I wanted to post an update on my quest for replacing my paper-based planner with something electronic. After all, now that everyone knows that I'm crazy, I had to make sure everyone knows exactly how crazy.

I started off, very successfully, with Things on the desktop. I was in love. Data entry was quick and easy. The streamlined user interface, the general organization, flexible (hierarchical) tags, and project creation aligned perfectly with what I wanted. I spent about 2-3 weeks with Things, but ultimately I had some problems.

As I've said before, multi-machine sync is non-existant. I hacked a solution with DropBox, but every now and then I forgot to quit the app before I shut down my machine and had to go back and do it before I could run it anywhere else without possible database conflicts. Annoying. While I didn't buy the accompanying iPhone app, having to sync it on the local network while the app was running was a non-starter. When running out the door, I would never, ever, be able to do that, and that negates the entire purpose of having a portable app. The Things folks are still promising this is coming, but they have yet to ship it, so I can't rely on it.

As my free trial was winding down, I thought about taking some time and just writing my own based on Google's AppEngine. I wrote a long white paper of all the features I wanted (basically summarizing why I really liked Things), and just as I was starting to find other Googlers to help me in 20% time, I found Get It Done. It's a web-based version of Things, everything but the color scheme. Spot on. As a web app, my data is always available in the cloud. As a well-written AJAXy web app, I can use native-like gestures such as drag and drop to organize tasks and move items around.

One problem with Get It Done is that it's subscription ($40/yr). Cheaper than buying planner refills each year, but still a lot. I took advantage of the 15day trial and ended up making a lot of suggestions and reporting bugs. To my surprise, the developer responded, usually within an hour or two. Sometimes he even made minor changes I asked for on the website the same day. That's in direct contrast to the Things developers who rarely respond to the forums and don't seem to update the app that often. I figure if the developer is going to listen and be responsive, that's worth the subscription to fund future development.

I've been using GID for about a month now and while I like it, there are problems. I don't really like how projects are done. They're nothing more than tags, so to create a new project you have to add even more tags. There's no such thing as completing a project or being able to mark it as complete because it's not a real entity. Makes it hard to track completed projects. Speaking of tags, I didn't know how much I appreciated Things' concept of hierarchical tags until it was gone. In order to simulate it, I'm tagging each item with multiple tags which gets tedious and clutters the UI. There's also no way to filter on multiple tags. Finally, one of GID's greatest benefits - being a web app - is its biggest drawback. It's a web app. It's slower. It's clunky. Sometimes it feels really clunky. Entering data isn't as streamlined as a native app. While it does a really good job of emulating the native UI, it's got a long way to go to actually replicate it.

Things would be a slam dunk if only the data could be sync'd somewhere easily. I'll use GID for the time being, but I'll still be keeping an eye out to switch. Have I mentioned now nice the Things UI is?

Release notes can be found at Bug 549370; there are also small edits in the software update descriptions, since this will be the last Camino 1.6.x release (Bug 549374). See the full article for the usual status matrix.

Please note that there will be one and only one release of any localized version of Camino. Therefore, it's very important that release notes translations are produced and sent as soon as possible.

The translations are expected to be sent by Tue, Mar 9

The most recent Camino release is version 2.0.2 (Universal Binary, for Intel, PowerPC, needs Mac OS X 10.4 or higher). Camino 2.0.2 multilingual contains: Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Dutch, English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Camino 2.0 users should receive notice of the new version by way of the internal software update engine. If you have not set up Camino to check automatically for new versions, use the "Check for updates..." item in the Application menu.

A fascinating post detailing the creation of a consistent visual identity of the BBC’s online presence. Also, worth reading is the response from Paul Robert Lloyd. The use of big clunky Verdana for headings seems to have been phased out – hurrah!

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This just in: I’m leaving Opera.

Before I go any further, I need to make this very clear. I’m not leaving because I unhappy working for them, or any such rubbish. Neither did we come to blows over 42 different shades of red. Opera as company, and as individuals, have bent backwards to accommodate my remote working ways, and it’s been nothing but a fruitful and joyous time. I’ve made many friends, and it’s been everything I hoped it would be and more. I could very easily carry on for as long as they would have me.

But, I’ve got that itch. I’m sure a lot of designers feel the same way when they work on long term projects, and that itch is the desire simply to ‘do something different’. That is the sole reason. In fact, I’m hoping that we will still be working together in the future, it’s just that my work for Opera won’t be full-time as it is now.

I ‘finish’ full-time at Opera in late April. The reason for publishing this post now, rather than then, is that I need to get word around. I’ve been ‘off the market’ for a rather long time (looong before I started at Opera), and I’m now looking at an empty diary for the rest of the year. I have a few ideas, but very few plans at this stage, other than speaking at Future of Web Design London in May.

So if you’re looking for a icon/interface/logo/website designer or even character illustrator (the Mailchimp mascot has become the new ‘animal on fire round a globe’ request!) from May onwards, then please drop me an email. Thanks!

Release notes can be found at Bug 545347. See the full article for the usual status matrix.

Please note that there will be one and only one release of any localized version of Camino. Therefore, it's very important that release notes translations are produced and sent as soon as possible.

The translations are expected to be sent by Sun, Feb 21

The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool. At first glance, it looked like just another FFFFound, Ember or Img Spark, but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense.

Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDFs), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’. Content can be organised into ‘packs’ (folders) and as you would expect, it stores the original URL, and offers fields to change the title, and add tags or a description. It also provides integration with services like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, along with short urls, for sharing what you’ve found.

So, rather than having favourites being stored on different sites like Delicious, Vimeo, YouTube etc, they’re all in one place. In some ways I think of it as a huffduffer for anything that isn’t audio.

What’s particularly interesting is how well it’s been engineered to act like a Mac desktop app. Double clicking or pressing space bar on the thumbnails, takes you to the detail view, just as you would expect. Multiple thumbnails can be shift-selected, and to put content into a pack, you can drag and drop it. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I think it’s rather spiffing! It works so well it feels like it’s been a part of my workflow for long time.

