The county administrative board of Gävleborg closed a service today, after it had been up and running for just one week. The service allowed visitors to track local wolfs locations on an interactive map. The idea behind the service was to give hunters the ability to check where the wolfs where, so that they could stay on a safe distance from them in order to protect their hunting dogs from possible wolf attacks. Sounds like a good plan? Well that was what the Gävleborg Board thought at least.

New information has surfaced, actually some of this information became known to the local police on the very same day the website went online. The problem is that poachers use the service to track the wolfs in order to hunt them down. Wolfs are always a hot debate topic here in Sweden and there are several groups that would like to see the wolfs gone, or at least diminish them.

I think this is a perfect example of why it’s important to think your design through before you release it. Give people the ability to track certain animals and there are bound to be consequences—I for one would have loved the service so that I could be able to find great locations where I can find and photograph these beautiful animals. Instead of protecting the dogs the result was an illegal hunt of wolfs. It’s crucial in the design process to sit down and try to picture all the different effects the design might produce. Obviously, this is easier said then done—but it’s the designers obligation to do so.

If “we” as designers are narrow minded and only think about one possible usage of the service we are designing, then we have failed. We have an ethical responsibility when we’re designing. It’s impossible to foresee all different affects an application or a system might have. Everybody is individual and due to several varying factors the end user will use the product in unpredictable ways. That being said, even I would have raised my hand in a meeting during the design process if I was developing the aforementioned service. It’s such an obvious vicious usage of the service that I’m right out shocked that it was even released.

Source (in Swedish): SR.se: Tjuvjägare utnyttjade vargwebb

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I’ve been frustrated at Microsoft Office for several years now, especially Microsoft Word. Word is broken, it’s as easy as that. And I’m not just talking about the Mac version of Word but the Windows version as well. So, this frustration is the main reason why I wanted something else, something that actually worked. I’ve tried Open Office before, but it never really works as I wanted it to either, it’s a great project and concept, but I personally did not like using it. I didn’t have to look very far, I simply tried out Apple’s iWork (I’ve used both ’06 and ’08). iWork is simply amazing, it actually works.

Pages

Pages, which is both a word processor and a page layout application, could be compared to Microsoft Word in the word processor department, but Pages is so much more according to me. The grammar and spell checking works a bit differently and both the applications has their pros and cons here, Word however supports more languages than Pages does.

The true power of Pages is it’s simplicity. And with that I don’t mean that it lacks functionality, I mean that the software is simple to use, everything is located where you would imagine it to be (something that can’t be said about Word where most things are in weird places that you only know where they are because you’ve used the application for so long). It’s very simple to change a setting for either an individual paragraph or the entire document.

I said that Pages was also a page layout applications, something that Word is not, and this is where Pages shines the most. When I moved from Word to Pages I was shocked to find how easy it could be to place images and objects into the text. Images and objects used to be a nightmare to deal with, but now I can control them just as easily as the text — they behave just the way I want to without me having to dig though a lot of different settings.

A feature I like that I think most people overlook or simply don’t care about is the advanced typography tools. Pages has been criticized by some for the lack of faux italics and faux bold (i.e. having the application fake it when the font used doesn’t support italics or bold). I personally think this is a good thing, faked letter looks horrible. What Pages on the other hand does is to take full advantage of all typographical features the font is made for, which includes true small-caps, ligatures, ornaments and the like.

The last few months I’ve spent quite some time writing reports (IMRAD-style). Yesterday for example I put together a report of almost 10,000 words spanning more than 40 pages, written by me and three other classmates, containing several illustrations and a rather nice page layout if I may say so myself. I can simply say that I would not have been able to do the same job if I had been using Word, and what I would have produced with Word would not only have looked less appealing but would also had taken a much longer time to put together.

All in all, I love Pages.

Keynote

Before I got to the university it was very seldom I saw a PowerPoint-presentation, but in the last few month I’ve seen quite a few. The all have one thing in common, they look outdated. And I’m not just talking about the presentations from the teachers, no the students presentations are (sorry guys) just as boring and uninspiring. When it comes to presentations, the actual esthetics of something is important, so why is it that it feels like PowerPoint-presentations looks the same now as they did in the ‘90s?

