I do practically all of my work on Sony VAIO notebook I bought 3 years ago. I picked it because it was very light (less than 1.5kg), small, had great screen, keyboard and battery that seemed to last forever (around 11 hours without WiFi and about 8 with it). I still love this machine, but it has a remarkable design failure. Let’s see if you can spot it on this picture?

That glassy looking button is an on/off switch. It responds to light pressure and it protrudes from notebook even when lid is closed. What could possibly go wrong?

After a while I got tired of my notebook getting turned off while I carried it and made what I believed would be a temporary fix until I figure out something better ^[1] . A cap for button made out of layers of paper for sturdiness (I should at least use paperboard) glued together and reinforced with copious amounts of Scotch tape. It looked ugly, but mostly worked.

The problem with temporary fixes is that they tend to become permanent. I think this happens when they are too successful and remove too much pain, but it’s hard to find that sweet spot of enough uneasiness without actual aggravation. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.

So I’ve been using it ever since with a firm intention to figure out a better way to fix it. I finally decided to draw what I need and print it at Shapeways ^[2] . Here are results:

I made two (left is old paper one), because it takes them a while to print and deliver them to Europe, I had no experience with materials and they are relatively cheap. They also looked better before I sandpapered them somewhat for a better fit. In fact both of them were completely black.

A couple of tips if you intend to use SketchUp for drawing models. SketchUp was really made for drawing sketches of buildings so when you start it, you’ll see an image of a person (to help you scale your sketch). That image is an object and you have to delete it if you don’t want it to screw up your measurements in exported file. The other consequence of SketchUp purpose is that anything you draw has no depth. This didn’t matter to me since required thickness of protector cylinder was about the same as minimum thickness that 3D printer can print. If this is not true for you, then you’ll probably need to do some post-processing (search Shapeways for tutorials).

My notebook has been “on the road” and has performed admirably apart from a failed battery latch which forced me to now use a lower capacity battery (which still gets me through a typical conference day). But 3 years is forever for wandering notebook so it was no big surprise that frame of its screen eventually cracked. Superglue didn’t fix it and I was thinking about gluing a piece of wood or metal to screen for reinforcement, but I hate the idea of additional weight. It would also look awful.

At about same time I was snooping around Mozilla store to see if there was something I like which I could buy to support my favorite web project and discovered laptop skins. I was never a fan of covering my laptop with stickers from various startups (why would anyone want that?), but this was perfect. I’m not sure from what kind of material the skins are made of, but they are thin and don’t tear easily. With another layer of Scotch tape I got something that I think looks great and provides enough protection for a now more careful user:

Looks great, right?

1. I still find it amazing that this problem wasn’t caught before release.  Eventually they noticed it and later models got buttons that need more pressure to trigger and are better shielded from environment. ↩
2. I knew about 3D printing and company for years. Who knows why I didn’t think of using it sooner. ↩

I bought a Samsung Nexus phone in September after almost 4 years of being a happy Nokia E65 user. I switched because I didn’t have an Android phone to test websites against and it would be stupid to buy something expensive just to lay on my table waiting for an occasional test.

A month of use is enough to get a solid impression, but not enough to really know a modern phone. Which is alright, since I don’t want to write a pro-cons review of Android. Better ones have already been written. I am more intrigued by what design hints about its creators and their environment. Hints, not tells, because I know Android’s authors even less than I do my phone, which is to say I don’t know them at all and could well be wrong. Enough of disclaimers and let’s proceed with this Sherlock-like conjecture.

Data roaming is something that ought to be common, but is usually an obscenely expensive luxury and it’s nice that Android lets you turn it off to prevent unexpected expenses. However home network may not be cheap or unlimited either and what I really liked about an otherwise severely limited email client on Nokia N900 is that you could set automatic email retrieval to proceed only when connected to WiFi. Alas there are no connection based settings for data syncing. So this feature was designed for countries where cheap-enough data connection is available to most or in expectation that this will soon be so.

Notifications are an important part of Android’s experience and are done well enough to inspire iPhone’s. They are also less important to me than Android believes they should be. Pull-down notification system was obviously built for a steady stream of messages and as such would benefit from a few more options. Like K9 mail’s quiet time during which it would not check for new messages (or just be silent if it gets them). I’d also love to be able to set a different volume based on type of messages. I care about (rare) text messages, but don’t want to be bothered with Twitter’s deluge. However if I wanted to be notified about everything as soon as it happens, then I would just love what I got. I know many social media users who surely do.

The under-appreciated side of Nokia has always been company’s understanding that mobile users around world are not same. Android however doesn’t care about subtleties. E.g. selecting language of your interface will also select when week starts (is it Monday or Sunday?). This would be a great shortcut for setting locale in one swoop, but is incredibly annoying when you want/need to override it.

None of my examples is actually a bug or even necessary a bad (business) decision. I talked about Android, but most of what I said also applies to iPhones. While I do think smartphones will eventually end up in hands of practically all phone users, I do not believe that economies of scale or environment will work equally for all. I am not sure if designing mostly for affluent is wrong, but I do think it’s sad.

Web Hours (spletne urice) is a series of web related talks that is happening weekly here in Ljubljana and is free for everyone. Today’s talk , happening on sixth anniversary of the first , will be 181th. A lot of people shared a lot of knowledge and our community has grown from a handful coming to first few talks to few tens of regular attendees. We never made a really serious effort at counting, but I would be surprised if few talks haven’t drawn close to a hundred people. My congratulations and thanks to all who made it happen!

I started Web Hours on Andraž’s suggestion because I was not happy with  the quality of work done in Slovenia and I thought regular web talks could educate and help raise awareness. Looking back at the state of industry then and where we are now, it is obvious we came a long way and I’d like to think our talks played a part in it. I may be biased, but not that much because I stopped organizing them a long time ago so kudos really goes to those who followed me .

It is still easy to find shoddy work , but this will never change. You can find it in any field and there is no reason why web should be any different. There is always room for growth, but I am fairly satisfied with Slovenian web development community. These days there is no shortage of interesting events (meetups, hackdays, camps of various kinds) where you can meet kindred spirits, many of whom are doing interesting stuff. I wish there was more open web evangelism, but talks always were what we made them and it’s up to us open web advocates to go out there more often.

On the other hand Slovenian UX community depresses me. It seems to be full of people with big egos, very limited knowledge and low self-esteem resulting in an environment where constructive criticism is avoided and learning remains personal and, as community, slow. There are exceptions to this, but right now it seems it is enough to read a couple of books and follow a few related blogs to justify a UX related title on your business card and profess expertise. Critical assessment of problems and approaches is largely missing. There is a difference between cutting corners and skipping all steps — being agile is not a justification for being lazy. Events are rare and online discussions feel limited to regurgitating blog opinions as facts and discussing eternal, but mostly answered questions (e.g. how much of underlying technology do non-developers need to know?).

Then again I may be just an old grump. My feelings about UX community are not all that different to what I felt about web development community six years ago and that one turned out OK. Maybe I am just too quick to judge and things will turn out just fine soon enough. We’ll see. See you tonight in Kiberpipa .