I do have a couple of concerns however. With any system that has tags, I never feel it’s worth the effort of tagging unless I can be sure that the tags are portable in some way. I can download a bookmark file from Zootool (with delicious tags), but should the service ever go down, all that data and effort is lost. This is where desktop apps like Leap that support OpenMeta win. I feel this especially in tools like Evernote and Littlesnapper – is it really worth tagging if I then change system in a few months? The answer is no – I’m tagging less and less for this very reason.

It also exists online only. Part of what I love about Evernote (which isn’t really a comparable service BTW), is that it’s everywhere, even when I don’t have a connection. However, Zootool still has a place in my life, even if it isn’t used as a design scrapbook.

If you haven’t tried Zootool yet, I recommend you give it at least a few minutes of your life. While you’re there, here’s my zoo

In the spirit of the title of this blog, I wanted to pass along my experience with some software that is really awesome (and free). If you need a way to share data between machines and do some simple syncing, check out Dropbox. It blows iDisk out of the water. With a nuclear bomb. If you've ever been frustrated with iDisk's performance, frequent file copy errors, and just general malaise, try Dropbox right now. It "just works" and it's so easy use.

Yesterday, their servers were down for a bit while I was in the middle of trying to copy some files around. If I was using my iDisk, I would have gotten hangs and failures and dead files. The Finder probably would have locked up and I would have had to Force Quit it. However, Dropbox recovered transparently and when the servers came back up, everything finished copying without a hiccup. Proper error handling. Imagine that. The icons in the Finder are even badged to let you know what's been synced and what hasn't.

Go try it.

How often have you read a snide, bumptious or haughty comment where you feel the only reaction could be a raised handbag, accompanied by the high-pitched mocking call of “oooOOOooooh!”?

If you’re not familiar with the work of Vic and Bob, the chances are that it’s never. Well, hopefully that will soon change, as Hicksdesign has launched a site to fulfill that need you never knew you had to “oooOOooooh!”:

Now whenever you see such a comment, you point them in the right direction: oo00.eu (2 oh’s, 2 zeros and a european union). Obviously, feel free to use it on me if say some deserving! ;)

If you’re still confused, this video might help explain the origins of the raised handbag as a retort, (before going on to become a surreal contest):

Playing catch-up

This little side-project was the perfect opportunity to play with new CSS3 toys and HTML5 tags that I haven’t had time to experiment with yet:

CSS Animations: In any webkit browser (Safari, Omniweb, Chrome), the handbag will actually be raised, waved at you, and then lowered. There is a separate animation for the shadow underneath the bag. It’s a little clunky, but that suits the context.
CSS Media Queries: Just as this blog does, the layout changes when the viewport is reduced smaller than 700px. These style rules also govern layout on mobiles (only tested on iPhone so far though). Not currently supported in Camino or IE, but work in everything else.
HTML5 structural tags: Added footer, header and section, with simple javascript to allow their use in IE. Not forgetting to add display:block to each to compensate for lack of browser default styles.
HTML5 audio: In Opera 10.5 (Win), Chrome and Firefox, you should get the .ogg file, and in Safari, the mp3. It won’t be in time with the animation sadly, but I’m hoping that’s something that will be possible in the future. Thanks to the Webble Millers for providing their oooohs.
Web Fonts: Type goodness is supplied via Typekit, namely the gorgeous slab-serif Adelle. Currently a no-show in Opera, but hopefully once 10.5 final is out, Typekit will update their sniffing.

So depending on which browser you use, you’ll get a slightly different experience, but the same content.

I'm directly over the city of Columbus, Ohio, amidst a large amount of turbulence that would have spilled any drink I had, if only they had come around and brought me something. I'm also very frustrated, and I'll explain why over the course of this blog post, which is about my inability to find a task management system that has a foothold in even the 20th century. This will turn into something that most will skip with "too long, didn't read", but it's as much for my benefit as for yours. Who are we kidding, it's entirely for mine, I don't care about you.

I'm a list person. I need to write things down and capture them outside of my head or they simply won't happen. At one point in my life, I had a really great memory. It's still not so bad, but I can tell it's gotten a little worse as I've gotten older. Regardless, I have to write things down in order to organize them. This is the only way I'm able to execute on anything. It's also the act of writing things down that helps me remember them. I'm one of those people that learns best by taking notes, even if I never look at those notes again. None of this is up for debate, it's been proven time and time again to me through years and years and years of school, followed by work.

As an aside, I can barely read this as I type it because the screen is bouncing so much. Why? Because the plain is bouncing all over the sky, just north of Dayton, Ohio.

I used some task management software through college, but it was in grad school where I was really introduced to the joys electronic planning with my association with some research going on in the Graphics and Visualization Lab at Georgia Tech. They were doing work with the Apple Newton and I was able to procure one for daily use. That day my life changed.

Let me take a step back and introduce you to one of my neurosis and idiosyncrasies. I love office supplies: pens, highlighters, post-its, flags, folders, mechanical pencils, notebooks. If it's in an Office Depot, I love it. I can wander around a Staples for days and not get bored. I love them so much that I can't bear to see them spoiled by, well, using them. What if I mess up and have to scribble something out? What if I use too many and they're all gone? I have to force myself to unwrap post-it notes, let alone write on them. You can see this might make it difficult to organize my life with such supplies because doing so would mean I had to soil them.

Oh look, they turned off the fasten seatbelt sign.

With the Newton, everything was electronic. I could scribble out any mistakes, move things around on the fly, and never ever have to worry about unwrapping my precious stickies. It was as if a weight had been lifted from me. Most importantly, it was portable. Sure, my Mac had a stickies app, but I couldn't lug a PowerMac 6100/66 around to class in order to take down my homework or set up a study group. It was the best of both worlds in that I could write with my own handwriting (yes, it worked perfectly, regardless of what the press said) and I could take it anywhere. Life was good.

