I’ve written about this before, but today I really needed to dig up an old transaction from last year, and I didn’t fance sifting through the 3 inche thick pile of Natwest statements and 1 inch thick pile of Abbey/Santander statements. I went to the Natwest site first and although the site has always been a bit clunky, they are getting much better these days. Also the iPhone app however crap it actually is is definatly 1 more app than Santander have.

I thought I would do a comparison of features offered by the two, I think I want a new bank?

Overall I don’t like either, Natwest have given me problems in the past which I will never forgive so I only use them as a way of getting a free 16-25 Railcard. Santander have good interest rates but they seem to becoming very behind in the technical aspects of their service, why is there no iPhone app for their ex-Abbey customers? Why can’t I view all my transaction history?

Also other bug bares with Santander are that they don’t seem to allow you to talk to someone on the phone without a telephone banking pin number but the only place to change the code is at the ATM so I never change it and I always forget to keep the new number in a safe place.

Santander are overall probably better than Natwest but I am still unhappy, Nationwide were pretty poor in the past so I may have to try Barclays as I don’t like Lloyds TSB from my friends past experiences.

Something I found that I want in my home one day!

Symbol Coat Rack – Browse All – Yanko Design.

A twitter friend (@simonmaddox) of mine saw my post about brownies and decided to make them with his girlfriend over christmas and sent me the rather festive results, apparently they tasted great!

If you have a bank account with Abbey you might be used to having to type in the long card number every time you want to login to your online banking, well not any more!

For a long time there was this bit that said Personal ID and when ever I asked or looked for the setting to create this it was not anywhere to be found, but at last I have found it!

Follow these steps to set it up for your self!

1. Login to your online banking as normal with your card number.
2. Click the  button at the top of the screen.
3. Under ‘Change my Personal ID’ click ‘Go’
   
4. Enter your card number as the old Personal ID and then choose a new Personal ID that you will use from now on.
   
5. Submit that and your done!

Now your can login to your online banking with Abbey without having to try to memorise a 16 digit card number which changes once a year, for added security you can also setup the one time pin number service which they send to your phone to protect your account from being emptied to a strangers account if you get hacked.

Arduino, Processing, Arduino, Processing, Arduino, Processing, Arduino… Fritzing???

Many people have heard of Arduino, and many have heard of Processing. Two of the best open source tools in the interaction designer’s toolkit. They are like Photoshop is to a photographer and Illustrator is to, well an illustrator. So you come up with a great idea, and you use the Arduino to create the physical interaction, and Processing to do the software interaction, but what about the hardware prototyping. You can’t just leave it on a breadboard for ever.

The cleaver people who made Fritzing took a whole new approach to PCB design, rather than expecting people to learn complicated but more comprehensive software like EAGLE the new approach works on the idea that you probably have a breadboard wired into your Arduino right in front of you. You start by inputing your breadboard layout using a fantastic vector based drag and drop interface with wires and resistors and everything. Then you can move to schematic view or PCB view and make your circuit diagram or PCB layout (respectively).

So why am I so excited?

The Fritzing project is also open source and free to use like the others, but to help fund development more professionally they have started a web store and are trying to setup a service which allows them to offer manufacturing as well as design software under one roof.

To test out this brand new facility they gave 12 people the opportunity to have their designs produced, and really wanted to have a go, I quickly made my design and despite a few quirks it worked very well, I found the schematic view hard to use but it wasn’t important because all I needed was a PCB layout, and I was amazed, where as before I needed to sit down and struggle through the impossible UI of EAGLE this time the mildly elegant and very intuitive interface of Fritzing meant that despite my lack of time I was able to build the whole project and submit it to the competition email address in time for the deadline (more or less).

I won’t bother explaining what the project I built did but if you came to my degree show you’ll probably know about ‘the tree’ and this is a miniaturised version of that.

To the point

I a writing this post because I wanted to share my excitement about Fritzing but also show you some photos of my newly etched PCBs which arrived on Friday.

The one problem I would like to complain about is the lack of 2 sided board designs, meaning several things go wrong. The two I had were that I had to use jumper wires on my design because pins needed to cross over and there was no second layer to go via. Also because there are only pads on the bottom side it means the pins which push into the Arduino have no where to solder onto, which was a big problem until I figured out a little hack to my header pins to fix them to the underside…

Basically just push the black bit to one end and poke it through the top and solder to the bottom rather than poking the short side through the bottom and soldering to the top as you would expect.

