Life io at Supernova

Back in March, I explained what’s been keeping me busy for so long. I’m working long term for a New York based startup Attap (pronounced ‘ay-tap’), and the product we’ve been working on, Life io, has been selected as a Top Connected Innovator at the Supernova 2006 conference this week. This means a little more information is being released on what it is, but essentially it’s a ‘Life Organiser’. Before anyone says ‘not another calendar app’, thats not what Life io is about. You’ll see! ;o)

I also want to quickly mention that working with me on the design of Life io is none other than John Oxton. They say you should never work with Children or Animals… or Friends. Working with friends is a dangerous situation, and has before been the cause of lost friendships. Thank goodness then, that collaborating with John is going really, really well! I’m working on the interface design, and John takes up the challenge of working out how to code them in CSS and XHTML. I’m savoring the freedom of not worrying about browser/platform issues! I’d love to have been at the conference with John and the Attap peeps, but it was hard enough juggling life and children to get to @media, let alone San Fransisco. Hope y’all having a good time!

Tags: attap, lifeio, webapps

What I'm doing at the moment

I keep being asked why I’m so busy, so I here’s a quick summary of what’s going on at the moment:

First of all, what I’m not doing…

• I’m not writing a book. I’ve been toying with the idea of self-publishing for a couple of years now, but it’s come to nothing.
• I’m not preparing to speak at any conferences (although I am on a panel at @media). It has to be said, speaking is not where my skills are.
• I’m not redesigning my branding and site, although I desperately want to. I have various ideas, but after sitting on them for a week or two, I always reject them. Then everytime I see another leaf logo, I get embarrased that I haven’t done anything about it yet.

Now, what I am doing…

What I am doing is working for Attap (which stands for ‘All things to all People’). As well as Riffs (which I worked on) and PersonalDNA (which I did a little work on), with another site to follow, as well as the biggie project LifeIO. My favourite part so far was the Attap ‘wee guy’ logo as he/she is affectionately known. It came together very quickly (once I’d turned the ‘a’ on it’s side).

Tags: attap, hicksdesign, sxsw, updates

Riffs, now for Safari too

As promised earlier, Riffs is now able to open its doors to Safari. Believe me, no one is more glad to see this than me!

There is now a blog to accompany the site – riffs on riffs so that Attap can communicate about what they’re up to, new features & changes, as well as gather more feedback about the site. If they let me, I’ll also use this to write about the CSS issues I encountered and solved whilst designing the site.

Tags: attap, riffs, safari

Riffs: your social recommender

At last, I can finally talk about what I’ve working on for the last 5 months! It’s so hard to work in stealth mode, and when everyone asks you why you’re so busy, you have to say “a thing”. Anyway, today, Riffs has gone live in ‘public alpha’ mode.

Riffs is a recommendations engine, a place to rant and rave about anything, recommend and get recommendations. My main use for it will probably be to give music recommendations, but you could use it to rate and review a gig, movie, conference or meal you’ve just had. Perhaps you want to get users opinions of a certain digital camera? While this is the early life of riffs, there are already over 10 million items in the database, and we’ve tried to make the process of adding a new item as quick and easy as possible.

Tags: attap, design, riffs, updates