Right about the time I started working, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and decided that things had to change. Out went the Newton division and along with it my hopes and dreams. There was a new sheriff in town anyway, one that was taking over the PDA landscape: Palm. Sure you had to write with some arcane squiggles. Sure, it was tiny and you had to squint to see just about everything. But it was supported by everyone and had great desktop integration. That means I could use a desktop app at work and at home, but still be able to access and enter tasks/events on the road. For the most part, I was happy, but there was still something that left me wanting.

Remember that part about how I like to write things down in order to commit them to memory? The Newton allowed that, because I was really writing as if I was writing on paper. Doing any serious data entry on the Palm was a joke, so you just typed everything. In addition, the Mac desktop software was a joke, so I had to do most of it on my spare PeeCee at work and that made it difficult to do things at home. Also around that time, I was looking for something a bit more holistic in my life, something that would help organize not just remembering to do my TPS reports, but also help me make myself a better person.

About this time, I discovered Franklin Covey products. For those unaware, it's a methodology crafted around Stephen Covey's book about some habits and traits shared by highly effective people. He makes a lot of money on seminars and training, but that doesn't mean it's all schlock. There's some good stuff there, and it was the method I was after, not the religion. I was drawn to the "life-planning" aspect of FC, helping me to identify what and who was important to me, to set life-long goals and values, and to think about more than just TPS reports. It helped me evaluate who I was versus who I wanted to be and find a plan to unify the two. The approach of long-term and short-term planning, with frequent reviews, made a lot of sense to me and clicked very nicely. Day-to-day, it was a good system, and as part of a larger whole, it helped me to balance myself (or at least identify where I was out of balance so I could correct it).

There was some desktop software (PC only, of course) and accompanying Palm software (remember, everyone supported it). I used this for a while, but while the system was great, the desktop software was shit. Unadulterated shit. It did about half of the system very well, but the other half barely worked. It's as if the FC developers didn't even understand the system for which they were building software. The poor customer support people on the forums were overrun with complaints and eventually stopped responding. Updates were slow to nonexistent and didn't address the obvious bugs people would routinely complain about. After all this, I started to doubt what I could get out of this system. I made a temporary switch over to LifeBalance because it had a Mac client, but it never really worked right either.

Then one day I decided to take the software out of the equation entirely. If it was the software that was the barrier, the solution seemed obvious. I invested a couple hundred dollars in a nice leather binder, a year's worth of planner pages, all the inserts, pages, goal planners, etc and started my journey down the path people had been traveling for centuries: pen and paper. With pen and paper, I was free to organize myself exactly how I wanted and could adapt the system to my needs. There were no rules to follow because I controlled the horizontal and the vertical. What could go wrong?

I've lived with a paper planner for close to 10 years now and clearly it wasn't a bad solution. It allows me the tactile learning which I require by writing in my own hand, and it's portable. There are some problems though, which should be obvious. Remember my neurosis about not wanting to mess up? Yeah, well, I still have that. Crossing things out still makes me bleed internally. It's distracting, and always seems to happen right after a 3-day weekend when I write everything off by a day. In order to use the system properly, I need to write goals and assign them tasks. That means opening up my package of goal sheets and scribbling on them. This too makes me bleed internally because I know that once I put pen to virgin paper, the magic is gone. What if I write things in the wrong order? What if I make any number of mistakes? It's too much, and so I don't do it. There's also the problem that my paper-based system isn't on the Interwebs anywhere. If I don't have my planner, I can't capture anything. I generally have my planner, but not always. The last annoyance is the cost. The pretty pages aren't cheap, and you have to keep buying them year in and year out. At $65 a year (that's just for the yearly pages, there may be other pages I need to get too), you can see how much money I've spent in the last decade on this stuff. I could argue that being this organized has allowed me to be in the position I'm in and the system has clearly paid for itself in that regard, but it's still a bitter pill to have to swallow every year.

So come this New Years, I thought to myself I would try to find a solution that was up to the standards of the 21st century in which I'm a citizen. There are a few requirements to head back into the digital domain. First off, it has to run on a Mac (duh, but this means no iPhone-only solutions) and have a way to access it from my iPhone via something other than the built-in calendar app. Second, I must be able to have first-class viewing/editing from both home and work machines without resorting to lugging around a laptop or requiring the use of my iPhone at one or the other. As I split my time about equally working at home and the office, I need something that syncs between both sets of work machines. I do not want to have to have a separate laptop open at all times that I must carry to work in order to access my life. This much is firm. Finally, it's gotta cost less than the paper planner pages I already use, though this isn't really a problem.

Scanning the Mac desktop landscape, there are really only two players: Things and OmniFocus, and thankfully each comes with a 14-day trial. I downloaded both and played around with them, as well as took the temperature of their online communities in the forums (support is important). Here's the gist of what I came away with.

Things is a beautiful application. It's a lot like an iApp in that it doesn't have complicated inspectors for everything, nor is it cluttered with buttons and UI thingamabobs that probably serve some purpose if only I could figure out what it was supposed to be. A lot of time was spent on the visual design, as well as the work flow, and it shows. It's a very good example of a well-designed, user-centric application. The ability to put multiple tags on items harkens back to the planner software I used in college that's long gone the way of the dodo. It's very flexible and comes with lots of awards for both it and its iPhone app.

There are some downsides, however. Multi-machine sync is something you have to hack with Dropbox and seems easy to mess up if I forget to quit the app before I go to work or come back home. The developers have promised it for forever, but it's still not here (they're a pretty small shop). Being a small shop, new features and bug fix releases are few and far between. Now, I run a rag-tag open-source project with limited to no resources so I understand what they're going through, except my app is free. We don't get paid. I don't make real dollars (or euros) on every user, money they could theoretically use to hire some more developers. I've also seen complaints that the software doesn't scale particularly well (performance of single-file database, no nested projects, etc) and If I'm going to invest in a system, I'm not going to invest in another one in 6mo because it can't keep up with me. That would be unfortunate, and it gives me pause.

So I decided to check out the 800-pound gorilla, OmniFocus. If Things is simple and clean like Camino, OF is like Opera. Sure, you can do tons and tons with it, but, um, do I really want to? The inspector dialog for editing tasks is daunting. I feel a large learning curve coming on, and I'm not sure I want that, as I'll get to below. OF does a great job of multi-machine sync without any hackery and that's a huge benefit for me. Clearly OmniGroup is supportive of this software, they make good and solid products, and they have the resources to continue developing it for a long time to come. It seems we have the requirements met, thus I popped over to their forums where I found them full of happy users and OmniGroup employees answering questions and providing support. Upon further reading, however, I found something I wasn't actually expecting. The forums are chock full of Getting Things Done (GTD) zealots whose beliefs about how the software should be used are clear.

GTD, for those who don't know, is a different system for managing your life. There's nothing wrong with it, I have nothing against people who use it. However, I don't really care to follow GTD (I have my own system, thanks), and it seems that OF was built specifically for GTD. If you want a feature or behavior that's not part of core GTD, don't even bother asking about it, as you'll be met with stiff resistance from the community who will not so gently point out that you're doing it all wrong. I don't need this stress in my life, nor do I want to set out using software in a manner at odds with its design philosophies. Down that road lies madness, and I'd rather avoid it altogether. OF may be awesome, but I just don't want to use it.

Then someone at work suggested a cloud-based solution such as Remember The Milk. I hadn't even though about a web-based alternative, but the benefits were suddenly obvious. Multi-machine sync was entirely a non-issue, and I always have a web browser open for Gmail. After some searching around, I found Toodledo which, astoundingly, was free (let me say that again, free!) for just about all of its functionality. Not only that, it did more than just about every other cloud-based task manager (who, again, demanded yearly payments). It followed GTD, but didn't force anything down your throat and even had several non-GTD features that appealed to me (tags, priorities, etc). It also has a 3rd party API so there are multiple iPhone apps to choose from. Being able to open any laptop in my house, or any computer I come across and see my tasks is liberating, even in just the one night I've been playing with it (laptop batteries kept dying). Perfection, right? What could be wrong now?

For starters, the web site's UI is ugly and mildly confusing. Yes, it's powerful, but it takes a lot of getting used to and navigating to get what I want. There's also a bigger problem. In theory sending any of my daily work tasks up to a 3rd party server is bad bad bad. In practice, I work on an open source project and the majority of my tasks are for things in my home life. However, now I'm concerned about any strategy that isn't pen and paper since every multi-machine sync solution requires a third-party server. That said, my binder could get stolen on a trip, and it's clearly not encrypted, so it could leak just as much. The only truly safe solution would be to use a single work laptop with disk encryption and lug it everywhere, which violates requirement number two. This has my stomach in knots, enough so that I'm thinking about going back to Things and manually copying around folders.

One thing that I'm still searching for is a solution for calendaring. Tasks are just one aspect of organization. I still have to get to my appointments on time. It would be nice to have one program to be able to check calendar and tasks, especially on the iPhone where context switching is expensive. There's a phone app called Pocket Informant that duplicates/replaces the calendaring functionality of the built-in calendar app. It sync with Google Calendar as well as Toodledo. In that respect, it's perfect. However, it's really really complicated and clunky. It also doesn't support Toodledo's tags, and in a day of using it it's already corrupted itself once. That's fine, i just reset and did a re-sync (this is really why life in the cloud is awesome) and it's fixed, but makes me hesitant to spend the money on the software. Toodledo has its own iPhone app, but it lacks calendar, so I'd have to get the built-in calendar to behave with calDav, something it only wants to do begrudgingly. For example, I got it to see my work calendar, but only the first calendar. I guess when I get off the plane I'll try some hacks I've found to get it to see others. These are things I don't have to do with PI.

Congratulations if you made it this far. You're one of probably four (one of them is my beautiful wife, I love her dearly and have no clue why she puts up with me; that leaves you and two others). Where am I in all this task nonsense? I'm still not sure, though I don't have my binder with me this week on travel. I guess I'll have to find make something work, sink or swim.

Update from somewhere over Nevada: I decided to play some more with Things while I had my laptop and some time to kill. I went and entered all the tasks and projects that I had put into Toodledo just to ensure that Things could fit my workflow and something surprised me. It was so much easier using Things than the clunky Toodledo web UI that I'm almost ready to plop down my credit card. I'll be stuck with the poor sync hackery, but it might almost be worth it. I want to live in the cloud, I want to believe that there is no need for desktop software and that everything can be done on the web, but I don't think I can in this instance. At least the calendar side can mostly be online.

Leigh picked up a little gem from an antiques and curios shop in Burford, titled “The Internet A to Z”. This little tome was published in the year of our Lord 2000 (so possibly written in 1999), and it was interesting to see what difference 10 years makes.

In particular, there were 2 very relevant entries:

Opera

…and then iCab…

…ouch!

“I want my sites to look Safari in Safari, and IE6 in IE6. I most definitely do not want my sites to look like IE6 in Safari”

Sam Brown

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“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.”

Ben Terrett (Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts)

When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. There are so many factors that eat into that supposed ‘billable time’.

