Steven Aitchison writes on his three pillars of creativity

• Do it alone
• Do it with available tools and material
• Do it anytime, anywhere

Do it alone
This is more a criticism of committees. You can certainly brainstorm with a few people to be creative but using these as springboards for ideas and not as decision makers is important. Creativity requires vision and it takes a special sort of person to spread that vision to other people. I think small groups are best. With a small group (say, less than 4) you’ve got enough room to express yourself without feeling like you’re being talked over or interrupted too many times.

Do it with available tools and materials
I’m guilty of this but sometimes you do need the right tool for the job. While I enjoyed using it, blogging was a pain on my Nokia N800. It was never a good fit. In fact, any sort of data entry was just painful. I had to wait until I got a laptop again before I could feel productive again. Likewise, give me a camera and I’ll give you some shaky mis-aligned photographs. Give me a violin and you’ll give me a Noise Abatement Order.

Do it anywhere, anytime
At the most basic level, this means keeping a notebook and pen with you at all times. This also means getting yourself into the lifestyle where you can work when the inspiration strikes you. My after hours are flexible enough that I seldom need to pencil in time to do things, I use something called a “Nag” (which will feature in an upcoming Infurious product) to remind me to do things and along with my Do Something Now guidelines, I’m usually kept busy with the jobs I want to do when I want to do them.

The 7th Ironcoder contest was announced today (for some definition of today - damn those pesky time zones). I think this year I actually feel confident enough to take part, even if I accomplish not very much For those who have no idea what it is, each contest selects a theme and Mac OS X API, then gives you 48 hours (real time) to write an app that has both theme and API centrally featured. Check out the Ironcoder site for more info, or take a look at the entries for Ironcoder 5.

Here’s a quick preview of the product I’m currently working on. It’s called Rickshaw and it’s designed for people who like the convenience of sending (large) attachments via e-mail. Using Rickshaw your attachments are stripped from the mail as it is sent and uploaded to your designated server. The attachment is replaced with a URL that allows the recipient to just download what you sent at their leisure.

This product is primarily aimed at people who have to work with large files and need to send them to multiple recipients - avoiding issues with mailbox quotas, mail server file size limits or file type restrictions and so on. More details about how to use the product will follow, but here’s a quick video showing it in action.

Enjoy! (also available as a QuickTime movie)

In mere hours now, people all over the world will be cracking open cases of Leopard and drinking deep of the experience.

For our part we’ve been developing using the developer seeds from Apple’s Developer Connection and then testing on Tiger for compatibility. Why? There’s several reasons:

• 2 Million Macs sold last quarter.
• 1 million iPhones sold last quarter
• Untold numbers of iPod touch and Apple TV models sold

and these will all, from tomorrow, run Leopard (truth be told iPhone/iPod touch are already there).

We’ve been enjoying working with Interface Builder 3 and the rest of the new tools and we’ll be over at Mac-Sys on Friday to see if their copies of Leopard have arrived….

There’s a wordy post on The Equity Kicker about how to think about product (in terms of Seedcamp).

The point that caught my attention more than others was:

Find the ‘nub’ of your product and only build stuff that fits with that. You should be able to capture the ‘nub’ in a single sentence. If you find yourself wanting to build stuff that doesn’t fit with the nub then it is probably time to re-examine it….

With Infurious, we have four guiding principles and this coincides with one of them. We want to create products that people will use to solve problems. Some of these will be problems we’ve had and we’ve built the solution to solve that. When you look at the list of apps that we intend to build eventually, it would seem we have a lot of itches that need scratched. The truth is: collectively we have a lot of experience in our markets as users and, perhaps more relevantly, as troubleshooters and consultants. The apps we build are maybe not for scratching an itch we have but they’re certainly itch points, or in some cases, pain points for customers.

I guess what the quote says is that you have to define the itch. What does a product do? In simple layman terms.

SyncBridge, for example, allowed the sharing of calendars with friends and colleagues. Other apps just remove pain points that we’ve witnessed (and I’m waiting for one of the guys to finish a blog post on the next product).

The mantra: Do One Thing Really Well is really a paraphrasing of the UNIX way and, to a lesser degree, the Mac way. I find there’s a surprising correlation between the two though on paper they used to be such diametric opposites. I grew up in a culture of UNIX + Mac = Computers.

I’m excited about some of the things coming because they scratch an itch I have and I’m even more excited about the pain points we can remove for some of the customers I have in Mac-Sys.

1 - The coffee tastes like shit so I’m never tempted to order one

If I forget myself and accidentally order one I certainly never order a second (I usually drink hot chocolate in Starbucks).

2 - You have to pay for wi-fi so I’m never distracted by IM/IRC/RSS

In the UK, all the wi-fi at Starbucks is through T-mobile who charge £30 ($60!) a month to use their hotspots. With a 1Gb download limit.

3 - The ‘comfy’ chairs are really uncomfortable after an hour or so

One of the biggest issues I had back when I was working in a coffee shop all day was that I’d get too comfortable in the chair and not move around as much as I should (eventually I got tendonitis). At least this way I always get up and leave after an hour.

