27 Feb 10 — conference / speaking — No comments
I’ve just arrived back in the UK after NSConference 2010 USA in Atlanta, where I delivered a 6-hour workshop and also gave a presentation on Making Mistakes Impossible. It was a huge amount of fun, and it was wonderful to get a chance to meet so many of you in person at last; I think the entire thing went very well indeed.
If you attended my workshop and/or saw my session during the Mac conference, I’d be very interested to hear your feedback – good and bad. Get in touch via email (“matt” at this domain, or my gmail: matt.gemmell), and please be as candid and specific as you like.
I hope everyone had even half as much fun as I did, and I hope to see you all again soon!
16 Feb 10 — writing — 12 comments
I read quite a lot of fiction, and in recent years I’ve taken to reading a fair bit of it online during odd moments; maybe a chapter of an amateur novel with lunch, or some fan fiction while waiting for the coffee to brew.
Amateur fiction is a wonderful thing, and the internet is a great publishing medium, but you naturally run into the issue of quality control – there’s a lot of bad fiction out there. Perhaps not quite as much as you’d think, but still a lot. If you’re writing such stuff and your problems are those of triteness, illogical plot points, indecipherable or tired dialogue or any of dozens of other problems, I can’t really help you.
But there’s a far bigger group of writers out there whose problems are those of style, and I can give some advice on that. Here are a few stylistic guidelines to follow for readable, smoothly flowing online fiction.
Continue reading Writing Fiction Online →
8 Feb 10 — Development / Interface / conference / speaking — 1 comment
If you’re attending my workshop in the US at NSConference 2010, I’d like to ask you to please read this and email your questions, topics and suggestions for what you’d like to cover. Anything at all is most welcome; it’s your workshop, and the reason the UK one went so well is because so many people contributed interesting points for us to discuss.
You can ask to remain entirely anonymous if you wish, and you can similarly contribute a question or issue that you’ve already solved – there might be scope for other views or some useful additions. In you have a possible topic in mind and aren’t sure about it, send it anyway!
You can send your thoughts to me via email to my gmail account (matt.gemmell) or to matt at this domain. Get those suggestions in.
7 Feb 10 — Development / Interface / Personal / Tech — 3 comments
I discovered Formspring today via Twitter, and I think it’s an interesting idea: you can ask people questions on anything you like, and see their responses listed. Very simple and not very original, but the lack of a need to sign up (though you can if you want to) and the simplicity of the interface is somehow very conducive to just asking and answering.
I’ve already answered almost 40 questions on all kinds of things (mostly Mac/iPad/iPhone UI/interaction questions), and I’ve love to hear yours – though please note that I’m more interested in giving my opinions on things than answering specific technical questions. You can ask me a question here.
5 Feb 10 — General / Interface / Tech — 114 comments
This is an open letter to the many companies who want to compete with the iPad. Sony, HP, the JooJoo people; all of them.
Continue reading How to compete with iPad →
