Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Proudly presenting… an excuse to be in the sun.

Friday, June 6th, 2008

ts.jpg

Yep! It’s exactly what you think! We’ve spent a few quid and got some T shirts printed for the team. We’ve been working hard over the winter months. Summer is here so why not do a little “unconventional marketing” while we’re sat in the beer garden celebrating our upcoming second phase of Beta trials.

So, if you spot us out and about, please come over and say ‘Hi’… and just incase you’re feeling extra nice, mine’s a ‘Brains SA’!

Guess what! We’re even thinking of getting some T’s in for our friends. So if you fancy ‘being our friend’, drop a line to hello(at)woosabi.com or even sign-up to our Beta user list. Limited number of spots available.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Design, Marketing, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

Woo Loves to be Smart.

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Walking over for a coffee this morning I spotted an opportunity to stake out the first Smart fortwo BRABUS. Not only is this car green with its micro hybrid drive (mhd) but it also packs a mighty 98bhp.

smart.jpg

I’m a big fan of the Fiat 500 but it struck me how cool the Woosabi brand would look pasted on the side of a crystal white painted fortwo, and while you’re testing out the performance of 98bhp from the lights, those left in your dust trail would read “mind your own business” printed on the rear :)

Woosabi has something in common with the fortwo… small but mighty, simple to use and designed to get the job done with ease and fun.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Design, Misc, Technology | 1 Comment »

Woosabi Desks #2: The Designer

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

People who know me well may argue my work space is never cluttered with ’stuff’… for the best part of the time this is true. However notice my compulsive neatness is still in play…. all my pens and bits are in the reclaimed SB coffee cup!Designers desk

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Design, Geekery, Misc | 1 Comment »

When development gets tough

Friday, February 1st, 2008

So, we’re 4 weeks away from the launch of Woosabi and the integrated email needs some serious attention. It turns out that the Thunderbird email client sends all attachments as inline messages by default. This means, basically, that emails sent via Thunderbird were showing up without their attachments (they are still there) or the message was showing part of an attachment instead of the actual message.

This is a serious problem for Woosabi, as we do lots of very smart things with email, in fact our integrated email (imail?) removes a lot of the unecessary clunk of using email - for example, it automatically connects your mail to your contacts which connect to your job list which connect to your files. What does that mean in English?

  • It means that Woosabi can let you download any attachment to any email from any computer just by typing a contact name.
  • It means Woosabi will remind you that you’ve not responded to an important email after a few days of reading it.
  • It means Woosabi can send you a text message to let you know that a particular contact has replied to an urgent message
  • It means Woosabi takes care of things for you!

Unfortunately, for me, it means a few late nights trying to fix Thunderbirds rather strange way of doing things. So, when in doubt, go back to basics, find out where the discrepency lies and then build back up from there.

It’s Friday night, everyone else is off down the pub, but I’ll have a beer when we launch and know it was worth it :)

So here it is, the current Inbox - stay tuned for updates!

Inbox - Version 0.0

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Design, Geekery, Misc, Technology, Woosabi.com | 1 Comment »

Firefox Invisible Caret - Position:fixed;

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

The amazing Firefox has a problem (in version2.0, it’s fixed for version3 here’s a bugzilla thread on it) . Under certain circumstances the caret/cursor (i.e. the little vertical line that blinks at you when you’re typing) vanishes! Doesn’t sound like a huge issue, but it’s potentially a massive problem that breaks the interface. If you can’t see where you’re typing you’ve got a serious problem.

For example, in the Woosabi product our integrated email and contact management uses a lightbox gone wild/subModal style window. When the user wants to read/reply/compose an email it overlays itself over the main page - like a traditional email client would. This metaphor works really well, not least because it looks like a little sheet of paper. However, it all breaks down when the user can’t see where they’re typing on Firefox ;) After trawling many sites to solve it the common solution, most of which use the CSS setting overflow: auto I found that the root of the problem seems to be this this:

Textareas and text input fields that appear within an Iframe that appear within a div that has the CSS setting {position: fixed} will exhibit the problem. Still with me? Good, becuase if you change the position on the div to absolute the problem disappears.

It isn’t appropriate for all interfaces as it will affect your layout but it’s a consistant - I found that the overflow: auto suggestion did not work consitantly.

-Dan

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Design, Technology | No Comments »