volume to drown out the cacaphony of commuting noise pollution. (more…)

Speakers range from Al Gore to Peter Gabriel to David Pogue.

The talks are available as podcasts from tedtalks. Because they’re so short, they don’t require a vast committment of time and from what I’ve seen so far, they’re thought-provoking and entertaining.

To the case study! My mother has been using a computer for longer than I have. She had one for her business accounting back when you needed to know DOS, well before the WYSIWYG word processor. Yet, she remains to this day remarkably unintuitive with her computer. (more…)

I decided on a Sony Ericsson W300i. It was a tough decision. The truth is I only need a basic phone. My primary concerns are battery life (since my old one had none) and signal strength (since my old one had none). Beyond that everything else is gravy. (more…)

 ”You should try this, Kath,” she told me. “This is your medium.”

I had never before considered creating a blog. The blogs I have read (admittedly, a very few of the many available) have either been shocking, distressingly personal, or dull. But before I dismissed the idea entirely, I remembered one I’d seen recently about creating passionate users of software.

The authors of that blog were speaking my language. Which is what? Although I work in a technical field, I’m neither an IT expert nor a programmer. I speak for the users of the software we build and it is sometimes a lonely position. 

I love tech. I love new toys that are technical. I’m fascinated by how things are designed and angered when design is not well done.  And I love words and writing. Maybe my friend was right about this being my medium.

 I’ll do my best not to be shocking, distressingly personal, or dull.