Daniel Hardy

Art with Time

A few months back I posted some silly art I had created. Well as any fun art project should, it actually made me create more art. Although this time it was a little different.

In the last piece I used Google image search to find images of famous tech people on the cover of magazines. I then tiled that and played with it in Photoshop. Really nothing to special or impressive.

This time I decided to do something a little different. I enjoyed the magazine covers as a medium so I wanted to continue down that path. The problem with that is I needed more of them… preferably lots more… thousands more. So I started looking for ways to get lots of interesting magazine covers quickly.

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Officer Blue and Pinky

Got a Pogo stylus today so I had to try it out. Here are some quick sketches I worked up.

Pinky

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An hour surfing

This is what an hour of me surfing the internet looks like. I used a cool little app called ioGraphica. Maybe someday I can get a longer and more active capture.

Fun from the iPad

Made a couple of drawing while playing with the iPad and Sketchbook Pro. It is an amazing user experience… now if I could only get some amazing drawing skills. Enjoy!

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Yet another new design

Alright I know it is horrible but I really didn’t like the last design and there was a lot behind the scenes I wanted to change. I decided I would update the site again and resolve some of the issues I had with the code.

One thing I wanted to do was start converting the site over to html5. Really there isn’t much of a point at this juncture other than it is more semantic and simple to make the change.

For example historically I would code something like this for the header.

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Strong loyalty.

Earlier today WordPress.com along with 10.2 million blogs under its control went down for almost 2 hours.  The most amazing part to me is reading the comments on the outage announcement.  I don’t think there was a single negative comment… truly amazing considering most companies would have been screamed silly by their customers for such an outage.  Granted WP could be moderating negative comments out but historically that is not there style.

If you offer users an amazing experience from end to end.  They will repay you with loyalty and understanding in those times where things don’t go as planned.

Art time…

Every so often I get a craving to do something creative purely for the sake of creating.  This happened to me recently so here is the fruits of my labor.  If my sever starts cooperating I will post the originals.

Site updated

I finally got around to updating the site… nothing special… but maybe with the new look I will write a little more often ;-)

To Upgrade, Or Not To Upgrade

A few weeks ago I wrote a brief post about the newest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  The post consisted of my first impressions of the new system and really looked at the surface level enhancements.  After giving it some thought I decided to revisit the topic from a different perspective.  Is it worth upgrading?

With each new version of Ubuntu the reason to upgrade is diminished.  This is because the operating system continues to grow stronger and stronger making each consecutive version have less and less added value.  This is not to say there isn’t several good reasons to risk the headaches that could ensue.

The first reason that comes to mind is the improved overall experience.  A lot of work has gone into smoothing out the details of the operating system.  One area that I have noticed a great improvement is in the boot process.  In previous versions the boot process has been choppy with several different resolution changes that make the whole thing seem disjointed and a bit jarring.  In hardy this has been smoothed out a great deal (at least on my Sony Vaio).  Now instead of having several noticeable transitions between resolutions and background colors you get a smooth transition where the colors are better matched and appear to transition smoothly.

Another great enhancement comes again during the boot process.  Every 30 or so boots Ubuntu will scan your disk drive for errors.  While this is great feature as it provides a level of data security, it can be a bit annoying when you are in a hurry.  In Hardy Heron the user has the ability to bypass this by simply pressing the ESC key.

Once the system has booted up you will see the familiar menu options and applications.  You don’t have to look deep to see a couple of new faces such as Transmission (BitTorrent Client) and Brasero (disk burning utility).  These two offer a great upgrade to their predecessors with improved usability and increased functionality.

Another feature that I have found handy is the ability to “Bookmark” web based drives and server connections.  This is a nice touch as it allows you to unmount the drive with out loosing the settings.  For someone who uses several different network drives and is a little OCD about their desktop this is a great feature.  To utilize it simply select the “Add Bookmark” check box the first time you connect to your drive.  From then on you can access the drive from the “Places” menu or the “Bookmarks” area of Nautilus.

Better hardwareware support is something to strongly consider when upgrading.  If you have any problem hardware typically an upgrade offers an opertunity to get support as the kernel is always adding new drivers.  In my previous post I mentioned a problem with my network card.  This has been resolved and was simply a problem in the beta level software.  One thing I do enjoy is with the new update my system runs completely open.  I no longer have to depend on any closed source drivers (Thank you Intel for open sourcing the 3945 driver).  To many this may be marginal but I believe in open source software and try to use it when it is available.  It also typically means better support and performance.

The final reason for upgrading is to have a Long Term Support (LTS) version.  These versions will recieve support form Cannonical for 3 years meaning you won’t need to upgrade for quite sometime.

Overall I think the upgrade is worth it for me, afterall I have my Home directory on a separate partition so even a full install isn’t to much work ;-)

Building Expectations

One difficult aspect of overhauling an application is the loss of a preexisting mental model held by users.  This is to say that users have developed an idea of where items are located and how they generally look and act.   Often a major overhaul will cause these things to change a great deal.

Form the users perspective, one day they log out from an application they may love or hate and the next day the log in to a completely new application.  Sure the data may all be the same and the end goal of the application will probably remain the same but for the user this is effectively a completely new application they must now learn.

There are several ways that an organization can bridge this gap and make the transition a little smoother.  One way that I have recently seen and is quite simple, is just placing a notice on your screen announcing the upcoming changes.  This should link some final comps of the upcoming look and feel.  If you have a bit more time you can do what google did and offer the user both interfaces during a trial period.  This method allows the user to become familar with the new interface while having the ability to fall back on the trusted version should the need arise.  The danger with this is many users will never try the new version.

No matter what method you divise it is important to start building the expectation of change.  This will give the users a chance to prepare.  If done correctly it can also create a bit of buzz as users discuss what is to come.