Straight Up. (Autistic)

I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t stop for lunch or take breaks. I get my own high from hours and hours of focused sharp effort. Wether that time is spent coding, explaining or building Lego gearboxes

I tend to think I’m right and get intensely frustrated by half measures. I believe people should be bold, do or do not. You know the rest. I strongely feel that if your going to own something and make something happen that means you commit as strongly to those things you don’t want as much as the things you do. The hard decisions, the difficult no is infinitely more productive than a half hearted diplomatic maybe.

I see a mostly black and white world. I feel better with the lion in my rucksack, so I carry the lion. Everyone knows the lion, I’m carrying the lion therefore no hiding the fact. Im different i know that. celebrate it, embrace it and make it a feature. Grey is wooly undefined and without structure. Grey is hard.

I am very specific. I am straight up. Autistic.

Published: 20 March 2013 | Categories: Opinion , Autism & Me Permalink

Appy government

The digital cabinet office are doing some great work. In their recent post regarding platform apps and the web they make some great points about why the web is awesome and detail their approach to talking with stakeholders.

Overall I don’t disagree with the post at all. I am tremendously happy to see the government talking about open standards.

However apps have the mindshare for a reason. Perhaps we can identify some ways in which the web can learn from native apps. The big one for me is discoverability

So many people head straight to an App Store when they want to do something on thier mobile device. I have seen this myself with users.

It’s frustrating that on the dominant platforms web apps and native apps dont get the same distribution channels. It would rock for both app types to be ‘installable’ from the same store.

Moreover I really want to see some numbers around this. How does the App Store effect influence installation frequency and user stickiness? I think this is a largely unanswered question.

Untill that question is answered, I feel there is a case for apps in App Stores. Even if it’s just a wrapper, it may help people to find what they want.

Published: 13 March 2013 Permalink

Are we optimising the wrong end.

I was reading about the google data compression proxy this morning when a specific line got me thinking:

“[the proxy] also optimises the perceptual quality of each image based on device screen resolution and pixel density of your device” (Data Compression Proxy)

So, why are we doing this on websites at the server end? After all a proxy has more information about the device, is easier to configure per user and moves the complexity to a single place

Moving this complexity downstream also removes the need for every site to implement their own approach to responsive images etc.

On a practical side, this is pretty interesting to me. I have always felt a little uncomfortable about providing retina images when i cannot reliably detect bandwidth and context.

I’m not sure how much i like the idea. But i do think its worth discussing.

Published: 6 March 2013 Permalink