Navjot Pawera - Navjot Pawera's Blog

A handy (& wishful) Alfred App tweak

I’m a big fan of Alfred App. The stats just on my machine at work read:

Since 21-May–2011, Alfred has been shown 1,149 times. Average 18.8 times per day

Like everyone, I’ve found my own unique ways of using it. Today I thought of one more which could be quite handy. Quite often I run into text where it’s hard to make out a capital O from a 0, a capital I from a lowercase l. If I could change Alfred app’s default font to a console font, a quick copy and paste into alfred could be very useful.

Here’s a screenshot to illustrate:

Alfredapp console font

I love the Alfred App team for sticking to simplicity & I respect that. Just throwing a suggestion out there.

20 Jul 2011

Prototyping iPhone apps with Keynote & Kodak Picture kiosks

Last week I hosted the “UX Panel” at Echelon 2011 and after the event quite a few people asked me about my workflow for wire-framing and prototyping. I’ve been meaning to talk about my this at the next IXD Session meetup, so I thought I’ll write some about it here as well.

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.

20 Jun 2011

Byword is the new Writeroom

I love writing my mails and blogposts in Writeroom and I’ve been a big fan since I found out about it around 3 years ago. Yesterday though, I switched sides and bought Byword after I read Roberto’s post. From his blog:

I already switched from WriteRoom when Byword came out for longer writings, but with Markdown support, this is now the tool.

Roberto had tried to make me adopt Markdown when we were in Oslo, but the lack of built in support in Writeroom was always the showstopper for me. Now there is no excuse and I decided to give it a try. Loving, Byword & Mardown, so far.

Might try QuickCursor in a few days as well.

26 May 2011

Recommended Mac app: QuickCal

I’d really recommend QuickCal if, like me, you also:

Use iCal regularly
Don’t like to keep it running as it just sits there most of the time
Like the idea of using plain english to add stuff to iCal
Would like to have a quick and simple way to add and view events

After setting it up, now I can quickly press:

“Shift + Cmd + C” to add a new event in plain english (love the feedback from the different fields that get filled in as you type)
“Shift + Cmd + X” to get an overview of your days appointments

I had been reading about Fantastical the past few days, but I think it’s a bit overdone design wise. Feels “bulky”. And it costs more than 15 times the price of QuickCal ($0.99).

Update: Quickcal does not support caldav sync, which means you need to keep iCal running all the time otherwise the events you create will not be synced (until you run iCal). This might be a problem for some (like myself).

25 May 2011