Category Archives: Usability

RSS: No, I didn’t notice your new website’s theme.

By Catherine Winters | Published: July 12, 2010
Over at the Future Shop Tech Blog, I wrote about RSS feeds, and how I organize them to stay up to date with everything from blog posts to Craigslist searches. If you’re like me and subscribe to hundreds of different feeds, it’s important to figure out a good workflow that helps you focus on what’s [...]
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In Which Catherine Blogs for Future Shop

By Catherine Winters | Published: June 29, 2010
So apparently I’m now a guest blogger at Future Shop’s Tech Blog! My first post is up this morning, bringing you my solution to a very specific and picky iOS4 problem. Imagine that, me complaining about something. Read the post: iOS4: Rotation lock good, backgrounds bad. (For future posts, check the Future Shop Tech Blog [...]
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Catherine Uses…

By Catherine Winters | Published: June 23, 2010
Feature:Catherine Uses… Blog:Omega Point Purpose:Telling you what I software I use. Posts:Frequent Price:Free! Allow me to introduce a new feature here at Omega Point: Catherine Uses…! But what is that, you ask? Readers, as you can imagine, I get asked to endorse all manner of products: video games, athletic shoes, questionable dietary supplements… the list goes on. [...]
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Catherine Uses Synergy+

By Catherine Winters | Published: June 21, 2010
Program:Synergy+ Purpose:Two Computers, One Keyboard Price:Free (Open source, GPL) Platform:Mac OS X, Windows, Linux How often do you find yourself in front of your two computers, forgetting which mouse belongs to which, transferring files via FTP or USB flash drive, moaning in agony as you save the contents of your clipboard on one computer to [...]
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Notational Velocity and Simplenote Part Two: Making a good thing better

By Catherine Winters | Published: June 11, 2010
Last week, I wrote about my experiences using Notational Velocity and Simplenote to turn a collection of text files into a quick, searchable, cloud-based notetaking system. Today, I’m going to complain about what’s wrong with it. Now, to be fair, I’m quite pleased with the whole Notational Velocity package. Simplenote’s team are quick to respond to [...]
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Notational Velocity and Simplenote: In which Catherine schools you on notetaking

By Catherine Winters | Published: June 2, 2010
After Monday’s “I wasn’t tweeting, so there!” recap of FreelanceCamp Vancouver, a few people asked about my much-touted notetaking technique. I’ve been wanting to write up a good explanation of this for some time, so this is a particularly good opportunity. I’ve known from a very early age that I tend towards clutter and disorganization. [...]
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Blogathon 2009: Catherine’s Safari 4 Review

By Catherine Winters | Published: July 25, 2009
So I switched to Safari 4 from Firefox recently. The end. Yeah, there’s more, actually. First, the good parts, the ones that were enough to make me give up Firefox: It’s fast. Really, really fast. Pages you visit get indexed in OSX’s Spotlight. It’s like Google Desktop for Firefox, only not totally ridiculous. While Safari doesn’t [...]
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Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

By Catherine Winters | Published: July 25, 2009
Okay, this is something that has bugged me for a while. People who say “interactive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scrollbars”. While otherwise a competent, irritatingly underfunded news organization, the CBC sucks at infographics. Most of their “interactive features” are just text that requires a lot of clicking and scrolling to read. [...]
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Won’t you be my neighbour?

By Catherine Winters | Published: July 20, 2009
For the past few years, I’ve lived in a Vancouver Special, chopped up into a few suites. My entire street, and in fact, most of my neighbourhood is like that, I suspect. It’s the sort of apartment realtors and landlords describe as “cozy”, but it’s decent. I know a few of my neighbours: There’s the [...]
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#Amazonfail

By Catherine Winters | Published: April 13, 2009
A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kensington Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by having it shipped to her address in Washington to take advantage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offering to US-based customers. I ended up saving something like $60. Sweet. Deal. So, my first [...]
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