Andie's Log

Soldering is easy - comic adaptation of Mitch Altman's soldering teachings

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:29:52 +0100

I met Mitch Altman the first time at Music Hack Day London. Mitch is the maker of the infamous TV B-gone, a remote control with the single purpose of turning off televisions. He travels the world teaching people how to make cool stuff with electronics. I hadn’t soldered since 4th grade, but remembered it as something fun, so I sat down with a TrippyRGB Waves kit and Mitch gave this wonderful 5 minute course on how to solder, that showed how easy it was to make good solder connections.

I wanted to pass that on, and thought a comic adaptation could work to teach it, and that having 1 page of instructions that could be pinned to the wall next to soldering stations in hackerspaces, handed out at workshops, or just used to refresh the basics would be a good idea. So here it is - 1 page on how easy soldering is, and how to do it. It assumes you have the tools and kit/parts you need, and a basic idea of what soldering is and why you’d want to do it.

Click the image for a larger version, or download the pdf. We would love feedback from people using it in the contexts above!

Nokia N900 experiences and what's in the iPhone usability fairy dust

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:15:00 +0100

In June this year I wrote down some thoughts about the single task design of the iPhone OS and hardware, and after having played with the new Nokia N900 properly for a couple of weeks I think the argument is even stronger - the single tasking design, no matter how much the geeks/power users have hated it and how the iPhone is slowly growing out of it, has been core and key to creating a whole new category of “mobile computing devices” that are actually used by people who are not geeks.

The N900 is an extremetly cool device, basically the capabilities of a netbook in a mobile phone format. It does true multitasking, several windows open at the same time, music playing, two SMS bus tickets on the same screen to show the bus driver. Conference backchannel in one window, switching to email and twitter in others. It’s very powerful, and I’m sure the device will have enormous appeal to pro users who want this functionality. It really is more of a computer than a smartphone.

But playing with this device as well as the Palm Pre and some Android devices, I see even more clearly the conceptual and mental overhead that the multitasking creates, both for app developers and users. I’m not saying this is “bad”, just that it has a profound impact on the appeal and usability of the device for users who are not geeks or pro users.

In a lot of discussions about usability on smartphones, there seems to be a consensus that the iPhone is very user friendly and easy to use, but I haven’t heard many people talk about why. There seems to be this vague notion that it has to do with the design, that the Apple stuff is just friendlier and looks better, and thus – by way of this design fairy dust – easier to use.

What I think is that the design choice to have the iPhone do one thing at a time is a huge ingredient in that usability fairy dust, and below I try to reason a bit about why and how.

So the situation I want to talk about is one that happens all the time when interacting with anything, really. It’s the question from the you the user looking at the interface and wondering “What do I do now?” The user wants to do something, has some agenda, or has gotten some notification from the device, and needs to take some action. If at any point you don’t know what to do now - you get this little pause in your interaction where you have to stop and think about what to do, rather than getting on with what you wanted to do. The more of these pauses you get when using something, the more lost you feel, and the less of what you actually wanted to do gets done.

When having one window active on the N900, I don’t remember what else I have open. Switching tasks on the N900 first takes you to the window manager and shows you what’s already running - another tap takes you to the desktop or the screen with all the apps. If the task I wanted to switch to is not already running, it takes me at least three taps to change to what I wanted to do: Close the current task/go to overview, tap to get to the app list, tap the right app. In between that, I have to scan the currently open windows to see if what I wanted to switch to is already running.

To show you what I mean, let’s say I’m looking at a contact. If that’s not what I want to do anymore, there is the back arrow to navigate within the contacts application, or the “window manager” corner to get me out of the current app.

Pressing the corner takes me to the window overview of all the stuff that’s open right now.

