threehv

Advertising is a weird thing.

A lot of people hate it.

Mainly because it’s built for money, to make money.

Most advertising is shit.

This is because the triggers that push people’s buttons can be discerned through experimentation, and they’re normally not the prettiest things.

But it doesn’t have to be shit.

It can do its job, whilst entertaining you, whilst getting out of your way, whilst being relevant to what you are doing.

There’s nothing wrong with letting people know what you do, what you have, what you would like them to see.

As long as you do it the right way.

3hv has had a good innings, with some great clients, fantastic staff and a whole load of ups and downs. But, now, it’s time to move on.

We’re going to make advertising better.

I’m trying out Mac OSX Lion’s Launchpad feature.

It kind of makes sense when you are using full screen apps (as I do on my 11″ Air) – as the Dock isn’t available to you any more.

But I really, really want to bind it to the left Command key – in other words – exactly where the “Windows Start” key is…

It’s no secret that the office phone is often switched off. Please just leave a voicemail and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The reason for this is because programming involves juggling a lot of information that needs to be held in your head at the same time. Programmers call this “flow”, sportsmen call it “being in the zone”, and even a thirty second interruption knocks you out of that productive state. The worst of it is that it can take fifteen to twenty minutes to return back up to speed, so that quick call actually has a very high cost.

The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.

“Do something that scares you” is what they say.

Today is one of those days I’ll look back on and say “this is where it all began” or “this is where it all went wrong”.

Regrets eh?

I’m going to do something that is probably considered heresy amongst the people I know.

I’m going to stop reading Hacker News.

It’s a great place, full of very smart people; some of whom have actually been there and done that.

But unfortunately, it’s also falling prey to GroupThink (which is why I stopped reading Slashdot all those years ago).

“Measure everything” and “A/B test your way to success!”. Well actually I hate statistics – they do nothing for me – and I’d rather go with my instincts.

“Fail early, fail fast”. Boring. I’d rather go out in a huge fireball over the night sky. Or even better, be an actual success.

“You’ve got to be lean”. Don’t tell me what to do. Toyota make dull cars. Reliable, but dull. Not stylish, not beautiful. Money-making but dull. That’s what lean gives you.

This marks the end of phase one of threehv. Now is the time to start over…

I’ve just got myself one of those iPhone 4s’s. I really really liked Windows Phone 7, but there’s just the odd problem with it – the keyboard is just a bit too imprecise, it’s just too easy to turn a vertical swipe into a horizontal swipe. Whereas, iOS is precise and exact. And Siri is amazing (even if lots of stuff doesn’t work in the UK yet)

But the UI does look tired. Compare Spotify on iOS to the amazing Spotify client on WP7. And the live tiles are lovely.

All of this is irrelevant to Android. The reviews of Android 4 suggest it’s fixed most of its flaws but given the size of those flaws, I’d be amazed if it comes close to WP7.

So, in UI terms (which is what is most important to me) it’s still Apple out in front. But they’re being pushed hard by Microsoft.

Update: From the sounds of this review Android still has a long way to go, new font or no new font.

When I was a teenager, I spent a while teaching my dad how to use our computer (he was given a PC for work). After several frustrating days, I went round to my friend Ben’s house. His dad was the proud owner of a brand new Mac (a Classic I think). He then proceeded to show us, the children, how it worked. And I remember wondering “what is this thing? where the adults are showing the children how to use it?”.

I can distinctly remember thinking that you can make things better, that it doesn’t have to be shit.

From then on, when I wasn’t sure how to design a user-interface, I would look to Apple.

RIP Steve Jobs.

While building stuff for clients is great, there’s nothing quite like launching something yourself.

Which is why I’m really pleased to announce the new way to buy pick ‘n’ mix sweets (like you used to get at Woolworth’s) – Click ‘n’ Mix. An ultra-simple ordering system and your bag of sweets is delivered directly to your door. Or get a subscription and stay stocked up all month.

Facebook has had a redesign. There’s more to come. The redesign hasn’t gone down too well.

But what’s more notable is the number of pop-overs that appear on the new Facebook. “Click here to see this”. “Where’s my stuff gone?” “If you want this, then do that”. Surely, that’s the sign of a bad design?

It’s not just Facebook. “New” Twitter is now for everyone. Every time I use it I get slightly confused – how do I do that? Where do I go for this?

I’ve always said that Twitter is proof that user-interface design is hard. All it is is a list of posts in chronological order, plus a text-area to allow you to post. Yet there are a myriad of different twitter clients, all working slightly differently, all with an alternate take on the ideal Twitter UI.

It seems that no matter how simple things are, the current trend is for complexity. More popovers, more boxes, more sliding widgets!

It’s confusing, it’s annoying and it is a massive step backwards.