links for 2008-01-04

January 04, 2008 | Comments

links for 2008-01-02

January 02, 2008 | Comments

Handset Customisation

January 02, 2008 | Comments

So, one thing we've done a lot of in the last year is handset customisation: in particular, producing handset themes for a number of Nokia devices. The 6120 and 6110 Navigator are the ones we can talk about, though we're doing this sort of work elsewhere too. We've actually had customisation as one of The Things Future Platforms Do for a few years now (after we did some Series 60 theming work for Three a while back on the 6680), but this year it's something we've put a lot more effort into.

And a good thing too, because it's prone to be a painful process, and one which I suspect Bryan (who heads up our design team) will post about once he's recovered from the experience. You think that development environments for J2ME are restrictive and bug-prone? Taking artwork and massaging it into a Nokia theme file using their Carbide tool is *incredibly* painful, then you need to get the thing QAd and bug-fixed, frequently on prototype devices that Don't Officially Exist, often with arcane firmware. Add in the variety of possible capabilities, even in handsets from the same vendor (curiously, Nokia Series 40 devices seem in many ways to be more capable then their upmarket Series 60 cousins), and you get a picture that will be familiar to anyone who's spent time working in mobile: poor tools, on-device testing mandatory, and fragmentation everywhere.

But where there's muck there's brass, and after a years effort, we've now evolved a process for doing these things: taking original artwork (or creating the artwork from style guides), mocking it up quickly to show what it might look like and get sign-off, then as far as possible automating the transfer of these mockups onto a real device - where the pain of QA, bug-fixes, workarounds and so forth remains.

Why spend so much effort on this, particularly when it's hardly glamorous or of-itself interesting work? We think there's an opportunity here that goes beyond the telecomms industry clients we've worked for so far. Mobiles aren't consumer electronics any more, they're fashion accessories, daemons even, scampering away from being feature-driven and towards being displays of social status. In this journey, manufacturers have typically favoured industrial design: getting the packaging right, often at he expense of the internals. Cough RAZR cough.

I reckon that, particularly post-iPhone (and post-75% of RAZR owners saying they'd not repeat their purchase), the innards of these beasties are going to start getting the same sort of attention that's been lavished on the outside - after all, why delineate software and hardware so clearly when it's all one device? And when this happens, customising the bit which device owners spend much of their time staring at is going to become more and more attractive for device manufacturers, operators, or even third-party brands.

links for 2008-01-01

January 01, 2008 | Comments

That was what was

December 31, 2007 | Comments

So as 2007 creaks to a close, I guess it's traditional to have an end-of-year post. A retrospective, if you will ;)

I've noticed that in any given year, I tend to get 2 out of 3 from work, my home-life and Aikido done to a decent standard. As I posted a year ago, 2006 saw home-life and pretending-to-be-japanese get the coveted top spots, whilst business came a respectable, but definite third. Things changed over the last 12 months, with FP taking big strides forward - more on that later - and Stuff That Matters pushing amateur ninja club into third position.

"And they have a plan"

Future Platforms in most ways had its best year ever; we grew from 8 to a nebulous number somewhere around 14 (depending on whether you count freelancers, or consider part-timers to be whole people), and we didn't manage this by lowering standards. In particular I'll string up Mr Rieger, Mr Hoskins and Mr Revill in the gibbet of excellence, and let them sway gently in the wind as a lesson to others. Moving away from execution metaphors, I'll confess to a sad moment when Mr Ribot flew the nest to form his own flock - bonne chance to all things Ribotic!

Our web site belies the quantity of stuff we've launched this year: Trutap, the Ghost Detector (our first US project), Bluetooth wizardry for the BBC (who also got us in for a couple of pieces of consultancy and an Innovation Lab), Puzzler onto T-Mobile, LocoMatrix (which I find increasingly exciting), customised themes for a load of Nokia handsets, educational tools for a large publisher (more on that early next year), mobile web sites galore, and a heap of stuff I'd be killed for writing about. There's already some really neat projects coming along to keep us busy at the start of 2008 too :)

We've started spending a lot more effort thinking about what we do - not in the "coping with the onslaught of projects" way that young companies often do, but a little more long-term. We've Adopted A Process, which is worthy of another post or five in itself; and just like kittens, processes are for life, not Christmas. Scrum hasn't given us answers to all our problems, but it has managed to make sure we're seeing said problems, and that in itself is worthwhile. We're into a rhythm of self-inspection and adaption every fortnight, and at last we have a structure within which I feel we can try and improve ourselves.

We amicably turned down a merger offer in April; it wasn't the first such approach we'd had, but it was the one we'd given most credence to - and the mental (and emotional) processes you go through in this situation were interesting in their own right.

In May, Noel Edmonds kidnapped one of our project managers. No, really.

Like last year, I ended up travelling a fair bit. Conference highlights were LIFT, XP Day and Picnic - all mid-sized events with a strong community feel to them. I think I'll try more of these and leave the more large-scale corporate ones to one side in 2008. Closer to home, Hack Day, Barcamp and dConstruct were all excellent, though the last two are still slightly hazy thanks to post-Burning Man sleep deprivation.

DSC00232

Ah, Burning Man: my big summer holiday of the year, and worth every minute spent on it. Time's healed over the memories of environmental stress and I'm looking back on it very fondly indeed. Can't wait to go back, and maybe contribute a bit more than I did this year (which wouldn't be difficult) next time.

My other home-time fun seems more pedestrian (with one obvious exception, though I'm not sure that all the connotations of not-pedestrian are entirely compatible); looking back at the year, our bi-monthly (quarterly?) Mah Jong sessions get remembered fondly, although I'm still learning to play, again and again. This years lesson: complicated games involving unfamiliar alphabets and atonal languages are easier to learn *without* tequila. Beyond this, I had the dual pleasure of sharing Rosehill with one of my oldest friends for the first 8 months of the year, then getting it to myself for the final 4 - both of which I've rather enjoyed, and the odd bit of construction work I managed to fit in (with the help of my dad) is rendering my home a little more castle-like. I think I've had a healthy year too (with vices tending to be limited to well-controlled bursts), upping the 3km runs I was doing to 5km, and - with the able assistance of Le Nike+ - fitting in 3-4 a week (though it's fair to note that Aikido is down to 1-2 sesssions a week, something I'll rectify in the new year).

So, 2007: not bad. Not bad at all... now let's just see if I can get my life balanced onto those three spokes in 2008...