Techiedog-blog

I've been traveling about for the last few days and with limited connectivity my online time has mostly been spent dealing with email and other coms rather than 'productivity' applications, so when I got back to my desk this morning and opened up Google Docs to check the progress of a collaboration I got a surprise - a brand spanking new interface. (pic from ZDnet review) That is to say that the home/file page has been revamped - the apps themselves remain unaffected. It is an improvement on the previous incarnation. There is more detail in front of the eye and dragging and dropping has been introduced both of which cut down time and effort. However, as a long time heavy Gmail user the file list layout with its new chronology based view, fires my 'inbox recognition neurons' which is confusing as I keep thinking I'm looking at mail. To my mind it all looks a bit cluttered - although the ability to see file name, shares and access date without extra clicking or...

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Thanks to everyone for being such an engaging audience last night - it was a pleasure to talk to you all. If any one has any questions or wants to argue against anything I said feel free to email me or post a comment here. You won't offend me by disagreeing with anything I said, I welcome debate and am not too proud to surrender to a well reasoned argument - debate helps us all understand better. As always with these things there are points I realize I should have made and other things I realize I should have expanded upon but time is always such a limited commodity. If any one can make it to the next Leeds open coffee we can talk further. Thanks for some really interesting questions and conversations after the presentation. As promised, the presentation (as a PDF) can be download from here : Also, below is the reading list I recommend and also the list of Web 2.0 apps that are worth taking a look at to see if they can help you in your business. If you find any others you like, pl...

Tonight I'm doing a talk at bmedia, (West Yorkshire's media, new media and technology network) on the topic of Web 2.0 and how it relates to the SME. I aim to cut through hype and misunderstanding and unearth the trends that led to Web 2.0, extrapolate these forward and give some pointers as to how it all can or will effect the enterprise. I'll post up the presentation on this blog after the event. Web 2.0 and the SME - Exploiting the potential of the 'New Web' for business Stories about MySpace, Youtube and the new range of Google products abound, but Web 2.0 offers the potential for far more than consumer and entertainment applications. Ian will discuss how the SME can and must take advantage of these new technologies and new ways of thinking in order to stay competitive.

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents , changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance. Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid. So, what prompted this moment of clarity? Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee , hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University ! Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails co...

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...

So this blog has been once again rather sparse for a while. There are many, many posts half finished in draft (and some of them are absolute corkers, believe me, you don't know what you're missing) but I just haven't had the time - and "Why's that?" (I imagine) I hear you call. Well, I'm just so darned busy. Its not just the stuff, but also the traveling to the stuff as well - a thought that also reminds me how much of my cash keeps going to line the exquisitely tailored Telco pockets for the 'privilege' of consuming a bit of WiFi while away from home and office. God bless all you forward thinking coffee shops, hotels, airports, University Campuses and the occasional Foneros (yes, they are out there is you look really hard) for providing a free data life line to a struggling Tech Entrepreneur. Someone really should put together a searchable, location based directory of all these freebies .... no, not me - I'm too busy! My 'business' rig...