MODERN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

iPhone Apps Finder have a nice review of clocks up here.

“A great way to turn your iPhone into an international alarm clock on the road.”

Responding to requests from pilots and military personnel, we’ve included military time zones in the latest release of Clocks. Also included are named US time zones (Central, Eastern, etc), standard time zone abbreviations (e.g GMT, EST) and also support for UTC (or Zulu).

A new local time zone is also included which will keep track of the local time no matter what time zone your device is set to.

The full press release is here.

Since I’ve been working in a home office (actually a cottage in the garden) I’ve become much more aware of my time management habits, both good and bad.

I’ve had to become far more disciplined with my work habits. Working in a typical corporate office (as a coder, anyway) much of your schedule is imposed on you from external sources. You have to turn up by a particular time, you need to be at your desk (or a meeting) throughout the day, you can’t leave until a certain time at the earliest etc etc.

Working from a home office is a different proposition altogether, and you have to try and impose your desired work habits upon yourself. Towards this end I’ve been looking at certain ways to improve my productivity, and lately I’ve been playing with something called the Pomodoro Technique.

Pomodoro is the name of a productivity improvement technique developed by an Italian chap called Francesco Cirilllo, originally using a tomato shaped kitchen timer (hence the name, Pomodoro is Italian for Tomato. I think.) It’s a pretty simple idea – break your work periods into 25 minute sessions with 5 minute breaks, with a longer 15 minute break after 4 periods, and you’ll get more done.

Back when I used to work in London, I actually used a variation of this whenever I had some tedious job that I really didn’t want to code. You know the sort of thing, you’ve effectively figured it all out in your head, and the rest of the work is just a simple matter of programming. By starting a timer and committing to coding without any distractions for the next 40 minutes or whatever, I was able to plough through the tedious stuff in no time and get it out of the way.

Anyway, so how did I find the Pomodoro technique? Well, really effective for certain tasks and a bit of a hindrance for others.

It was great for jobs that weren’t really that interesting, or when I was struggling to get started on something. As part of my implementation I turned off lots of distractions (mail client, web browser, twitter client), and the mere act of working solidly for 25 minutes improved my concentration and helped me get through the to do list.

25 minutes was ideal for this because mentally it’s extremely easy to commit to concentrate on one thing only for that period, especially with a small break at the end.

And for programmers the 5 minutes break is about right, because I found I didn’t lose my frame of reference much during that time.

For some coding though, especially when I was in the zone and hacking away, I found it a hindrance. 25 minutes really isn’t long enough in this case, and often I found myself ignoring the timer and not stopping when I should.

Would I have improved my productivity more If I’d have been stricter with myself in these periods? Possibly, but coding has it’s own natural breaks and I’ve found it’s best to recognise and use these when you’re working well.

The verdict?

Definitely a useful time management tool, especially as a way of dealing with procrastination.

I’m certainly going to use Pomodoro with tasks I don’t enjoy as much, but perhaps customise it for longer periods when I’m coding. And I think you really need to manage your level of external interruption, otherwise it’s not going to help at all.

Francesco has a whole website dedicated to the technique and the pragmatic programmers have a book out about it as well.

than bing all the time.

I’ve been getting quite excited about the hopefully forthcoming Apple slate device for quite a while now, and frankly this weeks introduction of a HP tablet computer by monkey boy has done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.

“Oh yeah, that looks cool! Wait, what, it runs Windows 7? Oh, Windows 7 with touch, oh, that’s okay then, I guess…”

Fail. For God’s sake, show me something new, something innovative, something that makes me go “Wow!”. Show me something that’s not running Windows….

I have to agree with Jeff Lamarche here, Microsoft needs to ditch Ballmer if they ever want to really get back in the game and not just try and wring their windows monopoly dry for every last penny.

Seriously, If I was watching him introduce an awesome robot dog (for example ;-) ) that brings you beers, mows the lawn, licks it’s own genitals and then chases away those pesky kids throwing a tennis ball against your garage, all I’d be able to think about was his sweaty pits and imagining him throwing chairs out of windows.

It’s obvious that Ballmer doesn’t love the technology just because it’s cool, but because it makes Microsoft money. And it shows.

Microsoft have never been the coolest of tech companies – Steve Jobs famously said that his main issue with them was their lack of taste, but at least Bill Gates had the right sort of geeky excitement and vision required. Ballmer clearly doesn’t get it.

Look, I’m happy to acknowledge that I’m not the hippest guy around either, but if I was going to pick someone to be in charge of the direction of any technology company, it’s gotta be someone that says something like “But wouldn’t it be cool if we could do XYZ as well”? And not “We bing all the time in my world”.

Ballmer may bing all the time in his world, but in my world I’d rather stick needles into my eyes.

was that we didn’t really know what they wanted. Not really.

Since releasing Clocks and Clocks Lite we’ve been receiving (inundated would be far too strong a word here, unfortunately) lots of requests to incorporate named time zones into the apps.

When we were designing the apps, we thought about including these but ruled it out because we were worried that somebody would set a clock to, say, GMT for time in the UK and then wonder why it was wrong for half of the year when British cities went to BST. Much better, we reasoned, to restrict the choices to Cities and then things like daylight savings time would be seamless.

Whoops, first lesson, you don’t really know what people are going to want. At least not until they tell you.

Turns out, there’s 3 different set of requests that keep occurring

1) Named American time zones, like Eastern, Pacific, Central etc. Now I know any North Americans reading this may be shaking their heads wondering at our naevity in not including these in the first place, but honestly coming from a developer who’s lived most of his life in countries where there is only one time zone, having a named time zone for a whole region was a surprise.

2) People who needed to use universal time zones for their work, such as pilots, military personnel and even network comms people. Apparently at some places of work, “Zulu” time (UTC) is used to plan all activities, and local time only used to work out lunch breaks!

3) Some people send meeting requests and the like with times referenced with a zone. e.g 3pm(PST).

All of these were somewhat of a surprise to us, as none of them had ever featured in our lives before. And bear in mind we’re a small team with family and friends flung to the far corners of the globe, and so thought we were familiar with time zone issues.

Which brings up an important point, which is that you may not know what people want until you give them something else!

This is certainly one of my main issues with the Appstore, which is (certainly now, anyway) geared up for apps which are complete from day 1. Personally, I much prefer to iterate continuously to improve quality over time, and this is also the best way IMHO to figure out what features your users actually need.

Well, if we didn’t know as much as we thought at the start, at least we know a bit more now!

Anyway, the latest update of Clocks was pushed to Apple today, and it contains the following:

- Named time zone areas for North America (Pacific, Central etc)
- All the main time zone code abbreviations (e.g GMT,PST,UTC)
- Full set of military time zones (Alpha, Bravo, Zulu etc) specifically requested by a couple of our users.
- Two new local time zones (Local and Juliet) which track the time zone of the iphone / ipod touch. If this changes, then the next time you open the app this will be reflected in the local time.

If anyone does have any more requests for these apps, please let us know. We won’t promise to implement them, but we always listen.

And fingers crossed we don’t receive a ton of complaints come the Summer that GMT time isn’t correct for London…