The Chocolate Factory for Engineers · 5 days ago by Michael Dales
Yesterday Laura and I went to the Lotus factory and testing grounds just outside Norwich at Hethel. We were booked in on their taster driving experience course but spectacular storm weather meant that we weren’t able to take an Elise for a spin, but that was made up for by the wonderful factory tour, which was a chance to see design and engineering applied.
(we weren’t allowed to take pictures alas, so this one is from Flickr by exfordy)
We were shown round the floor where the Lotus cars, and the Tesla Roadster, are assembled. From start to finish, it’s a fascinating process. From how the car panels are assembled, how the aluminium chassis is bonded together with a glue that’s stronger than the aluminium itself (and a nice shade of orange), how lots of the major components serve multiple purposes, all the way down to the production flow itself.
We were taken around by a Design Engineer named David (apologies to David for forgetting his surname) who did a great job of explaining not just what you were looking at, but why it was so interesting, and what it was that made Lotus special – the attention to applying engineering to make the best race car possible for the price. David, amongst other things, designed the intercooler on the Lotus Exige, of which he was clearly proud; but he was also clearly proud of the little things in the car too. He told us about the little bit of rubber to catch the one drop of water that gets in during soak tests where the side window, roof, and windscreen meet – a proper engineering solution to what might seem a trivial issue.
The tour reminded me of Objectified, the documentary on Industrial Design by Gary Hustwit. A great product is a combination of design thought at all levels – from the “ooh, isn’t that a pretty car/computer/whatever”, down to designing the right parts to make it perform, and then down even further to the design of the things that you need to make the item you’re actually interested in. When milling an iMac facia out of aluminium you also get two keyboards from the gap where the screen is – in every Lotus Elise crumple zone is also the housing for the air scoop for the cooling. It’s attention to detail all the way that makes these products what they are.
Another thing David mentioned is that Lotus will happily use parts from other companies where appropriate. The engines come from Toyota, for instance, but they also buy a lot of components in ready assembled so they can concentrate on what they’re good at. This resonates a lot with the industry I’m in currently – when building a web service of any sort these days you don’t build everything from scratch – there’s a wealth of third party services out there, from open and closed source code libraries all the way to services like Amazon’s S3 for data hosting. As a web startup you don’t worry about building those bits – you use what’s out there already and concentrate on making the cool bit that no one else does (or does well).
If you’re an engineer, I really encourage you to take the factory tour – it’s a delight. Or, better yet, if you know any children who are showing any signs of being interested in engineering, take them – let them see how much of a difference engineering can make in a product they can relate to. David (still without a surname) told us when we started that he went on his first factory tour when he was eight, and now he designs major parts of their fastest car – perhaps we can get more kids making that leap. They apparently cater for school trips too – so if you have a class of children, take them all!
I’m now looking forward to going back now to put all this engineering to the test – it’s only going to get less wet through the rest of the year, right?
ps: fun fact – the Lotus Elise has surprisingly large storage space at the back – you could fit me in it easily – but with only a small aperture to access it. The Telsa Roadster on the other hand has the same space easily accessible – now you know why the Roadster is three times the price of the Elise ;)
Scott Pilgrim vs The eBook · 16 days ago by Michael Dales
Having failed to avoid succumbing to the Scott Pilgrim fanfare on the web, I decided last night to see if I could grab the original comics in eBook to read on my iPad. I think I’ve said before that I quite like eBooks – the iPad’s a great reading device, they turn up instantly when you order them, and they hopefully reduce my tree count. Also, apps like the Marvel app show you can deliver a compelling comic book experience on the iPad – so bring on Scott Pilgrim!
There’s two primary ways of getting ebooks onto your iPad – Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle app – and the first volume of Scott Pilgrim can be found on both. I’d used iBooks before, so I thought I’d give Kindle a whirl. The Kindle experience is certainly a little less slick – you install the app, but when you click buy in Kindle you’re taken out the app to the Amazon US web store – this is a legacy from when I got my iPad and only the US store worked for kindle. I search for Scott Pilgrim, when it tells me I can now use the UK store, so I transfer my Kindle account to the UK store, and search again for my book, pay my £3.49, and head back to the Kindle app, ready for my instant gratification of comic book action.
Only, for no reason I can discern, the Kindle app decides to install two books. Scott Pilgrim Volume 1, as I purchased, but also, and more vexingly, first, it installs The New Oxford American Dictionary! So, having ordered a tiny book, and having done this dance through Amazon’s web site, I’m now having to wait while it downloads some book I didn’t buy. And not just any other book, but an ENTIRE DICTIONARY!
Thankfully the dictionary only takes a few minutes to download, and I’m soon ready to settle down with the adventures of Scott and friends. Only, the quality isn’t very good. Not very good at all:
The entire thing looks like it’s been scanned in at a fairly low quality, and hasn’t been cleaned up at all. The picture above is a screen shot from the Kindle app, blown up to twice the size – the default is really quite small for reading. The Kindle app (unlike iBooks here, so one up for Kindle) will let me zoom in on pages to help with reading the tiny text, but then I can’t navigate to the next page without zooming out again. And zooming in doesn’t buy my any higher resolution – that above is as good as it gets.
