Leaked photos of the Apple Tablet

Angry horde of Apple fanboys in 3, 2, 1...

Dear t61: I'm a designer. And I hate you.

If you pay attention to my endless rants of the size of ants in the almighty Twitter, you may have noticed I often tweeted about random songs, coming from thesixtyone. Good music, simple and clean. I got to listen from outstanding hyperactive electronic music (being Bankai an example) to rock and techno, and orchestral awesomeness. No mainstream bullshit from MTV and the like, just good music.

It also sported an interesting system based on leveling up, rating songs with hearts and doing quests (listen to 4 different music genres, etc). I spent many work days entertained with the music stream while hitting things on Photoshop with an hammer.

Then t61 went under an interface makeover, and the designer side of me went "... wtf?"

Before:Visit old.thesixtyone.com for old interface

After:Design!

Pretty? Yes. Different from everything else? Absolutely.
User-friendly? LOL. No.

I was caught in surprise by the new interface, so were many others. They gave no prior notice at all (only via their blog/twitter, but no notice on their website), apparently their beta testing went off with just 20 testers. And now we have a community divided in opinions: those who dislike the new interface and want the old one back, as evidenced in this Facebook wall; And those who think the website is beautiful, and make me want to stab them in the eyes.

Let's go with topics, because I don't want this to be too long:

- Like I said, they made a switch without prior notice at all. If you're going to make an interface change, it may be a good idea to announce in the website as well, because not everyone follows your blog/twitter. You had the banner on the top promoting artists, why didn't you use it to announce the big change?

- Even worse, there was no official "beta" for the entire community to try out, and if there was, it was probably a two day drive with few testers. Not only that, there are still a bunch of functionalities from the older versions either missing or hidden somewhere we can't find;

- I actually liked the plain, white background. It was clean. Now the background is a rotating image from the artist whose song I'm listening at the moment. So, I either get a good 1024x768 high quality photo, or a pixelated mess;

- Accessing music lists was easy. Now it's not. That's the biggest turn off so far. So is the navigation from song to song. They removed the top bar with the typical music player, and turned the whole page in the music player. While the concept itself isn't a bad idea, they performed it badly. Should I also mention I used to listen to t61 in a resized window so it wouldn't fill the entire screen? If I do that now, look how amazing it looks:

- I had 4 pages worth of saved songs, and it's gone. They say they're working on it, because not everyone is pleased with the idea of building an entire playlist from scratch. Yes, this means they changed to a new interface without even considering what to do with listeners' playlists.

- People on facebook and twitter are also complaining about the new lack of artist-fan interaction.

Like someone in this post said, "Graphic designers LOVE the new design. For artists and listeners, the new format sucks." I'm afraid this is true. I'm afraid a lot of designers will look at the interface all call it "unique, innovative, a bold move" and then say "people don't like it because they're resistant to change".

Yes, it's different. I understand they wanted to be creative and do something different that would make them stand out. And they failed. The older version could be considered as too similar to all other websites with similar services, but guess what? It worked. It wasn't perfect, but it was clean, simple, and it worked.

thesixtyone - Ruining music experience with unique and artistic interfaces.

4 months later.

Just because I worked for you, it doesn't mean you'll be free from my usual antics.



While it was challenging combining an internship with a college master degree (I now know what college students with jobs have to go through), I enjoyed working with you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Happy Easter- Ok, ok, I'm done with the joke.

Usually, I draw a Christmas related picture every year, but this time, it wasn't possible. I'm sick (no, it's not H1N1. It may be H1N2.), my internship is ending, and I have to write a pile of tl;dr texts for the thesis.

And that avatar on the top of this post is -old-. I think it's from 2006/2007? Also, Xmas drawing from 2008, and from 2007.

So, I would like to wish you all:

Καλά Χριστούγεννα!

Codebits'09

When I was accepted into Codebits'08, I was pretty excited. But circunstances forced me to refrain myself from taking a train to Lisboa, and remain there for three days. I regretted not being able to participate, as judging by the news and blog posts from those who were there, it was awesome.

And I'll tell you this about Codebits'09: it was awesome.


That's the short description. Here's the longest:

- It was easy to use the public transportation to get to Cordoaria, so it's a good location.

- I was stunned when I received my welcome pack at the reception. I had to sit down on the SAPO Campus stand (where my college partners and teachers were at), and look through all the free loot:
A bag for laptops; stickers; a flyer about Sapo's developers network; a t-shirt; a USB laptop light from Microsoft; a pack from PT Inovação with essential goodies like a toothbrush and toothpaste, earplugs and a sleep mask. These last two items were extremely useful.
Later, we could collect more stickers from the stands, and I saw a certain someone distributing Apple related keychains;

- Plenty of space, you could easily find a place for you to settle down and turn on your laptop. Also, BEAN BAGS!