There’s been a lot of traffic on the MacSB mailing list and on various blogs (e.g. Panic and Atomicbird) about how Apple is handling the release of Leopard in the same way as they did with Tiger, and about how indie developers get the short end of the stick because we don’t see Leopard until our customers do.

I think this is all just jitters.  The people who rush out and by Leopard on day 1 are all early adopters - they have the “bleeding edge” gene anyway, and will understand if it takes a week or two for their favourite app to work correctly.  Sure, things will change between the last seed and what’s shipped, but it’s not going to be anything major.  And yes, your apps might break within the first few days of Leopard being released.  But realistically, if you’ve run your app on the seed at all, I find it hard to believe that it will take long to get it working against the release version.

The other main concern is that developers who get the software as part of their ADC membership don’t get it the same day the general public gets it.  Yeah, that’s a bummer but it’s not really that big a deal.  Chances are good your software will work as intended, and if it doesn’t, it’s only a few weeks’ wait.

As I previously mentioned, my current task as Infurious system admin is providing the team with a bug/task tracking system, namely Trac.

My initial thought was: “our server runs Ubuntu, this should be easy…”

I could get Trac running via tracd and I could see that mod_python was working via mod_python.testhandler but the two didn’t seem to want to play together. Last night, after much frustration, I just gave up and configured Trac to run as a CGI application. Problem solved.

Unfortunately this solution will introduce a performance penalty but at this stage it’s my priority to get the system functional before I start worrying about access speed.

All I have left to do is get the Trac permissions set up and I’m going to move on to configuring a Jabber server which will free us from our dependency on Campfire.

Me? A Linux hippy? You bet!

A man with a very dodgy beard comes out with the following headline on the Guardian Technology Blog: A Gibbon beats Leopard.

The sub-headline says: Canonical has released the latest version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. It’s easy to install and use. Why don’t more people use it?

So that’s what he means. Ubuntu have a new version, Gutsy Gibbon, whose release date was 7 days before Leopard.

I’m not saying that it beats Apple’s next version of OS X, aka Leopard

Actually, Kevin, that’s exactly what you said. In your headline. Look.

Kevin is a special kind of technologist. He’s installing Ubuntu 7.10 onto what he describes as an “old first-gen PowerBook”.

Now that is amazing. I’m amazed it installs on a PowerBook 100 which shipped with a 20 MB hard drive, 2 MB RAM and a screaming 16 MHz 68000 Processor. That’s right, 16 MILLION cycles per second. Holy shit!

Joking aside (and guessing he means a 4-500 MHz G4 Powerbook). Kevin is doing Linux a disservice perhaps by stating a headline like that and then backing out of it in the first paragraph the way a learner driver reverses out of your front passenger wing. The only way Ubuntu beats Leopard is in the date of release? Say it isn’t so???

Though his article seems to rally support for Linux, he professes to prefer the file manager in Windows, complains about how long it took to get DVD codecs and had to downgrade his Window Manager because GNome and KDE were slower and less stable than Mac OS X. He gripes about drivers support for Linux describing it as “a return of the bad old days of Windows with insufficient driver support” and adds that though it’s come a long way, “It still is work, but not as much as it used to be.”

Look out Linux, with friends like these…

I really want to get out of the rat race.

Not so much the 9-5 thing because I’m most alert during 11 am to about 3 pm and can get the most done during then but definitely the traffic commute. It takes me between 60 and 90 minutes to get to work in the morning and the cruel thing is: I live in Belfast and I work in Belfast (even more chilling is that I’m coming from South Belfast into the City so it’s about 4 miles as the crow flies).

Crawling along the roads at 4 mph isn’t going to do me or the environment any good and other than catching parts of the Chris Moyles show on Radio 1, it’s remarkably uneventful. Leaving the house at 07:45 usually gets me into the office for 9 or so.

If I leave at 07:00, I’m in the office for 07:15 when the sky is still dark outside. On the other hand, if I stay at home until 8:45, I can be in the office for 09:10. There’s something to be said for staggered work starts.

So let’s try to fix this, obviously avoiding the whole work thing isn’t going to wash - we need money to eat, keep a roof over our heads and buy iPods.

Moving far out of town seems reasonable as it would mean leaving extra early and then we’d miss most of the traffic (or miss all of it should we manage to downsize and not need the day job).

Phil said this morning:

Very few people ever want to be where they are.

and I wonder how much of that is true. Is the only reason most people work in these jobs because they pay money? Without work would we all become slovenly couch potatoes? I started this day job back in June because I was finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning.

The small villages on the peninsula and along the coast of Strangford Lough hold the most attraction. It’s rural which means a change of pace. They’ve got broadband so my work can continue. And they’d be a lot better for the kids.

If the village is the right size, I’d also be interested in working to build a community wireless network. After experiences with Belfast City Council and their preferred support of Big Business rather than community efforts, I’m much more inclined to look after the smaller community rather than the whole - they appreciate it more.