Design software for PalmOS

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Recent changes to my lifestlyle have reduced the time I have for working on things like this website, and working in a rigidly corporate environment prevents me from choosing software which is efficient, fun and inspiring to use (as opposed to creativity draining nightmares like Visio). A couple of years ago I bought a Palm Tungsten T3, mainly to develop and demonstrate mobile applications, so I decided to dust it off and see what I could do with it to. resolve these problems. Apart from very useful tools like QuickNews, which is the first thing I use every day, and hBlogger, which I'm using to write this, I've also been using several design tools. What I mean by design tool in this context is something which I can use to easily capture rough ideas, and which ideally lets me export these for more detailed work in a desktop application. So what makes a good Palm application ? Usability is really vital. It must show good UI compliance, be easily learnable and intuitive, be easy to use in non-ideal circumstances, for example standing up in a bus. It should do a few things but do them very well and avoid complexity and feature overload, instead it should have high interoperability with other applications. I was basically looking for software which could help me to capture ideas and concepts. Generally I was looking for outlining, graphics, or mind mapping tools, which should offer some level of desktop integration - Mac desktop in my case. My "dream solution" would be PalmOS versions of OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, but failing that, here are some I found: MindMapper PDA is a classic mind map application. It may work well in its desktop incarnation, but the Palm version is awkward and buggy. The worst part is the lack of any scroll or zoom of the view. Possibly if there was a sync option for Mac it would be more useful. Leonardo is a fully fledged vector graphics application. It has a slightly weird UI but you soon get used to it - although not without a quick review of the documentation. It includes a cross platform desktop app which serves to organise synced files and to import & export to a variety of formats. Leonardo's main shortcomings are more down to the limitations of drawing vector graphics on a Palm than anything inherent, but whilst it is impressive I haven't found it compelling enough to license yet. There just isn't so much you can do on 320 x 480 pixels. Inspiration is an application I revisited with far more success after a so-so first impression. Unlike all the other applications here, Inspiration is derived from a desktop application, one that has a long history. These days Inspiration is primarily targetted at the education market. Inspiration is one of several outliners available for PalmOS. It is fast and easy to use, but fairly basic:

Outline of the logical structure for a redesign of this site in Inspiration

Where Inspiration shines though is its ability to switch instantly back and forth between outline and graphical views:

Graphical view of the same outline

Files created on the Palm can be easily opened in the desktop version. However, desktop files exported to the Palm lose a lot of complexity. The Palm version only supports a few graphics primitives. Manipulation of graphics on the Palm can be awkward - again, the UI isn't perfectly adapted to this sort of stuff - but not so awkward that you get terminally frustrated. It also doesn't support 320 x 480 resolution, just 320 x 320. The desktop version of Inspiration is a bit overpriced, and rather clunky compared to OmniGraffle, but it does the job. However so far I've only licensed the Palm version, and am using a 30-day demo of the desktop. Inspiration will stay on my Palm. It has already earned its keep. Whilst Inspiration does have an Outline mode which is quite useful, it is totally blown away by Shadow Plan, the ultimate PalmOS outliner (and one of the best on any platform). Shadow Plan is both easy to use and very sophisticated.

Outline of the structure for a blog index page on this site - note the arrows which indicate links to other pages

You can create a wide variety of outline types, and link these with each other or with OS applications such as ToDo. Shadow is equally useful for project management as it is for managing notes. One use I found for Shadow's link feature was to use it to model links between web page mockups, entered as individual lists. The only thing lacking here is some sort of high level view of the link map, but anyway Shadow has the depth and richness to lend itself to this sort of lateral thinking, without getting in your way when you just need a list. Shadow is so useful to me that it is mapped to a hardware button on my Palm. I actually sketched out this article using Shadow, and exported it to hBlogger via Memos. For conceptual design work on web sites it is excellent. Shadow syncs (optionally on a file by file basis) with desktop versions for MacOS and Windows. Here it shows some weakness, as the MacOS version is pretty clunky and no match for OmniOutliner. Unfortunately whilst Shadow uses an XML file format, it does support OPML, therefore files cannot be interchanged with other outliners. This is a real shame, but not a showstopper. I cannot think of any PalmOS application I'd recommend higher.

