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If you own a nokia smartphone I would encourage you to try this rather decent product that our friends at Google have created. It’s good. Later I shall tell you why.

Where’s London Yahoo?

Wrong!

Where’s London Google?

Wrong!

Where’s London Multimap?

Wrong!

Update: According to Natasha, who knows more: Nelson’s Column not Charing Cross. Still wrong though!

If you’re walking in soho, to my office perhaps, you might want to use this Walkit tip to save a couple of minutes. Be a walking pro and know the shortcuts!

About Numbers 1.0.2. This update addresses compatibility with Mac OS X.

Thanks, that’s really made me feel secure about your OS X only product. Did it just not work before?

“It’s your father,” she said. “He’s had an accident.”

My friend froze, steeled himself for the worst, and asked what had happened.

“Well, he’s deleted the printer icon from the desktop … and wants to know if there’s any way of making it come back again.”

This is the truth of my life. and yours

The Dyson DC16 is the most masculine object I have ever owned. For certain values of owned of course, in that my girlfriend owns one, my parents own one, my friends own them, I do not. So I thought I would write a little about why I like it and why I think it’s a successful product.

The key to the allure of the DC 16 that it actually delivers on the promise of a handheld vacuum cleaner. That is, it’s a vacuum cleaner, in your hand rather than being an ineffective noisemaker and distinct step down on a dustpan and brush. This may be a pricepoint issue, the DC16 sits invitingly at £99 (about the same price as a Nano) which brackets it much more closely to the conventional vacuum market than the throwaway handheld you’d get in Argos. Whilst there are other things I will talk about that are important to the success of the DC16 nothing approaches this for significance. It works.

I describe the device as ‘Suppressed Power’.  It seems barely constrained, bulging unexpectedly all over, with an aggressive profile and sub-machine gun heft. Rather than pincering the device like a remote control as you would with a normal handheld you have to shake hands with a DC16 as you would a man. A slightly scary man who would crush you just that little bit more than was necessary. Then bring in the long, positive trigger action where you have to really mean it to start it up. The long draw isn’t really that hard to keep pressed but it does create a more ‘bursty’ cleaning experience which fits nicely with the hunt and peck behaviour of a handheld and probably helps with the battery life as well. Of course you won’t want or need longer cleaning sessions because the DC16 actually cleans (see above) and thus your dirt will go away.

The final aesthetic point is aural. The start up whine is second only to a  Jubilee line train’s acceleration noise for sheer industrial beauty. This is a noise that carries through on the promises made by the industrial design, that you’re strapped into something that looks more like RoboCop should be carrying it than should be present in a modern British home. Something that’s slightly out of control, that needs to be watched like a dog on a lead.

This is only a very little review, so you should just go on and buy one of the things to experience it for yourself. It’ll make you happy.

I get a lot of email into my gmail that isn’t for me. This is to be expected, and no, it isn’t spam but i have the (fairly common) firstname.surname (which is also firstnamesurname) and many people in the world just can’t read, write or understand. But this is a new low.

Someone seems to have linked their Xbox live gamertag to this address, no worries as far as I’m concerned except that I could clearly 0wn them if required. Thus the emailed greeting this morning:

“Dear Boomhauerbiatch,  This mail is confirmation that you successfully purchased Xbox Live 2000 Microsoft Points bundle on Wednesday, December 19, 2007…”

Indeed.

very silly tip of the day: to get multiple windows on the s60 browser (in S60 3.1 - n95) open a popup then options > windows to switch between the two. It gets you a different UI to the History with the page screenshots on a standard S60 tab widget but works all the same.

It’s the feature they didn’t want you to see!

Potential mobile design pattern for a traditional device: Put only actions on softkeys and collapse the traditional ‘options’ list into a list of buttons at the bottom of each screen.

Potential plus: Allows customer to more easily discover the most important actions in a path

Potential downside: Puts less frequently used options on a slow road.

For reasons best known to myself I wanted to start a Java application in OS X. Now this Java application (the rather good JDarkRoom) comes as a Jar which works fine, just double click and it starts. But of course, this is where it gets a bit more complex. I want to start it in Quicksilver, the excellent launchbar for OS X, but quicksilver won’t see my Jar file. Now I’m sure I could do a workaround:

1. You could use the Apple Developer Tools to make any Jar file a proper OS X app (I don’t really want them installed, they’ll be a temptation)
2. You could write a plugin for Quicksilver to recognise Jar files and deal with them appropriately.
3. You could go for a grubby hack.

I’m sure it’s easy to guess what I went for. In short, Quicksilver will run a shell script just fine so I opened up my text editor and typed:

#!/bin/sh

java -jar /Applications/JDarkRoom.jar

Saved it, ran sudo chmod +x in terminal on the file I’d just saved and then put that file somewhere quicksilver can see it. Now I can just invoke the script and it’s all happy. Or something like that.

p.s. this is what happens now that I work on a Mac again and don’t have my handy copy of Tomboy available to be my personal wiki for remembering this kind of thing.