Going Design by Fire 2009

My company is sending me to Design by Fire 2009 on 20th of October in Utrecht. Since I thoroughly enjoyed the Chi Nederland conference earlier this year I can only assume it's going to be a blast!

Why users aren't designers

I am reading Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences. The chapter "The Question of Design" begins with a polemic on viewing users as designers and Norman's statement "We are all designers". A good comparison that Bill uses to illustrate the absurdity of the argument is the notion that we all would be mathematicians because we (hopefully) can add up the prices of a bill.

I would advise anyone who believes that participatory design should be equal to letting the users design to ponder what happens when Homer Simpson get to be a designer for his brother's car company due to the same logic.

Blog publishing roundup

After reviewing Blogo, ecto and MarsEdit I can whole heartedly say that you will get most bang for the buck from Blogo.

Blogo does all the things that the other applications does plus more and has hard to beat features such as:

• No Flickr dependence.
• Ability to resize and crop images from within the program.
• By not keeping breaks in the html code it avoids weird layouts on Blogger.
• Clean interface where most of the action is confined in the main window.

So even though I think that the buttons are somewhat clunky it is head and shoulders above the competition. If you are using a Mac and are into blogging then Blogo is the way to go.

Blog publishing applications on Mac OS X: part IV - MarsEdit

MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software is the last application I'll review in my series on blog publishing applications on Mac OS X. It has a cool icon with a rocketship and the planet Mars and is priced at 29.95 $. The version used in this test is 2.3.2.


How MarsEdit works

When MarsEdit is launched for the first time you are greeted to a wizard pattern dialogue that takes you through the process of setting up a blog. You can either create a new blog or supply information about an existing blog. After passwords and the title of the blog have been set you are all set to start blogging.

The main view in MarsEdit is a three panel selector which lists your blogs on the left, your posts in the top left panel and the selected blog post in the bottom right panel. Common controls such as "New Post", "Delete Post", "Edit Post" and "Media" are conveniently placed in the toolbar on top.

Creating blog posts can only be done in html but there is a preview mode to help you on the way. The toolbar on top has links to html tags in case you forget or just don't fancy typing. On the side is a panel with the categories and at it's bottom you can add new ones.

Images are added through a the Media Manager. MarsEdit stores your pictures on Flickr so you'll need an account there as well. There is a serious limitation in that images cannot be resized from within the program. Instead that has to be done either in the html img tag or in an other program.

Editing html can be a bore and in case you aren't happy with the html tags that come predefined you can always add new ones through the Markup Macros dialogue

My impressions of MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a competent program with some serious drawbacks. I like the clear and logical layout and naming and the stylish icons. It supports pinging sites when you update your blog and the preview mode in combination with the html editing works very well for me. However not everyone has knowledge of html and this will be a big drawback for many people. I would have preferred to have the option to edit in wysiwyg mode as well.

The fact that media can only be added using Flickr is another drawback but not as big as the fact that there is no built in support for resizing images.

Blogger's built in semi wysiwyg html interpreter considers breaks in the html codes the same as actual break tags and I would love to have an option to strip out the breaks before publishing. This is not a problem with MarsEdit however but something that the whizkids at Blogger came up with.

I would not discourage anyone with experience in coding web pages from buying MarsEdit. Just make sure that you know your html before you open your wallet.

New musical romance: Caparezza

My sister joined during the vacation in Hälsingland. She has been a semester in Bologna studying and insisted I would listen to Caparezza. Apparently he is the latest and greatest in Italian music and I have to agree. I have decided to make his song iodellavitanonhocapitouncazzo my new theme song (much like in that Family Guy episode)

Check out Vieni A Ballare In Puglia :

Härliga Hälsingland

Back from two weeks of forest work, roof laying and paddling canoe and kayak at my parent's place in Hälsingland. I put Anna and my sisters to work gathering wood for the winter.

Repairing the barn

Anna dragging newly cut logs

Maria playing with Mogwai

Me kayaking