I decide I can’t face 170 pages of this, so head over to iBooks to see if I fare any better in Apple’s hands. £4.99 later (and no leaving the app, and no strange dictionaries downloaded) I once again settled down to Scott Pilgrim and co. This time, the scan is much cleaner, but the resolution is still pitifully low:
But the cleaner scan at least makes it a lot less of a headache to read – clearly the £1.50 was well spent in the book’s production. Maybe.
I read on, and hit more frustrations with the eBooks – any fine detail is totally lost. Early on in Scott’s tale, his band play a song, and rather nicely they provide both lyrics and guitar music – how cool is that? At least, I assume it’s cool, as the best I can get out of either version is this:
G, C, and Em I can make out, but the rest of the text, and indeed most the lyrics to the song, aren’t legible. Add to this the lack of colourful, scene-setting cover (both eBooks have text only covers), overall it’s been a very disappointing experience. I’m quite frankly amazed that Harper Collins, who are responsible for both editions, quite frankly let them out the door. It might not be Harper Collins fault, perhaps they’re constrained by the software, but the end result is not fit for consumption if I can’t read parts of the book.
To check that I wasn’t doing Harper Collins a disservice, and that it wasn’t the source material that was at fault, I decided to give in and get the paper edition. So today I duly went to Waterstones and paid £7.99 in return for a lump of dead tree.
You can immediately see the paper version cared a lot more about the presentation of what is, after all, a visual medium. No colourful funky cover for the electronic version – I suspect Times New Roman is almost the antithesis of the original.
But what about the quality of what’s inside? How do Scott et al shape up in print? Quite frankly, a lot better:
It’s a shame really – there’s no reason the iPad shouldn’t deliver just as good an experience as the paper edition for a comic like this, instead this will just put people off the idea of eBooks. I’ve happily consumed both fiction and non-fiction eBooks on a variety of devices, and this was the first time I’ve been let down. But boy has it been a let down.
In the end, I did enjoy the first volume of Scott Pilgrim’s adventures, and look forward to reading the subsequent volumes. But I fear I’ll be getting those on paper until Harper Collins see fit to do the medium justice.
The paper version did have one other advantage though – I was a lot less worried about dropping it in the bath…
Update: A few days after I went through all this I got in touch with both Amazon and Apple and asked for a refund on the grounds the eBooks weren’t fit for purpose. I’m pleased to report that both companies got back to me promptly and refunded me in full, with an apology that I’d had such an unfortunate experience, and that they’d look into it. Top marks to both Amazon and Apple there on the customer support front.
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Work in progress · 24 days ago by Michael Dales
This photo captures part of the process I use when plotting user flow. I’ve done a write up of the whole process over on the Digital Flapjack blog.
Have phone, make movie · 33 days ago by Michael Dales
Last weekend was PuntCon VI – the annual tech conference on punts. It was a fun time, and I got to hang out with old friends and make some new ones, and huge thanks to Bill as ever for organising it.
If you’re thinking a conference on punts doesn’t make much sense, then why don’t I let Bill explain what it is:
So, shaky camera work aside, I had one of those reality check moments when putting that video together in the evening after PuntCon – I recorded, edited, and published the entire thing from my mobile phone. I think sometimes we get a bit blasé about things like this, so let me repeat: I recorded, edited and published a movie from my mobile phone.
So yes, the video is a bit naff, but that’s down to me – it’d have been just as naff had I had an HD video camera, Final Cut Pro, and my own broadcast satellite. The point is that I don’t tend to have those things to hand, but at times I’m out and about and do want to capture and publish a little video to share with friends, and now I have all that capability with me all the time.
When MMS first appeared, I didn’t see the fuss at all – why did we need pictures with our text messages? What value did they add? This is technology for technology’s sake surely? Then my sister, Karen, who lives a long long way away, had her first child. Karen doesn’t always have a camera to hand, but she does have her phone, and she’d send me MMS photos of my new niece at random moments, and it meant that despite being a long way off, I got to share in the magic of our family growing, in a way that text messaging or emails wouldn’t.
So, sure, I don’t need to be able to use my phone as a movie studio, but there will be times when it lets me or someone else share a moment that’d otherwise be lost (or at least transcribed poorly). To me, jaded to technology as I am at times, makes me think that this is a fantastic feature to have. Technology is only useful if it enriches our lives, and I think that just like MMS messages enriched my life all those years ago, this can do the same. And that’s before you think of citizen journalism and other cool things this enables people to do.
OK Diner · 41 days ago by Michael Dales
Introducing PlaceWhisper · 43 days ago by Michael Dales
After over 6 months of working away I’m pleased to finally announce the first release of PlaceWhisper, a fun little app that lets you leave and discover virtual messages in physical locations. You can think of it as geocaching, but without the Tupperware :)
PlaceWhisper is one of those apps I’ve wanted to use for ages, but no one else had written it. After being inspired by things like last years Hide & Seek festival, and the Playful conference (in particular Russell Davies’ talk), I decided I wanted to create something that let people have fun, so I finally decided to go make this app that no one else had got around to.
