Your Software Can't Do It All For You

The question many Baby Boomers are asking at this stage of their lives is "Where is my flying car?" We were promised a great many things by media of the 1950s and 1960s. Cars would fly. Robots would run our households. Entire meals would be just pills. Supersonic airliners would, in less than a day, whisk us away to faraway lands anywhere in the world. We would vacation on the Moon. So where are the flying cars?

Like most great ideas, the execution is much harder than the inspiration. Quite often we can only get close to the original idea. I think we've about come to this point in the evolution of a lot of our software.

You can boot up the most powerful word processor in the world, but unless you know the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation, and have a good imagination and a knack for storytelling, and even then, it is unlikely we will ever be able to just generate a novel at the touch of a button.

Web work is like that, too. You can know everything there is to know about the <p> paragraph tag. How to use it, how to modify it with an ID or a Class, how to string together all kinds of attributes and even three different ways to invoke the tag from your keyboard. It still isn't going to make you a great writer.

We have some very powerful tools in Dreamweaver. On the Design side, you can now look, in CS4 release, at your actual page in an actual Web browser in Design View now, because Adobe have switched to the WebKit engine for rendering Design View. You can outline block-level elements in Design View to call better attention to them—something I have been doing for years using CSS when I got confused.


But there is nothing in Dreamweaver that will automatically generate wonderful markup, full of Accessible Design considerations and the best practices developed over the last dozen years of doing this—or prevent you from using harsh colors, or from hiding all of your navigation at the bottom of the page, or keep you from designing navigation that can't be used on some fractions of your visitors' computers.

I mention Design here specifically because I have always felt it was one of my own shortcomings. And in my job, I mostly deal with Templated pages, so it is really difficult for me to get any better, because new designs only come along every several years. I have to make a conscious effort to pick up a book or read a Design Web site because this element of Web work just does not appear in my ordinary work day.

You can learn a lot from books. I know, I have. But there are any number of things you have to actually do to get any better. There are books about playing guitar. There are books about dieting. You can probably read a dozen different titles for either example; But reading those two dozen books will still not make you an expert guitar player and it won't make you thin, either. You are going to have to do the other work, too.

There is something about Web work that makes you uncomfortable. Probably, this is because you know your expertise is lacking in this or that area. That's fine. But this is an ever-expanding marketplace, not an ever-expanding technology. The HTML or the XHTML you use today has its roots in the early 1990s—even earlier if you go back to the original SGML markup language.

You can learn it all. Absolutely. But the real benefit comes from learning it all and using that knowledge, building on that knowledge and expanding that knowledge with elements of Design, color theory, e-commerce, programming and dozens of other fields.

The software is good. Even the Version-One program was a terrific piece of work. But we are not now and we may never arrive at a place where the software, alone, will ever be able to do the entire job for us.

Let's get to work.

The Song of Software

I am sorely tempted to do another New Beginnings piece this week, in light of yesterday's events, but Sourabh is probably right…. So let's talk about… software, today. In the early days, programs came in plastic baggies with mimeographed (ask your mother) instructions stapled to a little cardboard hangar/label. You would take your new (huge) floppy disk—disk is magnetic, by the way, disc is optical—home and crank up your computer, tear open the baggie and load the software in much more time than it takes to talk about it, today.

And you would probably read the pages about how the program worked. These pages were often written by the programmer himself, some featuring hand-drawn diagrams. So clarity was never assured. Still, most programs only did a handful of things, and there were only a handful of ways to adjust or personalize or work with them. And so learning an entire program wasn't a big investment in time or effort.

Then e-mail happened, and it was suddenly easy to write to a program's author, asking, "Hey, could you add a spelling checker?" and "How about a button that made text italic?" and other features. Some programmers took offense at these suggestions. Their Art was nearly perfect, as it was. The more heads-up programmers, however (today we call these gentlemen, millionaires) added these and other features to subsequent releases, and learned people would pay for these updates. They'd pay a lot. And so Program became Program 2.0, Program 2.1, Program 2.32 and Program 3. We flirted briefly with Program Pro and Program98, Program2000 and iProgram and so on. Oh yes. People would pay and pay and pay for the promise of a better, faster and more feature-laden version of the program they already owned.

So today we have programs that can do all kinds of things. You can watch TV in your word processor. You have to think that by the time you add a feature like that, you pretty much have spell checking and italics figured out, right?

But there's a problem with jamming feature on top of feature into what should be and once was a simple program. A great many of these improvements go undiscovered, unnoticed and thus, unused. People end up paying for word processors that are better than the original page-layout programs of a generation ago, and yes, they end up paying a lot, for hundreds of features they will never use.

This is why I have always been an advocate of noodling. You know, that mindless "I wonder what this does" kind of playing with a program. You know that last five or ten minutes of the morning, when you're essentially done working and just waiting for a coworker to get off the phone so you can go to lunch? That's a perfect time to noodle around with a program. Fire up a blank page and throw some text on it and see what happens, see how this works, see if you can un-do that. Make it green. Make it bigger. Move it to the other side of the page.

Remember, software is a tool. By itself it can't really do anything. It's only your own skill, talent and imagination that makes a program worth anything. Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October with MacWrite. Not even MacWrite Pro. Mark Twain used a typewriter and Ludlum never got beyond using a #2 pencil. Just because you paid $500 for a word processor doesn't mean it will write a best seller for you. And just because you paid $125 for Dreamweaver CS4, that doesn't mean you will become a World-Class Web Designer.

