There is a great article with David Kelley, the founder of Ideo, one of the most important design firms in the world, on the Fast Company site. The article touches a bit about Kelley’s life and his battle with cancer, but the article focuses on Kelley’s idea of “Design Thinking”. Designing experiences rather than objects. The read is really great and definitely inspires you to open your thought spectrum up a bit. (via surfstation)
Check out the article.
Until recently, the bulk of my writing was done on a Mac using Ecto.
I was looking for a suitable publishing tool for Windows and was directed towards Windows Live Writer.
Short answer, it’s nice. I’ve installed the 2009: Release Candidate and published to WordPress with no problems whatsoever.
I’ve been knee deep in the Java world for a long time doing a combination of desktop, backend J2EE (spring/hibernate) and most recently Seam-based web application development.
It’s the Christmas break and I’ve taken a bit of time to create an Ubuntu VM with Rails 2.2 installed in it. Rails has come a long ways since I last was working (playing is probably a more appropriate descriptor) with it. I’ve got a couple ideas to perhaps flush out, but before that, I need to re-learn a few things and come back up to speed.
Installation was simple and straight forward enough, there are a number of decent guides for getting Ruby and Rails installed in Ubuntu. Since I’m working in Ubuntu and not on my work MacBook Pro, there will be no TextMate for me. Fortunately, the guys from JetBrains have released early access versions of their new Ruby IDE RubyMine. I’m a long time user of their Java IDE and if the Ruby equivalent is anywhere near as good, it’ll be a real winner.
RubyMine is nice in that it seems to largely delegate to the command-line Rails generators. No magic and if you spot an error (it’s still beta software), you can still execute the respective command-line tools and continue working.
Don’t have much else to say, I hope everyone is enjoying their respective holiday seasons.
Happy New Year!