At 1024 wide, clean & clear:

At 1366 wide, overpowered by ads!:

Obviously these images are scaled but head on over and see for yourself. Despite that though, it really is a great resource. Whilst I have no comment form I feel much more comfortable getting away with a slightly opinionated post, maybe I’ll keep it that way like other trailblazers have.

Credit where it’s due, I ripped the foundations of this set up from Pete’s theme.

A quick run through of what’s there:

• dannyt.sublime-project – the project file for the excellent sublime text 2 editor
  Main things to take from this are the ‘build systems’ and the paths. Simply opening this file in Sublime should leave you looking at the right project structure with access to build and launch systems under sublimes Project > Build Systems menu.
• src folder – where all the wordpress theme php files live
• scripts folder – unprocessed Javascript, Less and CSS files
• build folder – contains an ant build file and various supporting build utilities

So far I’ve found playing with sublime and streamlining the build process the most enjoyable aspects. The actual theme side of things hasn’t really kicked off yet. I like the prospect of working out a good responsive design and brushing up on some CSS and JS wizardry but not too fussed on PHP. From the looks of things though wordpress deals with most of that and it’s mainly a case of putting the right function calls in the right files.

I’m using IIS Express to run the theme locally which after a bit of digging around I’m pleased with the setup of. I can keep the configuration in source control and launch it as part of my build so I now have a relatively friction free development process.

I’ll go through more details of the build process in a future post, normally I’d suggest leaving a comment if you have any questions but I’ve not got as far as the comment form in the theme yet! But feel free to message me on github or tweet me on twitter (@dannyt)

It’s a bad habit. Denser screen resolution, font collection, colour display, brightness, lack of browser chrome, full-screen, ergonomics, touch, text input and many other factors makes for a completely different experience.

Fine if you’re tweaking a layout or just trying to get a particular feature working, browser bashing is a perfectly acceptable way of reviewing your work but make sure you spend the majority of testing time in the correct context of the intended devices.

Beg, borrow and steal (okay maybe not steal) as many different devices that might be accessing your site as possible too. Your app and users will thank you for it… Actually they wont, as this is a case of the best experience being one that isn’t noticed, a bad experience certainly will be.

One major thing that has stuck out to me across these three platforms is that Apple and Microsoft have relinquished nothing to the carriers, whereas Android, by it’s very nature, is completely bound to them and suffering as a result.

When I first fired up my Galaxy S I was presented with a choppy, pixelated Vodafone logo animation. Once running, Vodafone were rife across the phone with their own music store, app store and other horrible apps that had clearly been thrown together with various greed-led deals with third party service providers. It instantly made the phone feel like it was several years dated on first usage. Fortunately, I’m a massive geek and within the first month I’d rid myself of this hellish experience and installed a custom rom on the phone which made things immensely superior. It ran faster, had a significantly improved battery life and actually worked. But I’m a massive geek. How many Android consumers aren’t and wouldn’t know a custom ROM if it slapped them in the face? I’d wager most of them, in fact in my experience the majority of my non-geek friends hate Android and still crave the iPhone. I know, from experience, this is the carriers fault, which makes it Google’s fault for not managing this well enough.

When I fired up my new Windows Phone, still on Vodafone, there was a single solitary Vodafone app. Which I was able to immediately delete. Microsoft have retained quality control in the same way Apple have with the iPhone. So yes, iOS and WP7 are closed, proprietary walled garden platforms, but they’re performing significantly better to the majority as a result. Android really needs to stamp some authority on how much carriers can butcher this otherwise amazing platform. This has been explained in much better, more informed detail by Siegler.

In my opinion, the carriers business today is old-fashioned and totally holds back innovation in the mobile space. They are driven entirely by greed and for some reason there just seems like no need to innovate and compete. Every year mobile contracts get more restrictive and expensive and tactics of the operators are becoming ever more underhanded and dishonest. Unfortunately we’re somewhat at ransom to these few giants which is why it’s all the more important the likes of Apple and Microsoft retain their control. I would love to see Google impose some UX restrictions on what the network carriers can do to their phones.

