After poking around OmniGraffle in the past I knew it had a set of stencils for space planning. On the outside OmniGraffle looks like it’s made for floor plan drawing — it’s got more power than something like a piece of paper or Scribbles while it’s no where near as intimidating as an architectural drawing application. On the inside I had trouble doing things as simple as aligning lines on top of each other. The library of stencils for making floor plans is not only extremely limited but also very basic in detail. The furniture stencil offers 4 beds, 5 couches and a grand piano only.

Searching revealed another graphing application that also does floor plans. ConceptDraw is the kind of software company that make the same software for Windows and Mac, charge a fortune, promote their products as “business applications”, require the filing of a large questionnaire to download the trial and follow up with constant emails asking if everything’s OK. I was initially very sceptical of ConceptDraw Pro 7.

Unlike OmniGraffle, ConceptDraw’s building plan library is bountiful. There’s huge arrays of all types of structures, furniture and appliances that look fantastic. Unfortunately it suffers the same flexibility problem as OmniGraffle. Just trying to break free of the grid for the ability to position elements on top of each other was frustratingly difficult.

I finally turned to Illustrator, not known for it’s architectural drawing abilities, it made more sense for floor plan drawing the longer I used it. It’s easy to connect and align elements, it’s easy to cut away segments of line and combine or layer simple shapes to create something more complex. I didn’t want to draw furniture from scratch, both OmniGraffle and ConceptDraw export their vectors in the highly interoperable SVG format. I exported doors, toilets, stoves, couches, beds, sinks and showers from both. Illustrator imported them flawlessly.

The trick is to use different stroke weights. Heavy for the outside wall, half that for inside walls, thick for doors but thin for their swing paths. The scissors, white arrow and align tools are your best friends here. Filling everything that’s not floor and ordering them correctly looks great too. I should have filled the kitchen and bathroom benches in mine.

The biggest problem with using Illustrator is that without getting tedious it’s impossible to ensure proper proportion. I simply guessed. These plans aren’t for building from, they’re to share your ideas, if you can’t tell it’s not in proportion then it doesn’t matter.

You can download my SVG file to open in Illustrator yourself and reuse some things not taken from the graphing apps like my walls, windows and blueprint background.

A huge range of mediocre phones similar enough to make none of them exceptional and dissimilar enough to make the decision difficult. Like the entire range, it’s easy to choose a phone from Apple. All their engineering expertise is focused on developing and improving one device. As a consumer, you either want it or you don’t.

To properly see the labels and detail view it at full size.

The plan is definitely not to scale, correct scale is hard so it’s my best guess. I’ll follow with a post about how to actually make a damn floor plan later.

The bottom left corner is the front door.

It’s small. The most claustrophobic thing about a house has little to do with the physical size of the interior and a lot to do with your proximity to other people. Big houses that force people to be near each other often, seem smaller. If you’re living alone physical size is much less important, there’s no need to plan for competing sounds and presence made by other people. Beside that, it’s more manageable. The study doesn’t need to be separated because there’s nothing to separate it from.

Every wall has a large window. This is to keep the air fresh, the light natural, the temperature cool and to open the small space. It wouldn’t be possible if it was an apartment. They’ll be covered with thick curtains so when I do want it dark and closed at night or for watching movies, etc., I can. I don’t want to live in a fishbowl at night.

Very high ceilings will also make the interior feel bigger than it is.

I’ve lived in an apartment with just one kitchen bench, it’s not enough and it’s annoying. A second kitchen bench doubles as a dining table. Formal dining is not for me. It’s a waste of space to have an area dedicated to the small amount of eating you do each day and it’s a waste of time to transfer food between where it’s prepared to where it’s eaten and then back again for washing up.

An ensuite is a must have but the house isn’t big enough for two bathrooms, nor should it have two. I want an ensuite but I don’t want to make guests walk though my bedroom to get to the bathroom. A second door that can otherwise be kept locked solves the problem.

The TV is mounted on the wall beside the front door. Floor space no longer needs to be wasted on a TV. I don’t need a room for watching regular TV and then a separate, dedicated cinema for watching movies or sport.

