I was really impressed with the Nike – Write The Future campaign, particularly the outstanding film created by W+K in London. Topical, beautifully shot, ok there was a bit of inaccuracies with the players featured and whom was actually attending the World Cup but hey, that’s sport. Bravo I thought.

Adidas have also launched a World Cup campaign, and although I’m basing my two-pence worth of opinion on just the short film, I don’t think it’s all that great. Why base it on Star Wars? Come on guys, that was like 10 years ago (if that). At least put a few Ewoks in if you do. Why have Snoop Dogg doing his rap-dizel-shisel thing? Then they throw in Daft Punk, in what I guess is a Tron related guise. Blah.

After catching all the great screenprinting work at Pick Me Up last month. It made me think about re-living the days of my good ole art lessons, and taking up a bit of after-hours screen printing. Not sure where I’d put all the kit mind. Maybe I just don’t need a bed.

As part of a comprehensive user experience process, along with wireframing, rapid prototyping plays a huge part. It allows you to examine more than just the static strategy and interactions, but processes and experiences that are inherently more complicated. Such as interactive applications, websites.

Rapid prototyping has been used throughout the history of software development but is yet to play a major part in web development. Fortunately it’s now being spoken about alot more (http://madebymany.co.uk/the-future-of-wireframes-001992) and pushed to clients under the sell of tangible benefits, and received under gradually more understanding accounts.

Still developing an understanding and process myself, I’ve began to collate and review a selection of services that offer such prototyping. I’ve not used any thoroughly yet, but I hope to dip my toes in soon!

Thoughts on any of the below, or even other approaches would be interesting to hear.

Protoshare
http://www.protoshare.com/

An advanced web-based wirframine & prototyping solution. Works in the browser, and offers facility to prototype fairly complicated user flows. Has a collaborative system built-in, with comment system etc.

Flairbuilder
http://www.flairbuilder.com/

Very similar to Protoshare, but the authoring application works via a desktop app. Pushing final wireframes and prototypes to the cloud, where reviewers can view via another desktop or the website.

Looks pretty good, but hard to tell if it offers anything more than protoshare without getting our hands dirty.

Mockflow
http://www.mockflow.com/

Quite a slick Flash based interface, with facility to develop all user flows that you can replicate in the Flash IDE. Similar to both Flairbuilder and Prototype, in that reviewers can view exports online, and add comments etc.

Mockingbird
http://www.gomockingbird.com/

Really simple rapid wireframing application that offers simple sitemapping and link-up functionality. No advanced user flow prototyping, but looks a good option to flesh out an idea.

Balsamiq
http://www.balsamiq.com/

This little application has picked up alot of hype, but as far as I’m aware it’s only a wireframing application. Thought I’d throw it in there anyway.

For some reason this morning I awoke with the thought of centralising my local websites floating about my head. Problem is I have multiple home and work computers, all of which I use to develop personal projects from time-to-time. But I’d ideally like to have one copy of these sites (which isn’t a downloaded version of the remote copy – if there even is one), which I can run within my local Apache setup.

It struck me during my daily Shredded Wheat ritual, that I could host everything on Dropbox and reference locally via a symbolic link. Then I can run the website in the same state across all my computers! And I even get the benefit of Dropbox’s lovely inbuilt versioning. Perfection.

If you want a solid run through on how to do it, read through this convenient Dropbox Wiki page on symbolic linking across local machines and Dropbox accounts. If you’re a bit more Terminal savvy, all you’ll need to do is enter the following into Terminal:

ln -s /path/to/original/directory /path/to/symbolic/link

Having failed to find a pre-prepared online World Cup calendar (.ics) I decided to make my own. It’s hosted on Google Calendar and you can install it into pretty much any digital calendar application of your choice. You should also be able to find it directly through Google Calendar search.

Available versions

1. XML – http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/446m6osvraga73oss7uid8n ppk%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic
2. ICAL – http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/446m6osvraga73oss7ui d8nppk%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic
3. HTML – http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=446m6osvraga73oss7uid8nppk%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/London