2011

New company website

At the beginning of 2011 we finally launched a new website for Moov2, accompanying it was a blog on business software for sharing some more company related thoughts. To be honest, from the outset things were a little slow on our part for keeping it up to date. This was down to the usual poor excuse of being too busy. However in recent weeks we’ve made a real effort to add regular new content and I’m fairly happy with where its going. We’ve also been putting a bit of time and effort into Google Adwords, SEO and Analytics. The purist in me really dislikes those terms but they are paying dividend and there are genuine approaches to these things without resorting to underhand tactics and falsified pointless copy.

Silverlight

In February, I dived into Silverlight and I was very impressed with the platform. Unfortunately I don’t think Silverlight took off as much as it could have and the outlook for it in its original guise is now somewhat limited. However Windows Phone 7 does leverage Silverlight and the development approach for the upcoming Windows 8 Metro apps, while not Silverlight, is looking to be very similiar to it (I.e. c# and xaml). So I’m still pleased to have familiarised myself with it.

Blog

In November I declared that I was going to increase how much I’m blogging here. It’s only been a few weeks but so far I’ve upped the amount of blog posts I’ve been writing (although not really frequency or consistency). It’s hard to pinpoint the benefit of doing this but it definitely feels better to be documenting my thoughts more. Another benefit of doing so helps me better get in the mode for writing which helps with content on the Moov2 site too.

Upset in Flash world

Adobe made a few PR blunders with some mixed messages about the future of Flash, Flex and AIR. This did cause me some minor annoyance purely by having to first decipher these messages and then explain them to some of our clients (summarised here). However it doesn’t cause me any great concern. I think the Flash platform still has a strong future in gaming, cross platform mobile and brownfield projects. That said, I am fully on board with HTML5 and standards based development and can definitely see this as a unified development approach. So whilst the announcements from Adobe (and similar from Microsoft) may not have been handled as well as we’d like I do think they’re doing the right things by putting their focus into HTML5.

Personal

Outside of work and geeky interests I started a blog on mountain biking which has been my main non-tech interest and healthy activity in 2011. I’ve not put too much effort into the blog but Mountain biking is definitely still holding my interest and has had a definite positive effect on my waistline. I’ve done some amazing rides and made some great new friends as a result.

At the very end of 2010 Andrea and I moved into a new house on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. After a tough few months trying to sort out a mortgage we were very grateful to finally move in. The novelty has still not worn off, I love living so close to the forest for biking and the general lifestyle of the area is great.

2012

Championing a new approach

I’ve been running a software development company since 2003, it’s often still terrifying and I know I still have a lot to learn. However, I have learned a thing or two along the way. One of those is that no matter how meticulously planned a software project is change is inevitable. This was always traditionally referred to as scope creep but that puts the onus on the client to not deviate from the original plan. Fact is, change comes about not because clients just change their mind but because the change presents itself as the obvious thing to do. I will post more on this in the future but going forwards our approach will be to be open to and expect change. This will be managed by tackling the obvious problems and opportunities first and reviewing at regular intervals (or even constantly). Each project will be broken down into multiple smaller projects and we will have the agility to change direction at any point without loss of investment for our clients and wasted time for ourselves.

Systemisation

Another benefit of having been running a software development agency for nearing a decade is that we have encountered and solved many problems. We’ve identified processes and procedures for dealing with them and have been constantly looking for new more efficient means of doing so. However, this hasn’t always been particularly controlled, more of an ethos than standardised practice. I’ve recently read a great book, The E-Myth Revisited in which the author describes the process of creating a system (a defined, documented approach for exactly how to tackle something) for each and every process within your business. Whilst at first this seemed like a ridiculous undertaking the more I thought about it the more I’ve entertained the idea. There are so many aspects of running a software business that could be easily summarised into a documented procedure which could then effectively be undertaken by anyone (within reason), reviewed and improved upon over time. This essentially creates a path for improvement and also reduces friction when delegating and sharing tasks.

In 2012 I intend to systemise as much of what I do as possible with the intention of being able to easily alleviate tasks that are currently tied to myself or whomever currently undertakes them. This will also set a starting point for improvement from which slicker and more efficient processes will hopefully evolve.

Continue to play

Finally both in work and in my own time I will be encouraging ‘play’. It’s become somewhat of a skill at Moov2 now to be able to investigate and review new technologies as they come about and where appropriate integrate them seamlessly with our workflow. This has many obvious commercial benefits but also is a lot of fun. Going forwards I hope that we’ll be able to share some of our thoughts and findings with the wider development community in the form of blog posts and open source projects.