That rectangle on the rear wall is a sliding (or french) door that will open to a large verandah or patio that’s not included in the drawing. I imagine it’s floor space will be the roughly two thirds the floor space of the house. It will provide nothing inside doesn’t but provide an inexpensive, secondary place to eat, drink, lounge and cook BBQ. It’ll add enough space to have people over. Inside would feel claustrophobic with just a few guests, a large, open verandah wouldn’t and living alone I imagine I’d want to invite people around often.

There’s no garage because cars belong outside. Consider that my entire house could probably fit inside your two or three car garage.

One area obviously lacking is storage. This could be solved with a backyard shed but that’s kind of cheating. I’ve thought about this problem and I’ve thought of a plan alteration to provide plenty.

The area right of the kitchen, the bedroom and bathroom could be raised to a second, loft style level. The bedroom door would be replaced with ladder style steps. The bathroom would no longer be accessible directly so a second toilet and sink would be installed below. The rest of the space below could then be used as storage, a workshop or laundry if you’re adverse to the laundromat. The ceiling above the rest of the ground floor area would simply be raised to match. I don’t keep rubbish, so I don’t think I’d need the space.

Download the floor plan SVG.

My obsession is with wonderful, thoughtful software and gadgetry. I love the iPhone because it’s fucking amazing, not because it’s from Apple.

People that use Apple products love them because they are good. They get excited about new Apple products because Apple has a reputation for making good products. No one wants competing products to suck because that helps no one. It’s in everyone’s (consumer’s, competitor’s, even share holder’s) best interest for competing products to be great, even better than Apple’s equivalent. Like Gruber, I also desperately want Android to be fantastic but I don’t expect it.

I’ve never used OmniFocus because it’s not an easy application to get into. It’s full of custom (ugly) UI widgets, small grey text on a white background, there’s varied colour, varied size, varied text spacing, the default set of data is messy and not easy to quickly read or understand. I call this kind of interface an intimidating interface and unless it’s necessary to learn and use the application, I’ll close it, maybe never to be opened again. OmniFocus doesn’t make me want to try it.

It’s important to know that everything said here is coming from a person that has not spent time using OmniFocus.

What I have done is read extensively and watched every OmniFocus screencast I could find. For me, I know what makes a great GTD application and I know exactly what I need and what I don’t want in a to-do app. One of the best articles is Matt Neuburg’s review at TidBITS and accompanying screencasts.

I’d go as far to say those two screencasts are the best user interface critique in a screencast I’ve ever seen, if not the best UI critique or simply just the best screencasts, fullstop. They’re to the point, illustrate those points beautifully and what’s happening is constantly explained with great sighs of frustration from Neuburg. Both are worth watching twice and also serve as a great argument against ever using non-standard interface elements.

Standard interface elements aren’t just great because they provide familiar functionality, work the way you’re used to them working and are tried and tested but they look better. OmniFocus is the ideal example of this. The calendar and combo box mentioned in the screencast are obvious but even more subtle details like the colour of the selection bar — rather than using blue or grey like every other Mac application, it’s a sickly orange colour and is much narrower than usual.

Some more unexpected behaviour is the function of command+N. Choosing what command+N does is a tough but I understand it to mean make a new instance of the main thing. The Finder’s thing is windows, command+N makes a new window, Photoshop’s thing is an image, command+N makes a new image, YoJimbo’s thing is notes, command+N makes a new note, you get the point. What’s OmniFocus’s thing? It’s is a library application which generally means they only need a single window, I’d say it’s tasks or actions as they call them. Yet hitting command+N opens a new OmniFocus window. Something I’d never want let alone need a common shortcut that should be used somewhere else for. Stupid.

Inspiration has obviously been David Allen’s Getting Things Done which is great, it’s what started the entire movement but it’s possible to take it too far, to the point of forcing users into a system that might not make complete sense inside an application. Calling tasks “actions” is the beginning, unless you’ve read Getting Things Done or watched the introduction screencast it’s not obvious that an action is actually a task stripped back to the minimum.

Sometimes it’s not about following the mantra word for word but picking and choosing details that best suit the situation or your sense of style. Ask any Christian. I agree that tasks need to be drilled down to individual actions — “complete assignment” is a useless to-do item but that doesn’t mean they need to be so explicitly called actions, a confusing name.

The most important thing for me in a GTD application is getting out of the way, it has to be very easy to get tasks in and get tasks out (marking them as complete). It shouldn’t force organisation or any style of task management. The default mode of a new project is sequential, which means tasks (actions) must be completed in order to complete the project as a whole. This would be fine but OmniFocus enforces this constraint, by default it’s impossible to mark any task that’s not the listed first under the project as complete. This is over-management and oppressive, even having to change that setting for each new project is more administration than I want to be doing.

The problem is being completely over-worked by OmniFocus. There’s a paragraph in the TidBITS article about the inspector window, something Omni applications seem to have great affection for:

In my opinion, the inspector window’s role is problematic here. The main window should express, somehow, everything important about every action; the inspector might function as a convenient secondary interface, but consultation of the inspector should never be required in order to know or do something.

The need for an inspector at all is a sign OmniFocus does too much and the fact it’s required to view for important information is a great example of how it forces the user to also do too much.

I asked a French co-worker what the kids were celebrating. He squinted, looking into the sun. “That it’s May,” he said. “That they’re French, that they’re young. You will not understand.”

Full of more funny and interesting anecdotes. France is so weird.

Aggregating content from varied sources to a single page is cool, being able to do it is cool but ultimately, it’s pretty useless. Simple links to profiles are enough and it does the same job uniting all your online junk.

I think it only works when you’re linking to services and websites you actually use. Linking to your LinkedIn profile that only shows your name and place of employment helps no one and reduces the allure of other destinations listed — they might shell accounts too. I don’t oppose signing up for every service you can to secure your username in case you ever do use it, there’s just no value in listing it at your headquarters.

I feel the descriptions are important because I use all the services differently and complimentarily. I use del.icio.us but it’s not where I most often link to content I love or find interesting — I do that here. I use a YouTube account to subscribe to channels and record favourites but I wouldn’t use it to publish video, I imagine I’d use Vimeo for that. Before a visitor visits one of my profiles or accounts on an external service, they know how and why I use it and how it fits into my life.

I love the idea of a central station.

Design sidenote: The layout primarily uses ems for sizing. Go to jimwhimpey.com and hit command+ or command- (ctrl if you’re on Windows) and watch the layout resize with the text. I love this technique because it preserves a good line length. After seeing it work so nicely there I also converted Valhalla Island to an elastic layout where it counts.

[...] computers are really not that popular, and I don’t think this Internet thing has much of a future anyway.

I think this is a great representation for how old and stuck in his old fashioned ways McCain is. Firstly he should realise how massive the part that computers play in modern, Western society is and realising that, he should make the effort to learn about them. Either he doesn’t realise how important and useful they are which shows gross ignorance or he does realise but won’t learn the basics of using them which shows stubbornness and unwillingness to learn new things or move with the times.

Ten to twelves minutes, per phone! Does anyone remember bread lines?

Whereas standing in line for a new Apple product in the past usually only took a few hours, this arrangement will usher in a new era of Soviet style queueing.

[on opening day].

This is so insane to me I don’t know where to begin.

You’re willing to wait in line for a few hours yet a 10–12 minute in-store activation makes you sick?

You’re willing to wait in line, outside, at a store, with other people for a few hours yet not being to activate the phone at home is a heinous injustice?

You’re comparing waiting in line for hours to spend a couple of hundred dollars for a slightly upgraded version of what you already have to Soviet citizens waiting in line for food to live?

If in-store activation is so terrible and it’s going to tip the wait in line on the first day over however many hours you find acceptable I have a revolutionary solution: Hold off three or four days before buying it. Surely, surely you’re able to live with an iPhone on EDGE, without GPS for just a few more days? No?

How can waiting in line for a few hours make sense while 10 to 12 minutes in store is outrageous?!

Ahh!

It’s like newspapers on the web as saying: here’s all the static stuff we produced for the paper — you want all of our dynamic web innovation? Oh, that’s downstairs, in the back room. Knock twice before you enter.

It’s about the Washington Post but it applies to just about every newspaper. The blogs section is the only section I read at the NY Times. Via Waxy.