PlaceWhisper lets you walk around areas and create and find hidden messages, called Whispers, that are tied to a physical location. When you get within a 100 metres you’ll find nearby Whispers show up on the map, but you’re not there yet – you need to get to within a few metres to actually collect the Whisper and reveal its content. Thus PlaceWhisper not only lets you leave messages for strangers or friends in a specific location, it means people have to get up and around to collect your messages! It’s like being a kid again and running around finding hidden messages left by your friends.
You can also link Whispers together to form trails, where Whispers only reveal themselves on the map as you collect the preceding ones on the trail. It’s a fun way to show someone around an area, and also a fun way to make a treasure hunt game in your neighbourhood, or perhaps someone else’s – below is a trail we created in Kensington as part of testing:
That’s PlaceWhisper, and I hope you enjoy it. This is first release, and there’s lots of stuff I still need to add and rough corners to smooth, but the basics of creating and discovering are all there ready to be used. This version had a tight deadline – we used PlaceWhisper to run a game at this year’s Hide & Seek Weekender festival (which I’ll blog about shortly in a separate post to do the event full justice). But despite the rough edges, the app let lots of people have a fun time – and I’ll hope it’ll let others do the same too.
Huge thanks have to go to Laura for her never ending encouragement in getting it this far, the uncounted cups of tea she made for me as I spent quite a bit of my spare time working on this, and her help in testing it – testing location based apps like this involve a lot of walking :) Thanks too to superstar play tester, Dan Wilson, who’s walked many a mile to ensure PlaceWhisper worked, even when it looked a little cloudy:
Thanks also need to go to the hugely talented Andy Field, who did the artwork for PlaceWhisper, and indeed the concept for the new look Digital Flapjack website – Andy got the playful vibe I wanted spot on, I’ve been blown away by everything he’s produced. Finally thanks to Sophie Sampson with whom I collaborated on the Hide & Seek game, who’s given lots of great feedback.
So that’s PlaceWhisper – there’s lots more to come, but this is where it starts :)
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Raspberries · 48 days ago by Michael Dales
Spotted in St Ives this morning. And now our fridge…
Come play with us! · 59 days ago by Michael Dales
Last year Laura and I went to an amazing event on the South Bank in London called the Hide & Seek Weekender – a weekend festival of games for all ages, where you basically played lots of fun, and often silly, games with random people and generally had a very good time. Laura blogged about it here, and I put up some photos here.
This coming weekend sees this year’s Hide & Seek event, again on London’s South Bank. It promises to be lots of fun, with some great looking games, and I really do encourage you to come along. What makes it particularly exciting for me is that this year, I’m on the other side of the fence, running one of the games!
After the 2009 Hide & Seek event, and the Playful conference later in the year, I decided I wanted to do something that was a bit more, well, playful. So last Christmas I started working on a mobile game for people to play – based on the idea of people running around areas and collecting and creating hidden clues. Having got the game into a rough shape I approached the Hide & Seek organisers, who are always looking for new games for the event. They put me in touch with a game designer, Sophie Sampson, and between us we’ve come up with the Time Trails game.
Time Trails involves you using your iPhone or iPad to find stories relating to the South Bank’s history – between World War II and The Festival of Britain, the whole area has changed a lot. We’ve left lots of clues dotted around in specific locations on the South Bank for you to collect. There’s also a trio of story trails to collect, where you can follow the journeys of people during the Festival of Britain in 1951, and experience life back then through their eyes.
That’s our game, and we do hope you’ll come along and have a go. Sophie, myself, and Laura, who’s been helping out too (in particular she’s put up well with being made to run around lots to help test the game tech :), will be manning a desk throughout the event. Regardless, you should definitely head down to the South Bank, specifically to the National Theatre, this weekend and take part – there’s loads of games to play, and Laura and I had a blast last year.
Not the hipstamatic · 101 days ago by Michael Dales
Taken by Laura on her new HTC Desire, which has quite a nice camera in it. To save you from all the Hipstamatic photos of late, this is taken with Vignette, the Android alternative :)
The blog moves home · 101 days ago by Michael Dales
After sitting on our trusty Mac Mini at home for the last few years, and my G3 PowerMac for the years before that, my blog is on the move again, and (assuming my redirects have worked properly) you now find it here on another server, no longer hosted at home.
As fun as it is to try and run everything at home, I had other servers to hand better suited to the task of hosting the blog, and I couldn’t face reinstalling MySQL on my Mac Mini (as some of you may have noted, the blog was complaining about some things MySQL for a little while now when you tried to comment etc.). When I started hosting this blog I knew very little about running web sites, and now I suspect I know more than I want to :)
Anyway, a new server deserves a new name, so I’ve found the shorter, but not less difficult to remember, http://mynameismwd.org/. At least it should save wear and tear on your poor keyboard. Although the old blog will redirect you here if you stumble across it, I fear you’ll need to manually update your RSS feed readers.