Google’s Weird Mobile Contacts
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 31, 2015
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 31, 2015
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 12, 2015
I’ve been using Gmail for years, yet I still sometimes have to think quite hard about which menu to use for lesser-used things. While I can see the logic in having a “More” menu where such things can go, I can’t understand why they can’t just all go in there. Why is an additional menu needed, and with […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 29, 2015
This is a sensitive topic: I’m often aware that comments I make on blogs aren’t published if they contradict the point the blogger is making. Usually I just let it go. It’s their blog, they can choose to defend their opinions or not. But sometimes I think it’s worth publishing my thoughts here if they don’t […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 4, 2015
I feel the need for some cathartic adjustment of one of the more annoying interfaces I have to look at most days: the Outlook Meeting Invitation. Outlook’s current offering is full of annoyingly confusing clutter. So here – more for my benefit than yours – is my re-take. The current UI is mostly irrelevant noise:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 10, 2014
On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of. For me, […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 19, 2013
A long time ago, I allowed myself a cheeky dig at one of my heroes of old, Nicolas Negroponte. The news this week about Blockbuster UK made me think of him, and how they outlived his prediction by almost a decade. But the prediction business is hard, and if Blockbuster took twice as long to […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 4, 2012
“The Search for Heart River” is going to be the title of my new book. It’s a journey through endless examples of people posting ‘shop jobs, and the people who try to work out if they’re fake or not. It ends with a some inconclusive rubbish about human nature. Hey, if Malcolm Gladwell can make […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 21, 2012
A while ago, I noticed a startling report from Statcounter had fired up interest in the mainstream media about Google Chrome beating Microsoft Internet Explorer in the “browser wars”. Statcounter claimed their research showed most Internet users now using Chrome. The report was echoed far and wide, seemingly by journalists who had no ability (or […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 3, 2012
On the few occasions I’ve told myself the situation calls for a Gantt chart – or more accurately the use of MS Project to plan tasks and dependencies such that I end up with a Gantt chart – I’ve almost always been disappointed. In retrospect, the complexity of the project, or my lack of skill […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on August 15, 2012
I was reading this Wikipedia entry today, and saw this: Roger Waters’ 1992 album “Amused to Death” was, in part, inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter as Postman’s book. In The End of Education Postman remarks that the album had “elevated my prestige among undergraduates”, and says that he has […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 14, 2012
So, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited say they will only let you link to their site if you have good things to say about them. From their “linking policy” on their site: “a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 4, 2012
A recent post on 37Signals’s blog is interesting. Jason wants somebody to help them with customer conversion and retention. One of the reasons why I like 37Signals is that they truly subscribe to the model laid out by the Cluetrain Mainfesto. 37Signals have without doubt turned their organisation “inside out”, as the Manifesto predicts modern […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 21, 2011
Saying that hoards of my friends like Wired’s website is just a lie. Or at least implying that they do is disingenuous as I’m pretty sure that none of them have liked it. And is that huge number just made up? Who cares? This sort of casual fakery (which Facebook thinks nothing of, regardless of […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 5, 2011
Only just noticed the new UI. Good to see they’ve preserved the Spinal Tap joke on the volume control. (Compare with the previous design)
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 12, 2010
What I know about Internet protocols can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering about them. Wikileaks’s recent call for mirrors (link may be down, obviously) got me thinking about the general possibility of a web site mirroring protocol that would make automatic the distribution and […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 17, 2010
With my Kindle’s free worldwide 3G connection (which I’m hoping to make some use of when I’m travelling to the Americas next month), I thought I’d investigate options for reading RSS feeds. Being the geek I am, I liked the sound of Daniel Choi’s kindle-feeds, a neat little Ruby script that gets RSS feeds from […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on August 30, 2010
I had a bit of a Seth Godin moment a while ago. I have been meaning to air it in public for a while. I don’t have such moments very often, so please indulge me. Working as I do in a large e-commerce company, I am constantly bombarded with information generally intended to make my […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 24, 2010
I admit it, I’m on Facebook. I know they’re selling my information. They probably have a whole team of people called something like “Personal Data Merchandising” thinking up new and ever more devious ways to trick me in to giving away just that little bit more. I sort of know I’ll regret it. A bit […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 18, 2010
It looks like my wife will be stranded in Japan this week following the Icelandic volcano eruption. I thought I’d better look at her travel insurance provider’s website (a company I’d not heard of called Holiday Extras), prior to playing the inevitable game of IVR over the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 17, 2010
Scrum is now officially my thing (850K PDF), having just taken my certification exam after the training I had a couple of months ago. A score of 80% or above is considered mastery. My result was: 92% (1.1Mb large image) I would have got more, were it not for my failure to read one of […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 9, 2010
