trendpreneur

Are you in your late twenties or early thirties? Did you grow up in Britain and have fond memories of Britpop, Blair and Big Brother? (Scratch that last one..)

I’m working on a wee project combining video and music of the times, and I’d love to collect memories from the time. Wow, that makes it sound like history… Anyway, we all have fond flashbacks to the age of heat reactive tie-dye shirts, and although my middle-of-the-road upbringing is chock full of happy reminiscences, I want more variety!

So, if you have a story, a memory, a moment to share from around 1992 to 2000 – for me, my high school years – and especially if it’s closely related to (or described by) a song popular in the same time period – please share it with me :) You can comment here/on Facebook, or email me (mail at jennielees dot net). Oh, and it doesn’t have to be meaningful or funny – just true.

Hmm, should I start a site to collect these or keep them private?

Here’s mine: our endless school assembly pop culture parodies. I remember dressing up as Mikey from Boyzone (I secretly wanted to be Ronan), doing a Grease ripoff for a departing Latin teacher that was, in retrospect, dangerously suggestive, and for some reason I posed as Renton from Trainspotting in front of our class blackboard in N3. God knows why. Anyway, cue montage! I wonder if kids these days do the same type of thing…

It’s strange being back in Edinburgh after six months away. The city feels comfortable, like an old pair of shoes you forgot you had; the weather isn’t a patch on the South Bay, of course, though it’s not too dissimilar from San Francisco. Minus the wind.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived in and around three lovely cities in my lifetime; Brighton, Edinburgh and San Francisco. Cambridge was pretty nice, too, inspiring yet overwhelming (and suffocating) in its way. Recently, my management coach (for I am growed up and have such things) advised me to travel as much as I can now — to visit the places I’ve always wanted to visit, to live in new countries, to have these sought-after experiences.

So, I shall.

Living in a different country is a fun experience, no matter how similar the country to your own. Even living in Scotland was a change from England — accents, customs, friendliness, the health service… America is a step beyond, a strange mirror country where things are sort-of-but-not-quite the same. On returning to the UK, I see it clearer than ever before. It’s not just that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, it’s the traffic customs around crossing in certain places. It’s not that the health service is totally different, it’s that doctors’ offices have credit card terminals at the front.

Stephen Fry puts it far better than I ever could, and hits the nail on the head — it’s not just that things are superficially different, but under the skin, that’s where it’s interesting.

The next adventure is to go somewhere totally different. In a way, it seems that it would be easier to learn a completely new culture than to do a botch job of assimilating one slightly but not quite the same. But we shall see. For now, I am enjoying the comfort of an old friend in Edinburgh, and secretly plotting my eventual growing of roots here.

I’m no secret admirer of O’Reilly’s fantastic technical books, so when I saw there was a new iPhone app book coming out, I got pretty excited. I’ve been meaning to dive into iPhone app development for a while now, and the advent of the magical piece of magic iPad has certainly made me more keen to do so.

Enter ‘iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual‘. (Book website)

This book by Craig Hockenberry does a really decent job of conveying the experience of being an iPhone app developer, not just the technical documentation. It contains details on Japanese tax treaties, beta testing and bug-hunting, MVC and paper prototyping. It’s more like a course on the lifecycle of an app than a detailed lesson in programming for the iPhone, something that the other iPhone books I’ve read have handled in a fairly clunky manner.

Any criticisms I have for the book’s content are not really the fault of the author, but more the ’standard’ way of teaching iPhone programming, and the constraints within which a tutor must work. Number one, I am fed up of flashlights. Seriously. I’m also pretty bored with the whole “Create an app without any code!” approach.

It seems every single newbie tutorial out there tries to schizophrenically assume you have little to no programming experience, and would rather build something with as little of that nasty code as possible, while also jumping in with details on the square brackets and types and inheritance from the get go. I don’t know. There must be a better way.

Craig’s book actually handled this better than most, and I found myself bookmarking nuggets of wisdom early on, which is useful. Let’s just say, however, I’m not following it through from start to finish. Rather, I’m using it side-by-side with the iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, which is a real joy in the ‘I just want to build cool shit’ department.

