Sporkers Helping Sporkers

thanks.

uh.

Ipad 1 had no cameras... You could do a "voice" skype call I suppose

Morg "NTTAWWT" anti

Fuckity fuck fuck... so I entered all this data into a Number (also saved as Excel) spreadsheet, and I'm thinking what I made columns should be rows, and vice versa. Googling (terms are too vague) and document searches are failing me... is there a "flip the thing on its side" command?

ddt

dpbd: or... I'm trying to get a graph of, say, "Y" or "N" responses to a question.

ddt

Transpose?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/02/2011 05:17AM by Bruce Robertson.

I keep all my important financial files on encrypted disk images. I find that, under Lion, I cannot mount these images by double-clicking and entering a password. I can open them in Disk Utility, my data's fine, but they are read-only. WTF? Anybody have any idea what's going on? I really don't want to create a bunch of new images under Lion and drag my data over, for fear of creating something Lion-only or losing data without realizing it, and I really don't think that I should have to.

Anybody know what's changed with encrypted disk images and Lion?

I thought that you had to convert any of your old disk images because of the way Lion creates those disk images vis a vis Snow Leopard. Have you tried creating new disk images in Lion?

Is that posted somewhere? This isn't File Vault, just encrypted images 30MB-200MB in size. I'll try creating some, but I would have thought that there would be either an automated conversion or a "DANGER: WE'RE GOING TO FUCK UP YOUR DATA!" warning.

Well, now that you can't access it, isn't that more secure?

ddt

Well, it's read-only, so it has the value of giving away all of my vital information without actually being usable for me.

Hm, wins all around. Sucks.

In other news: have any NON-programmers used Gherkin (https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/wiki/Gherkin)? I admit Python was incredibly frustrating and difficult for me... HTML was about my speed. Thoughts?

ddt

Looks like a more structured AppleScript. Problem with the fringe languages is lack of community support. If you want to start dabbling in programming, I can't think of something easier and more supported than Python. Tons of tutorials for every skill level, and StackOverflow has answered every question you have after that, and then the Python package index has a library that someone already coded those answers into. If there's a roadblock you need help getting past, maybe I can explain it over iChat.

Ah, thanks, but it's not that I want to get into programming -- and seriously, Python nearly made me want to throw my iMac out a window. Even though I was taking it in a class situation, with section, and tutors. The fault there lies not in the stars but in me.

One of the devs on this project I'm on wants to use it: "we're going to be writing our VAA's functional tests and use cases using Gherkin. Its pretty human readable, and could even be written by you guys when you start doing the flow?" After I posted my question, he gave a decent example:

"You could say:

Feature: Find a Candidate
In order to find a candidate
Users should be able to
answer the questionnaire

Scenario: Select voting district
Given there is at least two voting districts in the system
And I have selected the first one
When I press continue button
Then I should be taken to the questionnaire page"

It sounds a lot like this, actually: http://wireframes.linowski.ca/2009/09/ui-flow-shorthand-notation/

Agreed about the fringe-y-ness about all these things -- including the tempting and creative examples at that wireflow web site. I think I'd like to be the Elaine Pagels of all this UX/IA toolsets, and try to get some exegesis.

It's occurring to me that no one thing in UX is really rocket science -- there are few, if any, really difficult and deep questions to ponder. The skill and trick is keeping in mind all these little principles and what do to if and how things fit together. It's like yoga, where the pose may be simple but you have to be mindful of what your quads, your shoulders, your hips, etc., are doing all at once.

ddt

Sorry, didn't mean to be religious about it. It does seem designed for information architects, so that's promising.
Can't say I'm so formal, which makes me a tricky fit in teams because my process is not well-documented. I agree that there are a lot of little things to balance. My approach is just to lay it down and try it out and get feedback, rinse and repeat. Good in software, not so much in hardware on a tight schedule.

I'm cranking on a bunch of screens for an iOS interface, on a ridiculous schedule so my instincts will carry a lot of weight. Still struggling to find just the right tool. Been going back and forth between Omnigraffle (not precise enough), Illustrator (too much work), and XCode/Interface Builder (too limiting). And I'll be trying some iPad app, Blueprint. I want something like Interface Builder without having to code to navigate screens.

Have you tried Keynotopia for interface prototyping?

I wish I had your optimism about the usefulness of Apple warnings... I will have to look up the article I read that contained specifics, but there is a bit here:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-Mac-OS-X-Lion-Includes-Revised-Encryption-Mechanism-263317/

Quote

Apple made some changes to the way it implemented encryption in Lion, according to Almer, but he didn't know exactly what those changes were. He said there wasn't a lot of documentation available at the moment on the way the new encryption scheme worked.

Bruce, good suggestion -- I used a lot of that for my masters project. The ability to mock up interactions is limited, though, and it seems like a lot of what johnny wants involves (correct me if my inference is wrong) precise but quick alignment tools, linking elements, ability to resize (omnigraffle needs to auto resize text when resizing containers)?

Actually, yeah, I did go back and forth between omnigraffle and keynote for the prototypes, now that I think on it. Johnny, I can point you towards some great stencils and I do have the full iOS keynotopia template.

Neither can really show interactive transitions, though... .

Let me know now Blueprint is! And if you want to try justintime (http://www.meetup.com/sfbayux/sponsors/?sid=1122101&a=kn1_l2), I can get a discount.

ddt

Good suggestion, Bruce. Guess I'm looking for a tool that I'm already familiar with, or at least has standard layout behaviors. Keynote actually does pretty much what I need, with predictable auto-align. Making animated interactions is clumsy but probably as good as it's going to get without doing some timeline crap. I'm just saving UI pieces from Illustrator... at least there aren't too many moving parts yet.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/08/2011 10:09PM by johnny k.

johnny, do you still use the ice cream email address? I tried to share some dropbox subfolders with you and that was the only email address I have for you. Also, dropbox seems to take subfolder selections as meaning "just share the parent folder", so I need to send you notes on what to ignore.

ddt

dpbd:

jk, what I was intending to share were: the MockApp templates, the Persona Template, the iOSDesignStencilsGraffle, the iPad Library for Keynote. You can ignore the rest, or let me know when you've copied the files locally and I'll kill the share.

In other news:

Started prototyping this idea. Click on the little collage image on the far right: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ddt/collage3/index8Augb.html -- comments welcome. (I didn't do the javascript and CSS.) I've already shared this with someone at a media outlet... was that a stupid idea? What if I want to make a product out of this?

ddt