Burnout Paradise Upgrade

There are not many things that improve themselves after you buy them. Spend twenty quid on the latest blockbuster book from Jordan and it is unlikely to improve in content over time. Buy a Girls Aloud CD and, although you might get to tolerate the tracks after a while, it won't suddenly sprout extra songs and arrangements.  But video games seem to be different. I've just spent a little while upgrading the copy of Burnout Paradise I bought a few months back. Now I've got proper day and night and bikes to ride. In short, a great game just got greater. The upgrade is automatic for Xbox and PS3 owners and works a treat.

A lot of video game manufacturers walk away from a game as soon as it is released. Sometimes they don't even hang around long enough to make patches to make the game playable. It is nice to see that Criterion are in it for the long haul.

skyfire Windows Mobile Browser

If you have a Windows Mobile device you might want to take a look at skyfire. It seems to be a really fast mobile browser option and at the moment it is free.

Update on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 09:28AM by Rob

Unfortunately at the moment it only seems to be available in the 'states. But it does look good.

Loud Music as a Cold Cure

I've got a cold. A rotten one. I'm surrounded by used tissues and I'm hoping I've got enough clean ones to last the day. I've fallen back on the usual treatment. Loud Music.

One the way to work I had Beautiful Garbage on pretty much full blast all the way. Great stuff, although some of the cyclists did look a bit surprised as a somewhat distorted rock band seemed to be sat next to them at the traffic lights...

And the best bit? The track ended just as I pulled up in the parking space. I love it when that happens.

Doors and User Interfaces

As part of the refit of our department we have got all new doors. These are rather swish, and the ones to our offices have windows in them, to let light into the corridor and give everyone a view of what we are doing. I'm going to stick a picture of someone working on the inside of my door window.

Anyhoo, the main doors have been replaced too. And they've solved a problem that has bugged me for literally years. They only have handles on one side.

Version 1.0 of the doors in our building had handles on both sides. This lead to significant levels of confusion and wrenched shoulders, as people like me grabbed a handle and heaved manfully to find that the door doesn't open that way. I got quite good at looking for door hinges, and even invented a rhyme to help me remember what to do: "If hinges you see, then you should pull me". Unfortunately not everyone did this, and so version 2.0 of the doors added little labels with explicit "Pull" or "Push" instructions.

Version 3.0 of the doors, where we are now, have the innovation that if you are supposed to push the door there is no handle to pull. This is a great idea, in that if you can't do something there should not be a way of trying to do it.

From a user interface point of view there is a school of thought that says if you can't do something, the option to do it should not be present. This means that unusable program functions should be either grayed out or missing. This lines up nicely with doors version 3.0.

I used to think that this was always a good idea, as it means that users don't get frustrated when they try to do something and the system tells them they can't do it. However, it can lead to even more frustration, where the option or command is tantalisingly visible but can't be used, or worse yet, other people claim that they have the command and you don't. In the case of doors it is easy to see what to do from the start, you either pull or push, but with software things are always more complicated.

In my programs I now tend to enable all the features and then have a helpful message that appears and tells the user what they need to do to make it work. Rather than saying "Not Allowed" the message would be "You must log in to perform this command" and give a link to the appropriate help.

Money for Old Rope

We were in the pub, putting the world to rights, and were talking about the recent turmoil in the stock markets where people who don't actually produce anything have just discovered that you can't do this indefinitely without something bad happening.

Anyhoo, conversation turned to the way that it seemed to be possible to earn vast sums of money by not actually doing anything. I mentioned that I would feel kind of uncomfortable in this situation, in that I would have got paid for no reason.

"But you still collect your paypacket from the university at the end of each month..." said Ian.

Thanks for that.