Sometimes I agonise over putting one more link on a page. How many is too many in a given context? But clearly these people have no such worries: Money Saving Expert has 235 links on its forum pages HIS Travel has 341 links on its home page Both sites are major (if not actually leading) […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on August 23, 2009
I enjoy Seth Godin’s blog, but I do take it with a pinch of salt. I might have to increase the salt content a bit to get over this claim though. Still, just goes to show it’s always worth checkin’ the facts… Here’s the video (9.6Mb mpeg, no sound) – Seth likes videos.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 11, 2009
What, exactly, do otherwise intelligent Americans find so objectionable about the effective use of swearing? Here’s Seth Godin, marketing guru and otherwise all-round sharp cookie, upholding the grand US tradition of wondering more than seems even remotely reasonable about somebody who likes to put swear words in their books. Who cares? You may as well […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 9, 2009
I know people love to hate Slashdot, but I’ve always had a soft spot for their experiments.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 8, 2009
Just so wrong – and you have to dismiss it with a mouse click as well. Possibly an even worse violation of the principle of avoiding user distraction than Windows networking trumpeting its wireless connections. Why should I care? It’s so hard living through the dawn of interaction design. All I can hope for is […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 5, 2009
The campaign starts here. The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not write about “the internet” for the same reason. I’ve […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 31, 2009
Come Together – and I put a donk on it (3.2Mb mp3). Wonder what the rights position is on this? Donk your own.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 28, 2009
Headphones are wonderful things, and I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been hearing through them recently. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to sit down and re-visit Grace Jones’s version of Sting’s Demolition Man (mp3, 5.6Mb). Leaving aside its merits as a pop song, I think it’s one of the greatest feats of studio […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 28, 2009
So I bought an MP3 player this week. The reason I’ve not owned one before is simple: motorcycles. For the past 10 years or so until the end of 2008, my main form of daily transport was two wheels powered by internal combustion. But when I started work at Expedia, my route in was too […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 31, 2009
Cripes – looks a bit serious!
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 23, 2009
“Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.” — Charles McCabe So take that, “programme managers”
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 29, 2008
Several years ago, I was looking at the then newly-redesigned BBC weather page. I marvelled at how bad I thought it was because it failed to answer the one question that I always want to know right off the bat when I ask for a weather forecast: will it rain? I don’t care about wind […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 13, 2008
I’ve not been writing (that’s what we posh people call blogging) nearly enough. Look at me: two posts a month in the last 18 months or so, yet my life is a sumptuous feast of complex events, rare occurrences and fascinating adventures – and that’s just with my UX hat on. Why, just today, some […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 9, 2008
I’ve just spent about 10 minutes of my life trying to re-boot my mind after it suffered a cognitive blue screen of death on reading the question “Will Web 3.0 decrease or increase a user’s experience?” Deon Jenkins, an information architect at IBM, asks this question on a LinkedIn forum I’m a member of. It […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 16, 2008
Southern Electric are total muppets. Accessing their site using FF3 under Linux shows nothing but the Flash background (I hardly ever find sites that are completely broken these days). Not only that, when I try to update my profile, they tell me to choose a “proper” surname! Could there be a less effective wording for […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 16, 2008
For no particular reason, I’ve been editing the Wikipedia entry for Megatripolis this week, mainly tidying it up a bit. I added something about pHreak a while ago, but in the course of editing this time, I found this photo, taken in about 1996, of the pHreak BBS being demonstrated at the club. Ahh, nostalgia!
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 2, 2008
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 6, 2008
At least I assume it is:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 29, 2008
For some reason I’ve been noticing a lot of greenwashing recently. At work we have plastic recycling bins along with receptacles for waste paper and cans. This is good because we get free bottles of water, juice and other modern comestibles. So, at least by recycling we can do something to offset the wanton destruction […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 15, 2008
Last week I got a mail from somewhere announcing the launch of a new property website called zoopla.com, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a pretty nifty residential property sales site: good web2.0 thinking going on, nicely executed. Whoever put it together knows their stuff. But it has a few things I thought […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 19, 2007
I’ve not worked on an FMCG site in ages, so I’m taking the liberty of plugging this one, which we did for Sony Computer Entertainment this year. SingStarGame.com went fully live in all territories last week. I’m on there too if you look hard enough. It’s running at about 1,000 registrations a day right now […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 28, 2007
“cookingforfun (http://www.grouprecipes.com/people/cookingforfun) wants to be your cooking buddy. You can login to accept or decline (http://www.grouprecipes.com/profile/).” Is it me, or is this getting a bit silly?
