Professionally Confused - Egor Shokurov’s blog

Sorry about being late, but this brilliant piece of software deserves attention. Opera is about to release a new browser controlled by face mimics:

I found there is no keyboard layout to support my MacBook keyboard when I run Windows under virtual machine. So I had to make it. For those who need it here is the downloadable setup and source files:

Installer and source files

Here is how it looks:

compatibility, keyboard layout, mac, windows

A new magazine is starting up in March 2009, devoted to design of services. The magazine is named Touchpoint, it is run by Service Design Network, organization I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Touchpoint is a 50 pages, four-monthly edition, annual subscription costs € 33 plus delivery from Germany.

I am glad Service Design Network is growing and getting more followers

Technorati : service design
Del.icio.us : service design
Zooomr : service design
Flickr : service design

design, service, service design, Usability

“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take on more and more expensive debt, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to the bankruptcy of all banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.”

– Karl Marx “Das Kapital”

Technorati : marx, recession
Del.icio.us : marx, recession
Zooomr : marx, recession
Flickr : marx, recession

marx, recession

Once started crossposting, I’ve been always having problems redoing my blogging job twice.

I was loking for a better solution for few things:

• Cross-posting to the several blogs
• Automatic image upload
• Writing records offline
• Easy to use

I am writing this message in Zoundry Raven. And I can say this is a best solution so far.

The alternative has been Scribefire, but it is lacking support for Unicode in livejournal.com, so it was cancelled on the second post, which I tried to write in Russian.

If you were working in Computer Human Interaction for a while, you probably thought, why this area is being developed and getting supporters all over computer industry, while other areas of human interaction do not get so much fuzz? I was also curious about it, but lazy enough to discover this area.

And now here come news from Service Design Conference, gathered in Amsterdam this November. Since 2004 Service Design Network joins experts working on Business Human Interaction. I definitely believe this field has great future. People often pay much more for service than for any goods, so why would services be designed as a matter of art, not as precise science?

Videos and presentations are available for download:

Read more…

Usability

This week I got sick with flu and found nothing enlightening but developing a Mozilla/Chrome plugin to open Word documents online from any WebDAV server. The project is published under Mozilla License. The project is available here:

• http://code.google.com/p/npapi-msdocs/

OK, I spent a day, but why on Earthe would you need this?

If you, like me, often use Sharepoint and Confluence sites and still like Mozilla Firefox to be a default browser, you probably find it inconvenient, that when you click Word or Excel documents, they are being downloaded and opened locally, rather than start straight from WebDAV folder. So did I. I tried using IETab for all Sharepoint sites, but hey, why do I need Firefox then?

Then I tried to set up Flashgot to start Word or Excel with the document URL. I found that I not only needed to recode URL from URL-ENCODE and then from UTF-8, but also Excel did no accept URLs longer than 256 characters.

And, finally, new great browser has been released - Google Chrome. It supports NPAPI plugins, just like Firefox and Opera.

So the idea came to develop an NPAPI plugin which would find system association for a particular URL (not just Word or Excel, but pretty much anything, that has a moniker registered in Windows Registry) and start what is appropriate.

In this version the plugin only understands .doc, .xls, .docx and .xlsx files, but there is nothing to prevent it from handling other files, it is just a matter of changing .rc file and recompiling!

So if you like the idea, just download it, copy to your Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins folder and enjoy!

Or if you have anything to add, check out SVN, modify and commit it back.

Development

Here is the great test for awareness. Please watch and notice 21 changes. How easy is it to miss something you are not looking for.

Upon first watch I noticed 2 changes

I came acroos a great GUI prototyping tool, called http://rapidrabb.it, if you are curious, just give it a try with a single click http://rapidrabb.it/en/preview

It is amasingly simple to start, and it makes not just design, but collaboration on prototypes easy as well.

gui design, prototyping

I just redesigned this site with Wordpress. The process turned to be quite easy. Special fun was importing blog records from Blogger.com.

Please, let me know if anything is missing from the site.

And thanks to Blogger.com for long time support!

site