Here I need to figure out if the thing I want is already running, or if I should tap the area outside the windows to get to the desktop (where the thing I was looking for might be on the desktop) or the app overview corner that takes me to the application list. For a pro user this is welcome flexibility and a bunch of great features in a powerful mobile OS. But I can’t teach this to someone in 10 seconds, and it took me several days of use before I remembered exactly what each tap would lead to and how to navigate between tasks. I still get it wrong, stuttering in my usage of the device, constantly stopping and having to think about what to do now, what action to take to get where I want.

So how does this compare to the iPhone? There is nothing magically user friendly about the initial iPhone user experience - a lot of people who don’t own one and borrow one to make a call or check something on the web are confused at first and don’t know what to do. But as soon as you teach them the one thing they need to know - what the home button does - they are good to go. The key here is that in the vast majority of user interactions, the answer to the user question of “What do I do now?” is always one of two things:

1) It’s on the screen, tap the feature you want. (Tap an item you want to select, tap a button for a feature, tap a tab to switch screen in the current app)

2) It’s not in the current app, press the home button to select another app.

There is nothing to remember except the home button action.

If you are in the Phone app for example, all the main things you can do are visible in the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, and if you drill down to an individual contact for example, the actions you can perform on that item are displayed as tappable things on the screen. There is nothing to remember, and so people who don’t take naturally to keeping a more complex system model in their working memory at all times are saved from feeling lost. It’s such a simple answer to the user question “what do I do now?” that you basically forget that there is some action between you and your next task here once you figured it out.

Multitasking creates some serious mental and conceptual overhead on a mobile device where the screen is basically too small to have several things visible at once. On a computer, you have status bars and docks and task bars, and the screen is big enough to give you an “at a glance” overview of what’s running. On a mobile device, the current task usually needs to use the full screen to be useful, and this places the mental task of keeping track of what else is running on the user, without immediate clues to trigger the memory. This simply makes the device harder to use, and users more often find themselves in that pause position where they are not exactly sure what to do, and get “stuck” on figuring out how to navigate the UI rather than getting on with the task they were aiming for. You can actually draw a little parallell to command line interfaces - they are extremely powerful, but the knowledge about what to type on them has to be in your head since there are no clues in the interface itself.

There are of course lots and lots of people who like the multitasking complexity and the power it gives them, which is why I think Android is doing better and better, and the N900 will be in the pockets of many a big or small geek.

But I think we generally underestimate the complexity added by multitasking on a mobile device, and overestimate what and how we need things to run in the background, modelling it on standards from desktop computers.

A major reason in my view that the iPhone is such a huge success is because Apple found a way to force conceptual simplicity on the right level - basic usage navigating between applications with complex and powerful features is always the same, and something you can teach a person in less than 10 seconds. Behind that, each app can provide as much complexity as it needs or likes, but for the user there is just one basic rule of operation to learn. The rest most people don’t even know about, and it doesn’t matter. They can still use the device, and thus discover in time more and more things they can do. The overall system model you need to understand to have agency and feel in control of your experience with the device is small, and always the same. That empowers users, and makes the technology invisible.

As a final note to this observation, I do think the iPhone is slowly growing out of this simplicity. Apple has educated a whole lot of users into expecting a lot from their mobile device, and they become more and more confident in understanding what these mobile computers can do. Frustration with the powerfully simple interaction model that launched a whole new “smartphone” market might pave the way for sleek, multitasking little netbooks like the N900 or the new Droid. But I don’t think they could exist or grab users without the trail the iPhone has blazed, and I think there is still a lot of work to do in making those devices more invisible.

The web is levelling

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:16:00 +0200

In a talk about how to make websites that are not primarily blogs with Wordpress at Geek Girl Meetup I had a short passage about how it’s so much easier to build a full-featured website or service today, because the web has levelled quite fast the last few years. Here’s a write-up of that thought since some people have been asking for it on Twitter.

Like a WoW character, the web as a whole is gaining more and more skills in the form of more and more abstracted services and libraries. First someone proves the concept of a new thing, like doing asynchronous requests for new content with JavaScript, or storing files in the cloud. Every part of each new thing is meticulously handcoded, but as soon as the concept and implementation make sense to enough people, someone wraps all the tedious stuff into a nice library, service or API.

With most of these tools being released open source, and some really strong communities popping up around them, the web ecosystem is fast gaining a lot of higher level building blocks. More and more things are becoming a one-click operation: the blog revolution started because it no longer took serious programming skills to set one up. Today you can get a shop, a social network, a blog, a video website, on demand computing power or storage and a number of other building blocks for a new idea that can be easily accessed through a couple of sign-up clicks or API calls.

So while the web 2.0 ecosystem started out as a stumbling n00b where each quest took lots and lots of detail work and you had to plow through slaying boars in the beginner zone for a serious amount of time and cost to get things up and running, today the web is more like a level 50 warrior who can just wander unhurt and untroubled through the basic quests ad get to the core of what’s new with an idea and start solving hard problems much faster since most of the plumbing is taken care of already.

Second Life and user created content for Augmented Reality apps

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:47:00 +0200

The first wave of Augmented Reality apps is about to hit the world - they will mostly be based on geolocation and compass data to overlay information on the live camera feed on iPhones and Android phones.

One big question for AR apps is where the content will come from - several apps like Layar and Wikitude are trying to build platforms where users can add new layers of information or points of interest. Here we’re still talking text and image input, potentially also about users choosing a content type or template so that the information they input will be displayed in an appropriate way.

But what about 3D objects? One next step after displaying 2D “signs” on the real world like in Nearest Tube or Wikitude would be placing 3D objects in the world. How could that type of content be created by users? I would say there are two widely used 3D-modelling systems that “regular” people (not professional 3D artists) are using to create this type of content - Google Sketchup and the build tools in Second Life. I wonder if Linden Labs has thought of using their 3D content creation and scripting system for AR 3D content?

A huge user base already knows how to create and script 3D objects, and there is a huge bank of existing content and experience creating it. I’m going with the Linden Labs tools here because they have the scripting language and the social dimension, whereas Google Sketchup is more of a utility.

What if objects created in Second Life could be moved into the real world? This doesn’t even have to be based on AR markers - you could just rez Second Life objects and structures on geographical locations, and have them visible in a layer in an AR app. What if you could place your SL avatar on a real world location? Or place other SL objects like a mailbox, a house, a vehicle, an art installation, on a “real” geolocation, and have it visible through the lens of an augmented reality app? Second Life stuff could come back to the first life.

Is this a total long shot, or does anyone else see the connection?

Looks like Apple just (NOT) gave developers control over update release dates!

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:38:00 +0200

Update: Nope, didn’t work. Sorry for the false positive folks.

With the recent changes in iTunes Connect, where the application name, keywords and rating can only be changed when submitting a new binary, it looks like Apple have properly separated the Update of an app from the Live version.

Before, if you were editing details on the Update, it would directly affect the live information, including taking your live app offline if you set a release date in the future for your update. As pointed out by furbo.org among others, this meant you had no control over the release date of an update to your app, and it was hard to time updates of for example server side components of an app.

With the recent changes to iTunes Connect, I was curious to find out of the separation of Updates from Live apps also meant that the release date was separated, since we’ve sorely missed this feature on a number of occations at RjDj. So we gave it a try with one of the RjDj apps: RjDj Shake. Risking to take it offline briefly to find out, I changed the release date for the update we submitted today to Aug 10 2009, and hit Save.

After 15 min, the live RjDj Shake is still in the store, and changes we’ve made previously have come though in the live store quicker than that. Looks like a win to me. :) Happy release planning, folks! Can anyone else confirm this find?

Some thoughts on the iPhone single-task magic

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:10:00 +0200

Expanding some thoughts behind this tweet:

Uni-tasking is part of the iPhone magic - the device transforms completely with every app into just what you need for that task.

