Update: This talk has been canceled.

Kind folks from Kibla invited me to give a talk about iPod’s (web) design lessons. It will be slightly updated, hopefully more interesting and useful version of the talk I gave at Kiberpipa.

Please do drop by, if you have time and even a slight interest in the topic.

On a different note, Fry has saved my day. Again.

I never got a hang of “release early, release often” policy. I’m sure it works nice in practice, but it simply feels wrong to bestow an application to public use that you know is faulty. It should be my job to suffer through its problems until I can’t find any.

Still, here it is. First public version of a Marela uploader for series 60 phones written in Python.

It took longer then I thought, mainly because I overestimated my free time, but also because it grew new features. You can either shoot a new photo or choose an existing one, set its policy and tags and upload it to your Marela account. But whatever you do, you should treat it as you hopefully treat any first release. With utmost suspicion.

And you should do it in slovene, unless you change code, an easy enough task even if code is a bit messy. I didn’t try to support Flickr, but it shouldn’t be hard to do so for those (unlike me) with free time and without a conflict of interests.

Have fun.

I really dislike headaches and although I don’t get them as often as I used to, they are usually not as easy to shake of. That’s why we have several different pills in our home to battle this nuisance. I recently noticed that one of them, Plivadon, has its name stamped in Braille on the box (click for a bigger picture):

It’s great that Pliva (Plivadon’s maker) makes its product more accessible to blind people. At the same time, this is also a good example of how difficult good accessibility is.

It’s a common misconception that all blind people either know how to read Braille or can learn how to. In fact, a large part if not majority of them don’t and can’t. The reason for this is that you can learn Braille only if tips of your fingers are sensitive enough and that’s usually the case only for those who were born blind or became blind in their youth.

But blindness can be caused by an accident later in life or by various diseases like diabetes, which means it’s far more common among older people, who through years of working with hands lost the necessary sensitivity in their fingers. They are in such cases forced to cope with their usual methods such as being very organized about where they put things.

Pliva (and other companies) could help them more. They could make the shape and size of the box more unique. They could stamp an easily recognizable pattern on parts of the box, just like they did with Braille. Anything that can make the tactile feedback more unique would probably help. ¹

Alas they, as more often than not we, don’t do what they easily could.