Siemens new mobile phone breaks the rules

Siemens new mobile phone breaks the rules    Siemens new mobile phone breaks the rules

Siemens new mobile phone breaks the rules. The new phone uses strips of keys down either side of the screen instead of a normal keypad. I hope that Siemens has made a lot os user testing.

February 24, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Google buys pyra

Wired has asked this week’s big question: Why Did Google Want Blogger?. Acording to Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, Google’s acquisition of Pyra may help Google create a more powerful search engine by adding newly created sources of data directly colected from weblogs. The scores of links webloggers create every day may be the secret behind this point of view. The power of this techology could enable users to make a simple search on a news subject and get the instant worldwide reaction for example find out what people in France are saying about it. This creates so many new possibilities. The flexibility of manipulating metadata is enourmous. I think the user will be undoubtly be the winner. He can sort and filter information more easily. Instead of making use of personalization of websites a new kind of personalization can be achieved not just by showing connected-by-subject links but by constructing stories based in stories. With the same metadata different point’s of view can be created. A miriad of ideas will come out in this ever evolving internet community. Again internet is built by its users. Now even more directly.

February 24, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Tip on tap

Many designers think about design but not on usability. But design should mean also usability.
I went to a restaurant and someway along the meal I visited the bathroom. Finishing my duties I wanted to wash my hands and has I was getting my hands near the tap I noticed a A4-sized paper. It said “Press to open. Press to close. Thank you”. Redirecting my eyes to the tap, I questioned myself. Should I press to have water? I did. It worked. As I was washing my hands I was thinking how am I going to close the tap. Even after reading the paper my mind was too focused on the concept of rotate-to-close or mechanical time-out taps. The first are the tradicional ones. You rotate (clockwise) to close. But rotating this tap only gets the water more cold or hot (that is intuitive just by looking). The second ones have a pneumatic mechanism that closes the tap after some time. I read the paper twice and only then gave a small punch on the tap to close. It worked!.

They must have had a lot of complaints to put such a big paper there covering the bottom half of the mirror. What where the designers thinking when they designed this? Why didn’t they test? And what if the warning paper wasn’t there? How much more water would be spent? What would you do?

    

February 21, 2003 | | Leave a Comment 

Scripts and magazines

I have just installed a couple of new things here: backlinking allows my weblog to directly link any other site that linked to it, a Notify List so anyone can leave an email and be notified by next update and a list of recently updated blogs using blogrolling.com so that I can keep an eye on what is going on. This are very nice tools available for anyone to use!

The british magazine cre@te online is going down. Cre@teonline was one of my monthly buys and was a great media magazine covering many things from type to usability.

February 20, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

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    andre_ribeirinho_t.jpg My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
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    Adegga - Social Wine Discovery


    Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.