Stu Downes

Healey Nab Promo Video from TartyBikes on Vimeo.

This year after about a year or more of not doing too much I got out a bit more and one night with @robblythe discovered a new set of trails round healey nab (about 20 minutes cycling from my door).  I’ve learned over at I Dig Healey Nab that much of the work was the brainchild of committed enthusiasts who secured funding, the pain of planners, and toiled for many a free time.  So thank you!!!  Your work has got me hooked again and for that I thank you all.  For friends reading this take a look at the video, this is one of the things which makes keeping fit fun, I’m not brave enough for the black run – the bits of the video before the scenes of them building the track.  I am a firm lover of the red route which is shown after the chaps building it.  So big thanks, spot on!

About time I shared my experience of the form factor I believe will be game-changing in the way all our tech is designed.  So purchase was a wi-fi only 64G iPad, couldn’t justify 3G version when mi-fi’s are the price they are.  So thoughts:

Screen:  excellent resolution.  OK in bright light, though hard to read in bright direct sunlight due to reflections.  Screen gets awful dirty so a micro-fibre cloth is essential.

Case: essential.  I didn’t go for the apple case but instead got this one which I’m happy with.  It has a stand for raising the screen enough to watch videos while it rests on a surface and sits low enough to rest on a table for typing.  When working on your knee the case also works well as I find the ipad too heavy to hold up like a book for reading for long periods.

Battery life: excellent – I’m looking forward to travelling just with it (to date I’ve needed my laptop too).

Size: smaller than the power packs from a couple of vendor folk’s high end laptop power packs

Weight: is ok but you wouldn’t hold it unaided for long like a small book.

Sound: excellent, I’m not too much of a music snob so the speakers are great for games and music and videos.  I just use normal headphones and they work fine too.

Video: great.  youtube good (though I need better bandwidth at home – come on BT!).  Other videos good too.

Wifi: I’ve had some trouble initially with this at home and had to disable 802.11n on my BT Home Hub (I hear the howls or derision already!).  Haven’t been brave enough to re-enable n yet.

Keyboard:  Fine but in meetings you need a case which allows it to stand at a shallow angle.

Touch screen: good for navigation and using sketch packages to show ideas.  Forget writing with it, this is no tablet PC device (that is one thing that lets the device down for me but as I have a tablet I’m not too concerned).

Drawing / writing:  I bought penultimate but found that without a stylus it doesn’t meet my needs for meeting note taking.  Even with a stylus all the videos I have watched lead me to believe that for note taking the experience just won’t be enough – so I use the keyboard for note taking. 

For sketching concepts I just use Adobe Ideas which is great and free. 

Reading from the web: the towering strength of the device.  I not use the ipad as the primary aggregator for reading RSS (NetNewsWire), twitter (Osfoora) and I now employ a lot of “read later” activities from pc, smartphone and ipad with Instapaper.  Email reading experience is good.

Meeting Notes and Reference: Evernote remains my tool of choice for capturing information on the PC and having this accessible on the iPad.  I’ve also found this is the tool of choice for meeting note taking (keyboard input).  I’m going to do another post on reading and the applications and my use of them.

Games: are great.  I love Real Racing HD which is excellent.

I have found that you’ll spend much more with the iPad on apps than you do with an iPod or iPhone.

Tongue in cheek obviously but if you do fancy some mountain biking in the Chorley area of Lancashire then come try our the newly completed Healey Nab route for fun (although don’t tell my thumb that which is still recovering from an unplanned dismount 3 weeks ago – although x-ray says no break).  Yeah yeah I know not very end user service but loads of fun!  Oh and the title of the post, well the second victim was one of my bosses cycling helmet!  Good job he was wearing one as it saved any serious harm.

I can’t believe how easy it was to upgrade to 3.0. In fact I was left thinking I hadn’t done something. Congrats to all the developers out there. Awesome!

As far as our senses go we take them for granted in everyday life.  Touch is something that tells us an amazing amount of information – and generally we take it for granted when we consider heat, texture, shape and relating those to “simple tasks”.

I’ve had a tablet for a number of yeas and have found it great for presentations/ webcasts / diagrams / mind mapping / note taking. Recently I upgrading a tablet (x61) to Windows 7.  I have been mightily impressed with the improvements for tablet uses. Pen recognition is much better (even with my scrawl) and Office 2010 pen features are also much improved.

what I am really looking forward to is the adoption of touch based technology (and more impotantly software for touch screen technologies). Take the use case away from just mobile workers and industrial control situations and place it into the home/office.

Is it there yet?  Well not quite.   Up to the end of the last paragraph I had used only a pen with handwriting recognition in windows 7 doing the rest.  Amazingly quick, probably 70% of the speed I’m managing with the keyboard which is pretty good.  Gesture and touch will be important and a whole new user experience construct may be required (flicking documents to colleagues or team rooms with angle of flick defining where it goes).

Recently making the news at CES – suppose you’d call it a re-launch.  Looking forward to seeing where it goes and hoping it doesn’t remain a niche.  Hopefully the tablet PC blog at MS will see new impetus.  We will see!  I’m hoping smart phone advances driven by the iPhone will really help here!