Resolve now to learn a little more about your craft and your tools, this year. I'll help you. We'll help each other. Let's try to pick up one new thing every week or so and we can look back on 2009 as a year that was full of meaningful, positive change. A year when we learned to do more, better, and in less time, to open ourselves to the possibility that there may be several ways to accomplish the same task, and that some of these ways are better than others. Let's build on what has come before and build a skill set and portfolio that lets us hold our heads high in the company of Real Talent.

Yes, we can.

Back In The Saddle

So now it really begins. That first couple of days is all back-slappy, how-was-your-holiday stuff. Nobody really expects anyone to get much done that first day or two. But once we clear that first weekend we hit the ground running, again.

I am covering two positions, now. We expect to hire someone in a few weeks but for now my plate is suddenly full of many little things that need attention from both my job and another recently-vacated position. I had plans for Monday and Tuesday and today, but already things are starting to slide a little. I fixed a page of mine. I fixed a page of his, and in the process broke something else. I fixed that, which means I now need to correct a few dozen little things in several other pages. And so it goes.

I love riding the wave. I love being in the zone. Do you know what I mean? There are times when you get into a project, get your head down and start typing… and before you know it, it's time for lunch. You come back from lunch, point-point, click-click, and the next thing you know it's time to go home. An entire day passes in a fog of speedy productivity.

I work in an airless, windowless cubicle farm. To keep some measure of privacy I plug my iPod into my head about 8:00am and keep it there. Sometimes I listen to music, but most often it's podcasts, like little radio shows about web design or technology. I can hear my own office telephone ring, but I don't have to listen to half a phone call about someone's wife or kids or whatever. One day I finished all of my podcasts and noticed it was awfully quiet in here and discovered I was all alone. Everyone had been gone for half an hour.

I loved that!

To me the worst days are the ones where you start a project and keep getting interrupted. You never get to a point where you can examine your work and say "There! Now that is something to be proud of!" You never quite get to a place where you can see the whole arc of a thought as it moves from that first spark of inspiration and then becomes an image on your page, or a new division or a new CSS rule, a sentence or a paragraph or whatever. Type-type telephone. Type-type meeting. Those days are awful, and I have had entire weeks like that.

But this year, I'm going to try to concentrate on doing fewer things, better. There really is no such thing as multitasking, I'm starting to believe. You can do one thing really well, or two things passably well, or three things if nobody really cares about the outcome. With that fourth thing you start to notice quality suffering, or that everything is taking longer than it really should. So I'm going to try to winnow down my list and do a better job on the things I do, and get them done faster.

But of course I'm still at the mercy of anyone who happens by with a question, who calls or e-mails. And I'm covering that other position, too. At least for a while. So maybe there is something to all of this plate-spinning. At least for the time being.

I'm going to try really hard to do the best that I can at the things I do, this year. If I can help you in any way, I'd be happy to. But maybe you should call before you stop by, for a while.

A New Beginning

Welcome back from the holiday break!

It's been kind of nice seeing everyone, again. I am always surprised at how much I miss everyone at work by the end of the year-end shutdown. It's good to be able to sleep late, catch up on some reading from the accumulated pile, make some plans for the upcoming year and of course spend time with family. But I really have missed the daily give-and-take with coworkers, the last couple of weeks.

I always get this little tingle at the start of a new year. It's kind of like that first day of school again, with a new notebook filled with blank pages, a fresh new pen and a whole new attitude with the promise of doing better, this time. This could be the year I make the honor roll!

It also reminds me of my days as a freelance writer. Back then, each new assignment started with a blank word processing document and me staring at the empty screen. Maybe this would be the product review that finally convinced the Pulitzer committee or the Nobel folks that they needed to review computer journalism, too? Starting with a blank page you could imagine the work going anywhere. This might be the review that gets me "discovered" and whisked by private jet to some venture capitalist's hot new tech company. This might be the breakthrough page that earns me the cred to get free computers and software from manufacturers—for review purposes, of course. This might be the piece that snags me a monthly column in one of the shiny, glossy magazines!

Beginnings are like that—the sky is the limit. And then you motor on, doing the best you can, plodding, correcting, amplifying, clarifying, editing, copying and pasting and starting over. But the second word you type is very much dictated by the first, and that third word has to agree with the first two. And so on. At some point as you near the end, you come to realize that this probably isn't going to be The One. In fact, by the time you hammer out those last few words, you realize there isn't any chance that this turdlette is going to win any hearts or minds and maybe the best you can hope for is that they'll still send you a check for it.

At the start, a project can become anything. There is hope and wild optimism and the promise that only the fresh start can bring. But by the end, by the final word, you realize there's nothing you can do at that point to either help or harm the work, much. The best you can do then is to hope for another chance, another assignment. Another rush.

So far this year, I probably haven't screwed anything up. This might be My Year. There is a chance, however remote, that I'll do something worthy of them renaming the building for me. By about June, I will probably be satisfied with just keeping my job, and of course by December I will already be looking forward to coming back in January, with another fresh new start.

I hope, once again, to learn JavaScript this year. I hope to be able to spend more time in the new Adobe CS4 software, learning it's secrets to better work and more productivity. I hope to shine-up all of the training, since it all depends so heavily upon Dreamweaver CS4, to take better advantage of the features in the program. I hope to be able to bring on some new training, too. I have a collection of questions people have asked over the past year and more and some of those answers would make nice workshops. I hope to be able to do a little more work in PHP and MySQL this year. We'll see.

I have a whole bunch of personal resolutions for the year ahead, most of which come down into three camps: ending the year thinner and richer, with less clutter. Right now, though, things look pretty good from here. What do you think?