Archives

We Need a (Project) Plan

It’s been surprising — very surprising — the number of people that I know who have made the switch to the Macintosh in the past year or so. It’s as if Apple’s “Switch” campaign, which stopped airing two years ago, is only now having a delayed effect. But really, what it’s about is that the smartest and most creative people are doing the smartest and most creative projects on the Mac. And yet there’s still a big hole in the platform’s offerings when it comes to pulling off great projects: project planning software.

The 800 pound gorilla in this niche, Microsoft Project, has its faults, to be sure. But really, that program is sufficiently fluid and pliable for serious work, and it has the added cachet of serving as a de facto standard for project plans nearly everywhere. At Behavior we use it extensively, and not just our project managers — I spend time in it frequently myself, and I reluctantly depend on it as a fine-grained, flexible tool for estimation, planning and tracking of fairly complex jobs.

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How Many Blogs Does One Man Need?

Create a New WeblogIn the grand scheme of things, relatively few people have weblogs, but among them, there is a minority for whom it’s not uncommon to have even more than one: web designers. If freedom of the press is most free to those who own presses, it’s not unreasonable to think of web designers as those kinds of owners. For us, it’s possible to dream up and professionally construct a weblog (or most any kind of site, but especially weblogs) over a fast food-fueled weekend. I know at least one or two who each seem to be operating a Hearst-style empire of regularly updated sites.

I’ve always resisted the urge to create more than one weblog for myself because I know that, given my very small amount of free time, there’s enough labor involved in the upkeep of just this one without compounding the labor with another. Moreover, I’ve been nursing an idea for many years (to which I’ve hinted here a few times) that this weblog is just one early form of what will eventually be a massive database that contains most everything about my life. If it happens between the day I was born and the day that I die, the idea is that it would be recorded here.

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All You Can Eat Bookmarks

Del.icio.usWhen it comes to social bookmark managers — hosted repositories where your favorite bookmarks mingle with everyone else’s — I’ve been more of a Spurl fan than a Del.icio.us devotee. Mostly, I’m responding to Spurl’s generally nicer user interface which, as a designer, I feel compelled to support. For all its spareness though (and indeed, spareness is essential to its appeal, I’m sure) Del.icio.us is the one that, undeniably, represents the most potential. Its user base is larger, and its principal author, Joshua Schachter, has just secured a dream investment scenario in which he has agreed to receive funds without giving up control of his own project. You can’t not root for that.

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Podcasting Not All Hype After All

iPodderXThere are at least a few podcasting skeptics in my office, and until last week, you may as well have lumped me in among them. The technology seemed a bit too eagerly hyped to be really as cool as all that, plus I couldn’t justify finding the time to experiment with it. At some point, though, I downloaded the installer for iPodderX, probably the most well-known of the podcasting software aggregators (or whatever this particular sub-genre of software is termed), and installed it.

It was a week or two before I actually opened up the software and started to fiddle with it. In spite of its best efforts at imitating an Apple-style user interface, it’s not particularly elegant or intuitive, but I managed to get a few podcast feeds functioning and transferred to my iPod.

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An Inside Job

I’ve always worked at design studios rather than within design departments. That is, at shops (usually small) that deal with lots of different kinds of projects for different clients, rather than on a company’s internal design team, working on projects for in-house clients. Those studio jobs haven’t always been glamorous, especially when I was just getting started, but I’ve always enjoyed the varied exposure to different businesses and challenges that kind of environment affords me. It’s been a kind of an education in itself, and I’ve become familiar with lots of industries that otherwise I never would have known much about at all. It’s no accident that, at the last crossroads of my career, I helped found Behavior, rather than looking for work inside a corporate entity.

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You Got Your Flash in My Acrobat

My first thought when I heard this morning that Adobe has agreed to buy Macromedia was: poor Freehand, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Though I long ago stopped using that drawing program in favor of Illustrator, it was nice to know that it was still kicking around. Freehand was my first introduction to the Macintosh, and so I carry a quiet little torch for it. For me, anyway, if Adobe decides to finally kill it, it will be like the end of an era. Of course, there’s the possibility that the program’s owners — who licensed Freehand first to Aldus and, when that company was bought by Adobe many years ago (notice a pattern here?), then to Macromedia — will valiantly try to find yet another new publisher. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

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Design in Flight Four Takes Flight

Design in FlightThe newest issue of Design in Flight is out now, today in fact. This issue looks and feels more like a serious, world-class design publication than ever; editor Andy Arikawa, who apparently has the strength and fortitude of a hundred designers, does an amazing job bringing it all together and I highly recommend you go get yourself a copy (a bargain at US$3.00) and see for yourself. Between its covers, you’ll find some really good articles from Veerle Pieters, Mark Boulton, Molly Holzschlag and many more. As an added bonus, you’ll get my own contribution, “Acing the Interview,” which is a very modest little attempt at helping designers perform better in interviews. It’s rather more low-level an article than I tend to like, but I think it contains some really useful straight dope. If you have an interview coming up, you could do worse than to spend your three dollars here.

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Programming Skills Wanted

Lionel RichieLionel Richie has a jukebox in his head, or so he said many years ago, and new songs pop into it all the time — a principal source of his boundless inspiration, apparently. I’ll never reach the heights of “Say You, Say Me,” but I’m starting to think I have a venture capital fund in my head, because new ideas for Web-based products and businesses keep occurring to me all the time. Over the weekend I had an idea for the funniest and most robust movie plot generator ever — not exactly a powerhouse enterprise, but something that I think a lot of people would find amusing for at least a while.

The problem, really, is my appalling lack of programming talent, a situation that’s becoming more and more acute with each new idea I generate and am unable to act upon, and compounded by the continual emergence of hot new technologies that seem like immense fun to play with.

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Timing the Hand that Feeds Me

XML BadgeOne thing that I’ve learned is that if I open up NetNewsWire when I get to the office in the morning, my day is shot. I mean, I’ll get my work done, but rather than working for long stretches of uninterrupted productivity, my time is fragmented by countless little diversions to other people’s weblogs. An RSS aggregator is like a Pandora’s box of distractions, and it’s difficult to resist when facing those not-so-fun tasks that populate a work day. Very often though, I have little choice but to hunker down if I want to get out of the office before midnight, so I make a conscious effort to avoid firing up NetNewsWire at all.

Which leaves me feeling perpetually behind on my weblog reading. Not only am I missing out on the latest postings and developments with the many good friends I’ve made online — prompting feelings of guilt over not being a sufficiently faithful reader of their weblogs whenever I chat with them — but I’m missing out on lots of genuinely great content that’s constantly being generated in the blogosphere. Two or three times a week, I’ll find an evening hour to try and catch up with all of my RSS feeds; it’s exhausting and it always leaves me with a nagging feeling that I might have better spent that time doing some actual design work.

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