The man, the legend. “Phil the Light”

There’s been a few mentions in the press before of the man – indeed, the legend – known as “Phil the Light” who works at the McLaren Technology Centre for the F1 racing team; he’s been mentioned in the Daily Mail and the Guardian in articles about Ron Dennis and his obsessive compulsiveness and even interviewed and quoted by The Times after Lewis Hamilton won the world championship.  If you look close enough, he’s even mentioned in Wired magazine in passing as well.

However, the man better known to me as “Dad”, has outdone himself by appearing an a promotional video for Vodafone giving the outside world a quick tour around the McLaren building:

Typically he’s far too self-conscious to even watch this more than once, but even he had to admit, they did a great job here that totally captures him.  

For the first and probably last time I’ll ever say this – “Thanks Vodafone!”

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Setting up Absolute Radio 90′s on a Sonos system

Absolute Radio (well, Virgin Radio until not too long ago) have today launched their new station – Absolute Radio 90′s. Tapping into the demographic that appears to be well, mid-30-somethings like me, the station output so far seems to keep fairly close to those sort of 90′s festival bands from the Britpop era like Oasis, Charlatans and the Manic Street Preachers.

Obviously as the proud new owner of a Sonos S5, I wanted to try and add it as a new station to my setup.  After a little bit of picking apart their Javascript player code, the URL for the live stream of the station seems to be:

http://player.absoluteradio.co.uk/core/audio/wmp/live.asx?service=ab9

The station has only been running for a matter of hours, so there’s every chance this may change in the future.  Your mileage may vary.

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It’s the friends you keep

BlackBerry Messenger poster at Waterloo Station, London.

It’s hard to imagine that even just a couple of years ago that RIM would even consider doing advertising that:

  1. Directly targets 18-24 year olds, and
  2. Doesn’t make a single mention of e-mail.

I’ve been spending time with a lot of users in focus groups and testing sessions over the last few weeks in various locations around the world and the popularity of BlackBerry Messenger is surprising, especially amongst under 25′s who’ve moved on and shaken off their goofy AIM user names from high school.

Those same users no longer see the BlackBerry as something for men in suits to check their e-mail with. It’s the anti-iPhone used by those who want to present themselves as having a higher status or a more business-like approach to life – these are the people who look down their nose at an iPhone and dismiss it as “a toy that makes phone calls”.

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Forum Nokia release S60 wireframing stencils

It’s always the way. You spend months drawing and building your own mockups – then just days after we finally launched our Skype for Symbian client to the public, Nokia get round to releasing a set of wireframe stencils for designing S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition applications:

Forum Nokia’s Wireframing Stencils are a collection of customisable user interface views and components. The stencils can be used to create quick mockups or formal wireframes. […] This package includes stencils for S60 5th Edition touch devices and S60 3rd Edition non-touch devices, both in Adobe Illustrator CS4 format and Adobe Fireworks CS4 format.

From a cursory glance, the set seems fairly exhaustive and contains more or less everything you’d need for both portrait and landscape layouts, covering regular list views, menus, alerts, grid views, virtual keyboards and even 5th Edition home screen widgets.

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The Prodigal Guide’s open letter to the Nokia CEO

Really great open letter to Nokia’s CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.  I fully expected this was going to be a dull Nokia vs. iPhone rant, but it’s well considered with some sharp and accurate suggestions, not least number 2:

“Stop dithering, renew your software now: There are no two ways to say this: touch is the future and S60 5th edition simply isn’t up to the challenge. It’s unintuitive but – worse – completely inconsistent.”

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