• Admin. The obvious one. I hire a bookkeeper and an accountant to look after this side, but you still need to do a certain amount of admin yourself. Becoming a Limited Company brought with it more forms than I could ever imagine.
• Illness. Your choice of lifestyle and diet can affect this, but even the fittest get the flu.
• Hardware/software failures. Kernel panics, hard drive failures, crashy software.
• Meetings. Not so much with clients (which are billable), but with accountants, bookkeepers, solicitors, financial advisors…
• Enquiries. This has been a big problem for me, as before I worked for Opera, the level of enquiries was such that I could spend half of most days simply replying to them.
• Phone calls. The ones unrelated to active projects. “I’ve lost my login details…” or “Can you just send me…”.
• Lack of motivation. It sounds lame, but you will get days where no matter how hard you try, you can’t produce anything. Usually a sign of needing a break.
• Power cuts, or lack of internets (something I see happen a lot with Twitter friends cut off by poor service from their ISP).
• Children!. We love them, but every working parent surely dreads the call from school or nursery, asking them to collect their poorly child.

No doubt there are many more.

The problem with setting such an unrealistic expectation is two-fold. The first is that you often feel like a failure for not achieving those core hours (sometimes you do far, far more of course, but that doesn’t always help the guilt!). Secondly, it leads to underestimating project times, where your belief of how much you can achieve is sadly mistaken.

There’s no easy way around this, it’s just one of the things I’ve got used to. Correction – still getting used to. I’m better than I was, but I still get this wrong.

There’s not a lot left of last night’s dream, but here’s what there is:

I was at a carvery, that looked like the kind of cafe you get inside a department store, but the layout was a little odd. After picking up a plate you then had to go around taking your vegetables off other people’s plates. Bizarrely, no one minded about this, but every table I went to I heard diners exclaim “Look at the hygiene! It’s so hygienic!”.

I finally saw what everyone was getting excited about. In order to get the meat, you had to queue up to go past an airport security style desk, where you were checked for condiments, through a shower (with your plate of veg) and then put on hospital scrubs before joining the final queue for the meat. After that you simply exited via a little white swinging gate, with a plate of roast beef and soggy but sterilised vegetables.

Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks:

Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDFs or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too.
Cheese Diaries) – where I take snaps of cheese labels to remember what I ate.

Some notebooks are private, but synced, (such Opera work) and I’ve got used to a system to help ensure confidential information doesn’t appear where it shouldn’t.

Simply, I have a default notebook called ‘Inbox’ where all clippings arrive. Every 3-5 days I go through and tag the content (type, * rating out of 5, colour palette etc) and then drag the clipping into it’s proper notebook.

Often, I’ll combine various images and text by copying and pasting into a single note, to create a kind of simplistic moodboard. To do this, I often have to resize and crop images, but that can be done by right clicking the image, opening it in a graphics editor (Preview does the job quickly) and saving it. When I get back to the note, the image is altered.

One of my favourite features in the new Boxee Beta is a bookmarklet to add internet videos to a queue to watch in Boxee later. Once you’re logged into boxee.tv, the bookmarklet is found bottom right. Clicking it on a page with supported video type sends it to Boxee with a confirmation message:

(The video in the screenshot was live visuals for Overture by Brian McBride, he of Stars of the Lid fame)

This is even more useful to me than all the various video apps that come with Boxee, is an example of what sets Boxee apart from just using XBMC. However, if you’re using ClicktoFlash, with Youtube set to use H.264 video where possible, it will interfere with the magic, and Boxee can’t find the video. You just need to make sure it’s unchecked if you want to use the bookmarklet:

Almost a year ago, Matt Carey and I set up a Tumblr blog called “The PS3 Hub”, focussing on using the Playstation 3 as a media centre. We kept coming across handy tit bits and links, and a Tumblr account was the obvious, and easiest, choice. I love Tumblr. It’s fab, not to mention MetaLab who created the Tumblr theme that we use.

Strangely, I seem to have forgotten to link to it from here in all that time. So, here’s the link to PS3 Hub.

P.S – a year later and I’m still glad I went for the PS3 solution. It’s been a brilliant all in one solution. Now if we can just get a bit more codec support and sub-folders in the XMB…

I know we've had this conversation before, but I would like to request, beg, plead, persuade, demand, buy flowers and chocolate for, whatever it takes. I'm this close to getting down on my hands and knees and taking up religion. I'm bringing this up again because it's serious and I want to continue our relationship.

Please, Food Network. Please stop stretching the non-HD content on Food Network HD. Bobby Flay and Ted Allen are not really fat. Panning across a kitchen should not make me want to vomit from motion sickness. It really takes away from the viewing experience. How can you focus on the food when everything is stretched and warped beyond proportion? I don't like watching your channel when it's a non-HD show, and that means most of them because very few of your productions are. If I (and others) don't want to watch your channel, I'd bet your advertisers will eventually catch on.

Maybe I am in the minority. I wish I could start a Facebook group or whatever the kids these days do. Twelve people might even agree with me. Bravo gets it right, and their cooking shows are getting better and better. Cooking Academy is delightful. If you're not watching it, you really should, even though I think there's only 1 episode left. Maybe catch a marathon.

(As part of a drive to vary the content on this blog from either Dr Who, Media Centres or Apps, I’m going to start documenting the snippets of dreams that I still remember in the morning).

The first part of the dream was too hazy, but I know it involved a school, and was probably another one of my ‘back being a youth leader on summer camp’ nightmares. It’s starts properly with Glenda the Goodwitch flirting with a centaur in one of the school rooms. I think the Centaur looked a bit like her husband Scott, so that was OK.

Leaving them to do whatever they were going to do, I was suddenly in the car, driving some kids from the camp into town. The town looked decidedly Belgian, like the historic architecture of Bruges, but the car park was a boring modern affair. It then cuts to returning to the car, but the kids have gone and so has my car.

After what felt like half an hour of panicking, I suddenly noticed something happening in one corner of the car park. On closer inspection, it was none other than Thom and Ed from Radiohead, performing a small puppet show set to music from Kid A. It was small but quite spectacular, and was obvious that they’d practiced a lot.