Ever since the iPhone got the App Store, I’ve had this feeling that the hardware has some magic about it - that it can transform into anything, that the screen is like a pond, a magic mirror that can turn the device into something completely different for every app or use.

Someone called the iPhone “white label hardware”.

The lack of (third party app) multitasking on the iPhone has been a major gripe for reviewers and customers since the device came out, and both the Palm Pre and Android phones support as much multitasking as you like. Apple’s official stance is that it would drain battery life too fast, but I think there’s more to it, and that it’s one of the crucial design decisions that make the iPhone a great device. From this decision follows radical simplicity in key areas.

It really comes down to controls and simplicity. If you have multitasking in place, you need to put controls on the device, or use parts of the multitouch screen for controls that manage the multitasking. On the Palm Pre you flick between app “cards”, for example. I’m not sure how the Pre manages this exactly, but some gestures will in such a setup always be reserved for the operating system to handle this multitasking, and presenting a UI to the user for this.

I think the reason that TomTom, Zipcar and a ton of other app makers are on the iPhone platform and using the device as a blank slate for their purposes is that they get the whole thing to play with. The whole screen and functionality of the device (yes yes, with some exceptions) is given over to you once the user starts your app. No gestures are reserved for switching apps, no menu will cover what you put on the screen. It’s all yours, once the user has given you the go by launching your app, and asked you to transform their iphone into a car key, a GPS device, a camera, a todo list application or a koi pond.

This is key - the operating system gets the hell out of the way, because it doesn’t need to be anywhere on the screen. On a device that is in many ways too small and powerless to do multitasking well, the iPhone OS just gives center stage to the current app and gets out of the way, letting the apps transform the iPhone into just what you need for performing the task or entertainment at hand. The best apps are the ones that use this paradigm to the fullest - they do one thing, with a super polished experience.

There is a single button for the user to press when she wants to switch tasks - the home button that kills the current app. In a way it’s the only button on the device - the sleep button, volume buttons and ringer switch are all added later as things that did need hardware buttons to be convenient. The whole OS is designed around the idea of a single button, and that’s quite a design feat in my eyes - having a single button that frees up the big touch screen to be anything. I think this is where the magic comes from - for both users and app developers.

Of course there are a number of cases where the lack of multitasking becomes pretty stupid. But how would you design the multitasking interface with a single button and the same power to the current app? We could all probably think of something clever that would work for power users, (like the Pre has, clever but not intuitive at all) but really, something that is as clean and simple as the one app at a time paradigm, and one button to rule them all?

I don’t think the multitasking restrictions will change anytime soon, even when the hardware becomes powerful enough to handle some amount of it, because it’s at the core of the iPhone OS and iPhone/iPod touch hardware design. There will be a point when multitasking on an Apple device becomes possible and relevant, but I think it will happen on a new product line or much re-designed hardware, not on the iPhone or iPod touch as we know them today.

Disk I/O Errors - all hail the Internets and powerful unix tools

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:24:00 +0200

In case some other unlucky soul gets the same problem, here’s a writeup of what and how, and the fix that worked for me.

Having kernel[0] I/O Error on disk0s2, Invalid key length messages in the syslog of my MacBook, and a beyond sluggish and barely running system because everything else was waiting for failing disk I/O, here’s what I did to recover:

1) Boot into single user mode by pressing cmd-S on boot

2) Run /sbin/fsck -fy to check and try to repair the filesystem. When it fails, it will give you a basic diagnostic.

(The options: f is for forcing the check even if the system itself thinks it’s ok, -y is for attempting to repair any errors found without questions (Man fsck)

Here’s the fun stuff I got:

Invalid key length, and then on a second run, Invalid node structure. Fun times.

Some more googling on the “Invalid node structure” from my iPhone led me to a tip in this thread on macosxhints.com: A DIY solution to an invalid node structure problem. (always read down and go through the comments on posts like these, the proposed solution in the initial post is seldom the only or best trick)

3) Run /sbin/fsck_hfs -ypr /dev/disk0s2 where disk0s2 is the partition your previous log messages and fsck-runs are reporting the errors.

