April, 2010

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19
Apr 10

Week 483

The week just passed in a blur of events. We reviewed our prototype, which may be held in a little too much reverence. I see why – we aren’t a technology company, doing things like this looks risky or weird. It might have been better to spin it in music-speak, something like “working out some riffs” or “cutting a 4 track demo” perhaps. Anyway, it needs some changes, and additions, which will mostly be flat photoshop mockups pasted into ‘dumb’ pages I think. It was quite a chunk of work, and I didn’t finish until Sunday evening.

Meanwhile, a volcano erupted and clogged our skies with ash stopping flights. No problem thought I, not going anywhere. I’d ordered a brand new Macbook Pro on Tuesday but a little dealy wasn’t a problem. And then my current laptop went *poof* and properly died. Arrgh! Suddenly the efficencies of mass transit and globalisation becomes quite important.

It’s now Monday evening finishing this post, still no sign of where UPS may actually have my package (maybe Cologne, maybe Shanghai) and tentative signs of flights resuming. Getting work done if fine (ancient G5 tower to the rescue) but I’m a lot less portable. Work is at a very specific desk.  Laptops, I realise, are ace.

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design — 1 Comment
12
Apr 10

Week 482

So, that was a bit of a gap in weeknotes, my apologies. The weeks before the dev/fort were mostly quiet, like a coiling spring. The 10 days from Good Friday onwards were spent at a remote location in a big house near Inverness with a team of quite exceptional talents doing a mammoth sprint. A two day ideation generated something like 800 postit notes, whittled down to about 60 ‘groups’ and finally a couple dozen priorities. After a day or two exploration on things we knew we’d need (fundamental UI concepts like a timeline, a music player) and generating some data robust enough to hang it all off, we started building. And building.

At the end of the week, exhausted, we had a Thing. And the Thing was really good, exactly what we needed at this point (arguably a bit earlier…) that stands opposed to the glitzy video demos I’d previously completed by myself. They now look very thin indeed. This Thing on the other hand while not perfect by any means is deep, has layers and extracts attention from you in a good way – you gladly hand attention over. I played with it for 10 minutes at the end of the week, it was compelling – I want to spend more time with it and explore more, enjoy more of the artist we built it for. Rough edges aside, that is the response we want to illicit, so I think a success.

Now, sleep.

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