Redesign Part 1.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

After weeks of reading wise words on information architecture, usability, designing with web standards and other esoterica, I have finally started on some practical stuff. It is a lot easier reading about all this stuff than it is putting it into practice. My plan was to follow a strict ground up plan based more or less on the the Elements of User Experience. To some extent I did this, and forcing myself to go through at least part of the exercise was both useful and educational. It is all very well using these theories in a relatively abstract context working as a small part of a large machine, but applying them to my site, where I am the client, the designer, the developer, the content provider, not to mention approximately 98% of the audience. The pressure I felt to just "get on with some real work" was quite high, especially as I knew that the Movable Type part of the site was in a real mess. Also I have very little time available for this, mainly 40 minutes or so of commute time every day. To make best use of this time I tried to find design tools I could use on my Palm. I'll talk about these in a seperate post. I had (and still have) many ambitious plans in my head for both the visual and non visual design, but putting them into practice is another matter. Inspiration which flows freely on the tram or in the shower seems to dry up when I sit down in front of the screen and realise that in fact I have no idea how to do a particular trick in CSS. Practical problems intrude as well: StyleMaster from Westciv is a great tool, but v.4.0 is very buggy which means that time spent learning new features was largely wasted (v4.0.2, now released, seems much better). Finally I decided to attempt a full overhaul of the Movable Type templates, to rationalise and slim down the stylesheets, and to attempt some stopgap cosmetic improvements. I also wanted to make some usability improvements in link styles and navigation. I had about 4 hours to do this. Although it was all done in far less than ideal circumstances, some of the planning I did whilslt commuting helped a lot. For example, analysing my business requirements led me to understanding that a prime objective of this site is self promotion, and there are two aspects to this: Photography and Other Stuff. This led to the further realisation that my so far unintegrated blogs provide two ready made pillars for the site architecture, and that I should seek to take advantage of this. part of a high level site information outline It also occured to me that I might be able to use Movable Type for more than weblog publishing, but also as a CMS (Content Management System). A quick Google revealed that I was far from the first to think of this. I think a full blown MT driven site is beyond my resources for now, especially as I would have to integrate the photo publishing part, but it is tempting. For now I've settled on a quick fix, using mt-rssfeed plugin to add topic titles to the home page, providing some semblance of integration. I think that the experience so far is positive, but there is a way to go yet! [Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

Quote of the decade

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

This is so funny...I wish I could have expressed it so well. "I mean why is it that so much usability material is presented more like the Boeing Flight Planning Performance Manual than an airline safety card? Seriously, what's with all the damn text? How can anyone possibly write about design and not provide a visual aid or two?" From a brilliant article at Design by Fire.

It’s the computer’s fault (no, really)

Monday, May 23, 2005

I started reading John Cato's User Centered Web Design this morning on the train. Something in the first pages triggered a thought. It used to be very common, and probably still is, to hear people claiming that some administrative or other disaster was "the computer's fault". I always treated such whingeing with quite some scorn: "the computer does just what you tell it to". I guess I've changed my mind now! John Cato puts it very well: "usability is being able to do the things you want to do and not the things you have to do". The computer does indeed do what it is told to do, but it is being told by a combination of developers, managers, managers' managers, beancounters and many others before the end user gets a say in things. Many of the victims of my superior scorn would probably have been far less inclined to blame the computer if the software they were using had been designed with their needs in mind rather than some budget holder's. Of course there are exceptions. These usually concern vastly overpaid and breathtakingly incompetent managers of massively overbudget IT disasters blaming "the computer". I was right about them! ps: whilst John Cato's book seems good, one thing annoys me. His book's website is useful, but all pages titles are: "Untitled Document". Ok, so it's a minor point, but still... practice what you preach ? [Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

Echoes and static

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Just a quick one - here is a comment on blogging which is well worth reading. Bob Baxley seems to share the impression that I get, even of the more "serious" of weblogs, that the signal to noise ratio is very low. Blogging seems to encourage an urge to write at all costs, even if you have nothing to say. The content becomes the content. The medium is indeed the message and the message is mostly echoes and static. And that is my soundbite ping for today.