Brit Mansell :: Life's Influence on Design » Productivity

Fox 6 Interview

brit — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:48:59 +0000

The grand opening for Shift Workspace was yesterday and Fox 6 news was on hand to document the event. Here is their take on it.

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iPhone OS 3.0

brit — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:54:13 +0000

I installed the latest iPhone OS today. To my surprise it went on just fine. I only say that because of all of the pain I have put this phone through. I’m surprised it even turns on now. First, I spilled tea on it. Then, I dropped it in a parking lot and cracked the screen.

Below, you can see a picture of the phone. It doesn’t look much different from that side, but the bad news is it doesn’t look much different from the other side either.

Cut, copy and paste are huge, but that is only catching up to what Windows Mobile has had for years. Actually, all of the updates are just catching up to Windows Mobile, but trust me, I’m definitely not a WinMo fan. Im far from it. MMS? Really? Even low end phones have MMS. It’s about time Apple.

I’m still putting my money on the Palm Pre if it ever comes out. The synergy feature in WebOS could be an iPhone killer *for me*.

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Sony Vaio Z, How I Love Thee.

brit — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:08:08 +0000

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would actually have emotional feelings toward a laptop, and I didn’t until now. My new Vaio, replaced my first-gen McBook Pro, which I still think is a great laptop. The one major drawback for the McBook in my situation is that I primarily do Microsoft ASP.NET web development, which means I need to boot into Vista via Boot Camp. I’m a big fan of Boot Camp and for the most part it works great, but there were a few nit picky things that just drove me crazy. They’re not worth discussing here because they will just expose the depth of my OCD. Plus, it was just time for a replacement.

In comes the Sony Vaio Z-Series. I wanted a laptop that was light, thin, and powerful, plus had some buttons other than the keyboard and a card reader. I went through several different brands and models and even ordered a Dell XPS M1530. After further fondeling of the Dell at a local Best Buy I decided the build quality of the chassis and keyboard wasn’t up to par for what I wanted. While I was there, I noticed the Sony Vaio Z on display. The one major drawback to the one on display was the smaller resolution. The Best Buy models are usually not the fuller featured models so I went back to SonyStyle’s website and did my research. Hands down this thing has it all.

After a few weeks of using it, I have to say it is the best piece of hardware I’ve ever had, ever. The battery life is great, the keyboard feels nice to the touch, the SSD is cool, too. It comes out of standby almost instantly, which was something that drove me crazy about the McBook (when resuming Vista). The weight and feeling of the chassis is absolutely unreal. It’s amazing that Sony has packed this kind of punch into such a small machine.

The only problem I’ve had with it is the power cable’s connection to the connector. I’m overly careful with this part of the hardware, almost to the point of driving my wife crazy having her tip-toe around the power cable stretched across the floor, but somehow it must have gotten jerked around and in doing so it bent the little piece of metal that makes contact with the power connector. I took a small pick and bent the metal back down inside of the laptop so that it made better contact. All seems well now, but I’m still worried about this part of the chassis. I much prefer the mag-safe design incorporated into the McBooks.

Other than the above mentioned issue, this laptop is amazing, especially for the price paid. If you’re in the market for a new ultraportable powerhouse, give the Vaio Z a glance. You won’t be let down.

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Finally, A New Laptop On The Way

brit — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:18:58 +0000

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally ordered a new laptop today. I know I have previously raved over the original Mac Book Pros, but I decided to skip the current Mac Book Pro model in favor of a PC laptop. Begin, the ultimate laptop search.I’ve scoured the Web for months looking for the perfect laptop for my situation. I’m traveling a lot more lately and working out of the office a lot more, so I wanted something more portable than the 15.4 laptops but I wasn’t ready to give up any performance. In comes the new Sony Z-Series. This thing has it all, even at 3.4 lbs. Highlights: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P9500 (2.53 GHz, 6MB L2 Cache), Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate, Model Features: 4GB RAM, 128GB solid state drive, Hybrid Graphics System (1600 x 900 resolution), NVIDIA® graphics, HDMI out. The reviews on this model have also been great.

The key for me ordering one now is the drastic discounts that are currently available. I even found a $300 off coupon (coupon code Z590SAVE300) that combines with the discount already applied to the VGN-Z590UAB model.

If you’re in the market for an ultraportable with some great performance numbers, the Z-Series is worth checking out.

Oh yeah, and it has real carbon fiber, lots of it.

