No changes, no chances

Today, someone posted a comment underneath my post of the design/development process tree-swing comic post I made in 2007. He claimed to be the owner of the image.


update, 2011-07-24
Mike Wilkinson, CEO of Paragon Innovations Inc, replied! He informed me on the particular image I used in the blog post of 2007 and I have updated that post. After 2007 I finally know the owner of that image.

I did a quick Google search on the topic, since it had been so long that I've tried to find more info on it. And it turns out that people claim they've seen the tree swing comic around offices in the 1960s (!!), as businessballs.com writes in their article regarding the search for the origin of the comic.

.... caution, long sentence coming up ...

What strikes me is that
(allegedly) in the 1960s people already knew
and
the Interaction Design study I did taught people (since around 1990)
that end users should not be left with some piece of something that could have been suitable to them way better if only they were approached in the design process
and that
in 2011
there are still gazzillion of (software developing) companies that work with no or hardly any user centered design research and design process,
wasting their own time and energy, causing hours of user frustration,
because User Centered Design is .. [pick any of the 13 common objections from this article written in 2000]

2011 .. Still a long way to go ...

I've been searching for a free tool to recover files from a Compact Flash card, from which I thought I had already downloaded all files to my harddisk.

I found PC-inspector but somehow it did not work for me .. I however did read that it worked for others ..

Next, I found Photorec .. It works like a charm and I can see the recovered files pouring back into the folder I selected .. The user-interface however, is almost command-line-like .. So if you feel comfortable with an MS-Dos window textual interface it's great .. If you like a windows interface, you'd better try PC inspector ..

Happy recovering!

I hardly ever blog but when I am looking for information and get frustrated by the search, I post an item after finding information .. Today, the item is about Canon ICC profiles when printing (in my case from Lightroom) ..

I bought a second printer, to use as less expensive solution next to my 9500 Pro - the Pixma IP4700 (apparently the IP4600 is quite similar) .. So, I wanted to make a test print from Lightroom and the moment I opened the Print tab, I realised it would be hell to find the correct ICC profile for the paper .. I wanted to make a test print on the 10x15 (4"x6") "Photo Paper Plus Glossy II" (yep, that's the name of the paper) a.k.a. PP-201, that Canon delivered with the printer ..

The pp-201 is newer paper, apparently so the info I could find about profiles was not useful, since the ICC profiles I could choose from Lightroom did not seem to resemble what I was looking for ..

I happened to find the best amount of info after searching for the codes (MP2, PR1, GL3, PT2, SG2, SP1, etc etc etc) .. info that was useful for me were these ..

MP = Matte Photo Paper
PR = Photo Paper Pro
SP = Photo Paper Plus Glossy (PP-101)
GL = Photo Paper Plus Glossy II (PP-201)
SG = Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss
PT = Photo Paper Pro Platinum

These codes are followed by a number, which indicates the quality .. 3 is lower than 1 and it resembles the number above the slider in the software driver under print quality ..

Luckily I usually print on Ilford Galerie (professional inkjet photo range) Smooth Pearl paper .. Ilford is so sweet to help you find the correct profile for their particular type of paper for your particular printer .. Unfortunately the IP4700 was not listed yet (not a surprise since the printer is quite new and I can not find it in the Dutch Canon's paper-choise list itself!) - so I guess I will go for the IP4600 ICC profile .. The nice thing about the Ilford ICC profiles is that they come with a PDF file, which are instructions for the correct printer settings for your printer .. yay!

More on Canon ICC (IP4500) here at Dave Bartrum's blog
Find Canon paper/printer combination info here
Also the Canon ICC Profile guide is a useful source of information but it needs an update for their newer papers
I haven't read any of these but at a glance, these tutorials on printing from Adobe (Photoshop, Lightroom) seems quite helpful, if you are not custom to printing with color callibration and color management ..

Whenever I find more on this, I'll add it to this article .. any extra information is helpful!

On March 17th, the new Mutts site (www.muttscomics.com)was launched. But it was not until today that I noticed. I happened to browse to the site to send my colleague a link to the daily strip subscription page.

Guess what? The HOMEPAGE is now the subscription page! I am probably not the only one that never views the site but does enjoy the daily comic strip in my mailbox. How's that for user-centered design!

It features a logo and some high-lighted links to the shop and the news, that are pulled out of the main navigation. Beneath that you see the simple yet well functional main navigation in a horizontal bar. Underneath it they placed a fairly large main visual of Mooch and Earl (the two main characters of the comic series) with a short review comment by a paper or writer or client on top of it.

Beneath that, there's the daily strip for the current day. Here's a good thing: the strip shows up halfway the page-fold on a resolution of 1024x768 (with a clearly visible yet subtle link to the past daily strips). Only in 800x600 it might be missed by the visitor but hey - 800x600 in 2009 ... ;) Thus, the majority of the visitors will have to scroll down to see the entire strip - which gives them great chance to end up at the call-to-action underneath it: the Daily strip subscription. Well done! Perhaps the subscription-field could have placed in the lower-right corner of the main visual, so it shows up above the fold.

I think it's great that Patrick McDonnel acknowledged the needs of his site visitors, instead of wanting to tell all about all the stuff that HE thinks are important at first.

Look, we in Holland know all about making compromises .. it's THE country in the world where everyone needs to be happy and no-one may have any slight sense of feeling hurt .. Of course sometimes this results in endless meetings, discussions and the end result is some uninteresting solution that no-one is really happy with but to which all agree ..

Sometimes you just need to take a stand .. Just use your power and make the world a better place, because you actually know what's better .. Don't be a Plato and whine about it - take action .. The developers of Tortoise SVN, a tool that enables multiple people to do software programming work on one single project, understand how that's done: