tdog.blog

About a month ago, I went out and bought an iPhone. By and large, I love this little device, and not only because its a gorgeous gadget. I also love it because it allows me to minimize my computational needs while traveling–to such an extent, in fact, that several of my colleagues and I are embarking on what we call the “iPhone Experiment”.

Here’s how it works. When we travel (across town or across the continent) we do some hard thinking about what we really need to take with us. Do we need the full-fledged laptop? Probably not. What do we really need?

* a device that allows us to call, email, and text our colleagues (and receive same)
* a device that allows us to surf the web
* a device that allows us to enjoy personal music and photos and other stuff if we need to kill some time
* a device that allows us to record notes and data
* a device that allows me to make photographic records of where I’m at (whether that be shots of people, objects, vistas, whiteboards, whatever)

Now the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard isn’t the greatest input device for my fat fingers, so I bring along a quadrille notebook (I love that I can write and draw on the little squares) and a trusty pen.

Over the past month, I’ve learned how to trust this minimal kit–I don’t need to be able to review every single document right now, thank you very much (but if you send me PDF, I can preview it nicely on the iphone). I don’t need to be tethered to every single electronic heartbeat that my colleagues and clients send out. I don’t need to do word processing on the fly. I’ll be back to my desk in a few hours (or days).

I don’t have the annoying immediacy of the Blackberry (you have to request email manually) and that’s okay by me. Others who have made the switch to iPhone find this particularly hard, but I always hated the constant interruption, as thought I were some kind of Magistrate that needed constant consulting.

If I need further electronic backup, I carry around a 1 GB thumb drive. That way I can transfer files (and receive them) without the lag of email.

It’s not perfect, but its mighty fun to go through airport security without the laptop, knowing that I have a lot of what I need right in my pocket.

More later on the experiment.

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I hope you weren’t one of the 500,000 IIS sites hit with a SQL injection attack over the weekend. For all of us, regardless of platform, we need to remember to sanitize all input before we allow data to touch our databases! Especially in this day and age, when it seems that everything lives in the cloud.

Read the whole story over at Wired.

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Combine Twitter and the traditional startup pitch…and you get the TwitPitch.

The Twitpitch is the invention of Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant. Boyd had plans to attend the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, but was having trouble scheduling meetings with startups. To address this problem, on Tuesday he posted on his blog that in order to make things simple for himself, he was posting a schedule of times when he was available for meetings. He added that he would not accept email-based proposals for these meetings, only Twitpitches.

Read the full piece hereand watch this space carefully. There will be plenty more things crushed down to 140 characters for easy digestion in our snack culture, for example:

• Serialized summaries of books, movie plots, and other longer-length media.
• Summaries of web APIs and web services.
• Summaries of news headlines (already in clear evidence).
• Anything related to “breaking news” or “emergency information” — perhaps government channels for security information?
• Summaries of opinions or issues, with or without links (more and more of this!).
• Live sampling/surveys of reactions to panels, speeches, workshops (sanctioned, not guerrilla).
• Replacing blanket emails with twitter channels — thereby removing the reply-all evil in the world.
• Games that play out in real life — think of those annoying games held by radio stations involving asking people at a mall if they are the guy with the $10,000 certificate.
• Some kind of advertising will have to take effect here…a retail store using twitter to broadcast deals, but not being confined to a zip code or locality. Hmmmm…
• Integrating with time-tracking applications, RFID, mobile devices, warehouse inventory systems, hmmmm. This is all content too!

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Paul Walhus of Spring.net interviews me about SxSW 2008 and other subjects.

See the interview.

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Designers….learn it, use it, love it.

Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.

After creating a well-structured and usable grid, consider allowing it to breath. A page without a grid is a usability nightmare. On the other hand, a grid that has creatively overlapping, escaping, or energizing columns leads to a more enjoyable user experience. Discovering or planning areas of the design that will have some freedom will lead to more interesting and appealing design solutions.

Article includes case studies and examples. I’ll certainly be using this idea more as it brings some sense of stability into front-end design considerations.

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