If you’re the sort of person who likes following a single tutorial through without branching off on tangents though, I think you’d be more than pleased with the Missing Manual. You’ll definitely deep-dive into some nifty Objective-C syntax and Cocoa Touch specifics, tools and tricks that are used by actual developers (no, really, I googled some of them!). You’ll learn a lot about designing, testing and releasing your app along the way, too, which is great.

I’d love to see this book done as a class, actually, it definitely reads to me that way and I think it could be nicely broken into work segments. I aim to finish it and see how long the whole thing takes, for sure. I’m learning a lot, and not just about flashlights — I just can’t help it if I get distracted every once in a while and make a twitter app or tip calculator to pass the time…

Definitely worth a buy if you’re starting out with iPhone app development and ideally have some OO experience, just don’t expect it to be your only go-to book.

Really interesting debate/blogpost over at TechMeetup as a result of yesterday’s Engage Invest Exploit in Edinburgh. The main points I’m reading is that Edinburgh/Scotland needs more early stage risk money, more mentors/advisors, and a more flexible ecosystem (people willing to join startups, support networks that enable this). And yet someone has to gain; the investors, professional risk-takers, can’t see a return in 3-5 years investing £1m in 20 startups, so they won’t. Guys, Y Combinator took a long punt on funding hackers with ramen money, and it’s paying off.

Also in today’s reading, two lovely nuggets of wisdom from comments on a Fred Wilson piece on the ‘hopes and dreams’ phase (a phase that Scottish businesses either get stuck in, or never experience):

The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.

If you find yourself driving off a cliff, stop driving.

Contradictory, and yet not; there’s a difference between thinking you’re driving off a cliff, and actually doing so.

I recently idly tweeted an idea which flitted through my head while considering the pros and cons of “E-School”, the Founder Institute. People asked for more, so here it is!

To build a business you need to build a product. While technical types often find the process of knocking up a quick demo webapp a walk in the park, one way a non-technical person can quickly gain feedback and respect is to build a prototype themselves.

If you have an idea for a web application – whether it’s a shopping site with a twist, an iPhone app that shows you nearby tweets, a game to teach children about finances, or a global treasure hunt – chances are you can build an early version to get the idea across quite quickly, even without much of a background in computer science.

Today’s tools are accessible and almost universal, but they can be really daunting if you don’t know where to begin. The value of creating your first prototype yourself in terms of feedback, understanding the problems you’ll have, and even the exercise of trimming down the feature set and figuring out the MVP (minimum viable product) is far, far greater than the time saved outsourcing it to the Philippines.

But where are the tools to teach you how?

There’s stuff to turn hackers into entrepreneurs, but connecting entrepreneurs with the tools hackers have at their fingertips seems much less common.

Here are some of the ideas I have around creating a resource (offline workshops? week-long intensive? online course? incubator? unconference? wiki? website/blog? book?) to help people without a technical background build a prototype of their idea quickly, and get feedback on it.

Methods

• How to design, structure and plan a web application (see below for how to build)
• Rapid prototyping, iteration, and agile development (i.e. build it quickly, get feedback, change it)
• Minimum viable product and how to figure out what should be in your prototype
• Ways to test out your application; how to find initial users and get feedback (Real stories)
• Feedback channels for prototyping before you’ve written a line of code
• How to pull off an awesome investor demo (Interviews)

Technology and Tools

• Product and feature design techniques
• How to make the most of paper prototypes
• What’s wireframing and why should I bother? Won’t the designer do that?
• Designing an awesome user experience
• Visual design basics (Analysing/Breakdown of beautifully designed prototypes)
• How to make things look good and feel polished without a degree in graphics
• Readily available tools and products you can use to speed this along

Getting Help

• Ideally, build everything yourself; it really helps your credibility and teaches you a hell of a lot along the way. If this isn’t an option for whatever reason,
• How to outsource the building of a prototype
• How to find a developer and/or designer
• Once the prototype is built and you’re happy, how to find the right rockstar lead developer to take it forward

I’d love to hear some feedback on this idea and information on areas you particularly want to learn more about (whether I included them or not) — and how you’d like to consume the information.

Cheers,
Jen