An architect friend yesterday recommended that I read an HBR article from 2008 called ‘Design Thinking’.  The article is available on the web site of the author’s firm here.

He asked me what I think.  The short reply I typed on my iphone just before going to sleep:

The article has really nice examples, and I agree with most of what it has to say (in terms of how to approach innovation).  However, I feel the writer is being a little self-serving by using the word ‘design’ in two different ways: (i) the act of ‘design’, as practised by people from lots of different disciplines (whether they are developing products, services, or simply internal processes), and (ii) ‘design’ in the sense of work done by people in the ‘creative’ professions (graphic designers, interaction designers…), especially (more…)

Background

If you read my previous post about Sencha Touch 2, you will know that I’ve been experimenting with different ways to develop cross-platform mobile apps, without having to write and maintain separate codebases for each platform. Phonegap seems to be a great way to do that, allowing you package an HTML5/JS/CSS app as an app which, when deployed, runs insides a WebKit instance on the mobile, but without the browser interface fluff. (It does more than that, but that’s not the point of this post.)

I tried using Sencha Touch 1.1 and the pre-release version of Sencha Touch 2, but found (more…)

I had an email exchange with a good friend recently. It went something like this:

Friend: One of my colleagues has an app idea. It’s xyz. How hard would it be to build?
Me: Not too hard. I can immediately see how to do most of it. There’s one part of it which requires implementing an algorithm I’ve not used before. We would need to have .
… gap of a few days …
Friend’s colleague: I have the ready. What’s the timescale for getting the app up and running.

For those of you who are followers of Lean Startup, you’ll immediately see some things wrong (more…)

What are Sencha Touch and PhoneGap?

The combination of Sencha Touch and PhoneGap is alluring for someone wanting to rapidly prototype mobile applications:

• Sencha Touch provides a framework for developing HTML5/CSS apps targeted at mobile devices, providing classes for common UI elements, database functions and the like, all of which can be accessed using object-oriented JavaScript
• PhoneGap packages those apps (trees of html/css/js files) into native app wrappers (which can then be submitted to app stores for iPhone etc.).  It also provides APIs to allow your JavaScript to access native (more…)

Tasks are different from notes. This might sound obvious to most people but if, like me, you’ve tried to implement Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, you might have the same problem as I do: you come across so many interesting things in the course of conversations, conferences, reading etc., that you end up with a lot of items in the ‘some day’ or ‘inbox’ categories of your todo list/app/site/pad/whatever.

I use toodledo.com to manage tasks. The free version (more…)