(The r option rebuilds the catalog file if there is space, the p option auto-fixes some simpler errors on the filesystem. y again is an automatic yes to any attempt to repair encountered errors. (Man fsck_hfs)

This run told me the node structure needed minor repair, which was carried out.

Run /sbin/fsck -fy again

…and pray that like for me, it now ran without errors, ending with the comforting message “The drive seems to be OK”.

Thanks to some patience, some google skills and a basic understanding about harddrives and how data is organised (thank you DSV), I did not need install disks, a reinstall, a new hard drive or days of lost worktime and possibly lost data. Sweet!

Some thoughts after his little exercise:

Tailing syslog on my desktop with Geek Tool is a really good idea. Even when other apps don’t start, I can glance at the log and get some hints and warnings about the state of my system.
Wow the iPhone is a godsend when stuff like this happens. Having it ready to google for solutions when the laptop is not responding is really something that has solved similiar problems for me many times. It’s like a second computer. I’ve ssh:ed into my old machine that had graphics problems, googled for tons of good stuff to solve problems, and could also whine about my horrors on Twitter. Who needs a netbook?

If anyone wants to fill in the details of the how and why of fsck and why the fsck_hfs worked, feel free to comment.

Dn’s webbfrågan. “Do you think that The Pirate Bay...

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:19:00 +0100

Dn’s webbfrågan. “Do you think that The Pirate Bay should be convicted?” (yes, the question is posed in a strange way in swedish too, it’s not the website that’s on trial) Ja = Yes, Nej = No. 19000 readers of a big, serious daily and capitalism-friendly newspaper. The numbers of course don’t represent anything in particular in a representational sense. I guess they show that the version of copyright and intellectual property that is represented in court today by the prosecutor does not have a huge amount of loyal fans. No supporter club, no fan base.

I’m a realist in this, I don’t think it is inherently “right” to do this or that, but I wouldn’t bet money on any company with a business model that directly clashes with a culture based on both inherent capabilities of a disruptive technology and the behaviour of a generation of digital natives.

"3) If you’re running anything with the words “mobile social network” in the title, lock yourself in..."

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:56:00 +0100

“3) If you’re running anything with the words “mobile social network” in the title, lock yourself in a room with your team and work out how you’re going to save your business. That means innovate. Mobile is not a differentiator, its an inevitability.”

- Latitude: Google’s Trojan Horse (or, Why Who’s Nearby Is Not A Business) | Mobile Industry Review

Some clever and outspoken thoughts on location and “mobile internet” that tie in very well with my thoughts on Google Profiles.

Google and the social - reflections on the coming impact of Google Profiles and the Jyri-factor

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:20:00 +0100

Maybe it’s just something I like to think because I feel connected to Jyri Engeström from the early days of Jaiku evangelism in Sweden, but I think we are now beginning to see his work and thinking spread slowly all over Google services. After a lot of preparations behind the scenes, Google is taking some carefully thought out steps in line with Jyri’s ideas about social objects and “face rank” that as they mature will knit the whole range of Google services into what I believe will become a stong, lively and very very social network of data and interaction objects and people.

The Google user profiles, that Jyri is behind to a large extent, are giving people a way to represent themselves across Google services. The profiles may seem a bit disconnected and a poor replacement for Facebook or any such strongly profiled and obvious “social network”, but the Google account is becoming the center of news, calendar, mail, documents, location, comments and a host of other today more or less separate and disconnected services. When Google starts making that profile relevant in more and more ways, this will change. Look at some small recent changes to Google Reader:

Suddenly we have little icons in here. My friends, and their content, in a prominent place. Almost like a “newsfeed” right? Imagine these icons and profile elements turning up in more places in the near future, anywhere you collaborate with people.

