San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco

August 17, 2006 by Michael Boyle

I’m in San Francisco

at a conference this week, and of course I got in touch with Aaron while here. We met at the Apple store for an event called Designing the Mobile User Experience. The design team giving the presentation clearly had a great deal of experience in the field – but if anything, they had TOO much experience.

The problem with mobile user experiences is an issue that design can address, certainly, but to suggest that the problem of low mobile adoption is related to design completely ignores the fact that the carriers nickel-and-dime business plans are the real barrier to adoption and wide usage, and their needs will always trump any designers’ efforts to improve things.

For a fine artist to not acknowledge all of their challenges is forgivable – it’s not part of the job description. But for an applied artist to engage in an hour long presentation pretending that ANY design intervention or research could ever trump the client’s pre-defined need is pretty much dishonest.

The latest in the battle

October 4, 2001 by Michael Boyle

over filters in libraries? San Francisco bans the use of filters in its public library system. A clear victory for those who understand that simplistic faux-solutions are worse than no solution at all.

Sadly enough

September 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

I missed yet another fray day in San Francisco – this time it was the fifth edition, aka fray day 5. Be sure to browse the main fray day site though – it looks like it was a wonderful, multi-center event.

Is there anywhere

December 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

you can get reliable data on the current state of the internet down to the local level? I know of the Internet Traffic Report, but that doesn’t seem to indicate that there’s anything wrong, and anyhow talking about North America as a whole seems a little broad to me.

I’m prompted by the problems that some folks in San Francisco seem to be having, but also because we had the same situation at work a couple of weeks ago when UUNet went down here in Montreal for 8+ hours. Our sites stayed up cause they’re cloned elsewhere, databases and all. But the ISP whose BoD I’m on had huge problems – their backup bandwidth from Videotron relied on UUNet as well (which was news to everyone).

Shout out to former

July 28, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Montrealers! Hey – Eaton’s has been closed for a while, but today I drove by and the old Eaton sign running down the corner on de Maisonneuve has been covered, letter by letter – it now reads “Ailes.” Hundreds of dead Westmount matrons are rolling in their graves. That’s right – Les Ailes de la mode has taken over the first 4 floors of the building. In an interesting bit of irony (well, irony for like 3 people), Les ailes is owned by the San Francisco Clothing Group, a company based… here in Montreal. Pictures to come this weekend.