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Apple Mac Book Pro Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

brit — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:17:05 +0000

My daily web development/travel/email checking/photoshopping/bla-bla-bla “machine” is an original Mac Book Pro (15.4″, 3GB, 2.33, 300GB, Leopard – all updates installed). It’s weird calling it “original” now. Suddenly I feel outdated. Anyway, most of the time I boot into Vista via Boot Camp. I’m constantly blown away with how well Vista runs on this laptop. It just seems so wrong, almost ike Bret Favre playing for the Jets.Up until recently this has been a near flawless platform (except for no tap-click, poor battery life, dedicated home/end keys, etc. – ok, not so flawless), but within the last few months it has developed a disturbing sickness. When coming out of standby (sleep) it will blue screen (blue screen of death) about half of the time. I can’t find any rhyme or reason to this and I can’t accurately duplicate the problem. I went to Apple’s site and installed the latest Bootcamp update in an attempt to update all of the drivers. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t needed since I’m running the Leopard version of Bootcamp, but it was worth a shot. The install went fine, but didn’t fix the problem and now I get some crazy “mom.implementation error“. The fix in the previous link didn’t work for me. Either way, I’m still getting the BSOD with the same frequency. I could not care less about the mom.implementation error unless it’s causing other problems.

Anyone out there have any ideas?

Oh and yeah, and if you’re an “OS X only guy”, please hold off on the “I told you so comments”.

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Sync iPhone w/ Google Calendar and Contacts

brit — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:32:51 +0000

In my everpresent quest to find the perfect mobile device, I have recently upgraded my iPhone 2G to an iPhone 3G. The connection speed isn’t what I expected, but it is still the best platform for mobile application development on the market in my opinion, at least until Android and Andorid’s hardware matures some.Anyway, the one thing that has bothered me is the inability for the iPhone to sync with the Google “cloud”. Yes, it has decent Gmail support now, but contact and calendar sync doesn’t exist, until now. In step the heroes from NuevaSync. They have built a service that uses the iPhone Exchange push/sync support to beautifully trick the iPhone into thinking it’s sync’ing with an Exchange server, which is actually a wrapper around your Google account setup. And, another great feature, you can sync contacts, email, and the calendar all from separate Google accounts, including Google Apps accounts.

The service works flawlessly for me so far. If things change I’ll report back.

The only downside to this is the drain on the battery. If I leave the phone set to receive pushed data, the battery is practically dead by the end of the business day. That’s not a big deal since I’m in front of a PC all day. I just keep it plugged in some and that remedies the problem.

Great service! Highly recommended.

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Additional Displays on Mac Book Pro

brit — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:04:30 +0000

I have finally found a Mac driver for the UV Plus+ by EVGA. Now I’m not constrained to only two displays on my McBook. So, now for $99 (or less online) you can hook up an additional display to your laptop, or desktop for that matter.

More information: http://www.mostlygeek.com/2008/06/22/multiscreen-macbook-pro/

Download drivers here: http://www.displaylink.com/mac_beta_drivers.html

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Twitter Updater Test

brit — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:05:58 +0000

This is a test for the Twitter Updater WordPress plugin installed on BritMansell.com. If you’re seeing this on Twitter, it worked. If you’re seeing this somewhere else, you need to get a Twitter account and follow me there.

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WordPress for iPhone

brit — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:24:33 +0000

WordPress has just released an iPhone application. It works great for plain text posting, which should be fine for mobile posting. More information can be found at http://iphone.wordpress.org. This post was made from this new application. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Wireframing in Fireworks CS4

brit — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:04:54 +0000

Last week, I attended a presentation by Bill Abel at the June meeting of the Birmingham UX Group hosted at the Innovation Depot.

The topic was “Communicating Design”. His presentation was filled, and I mean filled, with wireframe examples and various types of charts and planned activities to evolve your users’ experiences within your website, application, etc. It was great to see how others dive into the same issues we face every day.

After the presentation there was a question about what software was being used by the group to develop wireframes. Most said OmniGraffle. Some were using InDesign, Photoshop and others. Recently (literally a couple of days before the presentation) I started using Fireworks for prototyping. At this point, I wasn’t comfortable enough with it to recommend it to the group simply because of some problems I was having getting printable versions of my wireframes.

Today is a new day. I was browsing through the July/August issue of Layers magazine, which ironically has a major focus on Fireworks CS4 (free beta download), and I noticed the cover article titled “Fireworks CS4 Beta for Web Design”. Not expecting to learn much, but optimistic, I read it anyway. As I read more I noticed it was driving more toward Fireworks as a prototyping tool. The inclusion of the “Common Library” window (contains various RIA and HTML buttons, etc.) and the ability to set “Master Pages” within your layout (from which your other pages derive their layout) are a huge help to the wireframe process. This drastically speeds the process of making layout and main navigation changes to multiple pages. The next part was the revelation for which I was hoping. The Holy Grail of printed prototypes; the Export to PDF option! Yes, it actually works as expected and exports all of your wireframes, in order, to a PDF file. It also mentions being an “interactive” PDF. I got so excited to share this news that I haven’t dug into the “interactive” part of the PDF, but I would assume it links between pages or something like that. If you read this and have any experience with this “interactive” feature, please post it in the comments. I will be looking into it over the next few days.

Along with the PDF export there are also a few other options for delivering your content over the Web: HTML and Images and CSS and Images. These also work as expected. Great features!

Until then, happy prototyping!

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