When the show was over, I realised that the chap standing next to me in the ankle length red corduroy coat (!) was in fact Jeremy Keith. He looked up thoughtfully, stroking his chin and exclaiming “Yes, that was really rather excellent”. I knew it was all going to be OK.

Then I woke up.

Dashnote is a well-thought-out dashboard widget interface for Simplenote, and my favourite of all desktop client/syncing solutions.

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I've now spent the last few weeks messing around with my Nexus One and I've got a few things to say about it. Note that I am speaking for myself only, not my company of employment.

What's good:

- Fast, though I haven't used an iPhone 3GS. I hear it's fast too.
- Pretty screen. I'm a sucker for those things.
- Nice 5mp camera with flash!
- Voice input on all text fields. I didn't know that, except I watched Gizmodo's liveblog.
- Nice Google Maps, Gmail, and gTalk support, but that's nothing new to the N1.
- Weather app is pretty cool. It has a neat display of high/low temps over time.

What isn't:

- Scrolling feels wrong. It's jerky sometimes. When you get to the start/end, there's no indication that you are there. The iPhone lets you drag just past the end and then it springs back, giving you really great feedback that there's nothing more. When you get to the end on the N1, it just stops and nothing happens when you move your finger. It feels broken. The "app wheel" has this feature, but none of the apps themselves do.

- Managing background applications feels like Windows 3.1. If you install anything useful (Twitter, SportsTap, Facebook, etc etc), you will be installing an app that wants to be online 24/7, and on Android these apps can be as long as the phone has juice. And they will continue to do so until they run the phone out of juice. Don't want them to kill your battery? You have to go to the settings of every single app, individually, and tweak the 5+ different settings (per app) on update frequency, etc. It's also very confusing when certain apps run in the background. I have a SportsTap widget that will update me with sports scores, but it didn't start working until I interacted with its widget. Now it's telling me about things from last night (shouldn't it already have?), and now I don't know if I can stop it until it kills my battery (yes yes, there is a screen for that, but it's buried and non-techies would never ever find it). Yes, it sucks having to switch apps and not be able to run background processes on the iPhone, but if this is the alternative, I'll take the iPhone any day. Thanks Steve.

- Want to know what background app killed your battery? Too bad. Once the battery is drained and you reboot, the helpful screen that tells you what ate the battery gets reset.

- Out of the box with a Google account, you're on Gtalk as long as the phone has power, even if the display is off (you're marked as away). Yes, you can change this, but it's a setting, buried two levels deep in a menu. Where'd that battery go, again?

- If you can't tell, I left my phone on overnight and came back and the battery was drained. What did it? Beats me, the info was lost when the phone rebooted!

- Pressing the hard home button takes you to a fixed screen, not the last screen you were on when you launched the app.

- The hard back button is offset from where the actual sensor is, meaning you have to hit the button 3 or 4 times just right to get it to register and take you back.

- On AT&T, it's EDGE/Wifi only. No 3G for that carrier. Most may not care about that, but if you're on AT&T, you sure would.

- Want to silence your phone w/out unlocking it? There's no hard switch to flick. You have to unlock it and interact with it.

- Want all your music sync'd from iTunes? Bzzzt. You need a 3rd party application to do that, or you can manually copy all your music there. Endless fun for all ages!

- When I hold it in my hand for an extended period of time, my hand really cramps up. I can hold my iPhone for hours with no strain at all. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I mostly feel it in my thumb and across the breadth of my palm.

- No multi-touch to zoom. It seems like the obvious default gesture to zoom in and out, yet the N1 makes you double-tap to zoom. It doesn't feel very "direct manipulation", and after years with an iPhone, feels clunky.

With full disclosure that I'm an Apple fanboi, I'm impressed with the phone, but bothered enough by it that I don't have any reason to switch from my 1st gen iPhone. I'm sure this is a really impressive phone if you're upgrading from a 5 year old RAZR. If my iPhone suddenly up and died, I'd use this, but I would still be grumbly about it.

I fast-forwarded (because, face it, nobody actually watches commercials anymore) through a Jim Beam commercial yesterday, on New Years Day. Isn't that an odd time to advertise? I mean, whose New Years resolution is to start drinking bourbon?

My Jersey Shore name is either Bones or Mikey Mortadella, though we're not actually watching it. We are completely hooked on True Blood, and if you've been following my tweets, you know we've now exhausted Season One which is all that's been released on DVD. Anyone work at HBO? I'll trade you a nightly build of Chromium for the second season!

One of my resolutions is to blog more this year. Hopefully I'll have enough to say about both Camino and Chrome/Chromium such that I'll need more than 140 characters.

While travelling this Christmas, I came upon some copywriting in a loo that I took umbridge with:

10-15 seconds and 80% less energy? Rather than 2 seconds and 0% energy? It’s really that last sarcastic last line that got to me though. It’s like the signs you get in hotels, claiming that they don’t want to wash your towels every day because they’re very concerned about the ‘environment’. ‘Well now’, I DID use my jeans, so that taught them! Fools!

Since when did we become Americans and start calling the toilet a ‘bathroom’? And surely ‘as nature intended’ would be actually be a large bush?

Things have been a bit quieter around here lately, and here’s why. Everyone at Opera has been gearing up to release a sneaky peek of Opera 10.5 before Christmas comes! This isn’t even at an Alpha stage but it will show off, not necessarily new features (there are some though), but some rather big improvements in various areas. One of which has already been hinted at in the post on Choose Opera – speed.

Can’t say anymore yet, but it will out on Tuesday 22nd December so you’ll soon be able to play with it, and find out.

…a giant woodlouse by the look of it! Quality clip art used on the programme cover of my daughter’s school Christmas play.

I’m more than just a few days late with this one, but I couldn’t let this pass without a mention! On Monday, Boxee unveiled their Boxee Box, a collaboration with D-Link to provide their own hardware solution. My initial reaction was that it looked like an award, and something that wouldn’t fit snugly into existing setups:

However, once I saw just how small it is…

…I changed my mind somewhat. In fact, the shape has very quickly grown on me, and in short, I really want one, despite already running Boxee via an Apple TV. (the restrictive supported formats, and size of, the PS3 are starting to get to me).

