On life and work between Dublin & Berlin

Omni group will release apps on iPad …

http://joehewitt.com/post/ipad/

I’ve been trying to get an angle on this from which to write this post and organise my thoughts on the iPad. Finally after a day full of chatting with other techies I think I finally have a few good leads on why I think the iPad is going to be a hit, at least with me, and why some of the negative reactions might not be completely justified.

Comparisons

Technical comparisons are the obvious place to start on trying to categorise or classify a new product and while this is a completely valid thing to do it doesn’t or can’t finally define or discount it’s potential usefulness. Does my iPhone 3GS have the fastest CPU with the highest resolution screen and run multiple apps at the same time (excluding the iPod). No. Is it still by far the best mobile phone/computing experience that I can have right now. Yes. I don’t expect anything different from the experience with the iPad.

Aims / Reach

The whole “my parents could use on of those” argument is a little cheap, but in thise case it does serve a purpose. I reckon the iPad is going to open up the possibilities of communication and Internet use just that little bit more to a vast number of people who just weren’t being served well. Those people who just don’t get what a multitasking OS is (”where’s my Skype window gone? Oh there it is, behind my Safari window”) and who don’t want to ditch their tried and trusted Nokias. They understand those things, with the clunky buttons. They might not want an iPhone to replace their phone that they already have. Here’s where I think the iPad will have a good chance to win in a badly served market. For those folks in the middle, an iPad might bring them that step closer to being internet connected. And yes of course you can argue that these devices are for the young go getters. I don’t totally agree with this viewpoint. I think that Apple’s strategy is world domination now. Not in 10 years.

Touchey feeley

In the end such a small number of the supporters and critics have actually had an iPad in their hands. So just like anything else, it’s only then when you finally get that thing in your hands and see what it can do for you and how it does it that you can make that final judgement. I lost count quickly of how many people I knew that spat so much bile about the 1G iPhone,  Apple fanbois, overpriced junk etc. etc. that were turned into purring kittens when they finally had one in their hands. They’re all of course 3GS owners now.

Fit

In the end, I’ll be buying one as I can completely see how it will fit into my daily life. Yeah I can surf and write email on my iPhone. But the page size for surfing will make the experience that much better, no more (or a lot less) zooming in and out to read paragraphs or hunting for what you want in the case of badly formatted html. The software keyboard on the iPhone always worked so well for me, I can reach a totally respectable speed on that with just thumbs, so I’m expecting that the full keyboard is going to be phenominal. And since I do a lot of travelling, it will make it redundant to always schlep the relatively heavy macbook pro around just to be able to do to general communications stuff.

Evolution

Lets face it, Apple will evolve this thing with just as much effectiveness the iPhone if not more so, if only because it will create massive profits just as the iPhone has to date. It’s going to be really exciting to see the iPad app ecosystem grow and watch as people put out more and more amazing uses for the iPad. I don’t think I could say that with any confidence about any other “net” oriented device on the market.

Not including the weekend of course, we’re into day 3 of starting Incredible Things Department. We met with our second client today and are really happy that we had a great meeting and are really looking forward to getting started with them.

I have to admit that the number of leads and possibilities that we’ve been presented with does not warrant the scepticism that I was feeling when we started. I really thought we would have months ahead of building up contacts and work leads. We’ve been really lucky so far and have had lots of enquiries for projects ranging from iPhone development to consulting on eCommerce projects.

Hopefully the demand will stay that way and we’ll be able to really operate our dev agency as we have always wanted.

Well, it’s day one being self-employed and so far so good. I’ve deployed the holding site for Incredible Things Department and upgraded my DSL to the fastest speed, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages.

Since I have a tabula rasa I’m going to try to document everything that happens as we try to build a business from the ground up. I have the luxury that we’re right at the beginning of this adventure and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of ups and downs over the coming weeks and months, hopefully years.

It’s still not hit me the gravity of the situation that we’re in. Having 24 hours a day to play with, to decide how to use as you see fit. It’s mighty exhilerating. But since if’s only the first half day I guess that’s to be expected.

So, first things first www.incrediblethingsdepartment.com has a holding page until the logo and design is done. And now it’s off to check out some offices. Wish us luck!

It was a real privalege to hear Yukihiro Matsumoto talk yesterday at RubyFoo in London about his motivations and experiences while developing Ruby over the past 16 years. One of his goals which clearly resonated through his presentation was that he wanted Ruby to be nice to “Ordinary People”. This wasn’t said in a patronising way at all, I think if anyone has met Matz or has been to one of his presentations it’s immediately clear how humble he is. I think that he himself feels like an ordinary person who has been really lucky that his hobby project has evolved into a culture changing phenomenon.

The subject of ordinary people or more specifically ordinary programmers is something which is close to my heart. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years since worming my way into commercial software development. The reason being I definitely think I’m an ordinary programmer. I describe myself as a functional programmer when asked. Not as in the programming paradigm but rather, I just am good at getting things done and working, that’s the best I know how. Joel Spolsky put it perfectly in his post on “duct tape programmers”, google it, its a good read.

One thing that has bugged me though during the first day at RubyFoo was a discussion where panel members seemed to approach the subject of Java and Ruby in a particularly shallow way. Programmers were more or less pigeonholed into either great programmers and lousy programmers and of course then there were the obligatory association of those kinds of black and white programmers with the 2 languages. Now, Matz himself said in his presentation that Ruby is just the tool to realise your goals it is not the goal itself. In all corners of life there are people who are experts in their field, who are artists with their tools, and there are people with differing experience and skill levels who of course will be able to get things done but maybe in a less significant way. There was a distinct lack of humility in some of the opinions being expressed and it was that balanced thinking which I felt was really lacking. Thank god Matz was on the panel too!

I finally got around to tweaking this when it was the last straw. Here’s the link

I think it was this article (or one of the similar thousand) where I inferred probably the most important lesson on productivity that really works for me. The idea is “do your most important task first” before you do anything else when you start your work day (or evening/night). Thereby psychologically minimizing the potential effort and resulting stress of the work/tasks for the day. I’ve also heard of this lesson being called something like “eat that frog”. You see where the analogy lies.

But my take on that lesson is this. I don’t go to the gym and jump on the bench press with 70 kilos on it. I need to warm up. And I certainly don’t want to get all the heavy lifting out of the way early on to ease things up. So what really works for me is rather than placing any emphasis on any tasks whatsoever (logically taking into account emergent or exceptional cases) the trick is just to get started on anything that is related to the goals of the day. The first thing that comes to mind, the first thing at hand.

I agree totally with the article that the effects of doing anything productive before procrastinating are amazing. But by ignoring priority, size, difficulty, you’ve already got something done and started that momentum rolling without having to eat any frogs or whatever.

I suppose I would call this “The art of effortless momentum“. Just don’t think about it. Just sit down, pick a task and get going, build up some momentum.