khal weir | blog

Something I’ve come to realise as I’ve broadened my view on web application development, is to not rely solely on conventional sources such as books and blogs for learning.

Think about it, were you ever shown how to use a hand dryer? What can their design teach you about UX design? Good design is good design, it doesn’t have to be a web based to inspire you to create a fantastic new webapp.

Great customer service in an Apple store, a nice touch at a restaurant or hotel that made a difference to your visit… what can you take from that? How can you use what pleased you in the real world and apply it to your site or application?

The pride and attention to detail a master knifemaker puts into his work is inspirational, even if your product is virtual and your tools a mouse and keyboard.

Seeking inspiration from unusual sources isn’t new; the development methodology SCRUM is based on the sport rugby. The concepts of Kanban and Just-in-Time, first employed by Japanese factories, have also been applied to software development.

Nature has always been a valuable source of design inspiration, for example the nose cone of the Shinkansen bullet train is modelled on a Kingfisher’s beak and the Fibonacci sequence is also found in the iPod’s design.

Everything in life has a lesson to give, the skill is knowing how to find and use it.

I managed to snag an invite from a friend who was lucky enough to be invited to a Google Developers event.

Just in case you don’t know Google Wave is the new web app from Google which they believe will replace traditional email and more. The project’s strapline is ‘what if email was invented now?’ and aims to solve some of the problems with they way we communicate online. Wave has the potential to merge and replace IM, Social Networking, Wikis, Email, will be open sourced and has an API allowing developers to write extensions or incorporate Wave in external sites.

Here are a couple of videos that explain Wave in more detail

Google Wave in 2 minutes

Google Wave revealed at Google I/O 2009

So far, my impressions are it’s fairly quick and clean… but until more people I know are using it, its only really useable as a kind of twitter/ forum hybrid by browsing the with:public waves. As far as I can tell, theres no way of knowing if a person is currently online, which seems odd to me and every now and again you are reminded that this is a product still in development as it hangs and gives you a quote from Firefly (incidentally, Wave gets its name from the show too).

I’m looking forward to Wave being released publicly and using it at work, as I think it will be an excellent project management tool. We have two offices, in different timezones and communication can be difficult. We currently use an inconsistent combination of Basecamp, Google Docs, Skype, phone calls, email and, within the main Edinburgh office, face to face conversations to communicate; I see Google Wave replacing and centralising a great deal of our communication in a clean, searchable organised tool.

If you got here via a Google search for free invites, sorry I don’t have invites to give yet!

These are the tools I use everyday and consider them essential for my work. I use Macs at both home and in the office so most of these are Mac only, sorry PC users!

Coda
www.panic.com/coda

This is my favourite IDE, after years of using Dreamweaver, dabbling with Eclipse, Aptana and Netbeans – this is the one that gets everything right for me. The tabbed, all in one interface, is fantastic, the SVN integration is awesome and we are big fans of the code sharing over Bonjour in the office.

Transmit
www.panic.com/transmit

Also from the guys at Panic, this is great FTP client.

Growl
http://growl.info/

Growl provides subtle notifications in the corner of your screen for various applications and activities for FTP file uploads, new IM or Email messages. It means I can focus on what I’m working on and can choose to ignore the Adium duck flapping in my dock if the IM message doesn’t warrant an immediate response.

MAMP
http://www.mamp.info/
Local development area.

Time Tracker
http://code.google.com/p/time-tracker-mac/

Stunningly simple time tracker, really useful.

Textmate
http://macromates.com/
A very powerful and feature rich text editor.

Textsoap
www.unmarked.com/textsoap
I just recently found this one, so haven’t played with it that much; but so far it looks like it’ll handle anything I throw at it and give me nice plain text.

Firefox
www.mozilla.com/firefox/
My Firefox is loaded with extensions, so many, I think its worth a separate article.

Litmus
http://litmusapp.com

Feed it a URL or a send it an email and Litmus provides screenshots in a variety of different browsers or email clients. They also provide Alakine – a desktop application and a plugin for Coda to better integrate testing into your workflow.

Parallels
http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/
As great a tool as Litmus is, sometimes a screenshot isn’t enough and you have to actually test the functionatily of a site. Parallels allows you to quickly turn on a virtual machine and run another operating system. Currently I have 3 Windows XP VMs installed covering the latest 3 versions of Internet Explorer.

Notebook
http://www.moleskine.com/
Essential for problem solving, notes in client meetings. I like the small blank Moleskine’s as they are neat looking, small enough to slip into a pocket and the blank pages are versatile.

Balsamiq
http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

I came across this Air app recently, its a great looking tool for creating quick mockups of web pages. It has a simple drag and drop interface and I love it’s sketchy style.

Spotify/ Last.fm
www.spotify.com|www.last.fm

I listen to music almost constantly, I find it helps me focus. I tend to use Last.fm more at work, as I can tune to my radio station and it will play for hours playing (mostly) only music I actually like. Spotify is also great, but the radio stations aren’t as good as Last.fm and I’m often paralysed by choice when I try to thing of an artist or album I want to listen to.

Pepsi Max

Sweet, sweet, sugar-free caffeine!