Another week and SOOO much technology...

Hey All! I know for those who are following me, I am getting back in the groove of things... well, this week I have been going through PluarlSight training and finished my UX, JavaScript, and Agile Methodolgies. I am doing some C# classes, which should be relatively straightforward. I also am deep in my HCI course at Stanford. I am not sure how that will turn out since I am doing 20 other things and think I may need to back off of that for now, but we'll see. I also have been walking a lot more, doesn't sound like a lot, but 3 miles a day almost every day adds up pretty quickly. Why? Because the weather is ridiculous here and you need to be outside.

Tech Updates

iPhone5 is out, Galaxy S3 is battling, new tools are coming out from Adobe to develop... several wireframe tools I'm learning about (yes, they have been around for YEARS, I'm just learning about them.. balsamiq, justinmind, moqups.com). Adobe's new suite of products seems to be impressive and designed to be creative and not just random tech stuff to keep up. Edge, as the group is named, includes several new products reFlow, animate, code, inspect, etc... You can see the full list and demos Here. I am doing some investigation on them this weekend to see what they really can do. As you know I am a .Net C# developer with heavy UI experience (CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript). They built Adobe Code on Brackets, which has some nice simple functionality that a web developer would love. I want to see what they have added to the game.

Wireframing

Balsamiq has pull forward as the leading tool for wireframing. I also remember when AOL was the leader for Internet Access. Ok, that is mean to make such a harsh comparison, but there are some free tools out there that I think are JUST as good or better in some of their approaches. My top recommendation for wireframing tools is Moqups.com. Why? Because it is free, online, I learned how to use it in SECONDS, and it works. Don't add 1000 features to a product that I don't want. You can add them but keep them hidden and make sure I don't see them. Clutter is bad in UI design. Screen Real Estate is NOT Valuable, we have better UX process to handle it. The term is Horror Vacui, google it. :-) Ok, go out there use some mockup tools and let me know what you recommend.

Life Updates

Nothing amazing... finally feeling "normal" here. Yes Dave, I need to get back to Crossfit. I also need to get on a better sleep schedule. I need to.... yeah, yeah... I can only do one thing at a time, I am NOT a multi-tasker... very few people are. I like to focus 100% on thing at time... I said I LIKE to, doesn't mean I can, but I like to. Take a task, move it to completion... take the next task... I want to do Kanban in my life, but I think I do that naturally.. My Work-In-Progress (WIP) is usually 3. Any more than that I get overwhelmed, and things don't get completed. Don't get me wrong, I can complete tasks VERY quickly and people think I do more than I actually do. It is that workflow that keeps me happy.
Ok, that's all for now... Thanks for stopping by...