Oh How I hate Design

Today I am frustrated, which is annoying.

Let me set the scene. It's a beautiful sunny day, I'm sat in the garden on my laptop casually getting some work done (the frickin birds are tweeting - it's lovely). Nice ice cold drink and no one in the house to disturb me.

So why frustrated? Because the work I'm supposedly trying to get done is the worst kind (for me): design and layout. I'm trying to work on a refreshed Web 2.0 style layout for www.tomnrob.com (which is currently still not built 2 years after we launched it). I hate doing this stuff.

The problem is I am a programmer, and applications developer; art and design is pretty much beyond me. Sadly because I (we) can't afford to hire a top notch designer into the team I have to make the best of it - mostly by cutting, pasting and cropping bought stock images.

I've been at this for about 3 or 4 hrs now (on and off) and it's just annoying!

As you can see it's going to be a cross between "hip" web 2.0 and stylish corporate - at least I hope so!

Despite my (temporary) mood all is not lost! I did find a few awesome resources to help people create web 2.0 style sites and designs. Some of the stuff is well worth a read.

This guy in particular has an amazing amount of content and commentary. I especially like his assessment of the future of the Internet, it has really got me thinking too about how I could develop sites in the future.

He even has created a totally open source "developers" CMS: which seems to be able to let you develop amazing sites really really quickly and roll them out to consumers in record time. I'm definitely seriously considering switching from my usual framework and custom CMS (hah!) to using this simple (but effective) approach.

On top of all that I think I have changed my mind about OpenID again (after the initial excitement stage I went through), thinking it through (and reading up) the security implications are insane! That said the idea is nice and I've been toying with possible ways to make a new form of OpenID that DID have a basis in trust and security - more on that later I think.

I did have a half started posts of some links to things I like to read day-to-day on the net: but I think I'll leave that for another time :)

Skegvegas

Welcome to my new blog, lets hope I keep this one up a bit more.

Todays post comes live from SKEG-VEGAS: aka Skegness (on the East Coast). What a wonderfully dead place; lots of old people and tired looking shops. I'm stuck here because my brother's playing in some jazz orchestra tonight and my support is apparently essential, not totally sure whether it's going to be decent music but we shall see.

Anyway slightly more interesting is the new phone I got today (O2 love me again and so I got me an upgrade); a Nokia N81 8GB.

The first thing that impressed me is the amount of onboard memory, 8GB. When I got my last phone (A Motorola RAZR) 18 months ago it came with a 512MB upgraded memory: which at the time was really advanced. However I've been trying to work out what I might use it for, and the answer is very little. It does have an inbuilt music player - but I also have an 8GB Ipod (which I prefer for music), so just photos then? How many photo's can I fit on 8GB.. (it's a 2MP camera) ..I'd imagine quite a few; but then I hardly take photo's.

However all may not be lost. The N81 also has WiFi connectivity: which means when Im at home and in public WiFi spots I can browse and check emails (or blog!) for free. This is definitely my favourite feature so far because it means that I can avoid lots of expensive bandwidth bills when I fancy grabbing my emails, my university has free WiFi so that will work out really cheap!

I especially like the idea of picking up my emails 24/7 because it seems an obsession of mine at the moment. 8GB of memory means I can store all my emails and other data on the go really easily. Plus the phone has a PDF reader (admittedly a crappy Adobe one) so I can open documents and what not as well (lecture notes on your phone ftw!). Im hoping the phone's memory will double as a "pen drive" too because that cuts down on something else I need to have in my pocket!

So a big thumbs up so far for this phone: I usually don't like Nokia's that much but it is such a huge improvement on my current phone (an old old old one that used to be my dads) that I can forgive it. I don't have a good run with phones (the RAZR lasted 10 months at most) but this feels a bit more rugged.

Going back slightly to WiFi on phones: this is an interesting subject. At the moment it is limited use - likely most people wont be able to use it in work etc. or have many public access points round about. Really only home use (which kinda defeats the object) is viable at the moment. But, what about a couple of years down the line when the governments plans of public WiFi all over the country may actually happen? At that point it becomes an amazingly useful feature; especially as you can browse / email for free on something you usually have with you 24/7. What about calendar syncing (easily done over the net) to give you instant updates - you could probably get a dentists appointment online and add it to your calendar in no time, all for free.

This is all very well and good but will phone manufacturers carry on bundling WiFi not phones? The N81 proves it is easily possible but will the network providers want it? They must make quite a bit of dosh from web access on phones, so if people can do it for free all the time it is a massive loss of revenue.

Just a thought :D