I have been using the FoldingText app for a couple of weeks. It is a very interesting app targeting writers, something I am not, but I was intrigued by the interactivity of this minimalist app. Specifically the ability to add interactive todo lists and timers and have them execute in a text document. Please take a look at the FoldingText Video to get a feel for it, I don't want to describe ideas that a video shows so clearly. [Read More]

For our startup I have been using github wiki to keep the product specs, design docs, user stories, etc organized and up-to-date. The nice thing about github is you can clone the wiki and work on it locally and push changes up to the server. See this writeup for more info. This is handy because you can then work on the wiki using markdown syntax in a regular text editor versus a web page editor. [Read More]

Doing iOS design and development I find myself capturing images on the iPhone all the time to make notes on. These usually end up being added to my notes or to our project wiki (see Screen Capture Goodness and Wiki + Searchable Notes for more on that). To get the images from the phone to my Mac I was using Apple's Photo Stream feature but it took too long and sometime images just didn't show up on the Mac. [Read More]

tl;wr Take the shell script from below and create a TextExpander snippet to save any image in your OS X clipboard to disk with a unique uuid.png name, and automatically create a markdown image link that is pasted in place in your editor. verbose When making notes on wireframes, screen designs, activity diagrams, etc, I have a particular workflow where I do a screen capture and want to link the result in my markdown notes or from our project wiki. [Read More]

Over the past year I have had the opportunity to advise a number of people I have worked with in the past who are starting companies. In the past few years my role had been that of a director of both design and R&D teams and so I enjoy continuing that type of role in providing direction to these exciting new startup ventures. One thing many of these early phase projects lack is clarity and proper measurement of the problem and opportunity; having only a vague sense of their relative probability of success given their chosen direction versus alternative approaches. [Read More]

I have been investigating using the ruby state_machine gem for a project. State machines can be very handy in simplifying code where objects move through various states. The state_machine gem embeds state machine behavior into any class that uses it. My first test was to create a simple todo list example. The todo list will include a main list that contains items and sub-lists. This allows a way to organize items easily into sub-lists. [Read More]