Jim Anning

So I’m up and running on Vodafone Spain Mobile Broadband… it’s taking a while to get used to gprs speed internet (although its flicked into 3G a couple of times late evening). What a crap user experience you get from Vodafone…. heres a potted history….

1. Bought VF modem – so far so good
2. find out that to get it up and running on a Mac you need to download some software from VF Spains web site… which is a bit chicken & egg really – which comes first the internet access, or the download you need to get from the internet to make the internet access work.
3. But – I have my trusty UK modem with me so for a measly £8 I can access the internet and download whatever it was.
4. In the booklet which comes with the modem, VF Spain point you to an place on their site…. which doesn’t exist.
5. Eventually – with Lisa’s help with understanding the Spanish – I find the download…. which is 35Mb & takes hours to download at gprs speeds (and if VF UK charge me any extra for downloading this then I shall explode).
6. Download doesn’t work
7. More searching around and it seems that the problem is that I have an existing (old) version of VF mobile connect – the new version doesn’t properly get rid of the old one, so have to manually delete, zap the pram, and re-install – Hurray… this works!
8. Now am able to use the VF Spain modem to access the internet… but wait…. I now need to top up the pay as you go card before the included data allowance runs out- no problem though their (helpfully written in English) instructions make it clear you can do it online… or on the phone…. or at an ATM…. or at a VF shop.
9. Attempt 1 – Online – Its not https – so no security – try it anyway… but it doesn’t work.
10. Attempt 2 – Cashpoint – doesn’t work I just get an error
11. Attempt 3 – on the phone (with Lisa’s help as you need to speak Spanish for this bit) – they tell Lisa that they can only top up over the phone if you have already used your card in an ATM first.
12. Attempt 4 – try every combination of bank ATM’s & cards we have – none work.
13. At this point, Lisa goes into bank and talks to helpful people – they tell us that you can only recharge at an ATM if you have a SPANISH bank account. They helpfully suggest that the internet cafe round the corner could top it up for cash.
14. Attempt 5 – Success – nice people in internet cafe top SIM up.
15. Jim weeps as he wonders why… 

A) the English instructions that came with the modem failed to highlight that at least three of the suggested top-up methods would not work for most English speaking people.

B) the people at the VF Spain didnt just include a CD with the mac install in the package (or at least offer it at the shop)

Once the top up happens, you then need to text a message to convert it into a BONO – a kind of voucher for internet access – luckily we have a phone which is unlocked so we could put the card in the phone and send the text, otherwise I would have had to rant on for a bit more…..

Rant Over.

The hard drive in my macbook started making a strange ticking sound yesterday – 5 mins later it had crashed and couldn’t re-boot. Having calmed down a bit now….

• Everything was backed up – Investing in a time machine was a good plan
• A replacement drive was around £50 – and for that I get 250Gb of storage (so no more messages about hard drives filling up. 60Gb seemed like loads when I bought the thing – but when every download from the digital camera = 1Gb and theres two kids worth of pics / videos to take, it doesn’t last long)
• It happened 5 days before we go to Spain… not 5 days after we’d arrived.

So whilst the downside is £50, a day of using Lisa’s powerbook and however long it takes to replace the drive & press the ‘restore from time-machine’ button…. the upside is over 4x as much storage and a lesson learned (in not too painful a way) about keeping backups.

Years ago I came across Milestone Slip Charts – which are graphical ways to show the history of a plan. I think they are pretty powerful because they make it v. clear whats gone on and you can’t really hide behind them. The top axis shows the planned milestone dates the left axis is real time – i.e. the chart shows how the milestones have changed over time. 

Milestone History Chart

 However…. they are a complete pain in the arse to draw, keep up to date etc… When I was building the basic prototype for the Milestone Planner I realised that the data I was capturing anyway would make it v. easy to build a milestone slip chart (or perhaps we should call it a Milestone History Chart – apparently some projects don’t slip !!). 

One concern is that this may just be too complicated to decipher and that a simpler (but not as rich) way of showing history would make more sense. 

So useful… or too complicated?

Spent the last hour in Costa Coffee doing some more pictures to illustrate design ideas. 

This one is for showing / editing the Milestone details – i.e. it Title, Owner and Status colour (will also allow people to change the due date here – although I’d imagine that most people would just drag & drop miletones on the timeline to do this). The box would pop up when you clicked on a milestone. At some point (once the basic version is up & running, I’d hope to add a whole bunch of stuff into this screen showing the history of the milestone – i.e. who made what changes to it when) and a wikipedia-like way of reversing changes.

 

Main Screen Design v0.1

Today I’ve been working on the main screen design for the Milestone Planner app (which probably needs a better name!!). I’m trying to keep it relatively simple, but to show ‘at a glance’ where stuff is on the timeline. Theres probably still a lot of tweaking of colours etc… but I chose a blue-ish theme as it kind of says “respectable” (Correct me if I’m wrong on this). I think the design must have something to it as I kept forgetting I was using OmniGraffle and trying to click the controls etc. It seems like a good idea to try and get 80% of the way there with the layout etc before I commit to code (I’m planning to code the colour scheme to make it tweakable later anyway), so the plan at the moment is to try and get some feedback on this design, and flesh out a few of the other screens and show what needs to happen when stuff gets rolled-over / clicked etc

Good question.

I’ve been involved in projects and programmes and change etc for a long time. There are loads of tools out there to help manage this kind of stuff. Some of them are good. Some of them are crap. None of them really tick the box for me. So I’m scratching my own itch. (apparently a good way to start!).
What I’m trying to build is a simple, visual planning tool which does three things…

ff0000;">1. Makes it really quick to agree what needs to be delivered when by who by visually mapping out some Milestones & dates then being able to send a good-looking, one-page overview out to team members / bosses etc.

In my experience what usually happens is…. get bunch of people in front of a whiteboard – draw up a timeline – bung some milestones up – then change your mind – get marker pen all over your fingers because there is never a board rubber – agree on something – take a snap of the whiteboard with your phone – spend a tedious hour putting that all into powerpoint or similar – send out – realise you’ve forgotten to add a bit – recall – amend send out – you get the picture.

ff0000;">2.ff0000;"> Makes it unbelievably easy to keep everyone in the loop when stuff changes by updating your part of the plan with just a few mouse clicks. The app then makes it really easy for everyone to see what has changed.

Once you’ve sent the powerpoint around… of course things change. Over the course of the project things usually change a lot. If you are really anally retentive about updating the plan you’ll spend loads of time doing nothing else (fooling yourself that you are actually managing things when really you’re just catching up with things). If you don’t have the time or (like me) the inclination then the plan will be out of date…. Even if you give the job to someone else – they are still the only person who can own & update the one-pager so they become a bottleneck and it still gets out of date. 

ff0000;">3. Helps everyone make better predictionsff0000;">  by making it obvious to everyone what’s happened during the history of the project (well we will have been collecting all that info anyway – so it would be rude not to!) – best indicator of future performance is past performance (so they say). 

Pulling all of the info together to do any analysis of what has happened takes forever – so we only ever really look at the history of the project when something has already gone belly up badly enough to warrant it. If only everybody working with you could have all the analysis done for them (effortlessly – cross fingers) before things go to the dogs….

Anyway that’s my best shot to date of describing what it is I’m trying to build…. Would you want one? (lets assume its free – as in beer – for now)