So that’s my wrap up of last year and some objectives for this coming year. To anyone who has read all of this (and I don’t expect that to be many, I’m writing this more for my own benefit really), I wish you a very happy and successful 2012!

First impressions of the Lumia 800 are superb. Windows Phone 7 offers a refreshingly different approach to the modern smartphone and Nokia have wrapped this up in an excellent chunk of hardware. The slightly bulging screen protruding from the front really makes it feel like a futuristic device and the size, weight and texture of the phone in hand has a premium and robust feel.

Windows Phone 7 is a very welcome surprise and sets a good benchmark for what we can expect in the upcoming windows 8. In the first few hours with the phone I found the user experience delightful with a lot of thoughtful touches that really adds to the familiarisation process. For example, in the email application, after performing an action a couple of times (using the context menu to enable a multi-select facility) the phone prompted me to a touch gesture I could use (tap to the side of the list item) instead of going via the context menu to save myself a tap. This is an excellent example of interface-led-discoverability as without this gentle prompt I would have been unlikely to work out this short-cut unless by accident or having to read through documentation somewhere (never going to happen ).

There’s plenty of reviews for the Lumia 800 so I’ll not go in depth on the phone and features but wanted to share my initial reactions. With the festive period coming up I am hoping to find some time to experiment with developing a couple of Windows Phone 7 apps to become a bit more familiar with some of the intricacies of the process and will document my experiences here.

Good job Microsoft and Nokia, I sincerely hope this is the start of a new competitive player in the smartphone market. More competition encourages more innovation and with a bit of luck one or more of the platforms will have innovated enough to warrant another switch the next time my contract renewal comes about.

… on a mission to convince the web design community that working with clients can be enjoyable, constructive and creates outstanding websites.

One of his key messages is that the traditional approach for building a website is essentially “big bang” development. Every few years a website is overhauled and redeployed to great fanfare and significant expense only to immediately begin slowly rotting and be forgotten about until the cycle begins again some years later.

Now this is all remarkably familiar to software development and typical complaints with waterfall development methodologies. A familiarity by the way, which is particularly understandable considering the line between “website development” and “software development” is now well and truly blurred (more on this in a future post).

Perhaps we should be doing away with major version numbers. There should be no MassiveProjectX to be delivered by DeadlineY. Throw that door-stop of a requirements catalogue out of the window and spend some time actually empathising with the businesses we’re trying to help. We should be building open and on-going partnerships with our clients focusing on providing smaller, more frequent deliveries which are solving the most obvious and important problems first.

Agile approaches (inspired by the agile manifesto) have been widely adopted by many developers to help with many of these issues which is great, but it is still a largely developer adopted practice. More-so than involving business people as per the original manifesto principles. More effort needs to be made in getting on board with our clients and working together to enable the best solutions which work out better for both parties.

Paul’s mission is set for full steam ahead in 2012 and I intend to follow a similar path focusing on more effective client relationships. I highly recommend reading the first chapter of Paul’s upcoming book Client Centric Web Design which is available for free. I’ve found it a real eye opener and will be posting more thoughts along these lines soon both here and from a more professional capacity on our company blog.

As I’m about to go on holiday for a week having an offline tool might be useful so am going to give this a try.

Next step is to publish this post…

The problem I see with this strategy is a matter of perception. I challenged Chris on this asking what he thinks the outcome would be if I went out and randomly asked 100 under 25 year olds “what do IBM do?”. Chris answered by stating that during some research they found 99% of people had heard of IBM but very few could name something they are known for. So an issue they have researched and acknowledged.

Great, however IBMs approach to resolving this is to start a campaign of ‘educating’ young people about what they do. They’re going to be visiting schools and telling students about the wonderful things IBM do in the hope that when they leave school, they’ll be so enamoured by IBM that they want to seek employment from the glorious mega-machine.

Herein lies the flaw, the great young minds that are graduating currently are not simply just ‘unaware’, they’re plain disinterested. The exciting opportunities being sought by the top talent are with the exciting companies doing exciting things. The obvious targets I would suspect for young people are the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter, [insert other new and rapidly growing tech company here] and the real hot talent are likely even sold on the prospect of their own startup.

This isn’t an issue faced solely by IBM, I’m sure Microsoft, Oracle and many more of the old guard have a similar challenge to face. Unfortunately simply telling people how great and exciting you are isn’t going to cut it. You have to BE great and exciting.