- I really enjoyed the sessions I participated in, from ps's "Hacking the Demoscene" to Pond's, and even the spontaneous one about the recruitment process at SAPO. I like when companies are this open and share their recruitment experiences, instead of staying at the top and not even bothering to look down;

- Pizza for breakfast, Pizza for lunch, Pizza for dinner.
Yeah, I can't see pizza in front of me for the next months.
But we had good alternatives, like salads, fruits, chocolates and cereal bars. Red bull, of course, along with other beverages.
Also, knowing there were microwaves around, I brought popcorn snacks. The ladies from the bar were nice enough to put the snacks on the microwaves for three minutes. I'll tell you: popcorns are the best to forget about pizza;


- I saw @vd and @armandoalves, who I had already meet at OFFF; I saw the responsible behind the apple keychains distribution, @pedroaniceto , and I greeted @pedrocs, who had no idea who I was until I told him I was responsible for the bastardization of Pond's prototype logo. I don't know, maybe he didn't expect this half-artsie half-geek breed to be short and chubby. Or maybe he was waiting for a dark blue cat on a blue background.

- I didn't participate in any projects. I was going to, but circunstances dictated otherwise, and I was still tempted into entering in another project, but they didn't convince me (sorry guys). Instead, I tried to keep up with some college homework for the thesis. I didn't do as much as I would have liked to (Twitter + #codebits = Best distraction ever), but it helped me to get out of the feeling "OMG, I have so much to do for college and I'm here having fun ;_;"

- Pornophonique's concert was <3

- The Quiz contest was highly amusing, especially the tricky questions. Like the one about the end of the world according to the Unix calendar.

- Say what you want about Microsoft, but I do like their multitouch surface, and the giant multi touch screen they had at their stand. Their Bing Maps Beta is looking good too.
I was also surprised to see more familiar folks from PT Inovação than I was expecting. Those 3D TV screens you saw there? I had seen them already where I work :D

- There were flipchart boards, and then there were flipchart /b/oards.

- We were called for a special surprise on the mainstage. And we're rickroll'd. Bravo.


Now, there were some low points as well:


- It was extremely cold at night. Now, there was nothing the staff from Codebits (Coldbits) could do, of course, it's an old and large building. But unless we had brought our own supply of blankets, it was complicated to try to rest in the sleeping areas, because we're right next to an open door. The sleeping areas should be isolated with something during the day, to avoid the cold breezes. That would help.

- I was kinda disappointed with the board games. I went for a round of Settlers of Catan, and I found too slow and boring. Ey, I trust they're great entertainment, but not for me. I was expecting more roleplay, less strategy games.

- I couldn't stay to watch the remaining project presentations, but few managed to appeal me. I know people complained about lack of a jury, when the audience was clearly more appealed by the silly projects, and not the useful ones, but I expected more from the presentations. You have 90 seconds, be clear and precise, just say what's your project about, and show it to the audience in case it's working, don't do anything else.


Suggestions for next year's edition? Besides the isolated sleeping areas, I don't know what else I can suggest. It's a free event after all.


Until next year, where I'll propose my own project, or if nobody is interested, I'll participate in something.

Extreme Makeover: (Inside) Laptop Edition

First and foremost, this blog has been inactive because I have a second one at hand. Go on, and visit Warfare Arts (warning: eyebleeding background) for my tales of epicness, thesis methodologies, and soon, live reports from Greece (if I get a decent internet connection there)


And where's what I did during this weekend. I turned my laptop's OS from this:

Do not be fooled, this is a Windows XP pretending to be a Vista. Also, awesome folder names are awesome.

Into this:

WINDOWS MADE OF GLASS! GET IT? *SHOT*

Good thing I did this during a weekend because:

A) I had to backup all my documents and important files, since I had to make a clean install.

B) I downloaded Windows 7 Professional from the e-academy website, where I could get it for free (hurray for being a university student!). While the app said the download was complete, when I burned the .iso, I kept getting autorun and spwizeng.dll errors. I couldn't install.

What happened? The .iso was corrupted. When I went to download it again from the e-academy website, they decided to go "lol wut" on me, and refused to let me download the OS.
I was close to either torrent an illegal copy, or borrow my brother's Win7 Ultimate copy, when I found direct download links for Win7. I downloaded it, used my product key provided by e-academy, and voila~

C) I had to reinstall all programs, I spent a good hour finding GPU drivers compatible with Aero and on top of that, I lost my Digsby and MSN's passwords for a while (I had them saved in my other installation, but they got erased). I managed to recover Digsby's account this morning, and the Windows Live team was helpful enough to give me instructions to recover my MSN account.


So, we're back on schedule. I still need to reorganize this and that, and install one or two missing programs. I'm ditching Microsoft Office for a while, and trying OpenOffice, see how it works; Aero is awesome, I -love- the glass effects; it's much better than XP, but I'm using the 32bit version. I might change to 64bit, but I need to check if all my programs are compatible with it first.

Cons? The startup time is slow. Well, it's faster than XP's, but it's still a bit too slow for my own. It's probably because of Google Desktop + RocketDeck + Avira racing at the same time D:


Time to go read more articles about digital game-based learning.

One week, two logos bastardized.