It's Lee Simpson.

Food&Tech North East

For years now I’ve worked on premise that if you write an idea down, it makes it a bit more real and encourages you to follow it through, so inspired by the North East’s busy tech and food communities I’ve decided to organise an event.

Food & Tech will be an evening aimed at people who’s interests span both the technology/start-up scene and food and cuisine, as well as businesses and companies currently in either industry who want to find out more about the other.

We’ll have some networking and some speakers but most importantly we’ll have some awesome food and drink.

I’m currently putting together a short list of speakers and finalising the details as well an looking for a venue for the evening which will hopefully run sometime late July - early August.

If you’re interested in attending or being involved then sign up to the mailing list and I’ll keep everyone updated as the event is finalised.

P.S. For the event to work it’s important we get as many techies along as we do foodies, so if you know someone who would be interested then send them a link to this page.

Thanks.

Wireframing 2.0

A few days back a friend of mine Jonny Philp, finally gave me a prototype of a project he’s been working on for a while called Scribbly. My problem with styluses for the iPad that I’ve tried so far is the way they drag across the screen, it doesn’t make for a natural experience. It’s hard to create a fluid line and feel comfortable sketching when pulling the stylus across the screen is like stirring a bucket of bricks.

Scribbly is the first* marker pen style drawing tool for the iPad that feels like a pen. The mix of materials (not sure I can say what) would have you swear down it was a real white board marker if you closed your eyes and with most of the apps I’ve tried is creates near perfect lines. Its a dream to work with.

The first thing I tried Scribbly with is Adobe Ideas, a really simple and well designed quick sketching app that is meant primarily for drawing. I’ve been using Ideas for about 2 months for rapid thought mapping and for some super basic wireframing just using my finger, but I knew I’d get a load more from it once I found a ‘pen’ that worked. I won’t go too much into Adobe Ideas but its got all the features you’d expect and you can email the sketches straight from the app as a .pdf, so there a bunch of possibilities with it.

Wireframing with the Scribbly, iPad and Adobe Ideas isn’t perfect. Adobe Ideas lacks a bit of control over the canvas and the way it deals with zooming is a bit hit and miss, but once you get past that then there isn’t much else to get it your way. If you’re a fan of hand drawn frames but need a way to quickly get them into a digital format, then this is an excellent solution, if you’re more a fan of dragging and dropping then maybe not.

One quick hack that I did come up with was the idea creating grid/template to wireframe on to. I did this by uploading a .png graphic to Dropbox and then transferring it into Adobe Ideas via the camera import function. Getting the template the correct size was an absolute nightmare as Ideas seems to pick and choose the size/resolution based on the graphic size rather than the canvas. Some playing around got me to the image above but it still needs some work, if I manage to get these any tidier I’ll make them available for download. The possibilities for this are endless, with a couple of tweaks you could create templates for mobile and other stuff like lists and dot grids.

In short; don’t bin your Moleskine, Field Notes, Omnigraffle or Mockflow setup just yet, but do give this a try once Scribbly is fully release and let me know what you think.

Scribbly isn’t available just yet, but if you check out www.scribbly.co.uk you’ll be among the first to know when it is.

* first to my knowledge

Update

Anyone who wants to have a blast a creating some templates I’ve made the simple test one available here. Feel free to download it and see what you can come up with.

Some thoughts on the Poloroid POGO

Today I managed to get my hands on a Polaroid POGO. I’ve been after one of these for a while but never really got around to buying one because its never been top of my list.

After getting it home and ‘setting it up’ I attempted to print my first photo to find its not compatible with the iPhone. Not quite sure whats going on with that apart from the iPhone not having the capacity for Object Exchange file transfers. Nightmare. After a quick search I found a couple of solutions that involved jailbroken phones and couple of solutions that involved some shady looking apps that seemed for the most part no longer available in the app store.

Polaroid launched a mini-campaign against Apple to try and get them to support OBEX which involves emailing their feedback form, but all signs point to no progress so I wasn’t sure what one more request was going to do.

A few tweets later Brendan Dawes mentioned that for his ‘Whilst I Was Sleeping’ project he used a Dropbox and Apple Script hack to get the photos to print automatically when the POGO is paired with a Mac. Not built specifically with iPhone in mind but I gave it a try, and it worked perfectly.

The photo quality isn’t the best I’ve ever seen and the size of the prints comes with a lot of artistic license on the box and in the promo pictures, but that said for £30 I’m not complaining. The print time is quick, the colours are OK and all the photos end up with a post-production retro look, but in general it all adds to the charm of the product.

The fact that it doesn’t work with photos straight from iPhone is a bit shit, but the work around will do for now. The most annoying thing about this though is sure you’d think Polaroid would either change the way the tech works to suit the iPhone market, or develop an app that makes a work around easier? Guess not.

Looking forward to having more fun with this.