Not many people care very much about their Google profile at the moment, but when this profile starts showing up in more and more places the idea of shaping it up will be much more attractive. With better API’s and Google Connect it will soon be everywhere.

The profile information is of course also used in the new Latitude service. I have no idea how involved Jyri is in this service, but it looks like there is lots of Jyri inspiration in there to me.

Quiting Jyri’s own profile page:

“He is currently Product Manager of social & mobile at Google, where he has been responsible for areas of Google’s social infrastructure including Google Profiles (behold this page!), Google’s sharing model, and the Social Graph API. He is currently focusing on Google’s mobile communication applications.”

A common “complaint” with Google and their “Contacts” concept is that these contacts don’t represent your “real friends” and that there is almost no relevant social graph data in there. Google contacts are just random people you emailed. Facebook looks much stronger in this regard, but I think that will change soon too. Everyone and their mother might be on Facebook, but everyone and their mother seems to have a Google account somewhere too. Guided by Jyri’s thoughts on sharing and social objects, we are already seeing privacy levels in Google contacts, and I think we will see Google connect more and more of their services with the Google profile as the hub that ties social objects and the interaction around them to your account-as-online-identity.

When people start using the privacy levels of friends, family, co-workers offered up when using services like Latitude or “My maps” or email, this social graph data will be built on the fly and while doing something else, not by actively seeking out and adding people as friends. There is a difference between having “add as friend” as the main activity or having it just happen when your purpose is something else. I think these other purposes - sharing my calender with my mother or sharing my photos with my “family” are stronger and more interesting representations of social networks than the Facebook model. Not for everything and not in a way that will immediatly replace and spell the death of Facebook, but as something that will grow and use the scale and cleverness of many google tools and then one day we will have Google as a major social platform. In many ways it already is, it just needs to be carefully brought out and presented to the user. It’s like this hugely powerful computer system that at the moment only has a slightly clunky command line interface, and now they are bringing in people like Jyri to dig into the possibilities of that machine and make the magic inside it avaliable to users. It was there all the time, but lacking perspectives on what to do with it and how to think about it.

The Google profile is creeping into one Google service at a time, and with Jyri’s thoughts about object centered sociality driving those changes I think Google is finally going to “get” social. It’s not all there yet, but watch and wait. I thought from the start that Google was buying the talent of Jaiku, rather than the specific technology or userbase. Buying the experience of launching a large scale successful social service with some very clever thoughts behind it. I have no inside information and might be completely wrong, but regardless, I think they got one of the smartest thinkers about social behavior online in the driver’s seat on developing the social features across the Google family of services, and that was a damn smart move that we are only beginning to see the poweful results of.

If Jyri’s influence on these things is as strong as I think it is, I also see it as a really interesting example of how some thoughts and ways to frame a problem domain are truly disruptive.

Yes, this is a Jyri fan post. Now go fix your Google profile. Here’s mine.

"The science fiction mistake was thinking we would have software or robots do everything for us. What..."

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:12:00 +0100

“The science fiction mistake was thinking we would have software or robots do everything for us. What we’re growing instead is socio-techincal systems that enhance, extend and channel communication within and between networks of humans. My prediction is that any technology that catches on and grows (on) the new web will be simlilar to Google’s Page Rank - a computer power enhanced way to connect and present items of human social behavior (like linking) and from those items create and abstract and feed forward new meaning. The computing power brings the scale that makes it possible, and *the link* will be the most powerful concept of the 1995-2025 era.”

- Andie Nordgren

My Etherpads - a bookmark service for Etherpads

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:32:00 +0100

Etherpad is a brilliant web based collaborative text editor service. You can create as many etherpads as you like, and use them to effectively collaborate on things like writing, keeping lists and swapping code snippets. With Interacting Arts, we have used the desktop app SubEthaEdit for collaborative writing workshops, and I was very impressed when Etherpad showed up. I use it daily for all kinds of projects.

