Extracted from the book Glimmer.

Google’s designers are ruthless when it comes to streamlining; even the most minor elements on the page are tested, and survival is dependent on being deemed useful by a given percentage of users. The density of information on the page is designed in accordance with people’s behavioral patterns on the Web. “For a long time people didn’t want to scroll and even now they prefer to see what’s most relevant at first glance,” Au says. “Part of it is basic human factors, and it’s very logical.” But the Google experience also can be surprisingly emotional, in terms of, say, how people feel about certain colors. If Google changes the color or even the shade on its header bar, “it can have an impact on how many searches per day we have.” Overall, in terms of its design the search experience is quite fragile; “even pixel-level changes have a dramatic impact on usage,” Au observes. “It’s the kind of thing where you move things two pixels this way or five pixels that way, it can mean plus or minus a million dollars in revenue.”

This just amazed me because how on companies of the scale of Google, tiny details such as this could cause millions of dollars on revenue or loses. For designers, this sometimes is extremely demanding and frustrating when there is so much reliance on data. The best example here is Douglas Bowman, who was the lead Visual Designer at Google, and left the company because it got unbearable to deal with such minuscule details.

Design details are just one aspect, there are also loading times—Google’s main concern as well—where half a second delay can cause a 20% drop in traffic and kill user satisfaction.  This same issue cost Amazon lots of money, where a 1 millisecond delay can represent a modest 5 million dollars loss. I’m sure that Amazon make pixel perfect decisions for their pages and products as well, but I don’t have info about that.

So, the moral of the story here is: the bigger your company gets, the harder the smallest details can punch you in the nuts. Or at least for me, it does sound painful enough

As I start typing I’m thinking of people that would make good use of this mobile blogging tool. One thing that pops in to my mind is that doesn’t seem very confortable scenario for writing a blog post as I imagine a context where you have a desktop screen, keyboard, and browsing through pages for resources, links, etc. Which on my Hero wouldn’t be an easy task which would involve swapping screens, selecting text not by drag-select and couple other thrills.

Another thing is the typing. Of course, the HTC Hero is not the best device for typing extensive posts or chunks of text, but here we are managing. So, how confortably would you feel if you have to write several posts from your device? On my personal mobile context it would be too time consuming.

Now on that note, I think it can work very nicely if you were drafting ideas and saving them as they come along on your mind for later editing, but then if that’s the case I’m currently feeling more confortable doing it in the Evernote app

Other aspect to consider is perhaps the topics or the pase of the blogging you do. For instance, maybe you have a considerable amount of people as your audience, and your posts are tweet-like snippets of text that generates interesting and juicy contributions from your readers. In that case I would consider it very useful. Otherwise Twitter is quicker, to the point and you have several apps (such as Seesmic, Twidroid, HTC Peep, etc) you can chose from. Another option as well would be tumblr.

Anyway, the WP app is looking good, still in beta and looking for testers. I would be interested to see how people are finding mobile blogging. I’m not much of a regular blogger myself, but excited to see how this platform will change the way we blog.

As an extra note and as you probably noticed, I’m posting with quite a narrow scope, device-wise, that can use the WP app and I’m outlining a first quick impression from a first post on my Hero. So, on that note and if you blogged already with the WP apps, what do you think of it? Have you tried it on other devices?

NOTE: I wasn’t able to figure out how to make links of words on the application, so, I’ll make them from the computer.

An interesting video where Faris Yakob discusses “How technology is changing the world of advertisement”

Since he is a very good presenter and the outline of the presentation is quite nicely put, needless for me to describe it on text.

[via trendspotting ]

To root your phone in one click you can try this video from the unlockr. It’s pretty straight forward and easy to follow even if you are not much of a programmer.

You might what to customize the ROM of your phone as well. Once again, go to the unlockr site and follow this handy video

An the last thing I did was to download the Radio ROM to improve the wireless services performance. Following the same steps as when customizing your ROM, get the latest radio and install it on your phone.

If you feel more confortable and you are confident about your phone software-wise, you can try this way for a more intrinsic approach.

I’ll test this to see how it goes and I’ll post any updates in case I run in to issues. But so far seems to be all good.

The solution to the problem is by turning off and then back on the phone—precarious, I know, but that’s what I’m doing. At this point I’m a bit annoyed since I’m having to do it quite often. I depend on the phone for communicating by several means—twitter, flickr, facebook, emails, not to mention and most importantly phone calls and SMS’s. So I’m getting worried that I might miss important calls or the phone might fail on important eventualities.

My guess is that there’s something going on with meteor.ie network but so far no certainty. Meteor has set up a twitter account: @meteor_mobile but they haven’t been able to give me an answer yet after a few DMs exchanged nor have they been updating their twitter posts since December 9th. Customer Service in store or online doesn’t have much idea either

So, I’m wondering if anybody else out there, with their new HTC Hero here in Dublin (Ireland) have had issues with the meteor.ie network or seen fairly often the ‘No Service’ message? What about the customer service or feedback on the issue? Anything at all?

UPDATE: 21/12/2009

After an email exchange with a rep from meteor.ie, I’ve got asked these questions which I responded on the following extract.

1. When did the problem started?

Started as soon as I bought it. I had an HTC Hero for a few weeks, with different SIM card and it happened. Then lost and bought a new phone (different SIM card) and happened again up till today.

