That being said, I am all game for the innovation that happens on new platforms. Don’t let standards stop you from innovating. Do keep in mind that you should be building for the user and not a platform.

It’s ironical, but easy to see that, the app wars are becoming the new browser wars.

You can download my slides here

• When paying, count your zeros
• When counting your zeros, decimal comma is not the same as decimal point
• Don’t leave your $30 t-shirt in your $15 a night hotel room
• Ice in beer can prevent hangovers
• Saigon Red beer is better than Saigon Green

I was in Saigon, Vietnam over the weekend for BarcampSaigon and I really liked it. Loved the food, the people, the weather & the barcamp. At the Barcamp, I spoke about my workflow for designing products – mobile apps to be specific. I’ve uploaded the slides from the talk for download here

Other links from my talks:

• Wireframing tools – Prototyping iPhone apps with Keynote & Kodak Picture kiosks
• Street photography – http://flickr.com/djnavv
• Writing a CV in HTML
• An awesome CV example

I’ll be going back to Vietnam in a month, this time to Hanoi – hoping it’s as good as Saigon.

Below is a summary of my pre-production design methodology specifically for iPhone apps. It’s relatively cheap, allows for quick iterations and has been working well for me so far.

1. Sketching (pencil/paper or whiteboard)

Lately I’ve become very obsessed about sketching every Idea we discuss in the stage where we are brainstorming to define the product. This always makes me convey my thoughts better and helps me remember more.

2. Wireframing using Keynote

I know a lot of people who swear by Omnigraffle. Especially folks who’ve been wireframing since early OSX days, for instance my good friend Wolf. I’ve personally never been able to warm up to it. Instead I’ve been using Keynote & Mockapp. I start with a base template (outline of the iPhone) which you can download from the link below:

Download: iPhone4 base template for Keynote wireframing

I’ve found keynote simple enough and quite versatile to do quick wireframing. With Mockapp it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping the iPhone controls (and they are made as shapes so you can edit them within keynote all you want).

3. Prototyping & User testing

My keynote wireframes turn into my paper-prototypes. I export the wireframes as images, put them on a USB stick and print at the nearest Kodak Picture kiosk I can find. It’s cheap and I can iterate very quickly as well. I use these for testing – which ofcourse, is the most important part of the entire design process.

4. Final wireframes and design comps

After the testing I aim to have exhaustive wireframes with as many screens as possible – including error scenarios and detailed settings. From here, the mockups are designed in Photoshop/Illustrator.

This is a rough workflow and ofcourse gets tweaked depending on the project. Hope this can be of help to someone!

PS – I was totally excited and extremely nervous about moderating the panel at Echelon 2011, but a big thanks to my panelists who absolutely rocked! – Richard White, Ian McFarland and Dustin Curtis.

Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Very interesting words. Nokia definitely needs drastic measures. I wonder what stopped him from making this a public blog post? Call me the skeptic, but I find it hard to believe that this is not just another internal “motivational email” from the new CEO.

“A retweet with the #Egypt hashtag won’t do anything to help those in the conflict. You’ll feel a lot better, true. And maybe, some geeks will have a moment of pleasure seeing the whole internet looking at them.”

I was thinking the exact same things while watching a recent news bit on the sad situation in Egypt. I wonder how long it’ll be before the “hashtag protests” see the same fate as the “mail-chain-forward” revolution.

I’m thinking, if I start doing this it might help me keep my blog posts short and to the point (I’ve realized I always get bored if I go back and read my own posts). I’m not sure if this will work, but it does appeal to me. Also trying to see how posting to word press via email works.

(I make blogging too complicated for myself. Waiting for Roberto’s post on his workflow to take notes.)

I had a great time and I hope everyone else did too!

“In another ruling, the Copyright Office approved the circumvention of copy-control technology on DVDs, but only in such limited circumstances as educational use, documentary filmmaking and making other types of noncommercial videos.”

- via Twice

Yes, jailbreaking phones is now legal. But the above ruling is much more interesting to me. However, I am not able to figure out if this applies to the music/audio content on the DVD’s as well? It will be interesting to see how this effects Youtube/Facebook service.

So, it does sound that the “The Grey Video” is good to go, but what about the “The Grey Album“?

(Thanks @stephanfeb for pointer to the awesome album!)

First impressions:

• Love the way it looks and feels
• Keyboard is marvelous. Soft and yet gives really good feedback. The backlight works great as well
• After initial reservation, I love the new trackpad. The smooth iphone like scrolling is just fantastic!
• Not sure about the glossy screen. I end up turning up the brightness in order to see past the reflections
• Battery life hasn’t been that impressive. Gives me about 4-5hrs I think. It hasn’t given me the “ph, wow! you still have some juice left” moment, yet.
• Performance has been fine, again, don’t feel like there’s a big jump from the old Macbook Pro I was using. Don’t feel any difference in the app launch times, or data transfer. I haven’t run any CPU intensive apps yet though.
• The base gets really heated sometimes. Way more than the older Macbook Pro. Especially on the left side. I hate this about laptops.

When I say, I don’t feel a big difference what I mean is that although it might be a faster when you measure using a stop watch, but it doesn’t make me feel so. It’s too early to complain about it though. I should say, it hasn’t given me any kind of problems whatsoever. But, it definitely hasn’t made me feel like, lets say, how I felt when I first installed 2GB of memory after using 512MB, back in 2004.

Happy with it. Hope it can work as a desktop machine for my photo-editing needs when I need it to. Looking at my current plans and some new developments, that won’t happen anytime soon. I might be city hopping for a fair bit of this year – hence the decision to buy a laptop, instead of the iMac.

So, in reply to mi amigo, Roberto Mateu, this won’t change the initial plan to use specialized tools for specific tasks. The Macbook Pro is solving my new-big problem (a portable workstation), which is what a laptop is supposed to do. As for the iPad, lets see how this changes things and we’ll get back to that in a bit.

I detected one other veiled insult against Google during the event — Jobs’s emphasis during the multitasking segment about how seriously Apple values the privacy of iPhone users, with regard to data and location information. In the way that the standard knock against Apple is that they maintain too much control over the App Store, the standard knock against Google is that they don’t value user privacy. Jobs’s message: You can trust Apple.

No matter what Apple says, or tries to sell this as; individuals all around the world are going to be tracked. People are going to let their locations be known to all kinds of 3rd party applications to extract relevant information (vs just a subset of the data, as is the current scenario) from the gazillions of terabytes of data on the internet.

Commercial apps will make your life a little bit easier in exchange for tracking you where you are. Constantly. That’s the carrot, for the bunny. The question is: how many will stay out of the system?

This comes from an earlier discussion with some friends which started with the statement, “I hate countries where you can’t even get insurance if you don’t have a credit card. Credit card’s track you everywhere you go & everything you do”. The conversation ended when we figured there are still places where you can survive without a bank account, for instance, India. It’ll be VERY inconvenient. The social defaults are being changed and other people around you, expect you to have credit information, bank accounts etc etc. So even if you have the choice, would you do it? Because, this inevitably translates into struggling against the system/ surviving outside the system or eventually – fighting the system.

So, is this system going to fail or is this just a precursor to being totally fine with having a tracking personal ID chip installed in your arms just so that you do not have to buy a metro ticket in rush hour?