Trello, a project management tool from the future.

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For years we’ve put with clunky project management tools. They all think they’re different and special, but at their core they are in fact all the same and suffer from the same pit falls. But fear not, there is light at the end of the slow and time consuming tunnel that is PM, and it comes in the form of Trello. And it’s free!

Raise your hand if you shudder every time you hear the term: Project Manager… Let me guess, your hand is raised? Of course it is, that slow web interface getting up in your grill. All the time spent managing a project when you probably could have it done by now. All those emails you get when someone goes on a task/ticket clean up spree (and you never read them, because you’re naughty). Your time wasted waiting for pages to load, your creative juices and motivation flushed down the drain by your slow and boring PM tool. It’s time for a change.

It gives me much pleasure to introduce to you, your new knight in shining armor, Trello. Developed by the clever folks at Fog Creek Software, Trello is possibly one of the most amazing web applications I’ve seen. It just so fast and snappy and intuitive, the page is updated in real-time so you never miss a beat and you can make and edit tasks in just a few seconds. And it works on any device, including your smartphone.

Finally, no waiting for pages to load or refresh.  Everything is organised in a hierarchy starting with Boards which contain Lists that are used to group a bunch of Cards. A Card (a.k.a ticket or task) can do just about anything, you can vote on them, add/remove members, attach files, comments,  labels, checklists and obviously a due date (which is optional).

And despite not catering specifically for a certain type of projects (i.e software development, personal to-dos, etc) it surprising flexible for anything straight out of the box. We’ve been using Trello internal for some project to make our Brisbane IT support even better. Beyond that, I’m not sure if Trello is really something I want to explain because it is something to be experience, and best of all it’s free! So a strongly encourage you to head on over to trello.com and have a blast!

 

Celtx vs Procrastination

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If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time looking for the right tools before commencing work on a project. Unfortunately, this can often pull you into a downward spiral of homogenous products, opinionated forums and chasing that last, subjective 2% of functionality before you even get started. It’s a classic trap and a secret tool of the procrastination ghost that lives inside all of us. As a quick example, I’ve always wanted to turn a small acorn of a story I have into a grand oak of a comic book. It goes as follows:

1. Spider gets struck by space-lighting

2. Spider gets human-powers of thought, consciousness and speech but retains his small spider size (note subtle reverse of the classic spiderman setup).

3. Spider craws up behind the ear of a Presidential candidate and whispers Machiavellian political advice in his ear, helping him get elected.

4. Spider uses his new puppet president to pass pro-spider laws

 

I’ll cut here briefly to reassure you that this idea is copyrighted.

My problem, besides a misunderstanding of basic story-telling and an inability to draw, was that I don’t work well without a structured system. I need to have all the tools in their place and a planned-workflow or I won’t get anything done. Moleskines and ink-stained fingers may be a touch more romantic, but if that’s what I’m using they’re more likely to be filled with shopping lists and crude drawings of phalluses than any actual work. So, I began the long search for a decent piece of software to help and that’s when I found Celtx (www.celtx.com).

You may have heard of Celtx before, as it’s quite common for script-writers. Opening it up on my Mac (though it’s available for PC and mobile devices as well), I saw that it had templates, examples and pre-made work-flows for Screenplay, Stageplays, AV scripts, Audio Plays, Comic Books and Novels. Further, you can use any of these work-flows as simply or as complexly as you like. After playing around with it for a while I thought damn.. I don’t really have any excuses not to write anything now. I’m not going to bore you with a long list of features but I strongly recommend that if you’re ever played around with the idea of writing a book, a script or a comic book and could do with that little bit of structure and guidance to get you started and spark your creativity, then download Celtx and take it for a spin. It’s free.

…of fond reflection.

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My first post here, and it’s one of fond reflection. I know there are a countless takes on what Steve has done for technology, but I’d like to share my story. Without Steve Jobs, my life and work would be much different today.

My first computer was an Apple IIe, handed down to me as a 7 year old from my uncle. It was completely pimped out with a DuoDisk and 80 Column card - that’s right kids, this computer required an expansion card to display 80 columns of text across the screen instead of the stock 40 on the first release machines. This was essential if you were plugging numbers into your Appleworks spreadsheet. Not that I was interested in spreadsheets at the age of 7 (nor am I that much today).

I fondly remember the many days of plugging in the “1 line” and “2 line”  winners from Nibble magazine - often to realise I’d mistyped something, and have to start over. Countless hours were spent trying to beat the toughest levels of Lode Runner or kill that pesky Werewolf in Transylvania.

Shortly after, my mum brought home a shiny new Mac Plus from University – complete with MacPack carry bag. It was a pretty amazing thing to behold. I was instantly drawn to that boxy little mouse (well before the days of ADB and USB) and MacPaint.

She was on it most of the time busily preparing her thesis, but every now and then I could sneak on to cruelly shoot the parachutes off of those little stick figure guys in Airborne and watch them plummet to the ground, or attempt to thump the dungeon keeper with my mace, in the truly fantastic and incredibly unforgiving Dark Castle (they just don’t make games that hard anymore).

