The World is Waiting for You

Just a quick post, last week I scooped up a cheap ticket to attended my first West End musical – Billy Elliot. I was amazed at the young talented actors on stage and the attention to detail in the set design. The musical has been running for 5 years in London and has expanded to New York, Sydney, Melbourne and this year opens in Chicago & Seoul.

I had an enjoyable evening and looking forward to my next visit to a West End production.

Last week my Facebook profile switch over to the ‘new’ layout as announced. With any new change I gave it chance, until today. As you see in the screenshot above and for 2 more pages all updates where from one person, just another example of a Facebook Fail.

Facebook is starting to get complex to use and this new version tries to ‘highlight’ what I might be interested in instead letting me control what I want to see. I think it good the Facebook is trying new ideas to present large & constanly changing content, but they need to be gradually with small improvements.

Google is a great example, with Google Labs Experimental Search, users can opt in to be the guinea pig for potential new features for Google search results page. The Google Search Quality blog post was a great read about how much time is spent improving what Google currently offers, instead of a complete overhaul. In short the KISS rule is always best (sorry about the pun).

What are your thoughts on the ‘new’ facebook redesign?

Im happy to say that I found a job, its on the other side of London town and I’ll be starting in a few days. The contract is only a few week long,  creating HTML email campaigns & attending to website updates. I am glad something finally came up as I was started to get bored at home.

One task I did attempt in my jobless period was updating the firmware on my Nokia N95 8GB phone. After backing up all my contacts & settings I proceeded to install the updates, then I loaded all my contact & settings back on, things didn’t go as planned. Many, many hours later which now became the early morning I had given up trying to retrieve my contacts.

To ensure I would never lose my contact again I did some research and came up with three options:-

1. PC Suite – software the comes with the Nokia N95 8GB phone. One major downside is that doesn’t work on a Mac.
2. iSync – comes bundled with Mac OSX. To be compatible with my Nokia N95 8GB phone a plugin is required. iSync ties in with Address Book, iCal & MobileMe, none of which I currently use. This was a viable option which I considered.
3. Google Mobile Sync – earlier this month Google Mobile Sync was announced making it possible to sync your address book & calendar from a number of selected phones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson & Windows Mobile) with  Gmail & Google Calender of which use both.

Even though Google Mobile Sync is still in beta and the Nokia N95 GB  supports syncing contacts only I decided to give it ago. After the longish step by step guide to configure all the settings it worked  first go! I was quite impressed with the speed  and to my surprised it even copied the photo for each contact, if  supplied.

I come across some great articles mainly to do with web development, recently I have started to keep track of them using delicious.

This animation by Jonathan Jarvis explaining the current credit crisis in simple terms did an outstanding job, so much so I am even blogging about it. I can’t start to imagine how many hours it took to research, plan & animate this video.

Its quite long at 11 minutes but you would want it to keep going after you have watched it, as they animation concepts used are easy to grasp and well polished. Reading some of the comments on Vimeo, this over simplification version of events is missing a few important factors. Overall being such a complex topic with many parties involved I think Jonathan Jarvis and his animation skills have done a marvelous  job to spell out the basics of the underlying issues that have brought us to the current state of the global economy.