Type Cast

Seeing as though I was made redundant for the second time in my career recently, this video reminded me of the first time.

I’ve had Leopard (or Mac OSX 10.5) installed on my machine for about five weeks now. And I have to say, it’s been a less than perfect experience. The installation itself was the usual, seamless Apple beautifulness. Simple to follow dialogue boxes that didn’t tax the imagination.

It’s using it in the real world which has thrown up the problems. Firstly, Firefox seems to have become very unstable. Get plenty of tabs open and start to flick between them. I’ve been met, on a daily basis, by the spinning beach ball of death and the need to force quit.

Some of Photoshop CS3’s palettes have stopped working. Try editing the type size or the corner radius of a rounded rectangle with the ‘Options’ tools along the top of the screen. It’ll work once and then never again, with rendering errors and all sorts of other brokenness.

Some things work, but seem to be a retrograde step in usability. In iCal the tray showing an appointment’s details has disappeared, only to be replaced by an ajaxesque pop up panel. There is no way to quickly view appointment details. You are forced to double click each appointment to show the dreadful popup and then click ‘Done’ to close it.

The dock, about which a lot has been said already, is fine but the blue fuzzy application active markers are too subtle for my liking.

Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of things I like, ‘Quicklook‘ being one of the best, but these issues are seriously hampering productivity and efficiency - something that I hail the mac for over a Windows machine.

At the beginning of November this year I found myself in a position that I hadn’t encountered for five years - since the end of the .com bubble. Redundant. The old company for which I worked went into administration with about one days notice for all 30 or so staff.

Interesource was a great place to work. A lot of very intelligent and often opinionated people gathered together under one roof producing some of the best work of our careers and helping shape the new web landscape.

We built sites such as DoggySnaps.com and MyTelegraph, campaign sites for the Conservative party (which got top billing on the Sunday evening iTV news), ProblemSolved.co.uk as well as a plethora of sites for leading UK charities and blue chip multinationals.

Anyway, what’s done is done, time to move on. Though not getting paid for October will take a little longer to get over.

The good thing is that, as far as I know, most of my ex-colleagues have found gainful employment either at other agencies or starting up on their own. That’s testament to the talent at Interesource that just one month after the demise of the firm no one is struggling for work.

As for myself, I’m back in the Creative Director’s chair spinning plates at a digital marketing agency, Pancentric. We have a great number of clients and I’m developing some of the accounts to embrace social media, as well as evangelising internally about all things digitally social. We have a very strong SEO offering and it’s interesting approaching the social media beast from a more marketing and brand awareness perspective.

Anyway, here’s to the future. I hope I’ll get chance as some point to work in such an environment with such a crowd of people as Interesource.