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The post Ask why – to champion your cause appeared first on Potion.

WordPress was rarely considered as a vehicle to carry full-blown apps. No more!

WordPress is no longer just a blog. It has progressed to a general purpose content management system and beyond, to a serious contender as a web-portal or application hosting framework. The reasons are not hard to find. The sheer number of WordPress sites has driven development of the platform at a dizzying rate, with new releases appearing every week or two, addressing things like security, functionality, styling and, above all, usability. This frequent update policy, an agile strategy that implements small changes more often, has meant that the update mechanism be extremely robust and reliable, even through major versions. Add to this the fantastically well-organized and well-presented wordpress.org website, a plugin repository you can largely trust, the largest supply themes in the world and amazingly responsive community support and, best of all, the slick and intuitive back end. WordPress has overcome the UX hurdle on which contenders like Joomla! have tripped. WordPress tops the charts. Easily. It’s no surprise that many of the worlds top organizations are now using WordPress for the primary website, not just to run their blog or online news portal.

The design is no less pretty and well thought out for those venturing a peek under WordPress’s hood. So much so that many web application developers have started using it as a development framework. Just think about it, when developing from scratch in something like hand-coded PHP, CodeIgniter or CakePHP, a developer spends the biggest chunk of his or her time with the standard stuff, like menus, security, content management, the admin backend and so on; and then comes the extraneous stuff like training the user how to use the beast, ensuring that the code can be maintained and updated when technology shifts — and not a line of the killer app (along with cool design, our raison d’etre) has been written Ugh!

Enter “App Themes” and App Plugins. What could make more sense? Themes and plugins that are applications in their own right, but rely on WordPress for all those things that are not core to the application. The styling, the menus, the contents that is not specific to the application, and so on. Just like Joomla! or Drupal. Yes, only better. WordPress is less rigid about it’s layout so, for example, the application settings can be placed all in one easy-to-use admin menu. And if it makes sense to change core WordPress settings, you can do that from your new admin menu too. Or you may decide that the best way is to add a setting or item into an existing WordPress edit menu like, for example, adding an image to a category. This non prescriptive capability has allowed WordPress’s admin back-end to shape itself into what most ordinary, non-tech users comfortable with. Best non-prescriptive, best practice guidelines have evolved, rather than some rigid, pre-designed management framework.

And if you think that there are no more cool things to be said about it, hear this. How about developing your website, live, as you go? Get up and running quickly with WordPress, a cool theme and the important content. Then add your web gadgets and added functionality as required. Commit to smaller changes more often. The big, custom development project needs a large upfront commitment of resources and, therefore, risk!

Lower cost. Reduced risk. No brainer?

Here at Potion our new policy is to make WordPress with app themes (or app plugins) the first consideration when proposing new websites. Contact us to see how we can reduce the development cost for your new site. Also, if you have been shocked by a recent quote to update your old [other framework name here] site, consider converting to the new way – there’s a good chance it will actually cost less; and you will definitely save a bomb on future maintenance.

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The post What does it mean to be a World Design Capital? appeared first on Potion.

There was barely an audible buzz around this topic in the WordPress community last week at Wordcamp, Cape Town 2012. But earlier this year, at the Enterprise Mobility Forum 2012, I listened to a lineup of industry giants explain their and their corporations’ views on  the future.  All, either directly or by inference, put forward a view that, except in a few isolated cases, all applications will:

  1. be cloud-savvy
  2. run in a browser
  3. support responsive styling for mobile, desktop and print
  4. be written in HTML5

The cloud can be large or small, it can be remote or local, and it can be public or private.  The macro end, “large, remote and public”, is probably what most of us think of as cloud computing.  But having tiny little private clouds is equally valid.  The other misnomer is that this is client-server computing.  Wrong again.  HTML5 does not even require a server.  It’s just another GUI that is equally capable of connecting to a remote server as it is running server-less.

The operating system will become the life support system for the browser.  It is not inconceivable that browser windows will be the only windows viewable, and that future Operating Systems will, apart from basic window management, become less bloated and dispense with deeper window system functionality.

At last, HTML5 introduces a standard Scalable Vector Graphics capability, and it will only be a matter of time before standard 3-D is supported. The “Power App” users will no doubt be skeptical but, as always, the underlying hardware will continue to play a significant role in arithmetic and graphics performance.

Last, it is important to make it clear that when we talk about HTML5, we do so in conjunction with CSS and Javascript.

Oh, did I mention, “Flash is dead, long live javascript!”

The post The OS is Irrelevant appeared first on Potion.

