Recently I attended a presentation by Alistair Cockburn. He is one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development and one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto. During his presentation he introduced the Japanese martial arts concept of Shuhari and it’s applicability to the learning process in general and the mastery of development processes in particular.

The Agile Manifesto

If you haven’t heard about the Agile Manifesto here is a summary. It is the core of agile software development processes like Scrum, Crystal or XP. The Agile Manifesto is a statement of the principles that underpin agile software development:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The Stages of Learning to Mastery

People learn skills in a 3-stage progression: Shu / Ha / Ri

1	2	3
Shu: Follow Learn a technique	Ha: Break away Collect techniques	Ri: Fluent Blend techniques

From Agile Software Development first edition, 2001:

People who are learning and mastering new skills pass through three quite different stages of behavior: following, detaching, and fluent.

People in the following stage look for one procedure that works. Even if ten procedures could work, they can’t learn ten at once. They need one to learn first, one that works. They copy it; they learn it. In this stage, practitioners measure success by (a) whether the procedure works and (b) how well they can carry out the procedure.

In the detaching, or Level 2, stage, people locate the limitations of the single procedure and look for rules about when the procedure breaks down. They are actually in the first stage of a new learning; namely, learning the limits of the procedure. The person in the detaching stage learns to adapt the procedure to varying circumstances. She is now more interested in learning the ten alternative procedures, in learning when each is most applicable and when each breaks down.

In the third, fluent stage, it becomes irrelevant to the practitioner whether she is following any particular technique or not. Her knowledge has become integrated throughout a thousand thoughts and actions. Ask her if she is following a particular procedure, and she is likely to shrug her shoulders: It doesn’t matter to her whether she is following a procedure, improvising around one, or making up a new one. She understands the desired end effect and simply makes her way to that end.

In other words a Shu person knows exactly one technique and will stick to it whether it is appropriate to solve the particular problem or not. Only a few persons will break away and learn other techniques and eventually become Ri persons. A Ri person has developed a large repertoire of techniques and applies the best possible techniques to solve the problem at hand.

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With SharedMinds Desktop you can browse though all your tweets quickly and show links, user profiles and twitter search results right there in the same application. This will make you more productive and enhance your Twitter experience.

 Download now – It’s free

Open Gallery | Slide Show

SharedMinds Desktop has unique features like a powerful view engine, an integrated web viewer and flexible sorting and filtering. It supports twitter search, conversations, twitter lists, multiple accounts, multi-select, easy retweeting, URL shortening, image sharing, a single inbox and has a small memory footprint. It is a native Windows application and supports many different visual styles. For further information see the quick start guide.

 Download now – It’s free

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You may love or hate the new Office Ribbon user interface. Microsoft was very brave to dramatically change the user interface for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Co. It means that more than half a billion people need to learn the new interface. That’s a huge impact – and not everybody is happy about that. However from a usability point of view it is amazing how much research, prototyping and usability testing went into the redesign of the Office 2007 user interface. The main goal was to drastically improve the productivity of the end user.

At Microsoft’s MIX08, Jensen Harris from the Office 2007 design team told the behind-the-scenes story of how the 2007 Office Ribbon user interface was imagined, designed, and validated.  He showed never-before-shown early prototypes and talked about mistakes and lessons learned during the design process.

This presentation is a must see for anybody interested in user experience design. The original full presentation is available here.

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• Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client
• SharedMinds Desktop – Quickstart
• The World’s First Computer Bug!
• Shu Ha Ri: The Stages of Learning to Mastery

If you are new to Twitter or if you do not have an account yet read the following article to get started:

• How to Use Twitter

By now you should have a basic understanding of Twitter and a valid account.

Go to Tools/Accounts and add your Twitter accounts. You can add as many accounts as you like. By default the first account you add will become your default account. You can change this later. For the default account you can select whether you like to automatically login to the twitter.com on startup.

Note: In order to use Twitter Search or to watch the Public Timeline you do not need a Twitter account. You can use those features right away.

a) Main Menu / Toolbar

The main menu can be used to show / hide the navigation pane, status bar, toolbar and to change the visual style of the application. The option dialog and the account manager is accessible via the Tools menu. The About Box and links to helpful resources can be reached via the Help menu.