This is the finished design…

And finally because these lovely people share their software with the world and bought me two great little PCBs and because I want to support their future development and to get 2 LAYER SUPPORT!!! (HINT HINT!!) I have donated €30 what I felt I could afford to the Fritzing team.

Also I wanted to say thanks to @tinker_it on twitter for bringing my attention to the competition via her tweet.

Perhaps it’s just the time of year but I was on the internets amazing Wayback machine if you haven’t checked it out you really should. Its a archive of snapshots of the internet as it was throughout the last 13+ years its been running.

My site is listed on there as far back as 2004 when I think I first registered it, with my mum and sister present we picked the name as a place for all our emails. Later I took over the running and it caused more than a couple of family arguments when I switched hosts/email services, before settling with Google Apps which is amazing also!

So whats this post about?

Not much to be honest, I just wanted to point out that I had been through all the archived pages I could find on there and imported all the missing posts that I could find, and dated them correctly. In places there is content missing and it is noted so for example links to Digg or incomplete posts.

Anyway feel free to have a look at my archive as its quite extensive although reading it my self supprisingly poor quality. I have throughout time has 3 or 4 different WordPress installations each time wiping the content as I flipped back and forth in opinion as to wheather it was better to re-invent the wheel and write my own CMS or not.

I have finally settled on WordPress and now I felt it was a good time to integrate all my old posts…. MANUALLY!

Anyway enjoy the read if you can be bothered and thanks to ling_ling of the Flickr community for the photo used.

I recently was reading TUAW when I discovered an amazing little app by a small company called Irradiated Software. The application is called Cinch, and its truly worth every penny of its measly $7 price tag. The application makes it a ‘cinch’ to resize windows on Mac OS X by simply dragging a window to the left or right of the screen it will make it fill the respective 50% of the screen, allowing you to line two windows up side by side in about 5 seconds max. Even better is the ability to fullscreen a window by dragging it to the top. The application saves all that messing about most Mac users accepted when they switched. Its been one of the few things Mac was really missing from its feature set.

These features may sound familiar though? Thats because they are, in fact these features directly emulate the Snap feature of the newly released Windows 7, and were in fact one of the few features which I really longed for in Mac OS X. So whilst perhaps the features aren’t original the application is a great utility and no one could fault it for what it does.

A couple of small niggles though if I really did dig deep. The Aero Shake feature has not been replicated, this feature allowed you to shake the window to expose the desktop, however, I am not particularly bothered as the Cmd+F3 key does the same thing with a feature called Exposé, and did it before Windows 7 was even a glimmer in Microsoft’s eye. The other niggle is simply that the application stutters when animating the dashed box it draws to show you how the window will be resized, this isn’t a major issue and has been reported so I hope that it will be fixed eventually, that said these niggles are not going to put me off telling everyone I know about this absolutely amazing application.

p.s. Another nice feature would be to move the MenuExtra at the top into a System Preference pane as the MenuExtra add’s little functionality that I would ever need but does clutter an already busy part of my screen.

Source: TUAW

I was lucky enough to meet an iPhone developer instore today who worked on an application for getting movie times. It’s great!

The app is called movie times! And it’s free on the app store. It’s way better thank flickster or what ever it’d called. The apps icon isn’t great not is the name but the UI is brilliant.

I really like it. It very reminisent of the delicious apps and especially the style of MadeBySofa and also TapBots.

I love the little flip clock style dates and the pop up facebook integration.

The only bug bear I have is speed. It’s as slow as a dog and it’s not just the Internet connection it just hangs for several seconds betwen screens after you click with no suggestion anything is happening.

I know I don’t have an iPhone 3GS but this is no excuse. I think it’s all the custom ui element whch I was just praising so much that make it slow but I want the best of both worlds with out upgrading.

Common guys hurry up!

My final proble. Is there is no support to buy tickets on the phone rendering it as just another film times app. I love it but I don’t think I’ll keep it on my homescreen.

So I released my first Wordpress plugin recently called ‘Broadcast MU‘ – Thanks Luke!

Its actually for Wordpress MU (Multi-user) and it allows you to post the same post to multiple blogs, you can read up more on it here.

I hope people find it useful and it is a great opportunity for me to learn more about PHP and Wordpress MU, it was developed because there was no similar plugin available for WPMU and we needed it for GDNM.org a site I have been managing for UCA Epsom’s Graphic Design: New Media and Graphic Design courses/departments.

I haven’t blogged it till now but I recently got my work awarded by D&AD with the in-book status in their student awards 2009.

Check it out here… linky