He says “The thing about sustainability is, changing the language we use is also quite important. How is it that township tours can be branded as responsible, if townships are something that should never have been created in the first place. What’s responsible is an experience that looks at how we unbundle the notion of township, and what that township delineation of space means. So things like responsible, having to really interrogate that, is part of our sustainability programme. In the context of Cape Town, what does township mean, and what’s the future, how does the city integrate, what are the design processes for that and how do we as a tourism entity, when we are taking guests on an experience of township, how do we bring all of that into the experience, so that they’re really thinking about it.”

Iain continues, “So it’s like corporate social responsibility and corporate social investment. So many tour operators will talk about how they “give back”. What are you giving back to? Does that suggest that you’ve been “taking from”? So the language of give back, and people always ask us, if you’re visiting people of a township, how do you give back? And our response is but you’re suggesting then that we are taking away. But that’s not the premise of what we do. It suggests that at the end of the month we have a party for people or give a percentage. But in the model when you say “what are you giving back?” what you’re suggesting is that we’re making a whole bunch of money at the expense of those people, and then they can have something back. And that very idea, which you’re thinking is the right approach, is highly problematic for us. Because in our model, everybody gets paid an amount of money that’s negotiated, that’s agreed upon, and that’s fair, and sustainable. So this “give back” idea is premised on there being an abusive relationship, and we’re saying this is problematic language, let’s look at the internal operations of things and try get away from the notion that somebody who’s on top has to give back to somebody who’s below, that’s bad business planning.”

So the change and their relationships are built into the value chain, rather than being tacked on at the end.

The post Are township tours responsible? appeared first on Potion.

He spoke about South Africa as being in the “majority world” context, which is where 90% of the world subsists, and Cape Town is by no means separate from that. He says “Also has what I call pre-industrial society dynamics, people who are yet to join this info superhighway, they are yet to own products, they don’t even have the luxury of choice yet, whereas we have moved to the point where we have moved beyond the basic need now to basically exploring our preferences and our subtle nuances. So the industrial designer similarly has moved in some of these instances from what one would have called pre-industrial design situations to industrial design situations and to post industrial design thinking.”

“So if I was to use that as a parallel, the post industrial designer then is thinking about user experiences, usability, service design, interaction design which are more to do with putting the user as the centre of your thinking, and to find a way to make sure that the user is happy. In the pre industrial design and industrial design phases, we are really focusing more on the product and not so much on the person and the process, so maybe the challenge is in terms of sustainability is to find ways in which designers in our context can help entire communities leapfrog into this new happier post industrial setting by taking advantage of the best systems that are available technologically, and one of the examples that is often given is the one of the MPESA which is a mobile money art form? in eastern africa where people are moving from a state of not having formal banking, skipping through the institutional buildings and going straight into the technological age of doing it electronically and wirelessly.”

“So maybe in terms of sustainability I think our debate should also move in a similar fashion to ask, since if we take the route of building systems and services over many years its going to take a very long time, and its obviously going to challenge the resources we have, how can we as industrial designers, designers, secure that future by helping entire communities and societies leapfrog into a more sustainable way of being and doing.”

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The post Vision for WDC 2014 appeared first on Potion.

He says it was not as glamorous as it seems, now we look back…
At the time Christo said “I can’t believe we have to do the bid book, its an incredible opportunity, where do we start?”
“We had two weeks come up with idea and then we had four weeks start to end, 480 pp. We would never have taken it on if we knew how big it was. And we sat around the table and said what do we do, then we said, “Let’s just go in our normal mode… what is the problem, what is the message, how do we solve it, how do we communicate it, what are the things we want to communicate? It’s gonna be a bunch of people sitting around a table in Quebec and they’re going to look at this book and what must they feel, what must they think, what must it say, what musn’t it say?”

“Slowly but surely prioritising your problems, it must be a happy book, it’s got to show before and after, it’s got to have interaction, show that the design of it and the actual layout of it is well done. It’s based on reading principles, how much information can you engage with on a page? It was very difficult, we looked at the previous bid books that other countries did – they were all very text heavy. So we made the book thicker but much more engaging, much more readable, and that helped.”

“We had the look and feel signed off and the pages just kept coming and coming and coming. We had four designers working on it day and night, there was no time to art direct pages, or let’s put them up… everybody in my team was very focused, they did a great job!”

“Cape Town Partnership wrote the material. A lot written by Carola Koblitz and Zaid Minty and Lorelle Belle at the beginning, and some by an intern. It was written while we were designing it, so they would sit in the boardroom, Carola sat right here, and emailed the files to our designers, and proofed it the next morning. The only thing that that caused was that we actually created this book without it having to be academic, which was a good thing because nobody would have agreed if we said “Everybody out there, who do you think should be in the book, which projects should we include? Which venues should we include?”  Undemocratic, very efficient.”

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