Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Object-Oriented Approach to Design (OAD)

OAD is a wireframing and specifications technique for documenting complex business logic and interactions authored by Nick Iozzo of TandemSeven. As it says on Nick's blog, "OAD allows the designer to decompose a screen in a manner that reduces complexity. Even if the screen has millions of variations, OAD can document the design in just a few pages."

Below is a presentation from the talk Nick gave at Interactions 09 in Vancouver. The talk was specifically on methods of documenting wireframes for RIAs and complex business logic.

Reading this as someone who gets caught up in this process all the time, and struggles to effectively communicate to all levels of affected parties in a complex project, I find this kind of thinking and research is a refreshing look at how to stay inspired through the process by using the right tools and methods.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

@bitpakkit Inc.

Made the decision to go 100% independent a few weeks ago and have started working for two clients on long term engagements now. Both are very interesting projects and both have very clear value in their respective markets and promising technology already in place.

bitpakkit.com will continue to be mostly a blog, but the site is being worked on to showcase my work from the past years and the blog will simply roll up onto the homepage. Those of you who know me well will know that I have been working on smaller side projects and a few big ones, on the side, off and on over the past ten years. This has progressively become more and more of a focus for me and I am pretty excited to be going into it full force.

I will be supporting both local (Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa) and international businesses and I will update on the projects here when I launch the new site. Disclosure: I will also investing in a few of the smaller projects (really ideas at this point) I am looking into in order to help them get off the ground and flush out the potential.

I have created a vator.tv profile to provide some information about the services I am offering:
http://vator.tv/pitch/show/bitpakkit

To contact me regarding projects or to discuss this:
bitpakkit [a] gmail [dot] dom

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Skip iPhone. Proceed straight to Android.


Update: I am setting up the Android now.

I may be slightly late to this game but I still feel like an early adopter. I have decided to bite down and buy an
Android so I can deploy and field test applications on actual hardware without relying on the SDK emulator or access to T-Mobile service. Plus its a pretty cool phone - definitely faster and more typist friendly than it's Apple flip-flop wearing cousin.

Thanks to a little windfall, some fateful events and 'devigner' inspiration I have bitten the $25 application fee for the Android Marketplace and then purchased the device directly from Google for $399.99 (US). I can run it on a Roger's SIM here in Canada and a separate AT&T one in the US. You can join me as a late early adopter and grab it here now. Update: With duty, taxes and shipping it tips at close to $600.

Two notable features that sealed the deal for me were the completely unlocked GSM/UMTS hardware and an unlocked bootloader for development access to hardware and unrestricted deployment of unsigned apps. Routers aside, I honestly haven't touched firmware since that bizarre Microsoft moment we had years ago with Smart Personal Objects Technology, or SPOT (I have a couple and the devkit for them actually - make me an offer).

For more great ideas on ways to use a dev version of Android, check out PhoneGap and some stories. That way it won't matter that I don't have an iPhone ;-)