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 13, 2007
One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam – but their status messages make nice bookends.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 18, 2007
I’m very rarely inspired to write about anything. When I do, it’s usually in reaction to something from outside. It doesn’t come “from me” in the artistic sense. Admittedly, I don’t write much uplifting stuff though – it’s mostly boring. This post is different however because I don’t know where it came from. I was […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 12, 2007
I was going through some stuff at the weekend, and found a CD I bought in the Los Angeles from a shop in Melrose several years ago. Fans of Julian Cope will of course spot why it found its way into the bargain bin with a hole punched through the barcode. If you’re not a […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 10, 2007
I took out one of those incredibly dodgy-looking “100% cashback” mobile phone deals last year. Much to my surprise – it seems to have worked. £35 a month for a 12-month T-Mobile contract with 200 free any time/any network minutes per month. The handset was free too – a K700i. I didn’t go over my […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 27, 2007
Those groovy people at AKQA are so groovy they are even in Second Life. Here’s a picture of me in their lounge, marvelling at the slideshow on the wall. And here’s one of me leaving a groovy comment. Although quite deserted (it’s a Saturday night after all – they’ll be at home looking at their […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 18, 2006
10 Downing Street, in conjunction with mySociety, have recently launched an on-line petition system where citizens can collect signatures for issues with which to petition the government. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to lend your support to petition set up by Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group: “Thousands of people own […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 13, 2006
I’m only barely aware of this meme, but it’s bubbling up from here, apparently.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 5, 2006
He’s gone for the irony hat trick…! Boingboing reports on this article is about a man who has asked his daughter’s school to take Fahrenheit 451 off the curriculum because of its use of “bad language” and (for extra irony points) smoking, amongst other things. The incident is wonderful not least for the fact that […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 20, 2006
Blogging from Flickr – I am so Web 2.0! Not sure why I’d want to blog many photos on Flickr, but you never know. Another benefit of moving to WordPress though: at least I can. Assuming it works – which, if you’re seeing this – it has!
by on August 29, 2006
We’ve been on holiday in Scotland for a bit of Edinburgh Festival, visiting relatives and – amazingly – very good weather while it threw it down in London.
I’ve had a cold, but am now better, and am thinking seriously about buying some Armor of God Pyjamas – not that the two are connected. Or are they? As an aside, there can’t be many ecommerce sites “salvation” as a link on the main navigation, and while greed is sin there seems to be nothing wrong with attempting to spamdex your title tags.
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 5, 2006
I’ve been attending a few of the many think-ins that the publishing industry, pressure groups and various other institutions have been having recently around the subject of The Internet and What Is Means For Us.
Sadly, these have been largely unnoteworthy, although my attendance at the IPPR event last night “The Long Tail: Opportunities in a New Marketplace?” threw up an example of what I hope is not a very wide misconception about Google and search engines in general.
by on July 2, 2006
“I don’t think I’ve ranted here about what a pointless occupation ‘blogging is, nor why all ‘bloggers should be shot through the back of the head with a small bore rifle.”
And so it is with rich irony and customary pointlessness, on a blog that nobody reads (and I have the Google Analytics stats to prove it!), that I link to the indefatigable Richard Lockwood’s, er, ‘blog!
And thanks for the abbreviating apostrophe, if that’s what it is.
by on March 7, 2006
Somebody must be reading this blog. At least, I’ve now had postings and email on subjects as diverse as copyright, software and public speaking. I’ve even had to remove a posting after somebody complained! Surely it can’t get much better than that.
by on December 20, 2005
It’s the new football! It’s the new rock and roll! It’s impulse blogging!
Impulse blogging (my italics, to increase the hype) is the new craze coming straight out of North Finchley’s finest blog. Like all great ideas, it starts off all complicated and difficult to grasp, then suddenly reveals itself to be so simple that even a five-year-old could blah blah blah, and probably has. Here’s how impulse blogging works:
by on November 4, 2005
As luck would have it, my Internet connection went down yesterday. That’s not exactly a disaster because the only thing I could muster for World Usability Day (yesterday) was this:
by on October 14, 2005
Having spent three days writing one of the most rigorous and boring five-page documents of my life this week (a “Summary of Business Rules”), I decided that nobody was going to read the thing unless I could promise it to contain hidden Jane Austen references. This, I thought, would endear me to my classically-minded colleagues while turning them on to the finest points of whether hiding a shared Page transfers medico-legal responsibility to the Pathway. So I spent another few hours working in references to Sense and Sensibility while pretending to work on wireframes.
by on August 14, 2005
There is a (possibly apocriphal – I’ve not checked it) John Lennon quotation: “Life is what happens when you’re making plans for other things” which is rather apt for me recently. For instance, I noticed that I’ve been blogging for more than a year now and that the anniversary (July 11th) completely passed me by. Not that this is in itself a wonderfully interesting event, but I did imagine I would be marking the date with a fantastic post on world peace, the copyfight, or at least something on site maps. But no. Instead I’m worrying about my pension.