October 28th, 2007 — Life
On Friday, I said goodbye to my workmates of 14 months. I was really touched by the effort everyone went into organising a great farewell, in particular Viv who did a lot of baking and organising! I was sent off with a very delicious morning tea (lots of divine homemade goodies), beautiful flowers and a fantastic present. This was followed up with drinks at Old Parliament House. I was humbled by all the comments and gestures from various people through out the day, with emails, phone calls and face-to-face conversations.
I learned a lot over my 14 months and got to work on interesting projects. Met lots of interesting people and made some good friends. I will miss my workmates and hope that people keep thinking about creating great user experiences.
As of tomorrow (Monday), I will be working at Stamford Interactive. I’m looking forward to a set of new challenges!
October 6th, 2007 — Gadgets
With a number of presentations coming up, I wanted the ability to remotely trigger my presentation slides. A quick search on eBay revealed similar remote devices at varying prices, mostly from overseas. I ordered one, but while waiting for it to show up, hubby suggested that I look into using the Wiimote as “it’s just so much cooler”.
We tried a few things…and found a solution that works.
Here’s what you’ll need to get your Wiimote to work with Powerpoint in Windows Vista:
- A Wiimote
- GlovePIE version .22 or higher
- A Bluetooth enabled PC - the standard Microsoft Windows Bluetooth stack isn’t completely compatible with the Wiimote. I ended up downloading and using BlueSoleil.
- DirectX 8.0 or higher
Once you install GlovePIE, you’ll need to set up a GLovePIE script to enable the Wiimote to function in Powerpoint. Here’s the script I’m using at the moment (just save it as a .PIE file somewhere easily accessible). As you can see, it’s really basic. I haven’t had time to play around, but there’s a lot more cool stuff you can do!
Mouse.LeftButton = Wiimote.A
Mouse.RightButton = Wiimote.B
PageUp = Wiimote.Minus
PageDown = Wiimote.Plus
up = Wiimote.Up
down = Wiimote.Down
left = Wiimote.Left
right = Wiimote.Right
At present, the Wiimote mimics the page up and page down function and up/down/left/right arrow keys.
If you want more information, check out:
October 4th, 2007 — Web, Accessibility
My thanks to Max Design for highlighting the recent court ruling in California regarding the accessibility of Target Corporation’s website.
A federal district court judge issued two landmark decisions on the 2nd of October in a nationwide class action against Target Corporation.
The first decision involved the court certifying the case as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the country under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). In addition to violating the ADA, the suit charges that Target has also violated two Californian civil rights statutes: the California Unruh Civil Rights Act and the California Disabled Persons Act.
In the second decision, the court stated that websites such as target.com are required by California law to be accessible.
For more information:
This is a step in the right direction, although it’s sad that it has to get to this stage before action is taken by the big corporations. Remember, accessibility is best done proactively - not reactively.