Tomorrow is April 1st and I have been pondering a number of challenges to begin. I wanted to wait till the next month the first of the month to start something as it is just easier to track.
I find for me the best way to learn is to keep doing and keep doing it. If I want to learn something I Just have to find a way to get into my routine and into my day. If I want to get great at JS and never write any of it.
I am just finishing up a Ruby on Rails course. While, I did learn a lot, I also feel like I learned nothing. The tutorial was wonderful and they really explained MVC and a lot of other programming basics well. The way I seem to learn best is through repetition so in six months I will probably forget all of that.
I think my plan will be to set up some sort of metrics I have to meet. A certain number of git commits a week and I certain number of projects once a tutorial is over.
I own a Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360 and Amazon Fire TV. This might seem really excessive, but I don’t have cable I like to have access to as much content as possible. There is also a flaw with each of the boxes that are keeping them from being dominate.
I buy a lot of content from Amazon that I can not get out of my streaming subscription services. I have a large library and have been with the amazon ecosystem for quite some time now.
The Amazon Fire TV almost has the best set top box out of all of them. There is something just fast about the Fire that the other boxes don’t seem to have. Playing video after video just feels like snappier.
The two best features of the box seem like they are not fully complete yet. The Amazon voice search is really incredible. They recognition is really spot on. If the Echo has taught us anything is there voice technology might be the best out there. I love searching with the voice search, but it only seems to look things up in Amazon. I would love to be able to fire open that show in Hulu if I have that app installed or even if they said “on amazon” or some nod to get some content sales but still gave me the option to go to the services that I already pay for it. For those who haven’t used their voice search. If that was able to go across all of your apps and services on the box it would be a game changer. I know have queues on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. I don’t know where things are all the time.
The other feature is Amazon’s watchlist. I add a lot of the “Prime” movies in there and anything new I might want to rent and check out later. There was a little box on one of my movies it said “watch for free on Hulu.” Its like they know we want it. My dream of one universal queue might be a possibility. But, for now I will take it.
I also but these interfaces need to go. Now, Amazon’s carousel works the best on the TV. But, this layout needs to get away from their tablets and when they try to do another phone. There is something about their design that just leaves me wanting something that gets out of my way. I know the have a mission to drive people to Amazons content. But, these are boxes that people are going to want to install apps on. They are going to want to switch content at times very quickly. I love the fact that there is gaming on here, but I feel like it should be a little more separate than lumping everything under the “apps” label.
If Amazon could open up their search and wish-lists to tap into other apps installed on the device. The Fire TV would be the best box to own hands down.
This week I have been in the middle of a massive project. It had a very sensitive deadline. But, allowed me to see some of the problems that face people in our work. These are nothing new to most of us. But, sometimes it is just good to vent.
Working with phone browsers it is challenging to do a massive testing of your product. At times, you want to use just and iPhone as a base and hope things render correctly across all WebKit/blink browsers. I like to actually interaction with the final product before we ship it.
Also, if you working on a stack where you can’t use SASS or CoffeeScript if you are into that. I want to be able to use SASS when the project calls for it. Now, I have been working off a massive CSS file that is nearly three thousand lines and is a nightmare to debug. I would love to dive into some of that partials world right.
And finally, if you are working in a small team and someone doesn’t like your design mockups. It is just better to be honest with them. Give, the designer good feedback. Nobody ever wants to hear “I don’t like it…”
Some days are just so much easier than others. But, sometimes it is just about showing up. I always want rather attempt than to not attempt at all. Yesterday, I was thinking about my next move and thinking about some of the next steps. But, today was just a day that took everything out of me. I have no energy to dice into a creative project. I just really want to put on some Netflix and sit on the couch and just read a book. That is ok some nights, it is ok to just turn it off and hit the rest button. This is something that I struggled with a lot.
There was a podcast I listed to at work today. It was by someone I respect greatly. He talks about the struggle of balancing projects and just living. It was only a few minutes and it was so honest and refreshing and just made me feel calmer.
A few other inspirational links to get us back in action for tomorrow. There is something really interesting me about this contest Airpair: Developer Writing Competition.
In Pieces – Some of the work on this site is so much on another level it will make you just want to open up a Codepen and just start trying to figure out some of this stuff.
Sketch Talk – A forum for all different types of Sketch comments and questions. Are forums cool again?
Firesize – Image resizing as a service? I can’t decide how I feel about this right now. I feel like I might use the shit out of this during a prototyping phases.
Building a Circular Navigation with SVG – Killer SVG demo to build navigation. It is a nice walkthrough even if you know little about SVG.
Sketch Recap
I have been taking a Sketch course and going through a number of different tutorials. The first project we did was replicate the Skype logo. That was much simpler than I thought it would be. The next thing was redesigning the Game Center icon for iOS. I am currently on about v6 and they all look terrible.
Currently this only live in Firefox but you can use symbols and images. There is a great demo here https://mdn.github.io/css-counter-style-demo/ as well so you can play with different options for list-style.
I love apps. If I could afford it, I would have an Android and iOS device and just swap sim cards once a week. I will always try new stuff and see if there is something new that I could factor into my process. Even though I really like my workflow. Here is what I have been working with the last few months.
Productivity
Evernote – Everything lives here, if I want to reference anything. I make sure Evernote has a copy
Todoist – I can install it on all my devices. It is the one todo app that I seem to auctually listen to.
Trello – Still don’t know how I can work this into the flow. I just really like i
Sunrise
Reading
Instapaper – The premimum highlights feature combined with IFTT syncing them to Evernote is just perfect
Feedly
Scribd – Just started a free trial to see if this can replace Audible. Selection is improving but their Android app has been a little buggy.
Blinkist – The cliff notes for non-fiction. I almost feel like I am cheating but it does help to cut the crap out of your reading list.
Writing
iA Writer – Recently released Android app is one of the best Markdown editors for the OS.
Draftin
Development
Hostgator – Have had zero problems with them. Plus, they are dirt cheap and handles my few static and wordpress sites
dploy.io – Just started using this and is a game changer. If you are still stuck using shared hosting. You might want to start factor this deployment system in.
**Drophost – Wordpress sites that sync with your dropbox. I started using this to make a Wordpress theme. A service to keep an eye on.
Github – We all use this now.
I finally played around with the app that has had everyone talking for the past month. Meerkat allows you to tweet live video to your followers. I only had access to this on my iPad so I was only broadcasting for a second. I started searching around on Twitter for some current live streams. There is something charming about this. All I could find tonight were some people streaming their walk home or their lunch. But, it was a lot of fun.
Could this be the start of something? What can we stream and what should we stream? Could Meerkat help us during rallies and political moments? What about music festivals?
What about bands streaming their own concerts and being able to control the stream and revenue models?
I think I could really found out my use cases once they have an Android client. For, now I am going to hold up my iPad mini and case my cat around the house.
Last night we watched the documentary citizen four on HBO. I honestly heard about this on oscar night as it won best documentary. I am sure like others I followed the Snowden case closely as it involved the services we all use every day. After all those leaks and all that knowledge out there. I never changed my habits.
I still use the same apps. I am writing this as a text file in my Dropbox. After all of that I never changed my workflow.
This documentary might make me look at things differently. The director shed a light on Snowden himself. The main focus of the documentary was the actual leaking of the information to the reports.
I am not sure if it was ever written the process of how he got his articles over the Guardian but it was intense to watch this data that caused such an immense reaction worldwide.
By the end, I felt that we should be doing more and we should of all taken this more seriously what was going on. I am sure most of this stuff is still going on.
I would still love to see a bigger push for privacy. Can we make web apps both easy to use and focus on privacy. It would be interesting to see some people take this problem on. I pay for Google Drive but would love a cloud storage solution that allowed all of those hooks be still remained easy to manage and easy move data around.
Does privacy have to come at the cost of simplistic design and user experience? I think we can and should do better.