The toolbar can be used to show / hide the Tweet Pane and Twitter Search Pane. The toolbar is context sensitive and allows interacting with Tweet commands like Reply, Retweet etc.

b) Tweet Pane

It is possible to select one account or multiple accounts for “cross account tweeting”. Spell checking support is provided (currently English only). Click on “Shorten URLs” to shorten the Tweet URLs all at once.

c) Navigation

Use the navigation pane to … well … to navigate! The navigation pane can be turned off or switched to auto hide mode via the pin button.

d) Preview Pane Mode

Use this toolbar to switch between the different preview pane modes of the current view. You can select one of the following modes: Right, Bottom and Off.

e) Account Filter

If you have multiple accounts configured you can select if you like to see Tweets from all accounts or from a specific account only.

f) Different Views

You can view Tweets in different ways: Default, By Date, By Sender, Tweet View, List View and Photo List.

g) Tweet Rendering

URLs, #hashtags and usernames are rendered as clickable hyperlinks.

h, i) Tweet Details Pane

The tweet details pane can be either shown on the right, bottom or it can be turned off. For each URL, #hashtag and username a tab will be added  automatically and the referenced web page, picture, video, twitter search or user profile is just one click away and can be viewed right there. Pretty cool!

j) Status Bar

The status bar shows useful context sensitive information like how many request are remaining for a particular user.

k) Twitter Search

Use the easy to use search editor to construct your Twitter search queries. New search queries can be saved and existing ones can be modified.

l) Organize Searches

After saving your search query it will get a default name and appear as a new node under the search folder.

m) Grouping & Filtering

By selecting List View or Photo List you will be able to customize the view in different ways: apply groupings, filters and choose the columns you like to display. For example it is possible to choose from a number of different columns: Name, Text, Date, Bio, Friends Count, Followers Count etc.

For more SharedMinds Desktop screenshots go and visit the Screenshot Gallery:

Open Gallery | Slide Show

Download the latest version at http://bSix12.com/smd.

For updates you can follow @SharedMinds or @RainerFalle.

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I am working on a Twitter Client right now. But I am not working on some Twitter Client – I am working on the ULTIMATE Twitter Client! Right? Well sort of… however we need to define what “ULTIMATE” means in this context ;-) Ask a thousand people and you will probably get thousands different answers. For example here is Guy Kawasaki’s wish list – which by the way is pretty good!

So let’s rephrase this: I am designing the ultimate Twitter Client for Windows which first and foremost I would like to use. And it depends on how far I can push it as a spare time project…  Anyway here is the concept:

The main goal for the application called SharedMinds Desktop is to integrate different communication and productivity tools. It will be designed with extensibility in mind and in future come with it’s own plug-in system. However the focus of the first version will be about Twitter integration only:

a) Main Menu

The main menu can be used to show / hide the Tweet view and Twitter Search. It allows interacting with Tweet commands like Reply, Retweet etc.

b) Tweet View

It should be possible to select one account or multiple accounts for “cross account tweeting”. I somehow can’t write without spell checking anymore… So spell checking support will be there right from the beginning! Clicking on “Shorten URLs” will shorten the Tweet URLs all at once.

c) Navigation

Use the navigation pane to … well … to navigate!

d) Account Filter

If you have multiple accounts configured you can select if you like to see Tweets from all accounts or from a specific account only.

e) Different Views

You can view Tweets in different ways: Tweet View, List View, Photo List etc.

f) Tweet Rendering

URLs, #hashtags and usernames should be rendered as clickable hyperlinks.

g) Sorting and Filtering

It should be possible to sort and filter by all visible columns.

h, i) Tweet Preview Pane

The tweet preview pane can be either shown on the right, bottom or it can be turned off. For each URL, #hashtag and username a tab will be added  automaticcally and the referenced web page, picture, video, twitter search or user profile is just one click away and can be viewed right there. Pretty cool!

j) Twitter Search

Use the easy to use search editor to construct your Twitter search queries. New search queries can be saved and existing ones can be modified.

k) Organize Searches

After saving your search query it will get a default name and appear as a new node under the search folder. From there you can rename it, change it’s icon or put it into a category folder of your choice.

l, m) List View, Photo List

Twitter Search can be used even without a Twitter account. So there is no account filter for twitter searches.

By selecting List View or Photo List you will be able to customize the view in different ways: apply groupings, filters and choose the columns you like to display. For example it will be possible to choose from a number of different columns: Name, Text, Date, Bio, Friends Count, Followers Count etc.

n) see above.

That’s pretty much it. I hope I can provide a first preview with some of those features in a couple of weeks. You can follow me on Twitter for updates: http://twitter.com/RainerFalle

How does your Ultimate Twitter Client look like? Which features would you like to see?

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• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?

With technologies like Ajax, Flex, JavaFX, Silverlight and WPF the borders between rich desktop applications and rich Internet applications are blurring more and more.

Today the possibilities to develop rich user experiences are amazing! However it can be quite a challenge to choose the right technology for the task at hand. There are just so many options out there.

Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Sun are competing head to head to attract as many developers and users as possible. They all bring in their own technologies and runtime environments. In the following I like to give a brief overview about the technology offerings of the four big players:

Adobe

Adobe’s runtime environment is called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.

AIR applications are running outside of the browser security sandbox, they can run offline and they can make use of local storage and file systems. Currently the most popular AIR applications are Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

Microsoft

With the .NET Framework, Winforms, WPF and Silverlight – Microsoft offers two runtimes and different technologies for building rich user experiences.