Keynote is another great part of iWork. Even someone with no knowledge of design or typography can make stunning presentations. You can start out with a template, but it doesn’t take much to make the presentation unique and specialized for your needs. Personally I’m not a fan of transition animations between slides, and although Keynote has a few nice animations I think one would do best to stay away from them. That is animations between slides, the animations for text within a slide can still be pretty useful to highlight what your talking about etc.

Since I haven’t worked much with presentations before I haven’t used PowerPoint even close to the extent I’ve used Word, so I can’t talk so much about pros and cons. But what I have noticed is that once again every little setting in Keynote is precisely located where I thought it would be, even the first time I started the application.

Numbers

Numbers is the latest addition to the iWork family. It was first included in the ’08 version and is therefor still at version 1.0 (whereas Pages is 3.0 and Keynote is 4.0). You can notice that Numbers is not as “complete” as the other two applications in the bundle, but for my needs it can take over the tasks that Microsoft Excel handled before.

One big difference from Excel is the look and feel of the application, and just like the other iWork applications the settings are exactly where you would imagine them to be. With Numbers it’s easy to make a nice spreadsheet, both for printing and screen display.

I haven’t had that much need for this application yet, mostly used it to create graphs and draw up some conceptual database tables. I will probably go back here and write some more about it later after I’ve used it some more.

Update:
iWork ’09 has just been released, and I’ve downloaded the trial version and tried it out a bit. Don’t see that many new features I would use, if I had owned EndNote X2 it would be worth the price but right now I think I will just keep using ’08 until Snow Leopard is released.

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I decided to start the new year with a new project — this site. I’ve had the idea for quite some time now, but wasn’t sure if I would be able to dedicate the needed time for it before. I really enjoy my studies and I think writing about what I learn and figure out will be very beneficial for myself. I’m not quite sure yet which direction the content will go in, hopefully it will be a bit of a mix but with the same foundation, which is information system science, (web) design and development.

Right now I’m studying for my exams in the courses “Design of IT” and “Database Systems I”. Besides the studies I’ve also recently started working with jQuery, which I think will be a great tool once I wrap my head around the “new” possibilities when I’m designing new sites. It feels like I’m still kind of stuck in the old way and so far haven’t had many practical uses for jQuery on any of my sites, but I think that will change soon, and if it does I’ll write down what I’ve done. I’ve also just started to dig into really learning Adobe’s Illustrator, I’ve often overlooked Illustrator and used Photoshop or InDesign instead. Now I’ve started to see the major benefits and will try to bring out my creative side again which has been a bit inactive lately.

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One month ago, the 14th of July 2007, I stood there on the beach outside of Falkenberg. But I didn’t stand alone, you were right there beside me, as you’ve always been for these past six years. It’s been an incredible journey so far, many rough parts and deep valleys, but I sense that some beautiful landscapes lies ahead of us.

Our wedding was the best one I could have ever imagined for us, just a private ceremony at the beach followed by a picnic in the sand dunes. This might sound like a cliché, but I guess there’s a reason behind that, but it was one of the best days of my life. I felt a bit silly during the ceremony, because all I could do was smile, I was so happy that my brain stopped functioning from time to time.

With the wedding we didn’t just exchange rings (yeah I have two rings now, one engagement ring and one wedding ring) we also changed our last names. Instead of Sanna taking my name or the other way around we simply decided to start a new family name together – Silverglimth.

A married man, that’s what I am now. It feels wonderful to finally be able to call Sanna my wife. I knew there was something about her the first time I laid my eyes on her. It seems like it was decades ago, that first day when we both sat on my couch in my room at my parents house. Two teenagers that turned into a married couple in a villa, and I love it – I wouldn’t change one thing that we’ve been through.

Sanna Lindgren + Fredrik Nyman = Mr. & Mrs. Silverglimth

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