Station Master’s Journal

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Source: smh.com.au/nwes/biztech

This is a stunning statistic and I can definitely see the effect that rampant email checking can have in the workplace. In our dynamic office environment I've been trying to keep to checking email to 3-4 times per day. I find that once in the morning, once after lunch, and once closer to the end of the day really helps keep my focus task oriented. Apparently it also saves me 8.5 hours a week just in refocusing time according to this. One of the biggest reasons I've ran with this approach to checking email is that it also allows me to get through email in a very rapid way by batching writing emails together at one time. Just a few bits of food for thought.

Just a quick plug here for a fun website called "Type is Art". As a associate member of the Graphic Designers of Canada(GDC) I've been busy broadening my knowledge of typography as it is also the focus of the association this year - and really enjoyed the experience at this dynamic site. The Type is Art site is an interactive exploration of different components of the typographic form and really does have some very fun educational elements. If you have any interest in typography be sure to give it a look.

Today I installed the free Firefox plugin Ubiquity and was amazed by the new concept and the possibilities it unfolds for both users and web developers alike.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

While you certainly can read more about Ubiquity yourself... I was very impressed by a variety of functions that have already come in handy for me.

Contemplating a trip to Central America I have had to look at many pages which are often in spanish. It's annoying to have to refer to babelfish or google translate constantly and I've often wished a translation could be done on the fly by selecting text and letting Firefox handle the rest. Enter Ubiquity.

First I go to a spanish speaking website...

I highlight the text and then type "translate" into Ubiquity. I hit enter and it translates the entire text in the page itself.

Then lastly I select the newly translated text and pull up the screen for Ubiquity and type "email" which then automatically opens up Gmail and composes an email with the text that I have selected.

All I can say is that's just plain brilliant. You can do all kinds of things with ubiquity. You can select a phrase or word and then:

• translate the text to english
• google map it
• email it
• get a definition
• look it up in wikipedia
• search Google for it
• and a whole lot more!

I can see increasingly that as web services and open API's get more prevalent that tools like Ubiquity will become an everyday part of our browsing experience. Huge kudos to the team behind the concept!

Also here's a good video on the concept:

Well it's officially September and our big summer code push is almost over. We've just finished off a handful of new websites which we will be showcasing in our design portfolio this month - but the bigger news is that we're preparing to launch our first 2 big open source products. We will also be relaunching our own website with a fresh design to accommodate our new products.

There are no official timelines yet for when we will launch them, but it likely will happen close towards the end of September / beginning of October. Both open source products will be based off of the Zend Framework and will most likely be released under either the MIT license or the BSD license. The products are also uniquely positioned, meaning that both don't have direct competitors in the open-source market as there isn't anything else out there that provides the functionality that they do. We are still working on naming both products so instead of giving everything away now we've decided to wait until the end of the month.

If you are a big Mozilla Firefox fan (like we are) then you might be interested in this short list (heh) of 85 Firefox shortcuts for the PC and for the Mac.

Today while looking through some of my favorite blogs I found an awesome article about creating a collaborative work environment (or is it known as a collaborative workplace?). The company who originally spawned the idea is located in Phoenix but I wonder if it would be possible to create a similar working group here in Victoria. I know I've had some interest from a few designers here in Victoria on the Jelly concept, but it looks like concept is more of a full-time work environment.

Phoenix is the 5th largest metropolitan area in the United States, and has the distributed talent and resources to become a powerful destination in the web industry. Unfortunately, it has always lacked the spark that brings everything together.

Local organizations that should be helping the web industry thrive have become bogged down in local politics, turf wars, or ego showcasing. Most web workers have given up on the hope that they'll actually change anything.

Attempts to emulate Silicon Valley (or other web hubs) have typically failed, because they simply don't fit the unique Phoenix culture and geography. We need to build a new community model, a Phoenix-centric one, to turn this city into a relevant hub of web talent and innovation.

That's where Gangplank comes in.

If you have any interest... fire me an email at info@simplestation.com and I'll start building a master list of individuals interested in the concept. I figure if we had a solid 3 to 5 groups who wanted to spit rent we could definitely get the whole thing going.

Continuing on the track of posting unrelated videos, here's another great one titled "I love the whole world." One of the best commercials I have seen this year.

It isn't often that we post videos that are not related to web design, marketing or technology in any way, but this particular video caught my attention as it is quite artistic from a human motion perspective. Imagine walking into a train station where everyone was frozen in time but you.

While I have been a stalwart fan of introducing simplicity into all the websites we design, I have also been a fan of putting more effort into leading a more simple life. On that note I have recently discovered an excellent blog on how to lead a more simple life that I thought I would share. Think Simple Now is a blog dedicated to simplicity, creativity, clarity and happiness. I would highly recommend giving the posts a read through as they are both thorough and insightful.

On March 29, 2008, cities across Canada, and around the world will turn off their lights for Earth Hour, a WWF event to raise awareness about climate change and symbolize that, working together the people of the world can make a difference in the fight against climate change.

Earth Hour has grown from a single event in Sydney, Australia in 2007 to a global phenomenon that will occur across six continents and in as many as 20 cities in 2008.

Toronto was the flagship Canadian city to commemorate Earth Hour 2008 but dozens of others including Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal have already joined!

The goal is to get thousands of businesses and individuals to participate in this historic event, so we can show the nation and the world that Canadians are leaders in addressing climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our world today.

Simple Station is doing their part - do yours too!