Winforms and WPF are the choices for building Windows desktop applications.

Silverlight is a subset of the .NET / WPF runtime distributed as a cross browser / cross platform (Windows / Mac) browser plug-in. Moonlight – a Linux version of Silverlight – is provided by the Mono project (supported by Novell).

Since Silverlight 3 applications can run outside the browser in their own application window. However they still run in the context of a security sandbox. This is the main difference to WPF or AIR.

Microsoft Patterns and Practices group offers very good starter kits and guidance’s for building composite applications. The Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF)  is the choice for building composite applications based on the Winforms technology. Prism is the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight. Specially for Silverlight there are benefits to modularize the applications to reduce the initial download time. Prism supports loading modules on demand which can be very useful in this scenario.

Google

Google’s client side runtime is the browser and JavaScript. Google is investing a lot to make both technologies better and faster. Google Chrome already speeds up the executing of JavaScript significantly. With the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) they are offering an excellent development environment for JavaScript based applications. Gears is Google’s solution to take web applications offline so they can run even without network connectivity and synchronize once the network is available again.

Beside that there are many excellent JavaScript libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI and ExtJS out there. For most scenarios it is possible to create similar user experiences like you would expect from technologies like Flex or Silverlight – however even without installing a separate runtime.  Just take a look at the great examples of jQuery UI or ExtJs to get an idea.

Sun

Sun is betting on its Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are many different UI technologies available on the Java platform: AWT, Swing, SWT and most recently JavaFX.

Maybe you have never seen one but actually it is possible to create good looking UI’s with Java Swing ;-) Just take a look at the excellent Substance Java Look and Feed as an example. And of course IBM did a great job with SWT to dress up the Eclipse IDE.

The Eclipse based Rich Client Platform (RCP) is the most well known framework to create composite applications on the Java platform. 

JavaFX is the brand new offering for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across a wide variety of connected devices. The current release (JavaFX, June 2009) enables building applications for the desktop, browser and mobile phones. JavaFX applications will run on any desktop and browser that runs the JRE and on top of mobile phones running Java ME.

As you can see there is a lot of competition and there are exiting new developments going on in this area. Do you see any of the big players ahead? Which horse would you pick?

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Ever wondered why a computer bug is called a “computer bug”? I was quite amazed to find out that the term can be understood quite literally:

According to the National Museum of American History:

In 1947, engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the components. They taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it “first actual case of bug being found.” The words “bug” and “debug” soon became a standard part of the language of computer programmers.

The operators removed the moth and taped it to the log. (See the picture below.) The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found."

They had "debugged" the machine and the terms computer bug and "debugging a computer program" were born.

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Today I created the first logo for this site and I am pretty sure it will change a couple of times in future. So I thought it would be nice to keep a history of those changes:

V0.1: Generated Logo

My first idea was to use a logo generator to do the job. After searching for “logo generator” on delicious I found quite a few. This is the best result I got after playing around with those tools:

This logo was created by a free tool called “Logo Creatr”. I know it looks like the Google logo but I really like the colorful design. However it reminds me a bit of the first experiments I did with rendering tools like 3D Studio Max more than ten years ago… I think the Google logo could really benefit from a face-lifting these days… :-)

V0.5: Self-made Logo: First shot

Finally I decided to create my own self-made logo. I started by searching the web for inspiration. Then I was refreshing my design basics by browsing the excellent The Non-Designer’s Design Book. This book is great for those of us who need to put together a flyer, presentation, newsletter, website or logo but don’t have the background in design. I highly recommend this book. For my logo I studied the chapter on complementary colors which helped me a lot. Here is my first shot:

V1.0: Self-made Logo: First release

After some more tweaking I had my fist design:

The solid background stands for solid principles and values. The colorful design stands for curiosity, passion and interests. The red/white combination has special meaning as these are the national colors of my home country Austria. The font is a called “Jokerman” that’s the fun aspect. And if you don’t get it from the image – there is the motto written in plain English :-)

About the numbers: 12 is a symbol of perfection: 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the Zodiac, 12 doughnuts in a dozen. 12 is one of two sublime number’s – the other one being 6086555670238378 989670371734243169622657830773 351885970528324860512791691264. Somebody else can have that one for his logo :-D.

So 12 is the perfect number – then what about Six? Well Six is still a perfect number – let’s think of a beautiful six-sided (hexagonal) snowflake pattern for example. But sill – it’s just half of the ultimate perfect number – there are element of crappiness to it. It’s a little bit like the relationship between 42 and 21. 21 being only half the truth…

This will do for now – however if you have any tips for future improvements your comments are welcome.

V1.5 Self-made Logo: Update

Whatever you want, wherever you go, whatever you do in your life, wherever you end up or wherever life takes you…

… do what makes YOU happy.

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