Recently Steve and I have been working on some really interesting work which we’ve had to socialise.  What has been really interesting is the responses it has provoked within the wider organisation, and more importantly within the elements of the organisation which would be most impacted.  I spoke on web meeting today to one group for whom this would cause change, in my typical interactive mode the tablet pen was out and pen functionality in PowerPoint got overused.  New blank slides emerged on top of the slides Steve and I had worked up with explanations of new emerging technologies and how we should adopt them.

[and given Graham’s recent post on attribution, mostly Steve’s slides ]. 

The response was great and the closing comment from the lead was how good it was to see this content and it seemed to me that there was a buzz and motivation around the message, one comment summed it up which was “its great to see that we are doing this”.  Its certainly a tactic I’m going to repeat for future services I’m working on.  So watch out!

When I was looking for some backup to this thought I came across this great article, the key extracts being:

“When processes change, then people who work in the processes must also change. Any given process includes particular roles in which certain knowledge and skills is required. Changes in these roles requires that the people involved change, which may or may not be good news for them.”

For me this is key but its something I have to consciously remind myself of – I shouldn’t have to because I think I’m very much a people person but I still need to remind myself that there is more outside the work you are immersed in.

I’m looking forward to the day when every web application, both internet and intranet can be used offline.  Its not a new request in that Lotus Notes performed this for what seems forever and recently new additions have started to emerge in the form of Google Gears and others.

So why do I ask or suggest we should drive in this direction?  I have a simple thought triggered by a recent read (Capture IT, a future workplace for the multi-generational workplace), and I’ll paraphrase:

If the task worker got 50 times more efficient in the 20th century then in the early portions of the 21st century the knowledge and information worker should also see a 50 times improvement in efficiency. 

How do we do this?  Well in hundreds of ways, some existing, some emerging, some not even considered.  One such method will be to make the information flow more efficient.  I am not talking RSS here I am talking about the integrating the data we work with today with our working requirements, our working styles, our experience of work.  Hence do we sync or do we surf?  My opinion is that we will start to build systems which understand our information consumption habits, understand our working requirements and sync that data, or maybe cache is a better word as we are likely to be living more in the cloud.  And that cloud, as Steve rightly asserts will no longer be simply corporate data but will increasingly be the mixture of personal knowledge, collaborative network knowledge, and corporate network knowledge.  Graham also recently asserted that user experience should focus on application speed today, tomorrow maybe its more about information access speed and knowledge transfer capabilities.

Some thoughts, a bit random, but something to ponder for me, and possibly you.

Well no doubt by now most organisations are running round ensuring that they are prepared should the present swine flu outbreak become pandemic.  Lets hope not.  From personal experience here are the things that people tend to not think about when planning:

I now have 2 voices.  We have a new internal platform which allows me to blog and use live writer.  So when access to C3 is rolled out to all CSC’ers you can go check it out.

The power of blog authoring tools

We’ve had other tools internally where I could have “blogged” through a web interface.  I found I couldn’t sustain any input because I love the simple type and click option in live writer (the ability to type and write at times when I may not have access to the web).  So I’m hoping that the authentication mechanism survives and I can continue using live writer.  The proof is in the fact that in just a few days I’ve probably blogged more internally than in the previous 12 months.

Its really helpful to have a good internal blogging platform as it means I can write much more (there is so much we all work on that we can’t publicly discuss).  I feel a sense of release and hope to use the internal blog to give people more of a flavour of what I do and the directions I think we should be heading.

Personal productivity is an area that I constantly strive to improve on and for those long subscribed here you’ll know I frequently share working practices.  Since I took a new role last autumn mine have had to change.  I recently had some time off and this system really helped me get back on track.  All my tasks are in Remember the Milk and most of the tasks get there through direct messages from twitter (heres how).  My mantra for task management now is:

1. Get everything into remember the milk (RTM).
2. Quick review daily to prioritise new tasks and define delivery days/times.  RTM allows 3 priorities.  Also during this daily review I’ll cross off completed actions.
3. Print the list daily and highlight today’s targets.
4. Look for calendar time for the most urgent actions.
5. Weekly thorough review with re-prioritisation.

I don’t use the full GTD methodology though I do like having an empty in-box (never quite achieve it but its generally small). 

Prioritisation

As my work has become more intense I’ve had to increasingly use priorities.  I now find I generally run on about 3 pages of actions when printed out.  The first page generally contains all the high priority actions (in fact I should stop printing the other 2 as I rarely get to look at them).

Stress

I feel less stressed (sounds silly doesn’t it!).  I have more work, more actions, more people wanting my input or deliverables from me yet I’m less stressed.  All my actions are in RTM.  If people chase me I can be polite and explain that they are on my list but not yet the highest priority.  I find I don’t get major pushback either.  I’m getting more done than before and I put this down to a combination of prioritisation and blocking time in the calendar for tasks – sure I get interrupted or diverted to other priorities but it seems to be working for me.  I hope it can work for you too if you are struggling.  Love to hear your stories.