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I can’t remember enough of the year in an organised enough way to make a sensible post out of it so thought I’d just focus on something that has come into it’s own this year. I read rather a lot of books this year. There’s no way I would have been able to keep track of them all without the very clever anobii website

I’ve tried various book tracking sites but anobii has a nice combination of features and usability that works for me. Honourable mention goes to the nicely designed Readernaut.

I’ve really enjoyed making the time and have uncovered some cracking books. Most surprising was the excellent Alan Bennett book that I picked up from the Library whilst looking for Scottish authors to dovetail with the family’s summer trip to Scotland. I also enjoyed my pretty random (and very cheap) way of picking up books from charity shops as a way of making it easier to decide what to read. 13 of this years books were bought this way.

Fiction Books

1. Arthur and George By Julian Barnes
2. Sam the Sudden By Pelham G. Wodehouse
3. White Teeth By Zadie Smith
4. The Sopranos By Alan Warner
5. Filth By Irvine Welsh
6. Knots and Crosses By Ian Rankin
7. The uncommon reader By Alan Bennett
8. The Colour of Magic: Discworld, Book 1 By Terry Pratchett
9. Quick Service By Pelham G. Wodehouse
10. A Study in Scarlet: (Classic Crime) By Arthur Conan Doyle
11. Charlotte Gray By Sebastian Faulks
12. The Fight: (Penguin Modern Classics) By Norman Mailer
13. The Corrections By Jonathan Franzen
14. The Damned Utd By David Peace
15. The Jeeves Omnibus 1: Thank You, Jeeves; The Code of the Woosters; The Inimitable Jeeves By Pelham G. Wodehouse
16. The Crying of Lot 49: (Picador Books) By Thomas Pynchon
17. Money: (Penguin Modern Classics) By Martin Amis

Art and Design Books

1. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative By Will Eisner
2. Language of Things By Deyan Sudjic
3. Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography By Emily King
4. Visual Research: An Introduction to Research Methodologies in Graphic Design (AVA Academia) By Ian Noble, Russell Bestley
5. From Lascaux to Brooklyn By Paul Rand
6. Play Pen: New Children’s Book Illustration By Martin Salisbury
7. Hot Shots By Kevin Meredith
8. The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora By Irwin Chusid, Jim Flora
9. Then is Now: Sampling from the Past for Today’s Graphics (A Handbook for Contemporary Design) By Cheryl Dangel Cullen
10. The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora By Irwin Chusid, Barbara Economon

Non-fiction

1. Once More, with Feeling By Victoria Coren, Charlie Skelton
2. Paper view: the best of the Sunday Times television reviews By A. A. Gill
3. The Rough Guide to Scotland, 7th Edition: (Rough Guide Travel Guides) By Rob Humphreys, Donald Reid
4. Previous Convictions: Assignments From Here and There: Assignments from Here and There By A.A. Gill

Biographies

1. Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram By Iain M. Banks
2. Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith By Mark E. Smith

Military History

1. Stalingrad By Antony Beevor
2. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man By Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

Graphic Novel

1. Watchmen By Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons

Mythology

1. Axe-age, Wolf-age: A Selection from the Norse Myths By Kevin Crossley-Holland

Technical books

1. Pragmatic Version Control Using Git By Travis Swicegood

Websites for Learners

Read fascinating article on a list apart by Amber Simmons where she challenges people who build websites, to build them with Narratives, Things to discover, Interactions and a meangingful Context. If that all sounds a bit vague, then read the article and it’ll all make sense. It struck me as a very practical list of things to aim for.

Mindmapping with Mindmeister

I’ve used mindmapping before, but have never really liked mind-mapping software, preferring the more direct route of felt pens on paper, but I read a tweet that raved about mindmeister and thought I’d give it a try. Really clever interface with all the polish of a desktop app. There’s a nice selection of the icons and images that are a key technique in making mindmaps, but it also show the limitation of software. It’s always going to be more personal to draw images that are relevant to oneself. On the other hand, an advantage of the software approach is the variety of formats that one can export to : the usual mind mapping software formats plus an rtf outline file and a variety of image formats. Oh, and here’s a great critique of mindmapping

It has all the usual social tools where you can share and collaborate on other people’s maps, as well as set up notifications of changes.The Tony Buzan book I’ve read on it claims it’s usefulness for all sorts of things from major projects to daily planning. I guess it all boils down to how committed you are to the whole process of mindmapping.

Showcases

Looking through this showcase of CSS sites it struck me that the familiar type of site featured is the design studio or personal blog. There are some beautiful and clever designs there, but it’d be great to see some more variety of different types of sites so people can see some examples of how people have dealt with the problems of bringing life and narrative to all kinds of sites.

Retrospectiva

Was sent a link to retrospectiva so I thought I’d have a look. Dead easy 10 minute install was a good start, with some decent instructions to follow. The scoring system is based on estimated hours rather than the points system that we currently use (badly), so that then gives you the opportunity to get the magic ‘percentage done’ so beloved of other project planning methods. I liked the fact that the extensions that came with it mean it was a cinch to set up a wiki,sprints and stories. Initially I found it confusing but worked out that the a sprint is made up of goals, which are in turn made up of stories. I liked the fact that a sprint is manually created, and so can be of variable length. Makes it possible to adjust to the work one commits to. Perhaps might be a little too tempting to make the sprints longer and longer. Also of interest to the project planners are the tickets which can be linked to milestones. I guess they might function like bug fixes and an ongoing support aspect of a project. There were some nice default feeds ready to be subscribed to and good group features for a pretty granular approach to users access. In all, switching is probably unnecessary for us right now, but if we ever needed and open source tool that we could develop ourselves this looks a really solid foundation to build on.

At the risk of a second post mentioning Tim Ferriss, and sounding like a productivity cult member, I’ve been reading some stuff about selective ignorance In short, it’s the simple idea that one recognises things that you can safely ignore and ignores them. The tendency with RSS,Email,Twitter,Facebook et al is to feel that one can stay on top of everything, but personally I’m finding that is exhausting and with unclear tangible benefits.

It hit home to me whilst perusing my many illustration based feeds. I was enjoying looking at some of the marvelous work produced and discovered and I had what I believe is called a moment of clarity. All the time spent looking, is time spent not doing.

Discovered that the Fontcase and Dropbox solution that i thought was working so well has hit a bump. Apparently there is a known problem with the resource fork in the files and the way that they are saved in Dropbox. There’s a really nice place provided by Dropbox where one can go and vote for features to be added/supported. If you’re a Dropbox user and you’d like this you can swing on by and vote.

Writing Tests.

I wrote in the last roundup about how I created an app with some tests ready to be picked up and made real. Well, I was reminded by our testing guru that the tests I had written were not clear enough and I needed to go back and clarify. Far from being chastened by this I was encouraged. I found it a good thing to be able to refer to what I’d written previously and see where I needed to clarify. I’ve found that many times as a group, we’ve discussed the way a feature or system should work and not captured that discusssion. When we then revisit it we have to start at square one again. I’m sure I’ve still got a way to go to get the stories to comprehensive and concise, but I’d much rather begin the job with clarity rather than sort out any confusion later.