Trainline.com usability: fail

My second attempt at buying a train ticket from the trainline today appears to have hit the buffers. I'm in the middle of the transaction, what do I do now? The same thing as the first attempt, wait an hour or so to see if a confirmation email comes through.

Definite fail.

Omniplan Breakthrough

I first used a Mac in 1992 in the Glasgow University Aeronautical Engineering Department computer suite. We used 'spreadsheets' and 'wordprocessor' programmes on a Mac that looked like this beauty.

But for the last 15 years or so I've been a PC user. I occasionally used macs for editing and encoding but that's about it.

Writing docs, spreadsheets, presentations, that was all done on PCs. Not that I love PCs especially, (I definitely despise Word) it's just that my working life involved offices and that usually means PCs.

Now however I'm using a MacBook Pro quite a lot and I do like it very much indeed. OmniPlan, the microsoft project equivalent, has been doing my nut in though. This is almost entirely because you have to schedule tasks by date AND hour, which seems crazy to me.

But I have found the way to turn off the crazy hour planning, and it's made such a difference that I had to share it. To turn off hourly scheduling go to the Inspector window, choose Project > Information, Granularity > Daily Scheduling.

Sit back and relax.

If you also hate Microsoft Word as much as I do, then my experiences with Google Docs and Pages have been much more satisfying.

Help Colin Canary Fly

Interesting Intro to Semantic Web

| View | Upload your own

Captures the essence of it quite well with these points:

- pages are not the centre of the web now, data and services are.
- 90% of Twitter activity happens through the API.

Lightwriting vid on Flickr

starwarsVstartrek
Originally uploaded by lichtfaktor

Some very cool lightwriting techniques from Lichtfactor. They must be very patient people indeed.

Confiscating longline in the Pacific

Confiscating longline in the Pacific
Originally uploaded by Greenpeace Esperanza

I've been following this great Flickr contributor from Greenpeace for a while now. The photos are taken by Greenpeace staff working on the Greenpeace Esperanza in the Pacific Ocean. The photos they post are infrequent depending on who seems to be on rotation, but show the crew, the work and the environment they spend their time in. They bring a real insight into the ship, the crew and Greenpeace, despite the Esperanza being on the other side of the world.

Its a great way of spreading the word of Greenpeace, and it does make it look very exciting!

This is their first Flickr video, nothing especially exciting but again, a great way of demonstrating why the Esperanza and Greenpeace are deep in the Pacific Ocean. If only they'd add in some location metadata and then we could see exactly where they are. That would be cool.

(posted from Flickr)

The Stuff of Life from Amnesty

I've been advising Amnesty International UK on some video matter recently. They wanted to get a newly commissioned video The Stuff of Life on the web so it could be easily distributed and embedded by activists across the web. The film imitates a glossy TV advert, and so the perception of production values was essential. The issue was getting it in as high a quality as possible, while allowing as many people as possible to watch it. The most important thing from my perspective was that the film played fully without buffering as I believe that had a terribly detrimental effect on the impact of the film.

The final file ended up at a bit rate of around 700 to 800 kbps, which was around 200kbps higher than I had originally expected. But as always with web video it's essential to try a test file and see. I'm on a standard BT broadband wireless connection and this file has played consistently well for me - the proof is in the pudding it seems.

Incidentally, the production company did a lot of testing with Blip.tv. I'd suggested Blip originally, as their player comes with lots of distribution benefits and good tracking which was important for AIUK. Following testing they felt that Blip performance varied considerably and files which would play fine one day buffered a lot the next. They also felt that the same file while performing well enough through another set up was not served as well by Blip. I can't verify this for myself, but it seems if a really glossy high production values are essential for you, Blip may not be the solution.

Watch the The Stuff of Life and spread the word.