The Etherpads are secret by obscurity - all etherpads are completely open and you can paste the link to anyone, but since the link ends in a password-like code it is hard for someone to guess their way to your specific Etherpad unless you sent the link. I often use Etherpads for discussion and collaboration on things that are not neccessarily super secret, but also not meant for the public eye. Todo-lists, discussions, ideas, text preparation. The fact that the Etherpad pages don’t have titles makes it hard to find previously visited etherpads by title or content in my web history, and since I don’t want to show them to the world, I have to bookmark them locally in my browser to keep track of them. These bookmarks are not accessible if I’m not on my own computer, and I can’t find the etherpad by search like I could with most other types of bookmarks if I didn’t have access to them.

These problems are all fixable by for example syncing local bookmarks via Dropbox, posting private bookmarks to delicous or keeping a named list of etherpads in a google doc. But then I wouldn’t get to write a nifty little web app on Google App Engine, would I? =) Presenting My Etherpads, a one page, super simple bookmark service for Etherpads. Sign in with your Google Account, and make a convenient list of Etherpads and what they are for. Bookmark that page, and you’re set.

The app took about 3 hours to come up with, design and build.

This is what the front page looks like:

Reflections on 24 hour business camp and the site we built

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:18:00 +0100

I love crazy hack sessions. When things click, when you are a working with others to GET. THINGS. DONE. Where you cut corners, push forward, make great things come true and produce things you didn’t expect. This was the main reason I signed up for 24 hour business camp. I also wanted to stand on my own two programmer legs in a bite-size but still ambitious project.

I teamed up with brilliant designer Alexis from Winston Design. We bounced a few ideas back and forth, about making some existing dataset better, building on the different API lego blocks out there to add value to some social object. We ended up picking something simple and clean that we both felt the need for - a place where you could reach out to the Swedish web, social media, entrepreneurship and tech scene for good people. Everyone needs good people at times, and we have all learned that looking for them through out networks is usually the best way. So we post to jaiku, twitter or bloggy, or write a blogpost about it, and hope that our friends will have or make the match.

The vision for the website we built, http://hitta.brafolk.nu, was to use the simple and straight forward posting style of twitter, and the ecosystem of #hashtags that has grown there to categorize posts. By offering posts directly on our site, categorized by tags written directly in the post instead of in a special tag field, and aggregating posts in the microblogosphere with the tag #brafolk added to them, we could make a convenient one-stop rss shop for people looking for jobs or good people among those who understand the new web and appreciate that type of simplicity and categorization.

During the 24 hour business camp, we got the basic website working, with job-postings on our own site. The day after, I had the time to finish the #hashtag implementation on the site and create feeds for each tag. This makes it possible to subscribe to only posts with for example the tag #design. During this week I hope to have time for the final step - aggregating posts from the microblogs and possibly other ad websites with tag support like rubbt. If we can establish adding the hashtag #brafolk to all shout-outs like this one, hitta.brafolk.nu will become a convenient and connected resource for knowing what’s up with recruitment on the swedish scene.

If you like these visions and the implementation we have out there now, go vote for us in the 24 hour business camp poll for the unofficial winner of the event.

Dear Facebook. Please take a moment to consider the idea that...

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:57:00 +0100

Dear Facebook.

Please take a moment to consider the idea that not all people can or want to categorize themselves when given only the options “his” or “her”.

Go read this post by Sarah Dopp too.

Thanks

/Andie

You may travel with Spotify, but only for 14 days.

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:12:00 +0100

I love how the Spotify team seems to have really considered all sorts of usage scenarios and come up with solutions that support them. The invite codes are re-sendable until used, you can log in from multiple computers without hassle (latest login trumphs the others), and now this location notification where they detect I’m in the UK rather than in Sweden as my profile says, and gives me this friendly notice:

Your current location does not match that set in your profile. You may travel with Spotify, but only for 14 days.

Legitimate use case, reasonable time allowance, friendly notification. Well done, Spotify.