I have recently changed mobile service providers. The experiences I’ve had calling my old provider (Vodafone Australia) to cancel my plan and my new one (Telstra Australia) to buy their products have made it clear to me that companies that employ call centres for customer enquiries (mostly) have it completely wrong by modern customer service standards. Its seems really simple – so why does no one get it?
Web Creatives like Black. There is no denying it. Every where i have worked where a graphic designer has had involvement in the creative process of a website, black has always been an early option. Nearly any text you throw on this magical colour will have bad readability in comparison to a dark-on-light approach, and yet designers keep plugging away… Maybe its got something to do with the tools they are creating these designs with; The Apple iMac.
When users of Windows Phone 7 devices open up the marketplace application in the US, they are greeted by an Apple’esque pricing model that start at $0.99 cents – but what if you don’t live in the United States? Why aren’t we charged the equivalent US$0.99? As i discovered recently this disparity in pricing is beyond ridiculous. So is this just currency conversion or is it a bad joke that users are getting sick and tired of – let’s take a look.
I have recently had a couple of interesting discussions with a different people on twitter and “the real world” about the use of third party build dependencies such as unit testing frameworks, database versioning tools and other command line executables in your build. The topic of these discussions has been about where these dependencies should be located, inside your project, or installed on your build server.
Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, Extreme Programming and many other new-age hippy development methodologies have spread through the development world like wild fire. I believe there is room for one more in the shape of Build Driven Deployment/Automated Deployment - A new source of confidence in the development world. Time to go out and spread the word.
Writing quality software for clients is difficult at the best of times. Planning a timeline, planning resources and making sure you have the skills to complete the job, along with a myriad of other things to worry about – If your company is a solution provider, not an integrator (a digital agency) you also have to factor in the end result, and expected return that the client will even get out of the project (the end game) before you even start. So the question is, with so many things that require careful planning, why do software development timelines always appear to carry less weight with management than projects in other mediums?
So in today's day and age stored procedures are not a new thing at all. DotNet Developers seem to put themselves in one of two camps, those that think they are awesome and use them for everything, and those that think they only have certain times when they are needed and only use them when the absolute need arises (these days, not regularly).
The past 6 months started out as looking like yet another elected Communications Minister of our great island nation was simply out of touch with his portfolio. However things have started to take a sinister turn with the recent direction our elected leaders have started to take in relation to how we consume the internet in Australia – and i honestly believe they think they are making the right move. This is BAD.
My day-to-day job is always interesting to say the least. I work in an “Agency” atmosphere, where catch phrases, high budgets, high hopes and a lot of other hoo-hah take place on a daily basis. I am, however, a realist. I would prefer you to drop the f-bomb in a meeting if it meant the difference between clarity and shades of grey. It is because of this, that i am constantly mystified by a lot of my fellow agency brethren’s conversations when it comes to the topics of emerging media and the social media space in general. How much bullshit can these people spew before the world wakes up?