2. The nature of the problems e.g. inability to able or receive calls, bad quality of call, call dropping during conversation, failure when sending SMS’s

Check out blog post. No problem with anything as long as I don’t get the error.

3. How many signal bars does your handset display when you have problems

It usually happen when I’m not using the phone. Just when I touch the screen to do something with it, I get welcomed with the image I have on my blog post I don’t know the amount of bars.

4. Do you experience the same problems when you put your SIM card into another Meteor handset? If you have not tried this can you please do so

I don’t have another handset at the moment. And I’m not buying another.

No, I didn’t have a problem before with any of the previous handsets I had. Again, the problem happen from time to time randomly. Sometimes it doesn’t happen in a couple of days, and sometimes happen 2 or 3 times in a single day.

5. Do you experience the same problems when you put a different Meteor SIM card your handset? If you have not tried this can you please do so

I had two different SIM cards and I had the same problem with both on the two HTC Hero’s I had. Never had a problem with any phone before, just the HTC Hero.

6. What error message do you receive when you try to make calls or send text messages?

I don’t get any error messages when I try to make call or send messages. Again, the error happens when I click on the ‘home’ button to do something with it, not while I’m using it.

7. Are there other Meteor customers in the area with the same issue?

I don’t know. In the store they told me that they are, but they don’t know what it is. A customer rep told me that the phone is flawed and needed to modify the software in it.

8. Can you forward 3 examples of dropped calls that you made within the past 24 hours?

As I said on my blog post, and here as well, there wasn’t any call drops or anything wrong while I use the phone, The only problem I have is that when I don’t use the phone and then I press the ‘home’ button to do something, I get that screen I posted on my blog

Put your Virgin SIM card into another phone. Enable the SIM password (PIN1). Remember that PIN! Then put it back into the Hero. When prompted, key in the PIN, and you should be good.

If you don’t have a spare phone lying around (or cannot bother someone to lend you theirs for 10 minutes), then a replacement SIM may be easier.

from .dan!el post on the same site

Have a look at the entire thread on the forum. There are a few explanations and interesting insights to have an overall idea of the problem.

Anyway, it’s been an hour since I’ve done it and hopefully that will be the end of my conundrum (and all the others) *Knock on wood*. I’ll keep updating this post if this didn’t work.

UPDATE: 22/12/2009

Unfortunatelly the previously solution quoted didn’t work. About an hour after I did it, I got the ‘No Service’ screen again.

However, I tried something else which I don’t know if it’ll make any difference or not, but it is another option. I went to the phone Settings >> Security >> Set up SIM card lock >> Change SIM PIN; and then change the pin number from there. I don’t know if this will work or not, but like I said, it’s another option. Let’s see what happen

UPDATE: 26/12/2009

So that last option didn’t work either. As I kept exchanging a couple of messages with the meteor people, looks like they are going to replace it:

I have been advise by our technical team that the issue is not a network issue but a handset issue and I would advise you to return the phone to us so we can verify the fault and will issue you with a replacement phone.

This is it then. I’m going to do this and hopefully will be the end of our phone idyll.

Some of the topics that are going to be presented and are quite trendy at the moment are HTML5/Chrome, Cloud Computing, Android, Development Tools and Social Web among others.

I wish I could be there hang out with those guys. Definitely I’m liking what I see it’s happening in Argentina in the fields of web and technology

This is a funny ad I took from Rory Sutherland’s TED Talk,  in which he explain how changing the perception of a determined product can have a great impact on it. Specially as a rhetoric used in advertisement. He goes on with more examples as how intangible value replaces actual material value in very interesting ways showcasing occurrent situations. It’s worth seeing the presentation video rather than me explaining it .

Zooming is about stretching your limits without threatening your foundation. It’s about handling new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges without triggering the change-avoidance reflex.

This extract is from a book I’m reading: Shift Happens by Seth Godin and I found it an excellent concept to keep in mind for companies to embrace change and not to avoid it or fear it. This pretty much represents the modus operandi any company should take and exercise.

Expanding a bit further from the book, same chapter:

Most companies that re-engineered did so in order to make the “machine” more efficient. This usually meant laying off people. According to CSC Index, a consulting firm heavily involved in re-engineering, more than 70 percent of the employees involved in these efforts assumed that their purpose was to lead to layoffs.

Zooming is almost diametrically opposed to this position. A zooming organization isn’t worried about making today’s machine work better. It’s worried about being flexible enough to put its assets to work building tomorrow’s machine. The management of a zooming company must communicate to the people who work there that the goal isn’t to get smaller—it’s to get more flexible. Flexible companies make better use of their assets, and the first asset they maximize is their people

You can’t shrink your way to greatness

I prefer this concept better than the belief of ‘flexibility’ my teacher of Change Management at NCI is trying to impart to us which is: unions stop companies evolution and stagnates them, people lay-offs  are necessary to lower costs and also to offer extreme cheap ass services in order to beat competitors. He finds and idolizes Michael O’Leary’s (Ryanair) for this which I find quite uncompetitive.

Even though the movie is not that good, the intro credits is the only reason that makes the movie worth seeing it, of course, if you are a designer or illustrator the more you’ll enjoy it.

Next, I’ll have to find out which design studio did the work for it.

UPDATE: Just found out that the designer of the film credits is Danny Yount.