It's important to consider the medium in which you communicate with other people (friends, family, team members, or people you collaborate with). Information is utilized best when it is well documented and shared easily between parties so that everyone can reference things have been said and decisions that were made. Email, chat, and typically any form of typed or written communication is perfect for this. Phone calls, meetings, and generally face-to-face are less than ideal unless someone is taking detailed notes (which almost never happens). When someone says something I've found it best to say something along the lines of "Put it in writing." This applies to any decision, idea, task, event, etc. If it can't be said clearly through written word, than it's usually not executable, and they are wasting everyone's time.

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Recently Newsweek website published an article by Daniel Lyons which bashes modern technology, screams as it's users, and preaches doom and gloom. Lyons assumes that people waste their time absorbing the vast amounts of information available to us and don't do anything, invent things, or think for ourselves. His claim that we are "busy zombies" makes him sound out of touch with what's going on in the world. With the new adoption of services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr by more and more people, on a surface level you might have grounds to make that claim, but dig a little deeper and you'll see people connecting, communicating, and ultimately making, inventing, and thinking for themselves in every corner of the globe. The internet and always being connected are tools, and yes, people forget that sometimes. But those that know how to harness it's power and have the self-control to not let it take over their lives are basking in the sun of glorious innovations in technology, changing markets, new ideas, and almost limitless information. So I say cheers to the digital age and cheers to the hard working designers, developers, and engineers who work to make our lives easier and better connected instead of cluttered and more complex.

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Project management and collaboration should be simple, easy to use, and actually make your life more enjoyable. It also has to be available at all times where ever you may be. Not all that long ago David Allen developed GTD, and since then a wave of task orientated applications have emerged. Many have attempted to tackle this elusive process. Some with great success and others have lost their way with bloated features and functionality. Probably the most notable in terms of success is Basecamp by 37signals. But I don't want to start there. Instead, let's take this in a different direction and start with another successful organizational tool; Things by Cultured Code. 

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I recently started looking around at different hybrid mobile frameworks, so I can create native iPhone Apps using web languages I already know (ie. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP). There are three main ones I took a look at and did some testing with: QuickConnect, PhoneGap, and Appcelerator Titanium. In all my testing I looked specifically at uses for the iPhone. All of these have a lot of the same functionality like GPS, Accelerometer, Vibrate, System Sounds, etc and they are all FREE.

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Let me first say that I'm really enjoying Google Wave. But there is one feature that seems off. When you click on a single image it pops up in a nice little lightbox style display. You're presented some navigation to other images, but they don't actually do anything. If you want to view all the images in a given Wave you need to use the menu located at the bottom of every Wave. You'd select Images > View as slide show to get all the images to display in a nice, navigate-able lightbox. Doesn't really seem like that area of the application was thought through enough. A single image shouldn't have left and right navigation elements showing up. They managed to hide the "Play" button on single images. So what gives?

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To get this blog on the right track let's start off by talking about briefly JavaScript frameworks. Back in 2006 I was completely obsessed with MooTools. I'd stomp around telling all my fellow web designers and developer about how "It's the best JavaScript framework out there! It can do anything you want and the animation capabilities are so smooth. You're a fool for not using it!" Truth is, at the time, I didn't really know about jQuery and its simplistic approach. What would be 5 lines of code in MooTools was suddenly a single line using jQuery. Now my argument didn't seem so strong — if it even was in the first place. I have since swore jQuery as the best JavaScript framework (for now).

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We've moved! At least our blog has moved. For about a year we had a Tumblr account, but now we have switched to Posterous. It's kind of a big thing because the two services are so similar in a lot of ways. It was a tough decision. But we're happy to be a part of the Posterous user base. The old blog has been torn down to start from scratch. We didn't want any stale posts floating around and besides a lot of what we were doing on Tumblr was simply reblogging other posts — not as interesting as reading new stuff. That's our goal this year. We want to offer interesting and original content. So here's to looking ahead!

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