Introduce advanced front-lighting technologies to make driving at night safer

By Adam Cogan in Tesla 0 Comment

BMW = yes (7 series only)
Mercedes = yes (S class only)

Ford is developing a couple of advanced front-lighting technologies to prevent collision and keep drivers safe at night:

  1. The first one called “camera-based advanced front lighting system” interprets traffic signs and use GPS info to widen the headlights’ reach at roundabouts
  2. The second technology called “Spot Lighting” uses an infrared camera attached to the vehicle’s grille to detect people and large animals on the road through their body heat

Watch Ford’s video to see how it works

Tesla should consider adding these to their cars.

Ideally, the driver needs see yellow and red squares flashing up on the heads-up display.

Note: With a software update Tesla could do this if it went in the console

Source: Ford’s high-tech lighting system makes driving at night safer

Adam Cogan reviews the Tesla Model S

By Adam Cogan in Tesla 1 Comment

Adam Cogan takes you through the good and the bad of his 2015 Tesla Model S.

List of things to improve:

  1. Profile – Support for more than 10 users
  2. Centre storage as standard
  3. Back seats – Clips to hang shirts
  4. Pre-installed dashcam
  5. Phone mount
  6. Weight driver to select profile
  7. Keep driver statistics
  8. Cameras above front wheels
  9. Physical button to open front trunk (inside and outside)
  10. Sound to confirm the car is locked
  11. Notifications on phone that windows are down
  12. Add Skype app
  13. Add weather app
  14. Add web browser
  15. Add mail app
  16. Introduce app for Windows Phone *irrelevant
  17. Show which profile used which bluetooth device
  18. Improve updating experience

It would be great if Tesla considered adding this feature to its cars.

Add Popup Notifications to Bootstrap

By Ben Cull in Bootstrap 0 Comment

When you need to alert the user to something, currently you use the .alert component like this:

Figure: .alert .alert-success Looks good, but can only be used inline

I’ve found however, that when you need to alert the user to something that does not have a direct relation to the page you’re on, you need something custom. A great example is successfully achieving something after a postback.

Popup Notifications! Of course, why didn’t I think of that?

It turns out many people have already come to this conclusion as well. Unfortunately, I find their designs too similar to the alert and usually straying from Bootstrap design principles.

Check out an example from my favourite popup notification library (PNotify: http://sciactive.github.io/pnotify/):

Figure: The shadow doesn’t feel right and there’s not much this popup provides that an alert can’t.

I think if Bootstrap were to design a popup notification, it should more closely resemble the desktop notifications of Chrome and Firefox. For Example:

Figure: An example Gmail popup notification

As long as the popups have a call to action, I think that a healthy balance between alert and notification can be reached with a purpose separate to the already existing alert.

Add Callouts to Bootstrap

By Ben Cull in Bootstrap 0 Comment

These informational callouts are littered throughout the online Bootstrap documentation:

Bootstrap Callout

Figure: This is a nicely designed informational callout

They look great, and being used in the Bootstrap documentation I assumed they were part of Bootstrap as well. Unfortunately, they are not.

Please add these to Bootstrap as .callout, with the same contextual options as usual (.callout-default, .callout-primary, .callout-info, etc…)

Time Zone – Change “All Day Appointment” to be an all day appointment

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

Outlook currenly uses 12 AM to 12 PM for All Day Events. This creates problem when it is for different time zone. A full-day event is a full-day event, no matter what time zone your are in.

It would be useful to use additional time zone feature in outlook to display local time zone without changing time of operating system. Either you can change all day event to local time zone setting.

One best option to handle with this problem is storing all time zone using UTC(Universal Cordinated Time) so that there is no need for any other time settings and appointment can be rendered using local time zone.

Ken Getz says more on this:
Time Zone Disaster – All Outlook Appointments Bite the Dust

How to sell the fact that Scrum does not allow for any time or cost estimates?

By Adam Cogan in Scrum 0 Comment

Scrum pushes the fact that devs are bad at estimating, and instead of providing methods to help with this process, it asserts that you should simply explain that any estimate will be wrong, so we’re just going to work on the most important stuff 1st, and then when the client runs out of money, we’ll stop. How can this compete against competitors who give a price up front? Is there any guidance on how to sell this?