I.D.E.A.

I came across this in Don Koberg & Jim Bagnall’s book “The Universal Traveller”…

A creative problem-solver is a “designer”; a person intending to improve what exists or to find clear paths through dilemmas or challenging situations and arrive at satisfying solutions

I think this is one of the best descriptions of a designer that I’ve seen. This can be applied to any field, whether it’s industrial design, interface design, experience design, etc.

Keep this in mind when you try to explain what you, a designer, does at the next holiday cocktail party!

I just started using the Things app on the iPhone. It supports GTD concepts. Let’s see how long I can keep this up. It seems like I’m more productive already. I’ve been adding items to Things as they come up, and I’ve been checking things off. I think it will take time to adjust to this way of doing things. I’m use to keeping things in my head, but now I will need to trust that I have this system to help me so I can use the extra brain bandwidth on other things.

I was just digging around my theme editor trying to insert a piece of HTML from my hosting service that says that my site is Green, because the hosting service Carbon Neutral. I decided to add the HTML to the footer of my theme. When I looked at the file there were tons of links embedded in a div that had a style of ‘display:none’ !!! I looked at the header and same thing, there were tons of hidden links. I of course deleted the divs from each file and all is well now.

It turns out that people’s WordPress themes are getting hacked for some reason. Here’s an article about it.

Here’s a game on par with the Rice Game that donates/takes action when you play the game.

I have to admit that I’ve tried to use the MVC pattern for coding projects in the past and have never committed fully to using it for all UI objects in the project. Sometimes MVC just seems like too much work for a simple button, for example. Maybe, I just don’t understand how to apply the pattern, but I’m pretty sure I understand the concept. To me, the MVC pattern still has points of tight coupling. For example, your View subscribes to Model events. The Controller holds onto references to the Model and the View.

I’ve just found PureMVC and am trying to understand their implementation. It seems like their architecture is based on really loose coupling. Objects subscribe to messages (not tied to an object at all), and other objects broadcast messages. Subscribers and Publishers don’t know about each other. It sounds like a good idea to me. I’ve seen examples out there of eventmanager objects (subscribers and publishers interact with the eventmanager via the subscribing and publishing of messages) and have used them in projects before and PureMVC sounds like it’s built around this flexible way for objects to communicate with each other. One down side could be that there may be too many message flying around the system. I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around this so let’s see how well this works. I’m following this tutorial.