Solved: Shopping lists

I wanted a barcode scanner. I don't need one anymore, now that:

• I have a shared google account for everyone in the house
• All of the smartphones and ipads use apps like gtasks to keep in sync
• The smartphone is always available in a pocket and acts as a quick warehouse remote inventory control

While some of the supermarkets are bringing out their own specific apps for shopping lists and prices, using google tasks and similar services for this seems a better fit.

Next on the wanted list:
A google tasks/similar API client that reads all of your tasks, searches google products, and fills in pictures, prices, and other information behind the scenes.

GetFridged is coming!

It’ll be really painfully broken and horrible and mangled; but Get Fridged is coming! The domain & hosting were aquired and shall be going into effect shortly :)

My birthday is on the 13th of April, and they are usually so disapointing. So, I decided an “official” early rollout of getfridged on my birthday would be a way to build stress and excitement…

I really need someone to step in and sit down with me to provide polish. “What’s the point of feature X, Y or Z?”, do all of the UA, and some kind of marketing platform – it’s hard as just one person – anyone who wants to get in and lend a hand, your karma will treble.

Oh, and the site? Well, I’m not one to explain things, but hopefully this propaganda will do so for me ;)

See more progress on: Finish designing that website

Usability: Users Are Stupid, But Don't Treat Them So

Yet another example of proof that usersdevelopers are quite stupid.

If you introduce a new feature (word, term, idea) to your application that someone has never come across before, you'd better damned well forcibly explain it before you let users touch it.

With my drag and drop form input on GetFridged, I've had people trying all sorts of interesting things, and people ignore the "hint" button.

• Users don't know what to add, initially.
• When they do get it, they try to add anything, because it's a magic box to them.

I even had one friend tell me about how she tried to add an item to her shopping list by dragging a photo from her desktop into it.

It made me giggle, but its not their fault. I gave them a magic anything box, so they are trying to make it do magic, not just cheap card tricks. Infact, it's a new and unthought of thing that I would never have thought to try.


Thoughts for improvement on the magic anything box:

• Make it so you can drop desktop links into it, and javascript works out it's a local file - if so, the magic anythingbox transforms, on the fly, to a file upload box. Users don't know what's hit them, or even notice.
• Dropping an image should create a thumbnail of the image, with "preview" across it and a path box below.
• I need Google maps style yellow popups to explain it on mouseover, with a "never show this again checkbox done by default".
• The magic anything box must be suggestive of it's drag and drop functionality.

Go ahead and implement a magic box, then subject real people to it, see what happens. I'd love to hear the fun that ensues!

A cool other kind of magic box: the speedreader. People read by recognising wordshapes rather than individual letters, so we think in pictures. This is like flashcards, and it helps the user keep one locus of attention happening. Try it out on your neighbours today, and see if you can't find some usability problems and bonuses with it.

Initially, I expected a "play" button to exist. What did you expect from it?

Never one to do things the easy way...

... I’m taking a left turn and developing a social web application to do it for me.

It’s in early alpha at the moment, and you lovely 43things crowd are just the kind of people who’d be the perfect testers.

If you’d like to be a beta chef-tester, let me know!

PHP skills are handy too :)

See more progress on: learn how to prepare 10 excellent meals

PHPretty Images

function tn($url) {
$step = 2;
list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize($url);

if ($width <= $height) {   $ratio["width"] = $height/$width;   $ratio["height"] = 1;  } else {   $ratio["width"] = 1;   $ratio["height"] = $width/$height;  }   while ($height > 90) {
 $height = $height - $step * $ratio["width"];
 $width = $width - $step * $ratio["height"];

}

return array("width" => $width, "height" => $height);
}

That's it. Badly remembered primary school math and PHP. Result? Reasonably sized thumbnails. I thought it would have been harder.

Refactoring & Optimisation Thoughts

• $step is derived from the current height of the image vs. the intended size, thus really big images are quickly reduced initially. The closer you get to ideal, the smaller the step. Probably a good idea to set a bottom for the step, unless you want to waste a lot of cycles.


• More generalisation during refactoring. $step, ideal $height & ideal $width should all be parameters.


• Is there a way to ditch the iterations? That would improve performance a gadzillion-fold.

This code is part of GetFridged.com - see, I'm not being that lazy!

What's in your fridge?

What's in your fridge?
Originally uploaded by CloCkWeRX.

Rubylicious. Sample interface... now to turn it into a working, clickable application with Rails.

I spent a while on this... I love the idea: it makes me hungry. Stay tuned, I've got to earn a bit more from the adwords before hosting costs can be covered :)