For some reason I then took a step to the dark side for many years. I was brainwashed into believing that “real” computers had a command prompt. Coincidentally perhaps, and I didn’t know it at the time but this would have coincided with Steve’s ousting from Apple. Maybe on some level I realised that Apple would lose their way during the dark periods of the 90s.

It wasn’t until after dropping out of my IT degree and my first job as service centre coordinator for an icky whitebox PC shop in Fortitude Valley did Apple even come back on to my tech radar. Some guys from an AppleCentre would drop by from time to time as they had a couple of PC clients. One day they popped in with a PowerMac G3 tower (the PowerMac 9600 form factor). I dismissed it immediately, but then they popped off the side cover and with a few clips had exposed the entire logic board (as those Apple guys called it). I was impressed.

It came up in later discussions that they were looking for an Apple technician and made me an offer. Having nothing to lose, and quite honestly I was pretty over the impending Y2K disaster (the Apple techs had already advised me that even my mum’s Mac Plus would be alright until 2040) I jumped ship back to Apple land. As a service engineer I got to go back over Apple’s past that I had missed during my stay on the dark side. There were some really great bits of engineering, but some really bad ideas along the way. There was that obsession with proprietary interfaces like Nubus and then the ridiculously over complicated product base of Quadras, Centris and Performas. They had new models just for the software that shipped on them. Seriously. This was early 1998, Steve was back at Apple as iCEO, Mac OS 9 would be upon us shortly.. but something even bigger was going to drop soon, the iMac.

And so my story of a little interaction with Mr Jobs begins. We had a large school that had just taken possession of  a big bunch of shiny new iMacs. However, all was not gleaming and translucent with these computers. Many of them were freezing at random intervals, causing massive amounts of frustration for us as engineers and the client who had bravely moved back to Apple’s new machines. We had contacted Apple’s engineering team several times as each time we received any of the units in for repair, they wouldn’t fail. We were constantly fobbed off and told that they must have software related issues.

Now I can be known for a fiery temper at times as my wife would attest, and sometimes I may channel this anger in misguided ways. I took it upon myself after yet another angry phone call from the school’s technology manager to draft an angry email.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any of these emails, they are trapped on a defunct hard drive, in a defunct Eudora database somewhere in landfill, but the general gist was:



To: sjobs@apple.com


Dear Steve,


These new iMacs freeze more than an elderly lady on a cold day. Apple's engineers have been as much help as a jagged stick in the ass.


Regards,




Lachlan


AppleCentre


 


I fired off the email and thought nothing more of it. There is no way that the CEO of a multinational technology company is gonna read an email from some punk in Brisbane (this was before all of his famously terse replies made their way on to the interwebs).


The following day my boss came into the service bay. “You know that email you sent to Steve Jobs? We’ll he ****** read it.”.


As a relatively new employee, I was a little concerned I will admit. I apologised to my boss and my manager didn’t even know I had sent it. I was already packing my desk up and ready to leave that afternoon. My boss asked that I send an apology to Steve, and I did so very promptly. But that’s just where the story gets interesting.


We received a call from the service manager at Apple Sydney very soon afterwards, they were sending two senior engineers up from Sydney the following day to investigate the issue. They showed up, and eventually we tracked down the issue to a batch of faulty USB mice (hence the issue was not replicating in our service bay).


A day later I received one of Steve’s amazingly concise replies to my apology. Again, it’s a shame, but this has been lost in a binary grave somewhere under a football field or a park. It’s certainly a lot easier to remember one of his emails word for word though.


 


from: sjobs@pixar.com


Thanks Lachlan, Steve


 


All was well, and somehow I retained my position.


Now this information is 3rd hand of course, but apparently Steve had read my email, sworn a lot and handed out ass kickings all the way down the chain. “Why the **** is some guy from Australia emailing me abuse about my **** iMacs?” (or at least I can imagine that’s what was said). It wasn’t until a few months later and I was at a training course, that an Apple employee shook my hand (off the record of course) and thanked me for sending the now infamous email. Apparently everyone in Australia from the CEO, service manager and engineering teams got their ass kicked from Cupertino. And from reports (unofficially of course) these ass kickings were well deserved. I was known though out Apple Sydney as “the guy that sent that email”.


I can’t think of a single company of this size that has a CEO that would read, and act on email from some young punk service engineer in Brisbane Australia. That really sums up the man’s attention to detail. Not only was he a visionary, but he was an operator like no other.


And that’s my story.


Today I owe the guy my livelihood. I am an Apple Certified Systems Administrator and Technical Trainer. If it wasn’t for Steve and Apple, there is no way I would still be working in technology. The rest of the industry is just completely uninspiring.


You’ve made your ding in the universe and will inspire for countless generations to come.


Our thoughts are with your family and friends. RIP, El Jobso.


 


					

			
				

			
			

					

				
The Iphone 4… and a bit

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There a few events that happen throughout the year that bring with them excitement, surprise & very large smiles. This year it was predicted by the tech community & the general public that this year we would all see the rise of the iPhone 5.  So on the morning of October 5 with a freshly placed CEO Tim Cook placed at the helm Apple presented the keynote for what the world was waiting for, or did they.