It’ll be interesting to see if it get’s a UK release and what the cost will be. I seem to recall the US price being $200, which should translate into roughly £120. That would be a price point that would beat the recently released WD TV Live into a cocked hat. A substantially better interface experience, and built in Wifi and SD card slot to boot.

I’m also rather interested in another new small solution that I recently discovered. Namely, the Acer Aspire Revo – a little nettop wonder that looks ideal as a Boxee Box:

If you go for the Linux version of these, they can be had for around £170, a complete bargain. It doesn’t have the industrial design finesse of a Jonathan Ive designed product, but I actually rather like it for that.

It’s funny, 3 years ago, I wouldn’t have considered a non-Apple solution for watching media on TV, but that’s changed a lot these days.

Release notes can be found at Bug 530177 (not finalized, but can be worked on). See the full article for the usual status matrix. There is an additional string to translate in Frameworks/Breakpad.framework/Versions/A/Resources/crash_report_sender.app/Contents/Resources/[lang].lproj/Localizable.strings: Bug 529989 comment #3.

Please note that there will be one and only one release of any localized version of Camino. Therefore, it's very important that release notes translations are produced and sent as soon as possible.

This month’s .net magazine (#196 December) features my article ‘Design the perfect icon’. focussing on icon design for websites, rather than for software. It expands on the talk I gave at @media earlier this year Icons for Interaction

This is my first really big magazine article that I’ve written, and found 5500 words much harder than I thought, and probably won’t be writing another one in a hurry! However, I’m really pleased with result, and it’s given me an idea of how much harder it would be to write a book.

I am very proud to announce today's release of Camino 2.0, available for download from our website. This release represents the culmination of over a year of hard work by our developers, testers, and localizers and easily surpasses the high quality bar we have set in past releases.

I want to stress that this is a product of our community, including our users, who provided valuable bug reports and feedback along the way. I am constantly impressed with the community's enthusiasm for the project and the care and thought put into every feature. They should be proud of this product and their contributions to it. I think it says a lot about the community that an open source project can have such high quality and attention to detail. Remember, none of these folks are getting paid. This is solely a labor of love.

I won't spend a lot of time listing features, since you can easily see them on the website, but many of the changes are under the hood. We're using a much more up to date version of Gecko (though not the latest for various reasons), and that will improve web page rendering and compatibility significantly from previous versions. If you find no other reason to upgrade, do it for the new Gecko.

Give it a spin, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

I'd like all the people active on this website and on the CaminoL10n mailing-list to raise a glass and toast to Camino 2!
You can find all the release details at http://caminobrowser.org but here I want to praise the CaminoL10n contributors, who did a terrific job in handling this major release.

I got a wee mention in Decembers’ UK Edition of WIRED magazine, in a section called ‘Icons of the Screen Icon’. Nice!

TheDieline.com (a packaging blog you really should subscribe to) have lustworthy photos of the special media kit sent to promote Kraken black spiced rum.

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I’ve used iPhoto, Littlesnapper, a combination of Leap and Dropbox, but of late, I’ve reverted to using Evernote as my collection point for design scraps.

The Desktop > Web > iPhone ecosystem is lovely. I have my design collection everywhere I go (also possible with the dropbox method I used to use, but there’s no way of tagging on the iPhone). The desktop client collects images and websites (as PDFs), and the iPhone client collects snapshots of sketches, camera photos and images saved from mobile Safari. Then the two ‘collectors’ get synced together to become one big collection:

Some more reasons why Evernote has struck a chord with me are:

• I’m not restricted to single images, I can add PDFs, group images together (as a note), and add text notes.
• I love the widescreen layout (above) where I can view thumbnails, followed a large preview of the selected item on the right – no need for anymore clicks or different screens to view it
• Importing content is so easy. The context menu in Safari offers ‘Add Image to Evernote’ and ‘Add Page to Evernote as PDF’. The latter gives me a complete web page (not a print stylesheet version), and any links are still active (not so with a PNG). The former works so nicely compared to some apps that get confused by links around images (cough, Littlesnapper).
• I’ve been experimenting with using a shared notebook to show moodboards/collected reference, and collaborate with clients, and this has so far gone OK. Would be even better if it was possible to layout images in a less linear way, and resize them, but that’s pushing the remit of Evernote.
• I find that I can often remember text within an image (especially as I often save a lot of found typography). Evernote’s OCR technology means I can find these images very quickly, and is often faster than tagging:

I do tag as well, usually marking content type, dominant colours and sometimes a possible project reference and a star rating. I’ve also started using it for things like a Cheese Diary, where I take a snap of the the cheese label, to store it for later reference:

There are still some negative points about Evernote:

• My main bugbear from last year still stands: Evernote makes it really easy to get all sorts of content in, but it still makes it tricky to get it out again in it’s original form. In particular multiple images can’t be exported easily – at least not without an Evernote branded border. It’s my data Evernote, not yours, and I resent the enforced advertising, especially with premium account. The ‘best’ way to do this is to export as HTML, and then fish out the images from the various ‘resources’ folders. Or drag and drop them individually.
• You can’t select multiple items and add new tags. The only way currently is to drag them to an existing tag in the sidebar, which isn’t intuitive, or easy (depending on how many tags you have).
• I would love to be able to restrict my view on the iPhone to a particular notebook.

Still, I love and use it despite these niggles, mainly because a lot of the things that niggled me last year (like thumbnails of images with loads of whitespace) have been fixed. Evernote development is ongoing and always improving, and I feel it’s a system I can put my trust in.

A tasty Flickr set of found typography – focussing on British/London Underground/Transport styles., which of course is right up my street.

