Firefox Tab Candy seems to be the future of browser surfing. No longer scroll only horizontal tabs, preview over 30 tabs at the same time, no longer be restricted to your computer or browser. Imagine the hability of creating page groups to organize your internet web page surfing, share them with other people.
All this tab candy makes me think, do I need more RAM memory on my computer?
So I was looking around for a TED Talk with a great speech about finding your passion, following your dream and making a living out of it when I find this video of Mike Rowe, the presenter and co-founder of Discovery Channel Dirty Jobs.
For me the key point of this talk comes between minute 11:24 and minute 13:05.
Mike’s advice is not to follow your dreams, not to pursue your passion but instead understand the world around you and do what you need to be thankful and successful at what you do and eventually happy doing it.
Cameron Herold, a professional entrepreneur coach, gave a talk at TEDx about how kids are raised in the USA. Again there’s a strong conviction that the educational system is not suitable for the student future challenges.
“Start building a network of fellow entrepreneurs that understand your passion and don’t make you feel guilty about always chasing it.”
Cameron Herold
Personally, I love the idea of raising kids to work for their money instead of just giving them money. Let’s incentive and teach them to be creative on ways to make more money instead of just getting them as an allowance. On the other hand entrepreneurs don’t really have all the advantages a normal worker has such as the obligation of full paid vacations, sick days and dental care and eventually retirement.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be an entrepreneur but I also believe that in my country there’s no solid ground for this.
I’ve love to get your point of view on this. Do you believe being an entrepreneur is suitable for your children or even for you? Or do you prefer the financial security of a company worker?
Konigi has been one of my favorite websites when it comes to IA related subjects. On top of that Konigi also sells some interesting products. The Wireframe Notepad is a paper block containing contains 50 sheets of paper (8 1/2 x 11 inches (~ 21 x 27 cm)) with grids created specifically for sketching wireframes.
The grids are drawn with a non-photo blue (cyan) ink that allow you to scan the sketches without the grid. Also the 24 columns grid system makes it compatible with CSS grid frameworks.
The biggest upset come when you want to order it. It’s only available in the US.
Cost: $9 each block (50 sheets)
It comes as a PDF format so you can use it for digital work or simply print it for sketching.
Download PDF format:
Other useful resources
photo by pigpongm
A while ago I remember reading about Pencils, Pens & Markers Sets used for offline wireframing.
Personally I’ve been in love with a Staedtler Noris H3 pencil for years. I’ve tried other models and brands but this one is the special one for me. I also own some coloring pencils of a brand called Milan and I find them great.
Usually if you are sketching wireframes you are not supposed to use color, but when sketching with paper you might want to describe certain actions or add notes and color can help in certain concepts of your visual information.
On Wireframe Magazine post they point out the most popular brands for wireframe hand sketching are Copics, Tombow and Primacolor. Unfortunately they are also some of the most expensive.
Although this resource kind of goes against the main idea of this post, practice productivity by hand drawing freely, sometimes, as information architects we need to do accurate straight-line sketches.
UI Stencils has this really cool set of kits of website stencils, iPod stencils and iPad stencils for offline sketching.
The includes a stainless steel stencil with commonly used iconography and a pixel based ruler, a Zebra Mechanical pencil, 2 UI Stencil stickers and a downloadable .PDF letter or A4 paper template.
Personally I like to sketch freely although having a notion of space, especially compared to
Although I made this list based on what some of the most known people in IA and UX use for their work, my personal resources are a bit similar but from different brands and economically more accessible.
It’s a very basic stock, I’m always trying to keep expenses down. On the other hand it’s important the people you work with, co-workers and clients, get a good impression from you and your work. I was fortunate enough to get a free wireframe notepad at UX LX, courtesy of London User Research Centre, afterwards I bought a decent set of pens and pencils.
Sometimes I print Paper Browser or this wireframe template by Alfonso Bozzelli for some quick sketching. Problem is that if I draw the whose website on these templates, clients usually think this is how it will show on their screens with no scroll. A quick workaround is drawing a straight line and explain what is above and bellow the fold.
I guess I’ve covered the basis for offline wireframe sketching. There are some color and visual concepts to be considered but that will be another post 
I’d love to get feedback from you. Feel free to add to this post. Leave a comment.
It works just like Twitter but every company has it’s own personal stream and only users with a valid company email can access it. Eventually you can create communities, which I call projects, and invite other users, with different emails without the restriction to valid company email, to those communities.
Like I mentioned Yammer works very similar to Twitter so you can use basically the same commands to communicate and search. For example you can mention someone by adding @username to your “Yam” or send a personal direct message by typing to:username.
Yammer allows you to attach files up to 50Mb with no limit in the amount of data stored at your network, meaning you can upload as many files as you want, as long as they are not over 50Mb.
Another great feature is the ability to follow people and tags, allowing you to be on top of project conversations via Yammer, E-mail or RSS feed.
Yammer has 3 pricing plans with fairly reasonable pricing per user per month, Free, Silver and Gold.
If you are simple looking to communicate the free version is all you need but if you are looking for more control a paid version is advisable. Check Yammer’s pricing page for full list of features available on each plan.
In March 2010 I started working on a startup company called Oferta Global – Web marketing services as a web and seo consultant. I felt the need to implement a few tools to improve our archiving and communication.
In April Oferta Global implemented Yammer to help improve organization and project management and with it the whole theme has a common place to share conversations and files regarding the projects we are working on, categorize messages using tags and keeping an archive of all the exchanged messages. The best of all is that Yammer works just like Twitter which made it a whole lot easier to use.
For me the biggest difference I find using Yammer comes when I’m searching the archives for a specific message or file when comparing to the hundreds of emails, many times what I want is a reply between many other replies and the whole email system is just a mess.
I recommend you give it a try, it’s free. It might not be the perfect tool for all businesses but can really improve internal communication. And in case you are still suspicious about giving it a try, companies like Adobe, AMX and Fox use Yammer so why shouldn’t you?
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