Let’s exaggerate by reversing the reasoning. I am a project manager and I say: “you absolutely have to code in your spare time, on some project of yours, otherwise I’ll not hire you”. How many people will file a cv in this case? Probably a few. The same holds for the opposite statement: “you absolutely have not to code in your spare time. Don’t touch any computer during the weekend”. More or less the result should be the same, few candidates. Why? Because you sort of invade privacy. There are many people around that don’t care of the job itself, it is just a means to get an income. If you want somebody committed to your project then prepare yourself to do many interviews and, moreover, you will discover the commitment only after one month (or more) you hired the programmer. You can be more lucky if you spread an inspiring call for job, with a few technical requirements and much more details about the motivation behind the project. Something like: “we are working on a project that will revolutionize the way people blog” can help you to be surrounded by people that share with you an objective.

In case you already have a project, somebody working on that, and you need someone’s help to not pass the deadline, don’t bother with their private life. Let’s say you need a php programmer to finalize part of a project. Let’s also pretend you find somebody so in love with php and technology which contributes to some open source project during his spare time. This can be be a double-edged sword. In the best case you are lucky, because the person you hire knows tips and tricks of php, many of which -probably – have been learnt during spare time programming. You hired a genius, and you are sure your project will be successful. Let me be evil.

• what if the genius gets involved in a toy project, more engaging than yours?
• What if he starts working during the evening, maybe going to bed late?
• Will his brain be fresh and ready for your project the day after?
• Will his attention be the same of the day before?
• More evil: what if he works on the open source project during the weekend? That’s what you want right?
• What if on Monday he is a bit tired of staying in front of a monitor with a php editor open?
• What if his spare time passion causes even a temporary indigestion?

I think that you don’t want that.
A spare time passion can feed or subtract energy to your project, whatever the passion is. If I go skying during the weekend and I arrive home sunday night, late, on monday I can be satisfied and ready to work as well as tired and not ready to code for your project. In the second case, will you ever tell me I should quit skying? Will your job post include a “no snow riders” restriction? I think no.
Passion for ‘x’ does not mean you do or you want to do ‘x’ everyday. Also, passion for programming does not imply you code all day and night. It means you read and write books/posts about programming, subscribe to rss and podcasts, stay updated with news, look at someone’s code etc. EVERY developer does it, otherwise he is not a developer. Just like ANY designer feeds his creativity by taking pictures or getting inspired by the nature. Just like ANYBODY chooses his on way to spend the weekend.
Last provocation: in my life I met many developers and I noticed that many of them like to drink beer. Will you include that as a requirement when you post a job call? :)
I think you should not focus your search on what a developer/designer does during his spare time. You should rather focus on professionalism and seriousness. If I do what you want, without passing the deadline, isn’t enough?

Time saver

The only thing to complete your daily todo list is to wait for an email and redirect it to someonelse? Go to the beach, play volley and in the pause between one set and the other check the email and reply/redirect accordingly.

Angryness preventer

You have to go to pick your girlfriend up. You’d really like to check some more news or finish reading a blog post, but you agreed to be at her place at 9 pm. You are on time, she is late. With no iPhone you’d probably feel angry. Grab your iphone out of the pocket and finish checking news. Stumbled upon something interesting? Use Read It Later.

Boredom preventer

Bored to wait at the bus stop? Nobody to talk to and the bus is late? Open one of the tons of applications and play with it. Side effect: might loose the bus.

Good guide

Looking for a bank around you? a bar? Open up Around Me and find what you need.
Got lost. Open the Maps application and follow the path to get to your destination.

Cool to program

Tired of virtual machined/garbage collected languages? Looking for some new development platform to expand your knowledge and your business? Have a look at the iPhone. I bought it because of development purposed (top secret at the moment) and I ended up with the iPhone as my daily technological companion. There is plenty of tutorials, books, forums and open source code to learn from.

Probably everything I described above can be experienced with some other 3G enabled phone, except the cool-to-programness, which is what I appreciate mostly at the moment.

• Pressing esc does not exit from the full screen mode
• Besides characters now you can also visualise word count
• .txt is added by default if an extension is not provided

If you are using version 0.7 you should receive a notification about the new version; just follow the update procedure. If you want to download 0.8 version go to the Focused home page.
It requires Adobe Air Installer 1.5.2.

Enjoy!

Step by Step

Let’s start with a Flex project. We’ll name it MyFlexProject. Then we create a class, called MyClass, as in the picture below.

We will add a trace statement to show when an instance of MyClass is created.

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package com.studiomagnolia.shared
{
	public class MyClass extends Object
	{
		public function MyClass()
		{
			super();
			trace("Created an instance of MyClass");
		}
 
	}
}

Now we create the Air project. Let’s call it MyAirProject. And here comes the trick. Open a shell and move to the src directory of the Air project. Here you have to create a symbolic link which points to the src/com folder of MyFlexProject.
The code for bash shell is the following:

      ln -s ../../MyFlexProject/src/com

Now if you refresh MyAirProject you will see that the src folder contains a com subfolder. Cool uh? Now let’s write some code to see whether we can use MyClass in the Air project.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" creationComplete="onCreationComplete()">
 
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
 
			import com.studiomagnolia.shared.MyClass;
 
			private function onCreationComplete():void {
				var c:MyClass = new MyClass();
 
			}
 
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
 
</mx:WindowedApplication>

In the console you should see the trace statement. You can access/edit/save the core code from both the Flex and the Air project. Try changing the trace statement within the Air project and you’ll see changes reflected into MyFlexProject.

Hope this helps.

Here is a screenshot.

I am happy!

Thanks Adobe!

I am aware it is a shallow approach, but Tweetanium is much more hungry than Posty, in spite the fact that Tweetanium supports just one service (Twitter) whereas Posty includes Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Identi.ca. That said I list few items which can help to contextualize the comparison:

• Disclosure: I am the author of Posty, though I think the comparison is pretty fair. Anyway I am open to criticism.
• Titanium is a prerelease version. It can improve.
• The Air framework is a bit ‘older’ than Titanium, probably more time has been spent to improve memory consumption
• Posty’s memory usage has been optimized, whereas Titanium (I think) has been built to show how easy is to build a Twitter client with the SDK, so probably not much effort has been put in optimizing memory consumption.
• Air’s is made by Adobe, a company. Probably this means more money and time invested in a project (though I am clearly aware that more money does not mean a better product)
• The comparison regards only memory consumption. I am sure there are many other aspects that can be put on the table before saying “this is better than that”.

This is why I think this post has just to provoke a discussion. I will be glad to hear your opinion.

Thanks Jacob and colleagues for the opportunity!

I was re-impressed by the graph used in that post, which represents the many sides of user experience design.

Now I realize why I am so tired when I go to bed. Because it’s like I am doing six jobs, which are:

• Information Architecture
• Human Computer Interaction
• Interaction design
• User Interface Design
• Human Factors Engineering
• Usability

Should revise my hourly rate :)

Here is the change log:

• implemented hiding of menubar on macosx
• hiding of secondary monitors
• added Save As shortcut
• added word-count (optionally displayed, check the settings)
• wanna open a txt file right in Focused? just drag it over its icon (or shortcut)

The new version can be downloaded from Focused home page or via automatic update.


Enjoy!