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This week I had the great pleasure of speaking at the 3rd Web Developer Conference in Bristol, along with Elliot Jay Stocks, Sarah Parmenter and Dan Donald.

It was only a one-day conference, but I had a whale of time, meeting new folks like Elliot Kember (who shone on the 2 panels he attended), Oliver Ker and the legendary Jon Tan, with whom I’ve had emails and chat but never met in person. I also got to catch up with Ben Hostler, the creative director of Bristol-based agency Beef, who I haven’t seen since I was at Middle School with him… 24 years ago!

The talk I gave was an update of one I gave at @media 2007, ‘How to be a Creative Sponge’. Back then, Flickr was really the only option for sharing design collections online, but a lot has changed since then. We’re now spoilt for choice, but I explained my current system of choice – Evernote. Like Fireworks, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it in the past, but earlier criticisms have been fixed in recent updates. In particular, I’m finding that I can ofter remember text in an image that I’ve saved, so the OCR technology in Evernote makes it easy for me to find items I’ve collected. I would even say it was more effective than a tag.

Download the slides as PDF (27.8mb). I don’t tend to write presenters notes, so I’ve added these afterwards to try and help it make sense. All links mentioned in my talk are available on Delicious under the sponge tag.

I came away with a really good feeling about Bristol – it has a great developer/designer community, in a city that feels friendly and very un-intimidating.

I also came away with a realisation that there is a whole book’s worth of material in ‘Malarkey’s Prank Calls’. Everyone I met seemed to have at least one experience of that delight to share ;)

Create a spooky Speed Dial background (1200×600 pixels and save it as JPG or PNG), and I’ll pick my favourite for a special Halloween edition of Opera! See this post on My Opera for details of how to enter!

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In Squared I mentioned that I’d ordered both a Whitelines pad, and the Behance Dot Grid book to try out. After trying them both for a few days, I thought I’d just post a few words about them.

First of all, the Dot Grid Book. The packaging was sublime (see my photoset on Flickr), and the book itself has a rubberised card cover, wiro-bound, with good strong stock inside. The rubbery cover freaked some people out that I showed it to, and has the habit of collecting fluff!

There’s no show-through using black ink (maybe just the very, very slightest hint, but not enough to be a problem). The dots work quite well, and provide a lot of freedom. It’s also US letter sized, which is a change from A4. The only downsides are the that the wiro-bound spine gets snarled up (I’ve heard this from others, and experienced it already) and they felt the need to slap their logo on every page, which is a shame. Overall, a good idea, but really rather expensive for what it is (don’t faint -£14!). The more costly and elite a notebook is, the less I feel like using it. Too much pressure! I’ll enjoy using it, but I probably won’t be back for another one.

I found I preferred the Whitelines layout the most. The grid lines are still there, but the use of negative-space whitelines is just enough to draw by, without being too noticeable. The tinting drops out when copying, and every page is logo free! The binding was very good, but the only drawback was the weight of the paper. It’s fairly light compared the Dot Grid Book, and you definitely get show-through. On the A4 perfect bound pad that I bought that’s not a huge problem. It’s not nearly as expensive as the Grid Book, and feels OK to leave one side blank.

Looking over their product lines, my ideal Whitelines notebook doesn’t exist yet. I need one with a heavier no-show-through-paper, perfect bound with similar dimensions as my Moleskine sketchbook (21 × 13.2 × 2 cm). If by any chance the Swedish gods of negative space are listening -any chance of it?

Marshall Alexander creates wonderful one-piece paper toys, available as free PDF downloads for you to make, including the Max figure (right) having a wild rumpus!

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, my personal work is heavily inspired by retro design, videogames, movies, bright plastic toys and TV cartoons. Most of this work can be downloaded for free from my site. So get your knives and glue out, download some of the models and start building. Enjoy!

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Culture Vulture, who instigated the Moleskine Project I participated in a few months ago, have published a short interview with me. I get asked a question I’ve been waiting for -“What’s your favourite building?”

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My name is Jon Hicks, and I’m a stationery fetishist. I’m sure many of you are too. I love the design, feel, and most of all, smell of it. Some of my earliest and happiest memories are of walking into WHSmiths and smelling the pencils and paper, looking at the pads and notebooks (and being allowed to buy a new one!). Even in an age when my work is solely screen-based, I still lust after the senses-satisfying joy of new stationery.

Just recently, I’ve started using graph paper pads again, particularly for sketching interface wireframes. I’ve tried plain paper, but I’m one of those people that can’t draw a freehand straight line to save their life. Then the wonkiness of the line just becomes a distraction.

I’d been using a Paperchase notebook, which had a very faint dotted line squared paper, but it was only a few sheets amongst a variety of other types. It was ideal, but Paperchase don’t make a pad or notebook of just this type anymore, so after fruitless local searching and googling, I asked for Twitter feedback on a suitable alternative. The response was fantastic, and here are the three best options.

The Original Designers Workbook (Available from the Design Museum Shop, although mostly out of stock at the moment) fits the criteria, as subtle graph paper pad:

Here’s a sample of it’s grid:

The most-suggested option by far was the Behance dot grid book (available in the UK from Strawberry and Cream):

Best of all though looks like the Swedish Whitelines series, as suggested by David Hughes (available from Foyles in London, Amazon and Papernation in the UK).

Rather than use the traditional lined approach, it uses the negative space, creating a less destructive white lined grid:

I should also mention the lovely Konigi Wireframe Pad, which also looked ideal, but sadly is US delivery only. Yes, I can always get someone in the US to send it on for me, but on principle I prefer not to. They offer a great range of free PDF templates that you print off, but that’s not a economical solution in the long term. Fine for the odd sheet here and there. Also, Inkjet prints just don’t have that lustfulness about them in the way new stationery does.

So, I’ve ordered both the Behance Dot book and a Whitelines notebook to try them both out!