X marks the spot

I don’t get many opportunities to start a post with the letter x.

On my way after a morning appointment in Glebe. Across from the Glebe Town Hall someone left their runners on a bench but kept the laces.

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It feels a bit spy thriller, like a “drop” location. I was hoping for a cryptic note, or USB drive with secret plans on it.
Maybe I’ve been watching too much “Homelands” and “The Americans”. There was just an abandoned sock and, as usual, usable shoes.

Mobile experiences are shared experiences

On the way to work this morning I encountered the following scene. Ten or so students sharing their morning journey with and through their smartphones. Received wisdom says we are alone with our smartphones, due to our intimate relationship with them. However, recent observations  show mobile experiences can also be shared experiences.

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Of special note is that they weren’t involved in isolated activity, the majority were involved in at least two other friends’ activity.

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Why waste such a valuable space?

I hate complaining.

Wait, that’s a lie; in fact I actually like complaining. I like looking at a problem or some sort of sub-optimal condition and say, if you just changed that bit, if you just dropped that thingummy, it would be so much easier for the people who come into contact with it. I make a living from telling people what is’t optimal in their product, service, website and then offer suggestions based on research, information from users, and solutions other people have come up with. I’m a bit like an iron, smoothing out the wrinkles of experience. *groan*

So, you might say, complaining is my job. Yes, I like complaining. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with Apple yesterday whinging about how even though it let me type spaces in my password, didn’t flag it was an issue in the error checking, and accepted my entry; it still failed my login attempts because my pass had spaces which they didn’t record. I’ve never met a coder who hadn’t read the XKCD Password Strength comic so there’s no excuse for not testing predictable use cases. Really.

But this post isn’t about Apple, it’s about a different music service.

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