Instead of realeasing the very expected & very much hyped iPhone 5 they announced the iPhone 4s. Straight after the announcement the internet boards went into chaos with outcry’s of “Apple you have failed us we want iPhone 5″ & one of my personal favourites “I wanted an iPhone 5, not some tarted up iPhone 4″. So lets look into this a bit more shall we, personally I dont think enough attention has been paid to what the iPhone 4s is internally as most people have given the impression that since it looks the same the old one they aren’t interested.


So what makes the 4s different, it may look the same on the outside but underneath big changes have occurred. The powerhouse A5 chip which is currently featured in the iPad 2 makes an appearance with speeding the phones operational speed to twice what the current Iphone 4 has. An 8 mega pixel camera has been included this round as well as a redesign of the physical camera, an upgrade of the camera sensor to allow more light into the camera is also a step in the right direction. Battery usage has been improved with 8 hours talk time stated, this has often been a sore point of some of the iphone haters but more power to the people is always a welcomed feature.


There is also an inclusion that will change the game of iPhone functionality, & that is Siri. So what is Siri, well it was an app on the app store that was a voice command assistant which would allow you to expand on the existing voice controls that were within iOS. The company was recently acquired by Apple & Siri was bundled into the Iphone 4s. So is it the same as traditional voice commands such as “Call Fred” well not really you can now talk to your iPhone and do the following ”Siri move my 12pm appointment to 2 pm & remind me to call the office when I arrive at that appointment”


With the 4s to ship in a couple of weeks, is it worth the upgrade? Well it depends, if your an existing iPhone 4 user  not so much as iOS5 will be released early October & with that opens up a whole new usage experience. For anyone on an iPhone pre the iPhone 4, then yes very worth the upgrade.


In breaking news, it comes with much sadness to announce the passing of Steve Jobs, whilst writing this very post Apple have made the announcement that Steve passed away this morning. The world & indeed the tech community has lost a cornerstone of innovation, creation & design. A man who created an empire & a vision that grew from a garage operation into an institution that has shaped the world & how we use technology.  I recently read an article which was reflecting on this very event happening as Tim Cook was placed as CEO, it mentioned that history will look back on the life of Steve as a great inventor along the lines of Alexander Graham Bell & even Thomas Edison. Apple will continue to do what Apple do best & the ideals & principles that they have been built on will carry on. In this time I would like to extend a huge thanks to the efforts of Steve for pursing his happiness & creating a reality of ideas & visions. An incredibly bright spark is missing in the tech community today & one that won’t be able to be filled.


I would like to close with some quotes from Steve that I think sum up his achievements & are a testament to everything he stood for.


“I want to put a ding in the universe.”


“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”


“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”


“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”


 


					

			
				

			
			

					

				
Amazon Kindle Fire: A killer tablet for a killer price

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Since their first release, we’ve been watching Android-based tablets struggle in the iPad-dominated tablet market – but it seems Amazon may have delivered a serious contender.


The Amazon Kindle Fire


Building off the success of their popular eBook reader the Amazon Kindle, Amazon have finally entered into the tablet market with their full featured Kindle Fire – and it can be had for just $US199! The new mobile device’s marketing is all about the content, and little about the specs.


Although it’s not available in Australia yet (no surprise) the slick Kindle Fire features a 7″ colour touchscreen and is completely integrated with Amazon’s content network, something that it’s other Android-powered siblings lack. A whopping 18-million movies, TV-shows, music, books, magazines and more will be available at the press of a button plus even more apps and games through the Appstore (which I assume is based off the existing Android Market).


And just to make things even more interesting, the Kindle Fire will come with the brand-new Amazon Silk web browser. Amazon Silk is the first of it’s kind, a cloud-accelerated browser which is set to deliver an even faster browsing experience; exclusive to the mobile device.


From what I can gather, it uses Amazon’s cloud servers to as a proxy and cache. A page request will run through Amazon’s network, and their servers will fetch all the page assets (images, CSS, JavaScript) and optimise and compress them down and then possibly send the whole page back as one Gzipped package – very impressive. I would also further assume that it is powered by the mighty WebKit engine, so users still get all the latest HTML5 technology in their palm.


To sum it up: the Kindle Fire is an impressive tablet at an amazing price and will give you more access to more content than you can poke a stick at. It all sounds good at paper, but the November 15th US release still feel like ages away, not to mention how much longer it will take make it to our shores – only time will tell if the killer tablet will deliver as promised. Either way, the wolfbyte crew is very eager to get our hands on Kindle Fire.


					

			
				

			
			

					

				
Why blog?

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Is that really the question?


Everyone keeps saying, “you should write something”, “you have interesting things to say”, “you will enjoy it”, etc. Sometimes, like everyone else, I do have interesting things to say, but never, ever, when I have logged into WordPress or Twitter. So until now I have convinced myself and those around me, that we really shouldn’t bother.


I’m now pretty convinced that is a cowardly perspective and as my future wife often says “harden the f*** up and get on with it”. The context is obviously different but the message is still valid. (more…)