The only two I’m not sure about are Natalie Pinkham and Steve Rider. I don’t feel that Pinkham adds anything and mostly just annoys me with her ‘one of the gang but I’m a girl’ thing. And Steve Rider is about as wooden as they come.

But overall, a great line-up. Quite how it’ll fair with the BBC team is yet to be seen but, as Martin Brundle has said, the fact that there are now two broadcasters who’ll be screening the 2012 F1 season can only be good for fans.

[…] a complex pattern created from simple, repeated, geometric steps defined by elementary equations. It’s this easily generated, difficult to reproduce intricacy that has led to a guilloche appearing in some form on most of the world’s currency.

This is the same guy in the official press release announcing that he will be staying with Williams in 2012:

“This has been a tough season for the whole team but it has given me personally the opportunity to learn and develop. I am convinced that the steps we have taken to improve our competitiveness will bear fruit in 2012 and beyond. I am thrilled to be part of that and also to represent the people of Venezuela in Formula One.”

Perfect English and nice use of the phrase “bear fruit”.

(Just a bit of fun, you understand. I’m perfectly aware that all press release content is generated by one person — the team’s Press Officer.)

Jakob Nielsen has a useful overview of the technique:

1. Replace every Nth word in the text with blanks. A typical test uses N = 6, but you can make the test easier by using a higher N value.
2. Ask your test participants to read the modified text and fill in the blanks with their best guesses as to the missing words. Each person should work alone.
3. The score is the percentage of correctly guessed words. Because you’re testing comprehension rather than spelling skills, synonyms and misspellings are allowed.

If users get 60% or more right on average, you can assume the text is reasonably comprehensible for the specified user profile employed to recruit test participants.

Of particular interest to me was the difference in meaning between ‘readability’ and ‘comprehension’ regarding the copy being tested.

Here is an example of the technique. (I scored 100% but had to remind myself that it simply meant the copy being used was comprehendible, rather than indicating that I was a literary genius.)

Fascinating and delightful. And I did not know that the ‘command’ symbol (⌘) was meant to be a castle as viewed from above.

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

First Williams Renault, now (apparently) McLaren Honda.

All aboard the retro bus!

(I entered ‘electronic calculators’. Worked just fine.)

Not having Flash installed means I come across a lot of “Flash isn’t present” messaging. It generally follows a pattern of telling me that I need Flash to view the content, which can’t be found, therefore something is wrong with my system and I need to do something to fix it.

Take any page with video or audio content from the BBC website as a good example of this kind of messaging.

The message is presented in a very negative manner and leaves the user with all the work to do if they want to enjoy the content. The burden is on the user to update their system, rather than on the content provider to offer an alternative non-Flash version of the content.

Whilst this is obviously the path of least resistance for most large-scale organisations I find the shift in blame annoying. With the death of mobile Flash and the proliferation of mobile devices (to use just one line of argument) the emphasis is surely now on responsible content providers to make sure they have suitable non-Flash alternatives in place for those systems that don’t support Flash, either through design (e.g. iOS) or choice (e.g. my Mac).

Now, I’m not so naive to think that this is the work of a moment. Nor do I believe that Flash on the desktop is going to go the same way as Flash on mobile devices anytime soon. But I do believe that Flash will cease to be the de-facto method of displaying all rich media content and that content providers should be communicating more clearly with users to reflect this shift.

The Audi website is a good example of how to do it.

The basic message is the same — that this particular part of the site requires Flash, which isn’t present — but rather than telling me I need to install Flash to view it, the message tells me that Audi are working to resolve the problem which, one assumes, means a non-Flash version of whatever this content is.

It’s a much more positive way of framing the message.

The burden shouldn’t be on me to have Flash installed. It should be on content providers to serve up decent, non-Flash content. Their messaging should reflect that.

Read the backstory on Smashing.

PopClip is a faster, easier way to work with text on your Mac. Just select some text with your mouse, and PopClip appears.

I’ve always loved Georgia. The new ‘pro’ version looks like a beautiful update.