Always have an Intent with what you do. Give your designs opinions, give your designs an Intent. Then you will never just blend in.
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hockenberry_we_are_all_designers.html
After watching (and posting) Ryan Singer of 37signals talk about design, I decided that a nice start to our coacher project would be to do something like the 37signals approach. So after writing a few lines in Evernote about the functionality of coacher I did two html mockups of a coach and athlete view (also got sidetracked and did a helper function. A programmer gotta code)
I find it a good way to, more than, visualize what will be in the app. We are using the twitter bootstrap for rails to easily get the CSS needed and don’t waste time on those parts. We will see if Anders likes my mockups when we talk tomorrow otherwise they can be changed.
Today Apple will present new products at their WWDC but some weeks ago Tim Cook talked at D10 and now the entire interview is out. Great talk about a lot of what Apple do and why they are so successful: http://allthingsd.com/20120611/apples-tim-cook-says-hello-the-full-d10-interview-video/
Design is not just something you add at the last moment, it should be present at all times. This Great Talk by Ryan Singer explains and exemplifies it very well for the things we are doing:
Anders is in the final weeks of his exam period studying hard for Security, Science Theory, and Linear Algebra exams and I have already gone on my last long summer break. Tomorrow I will get my ACL reconstructed, so a project was needed now I can’t enjoy the sunshine. So I have just run this command in Terminal and committed it to our git server, so now I won’t be bored to death in the coming weeks. Anders will join in July when he has passed all his exams. This will be Anders’ first rails development so it will be a process of learning, teaching, and efficient development. We have guessed (planned) that a first release of the system will be at the end of August. We will keep you posted on progress and workflow in our first project together.
Roy Fielding was an integral person in designing the World Wide Web and without him and others the World would definitely not look the same. His dissertation is an amazing introduction to software architecture and the architecture of the World Wide Web: REST. Roy Fielding’s homepage and his dissertation (pdf)
Go get it and learn how the Internet actually works
Sometimes knowing nothing about a knowledge area is the best way to solve complex problems: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18302158
With technology development and research accelerating and software in the public sector at a low point this seems like the way to go: Code for America
Seems pretty cool and hopefully some new awesome start-ups can benefit.
Olesen & Nielsen 