UX Design
A critical appraisal of my 'If Broad Habitats In The UK Were Clustered...' visualisation, highlighting some of its shortcomings and issues in the underlying data source that the 'pretty picture' does a good job of masking.
Tech
Intrigued by Mark Easton's question on Twitter, 'How much of Britain is built on?', and inspired by the associated article, The Great Urban Myth of Britain, I wanted to put the UK NEA's statement that '6.8% of the UK's land area is now classified as urban' into some kind of context that actually made sense to me.
Tech
It's been a busy Twitter day for me. A reasonably inane tweet that I posted this morning pointing out that the announcement of the (potential) Higgs Boson discovery was written using the much derided Comic Sans font has been retweeted thousands of times.
Tech
PhoneGap Build is a hosted service which wraps HTML5 applications into native applications. The plugin connects to the service, uploads the exploded WAR directory, waits for the builds to complete and then downloads the native binaries installing/deploying them as attached artifacts.
Tech
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a todo list application which uses gestures to achieve its basic functions.
Tech
My blog post from yesterday "A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8" sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter.
Tech
This blog post takes a look at what Windows Phone 8 (WP8) means for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers and the Microsoft development platform in general.
UX Design
This article considers a recent change to the BBC Weather site as an example of how overuse of information visualisation techniques and inconsistent design decisions can undermine what is otherwise an excellent content-first experience.
Tech
About a month ago, I was using the MoTeC i2 Data Analysis software to look through some telemetry data that I had exported from a popular racing simulator game.
Tech
This post describes how to develop an Earthquake Monitor application based on live data from the USGS, using Silverlight, the MVVM Pattern, Visiblox and the Silverlight Bing Maps Interactive SDK.
Tech
This blog post describes the implementation of a gesture-based todo-list application. The simple interface is controlled entirely by drag, flick and swipe.
Tech
In this post, I explore four of the available iOS charting libraries and investigate the features, API, and pros and cons of each.
Tech
In this article I show a simple example of integrating Bing and Google mapping into in WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone applications.
Tech
This blog post introduces the new jQuery Mobile Metro theme and demonstrates how to create a web UI that detects the device it is being viewed on, to render a Metro UI on WP7 and iOS on other devices
UX Design
Last week I attended the UX London 2012 conference. This was my first public foray into the world of User Experience and it proved to be both educational and thought-provoking.
Tech
This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage