I love ideas. I come up with them all the time because its an addictive process. Coming up with new ideas makes me feel good, great in fact – its a wonderful release to take a few days or even weeks maturing an idea from early sketches and concepts into a plan to make the idea happen.

In this video Scott Belsky details exactly why this addiction is a trap. Most ideas never get to the ‘plan’ stage never mind the ‘doing’ stage. My vast collection of  notepads, journals, post-its and emails are testament to that.

The fact is that as enjoyable and addictive as the idea generation process is it kills productivity and sucks time. When it comes down to it, idea generation is simply another form of procrastination that eventually leads to ‘idea fatigue’.

Idea fatigue is like a bad hangover and is incredibly damaging to a creative mind because it can make the process of maturing new ideas feel cynical and painful.

So the next time a new ides springs to mind don’t throw everything at it. Simply make a note of it, jot down the key points and concepts and get back to work.

I woke up to this earlier on my desktop PC:

This Spotify ultimatum irked me a little, I don’t mind being blasted with ads after ever couple of tracks and the free service has always served me well.

I guess its time I made a choice – or perhaps only being able to listen to songs 5 times will help to expand my musical vocabulary

Yesterday Google finally announced the release of a Google Docs app for Android.

It came with a few surprise like a cool widget for your homescreen and a really snazzy UI but the real big news was the introduction of OCR support.

Usefulness

Although I’m deeply entrenched in the Google-sphere (email, calendar, mobile OS, Picasa) I’ve never really embraced Google Docs. The introduction of this new app changes this.

I doubt very much that I will use the Google Docs app to really do any heavy duty word processing (yet) but for note taking, idea storage and project/task/action management its perfect.

At the moment I use a mixture of tools to achieve these processes – Dropbox, Evernote and Gmail are the main candidates but I can now see Google Docs replacing most these tools in some way (Evernote will most defiantly fade into obscurity) .

How does it fly?

To give the new OCR feature a trial run I decided to take a quick snap of some clearly printed text and see how the app performed:

This example is a page taken from the book ‘HTML5 for Web Designers‘ the text in the image is a little hard to read so here is a transcript of the most legible part:

Error handling might not be ofmucli interest to web designers, especially if we are writing valid. well-formed documents to begin With, but very imporkmt for browser makers. Whereas previous markup specifications were written for authors, HTML5 is written for authors and implementers. Bear that in mind when perusing the specíñcation. lt explains why the HTML5 specification is so big and why it seems to have been Written with a level of detail normally reserved for

Taken from ‘HTML5 for Web Designers‘ by Jeremy Keith

Now, I see you smirking but its not half bad! This was a first attempt in bad light on a bent page with pretty small text and you can make out most of it.

Not bad for a v1.0 release!

What’s missing?

Google Docs ain’t perfect, its missing a couple of key features on the web and app versions.

One thing that Evernote still has that trumps Google Docs is audio note taking. I love warbling into my phone at length and letting it store my ramblings in the cloud for later use – I’m pretty sure Google will trump this feature eventually as they have invested a LOT in audio to text conversion, its just a matter of time.

Finally, cloud storage is great, but I’d love to be able to sync to my desktop/device in a Dropbox-style fashion. I know this is against the Google-ethos but I can dream

A while ago I did a re-design of my personal website and drafted an illustrator to come up with the avatar image you see in the header. Now, the problem here is that the above avatar looks VERY SIMILAR to a freebie character file you can download on the Envato Tuts+ site causing it to be re-used over and over and over again in other peoples work.

Its not me

Since moving to the new avatar hardly a month goes by when someone doesn’t pick up on the similarities between the freebie avatar and the one I had commissioned. Case in point last week when a Mark Wilkinson posted on twitter that he had found my doppelgänger while browsing a CSS gallery:

Of course, I set Mark straight and went about my day but I’ve had a niggle in the back of my mind that this thing is starting to piss me off so let me try and explain….

My own fault

My avatar image was drawn by digital artist Scott Jackson who originally drew the freebie Envato file and also wrote the tutorial on its use. It was because of his previous work that I commissioned Scott to draw out my new avatar and I even asked for it to be BASED on the work he’d done for the Envato tutorial because I felt that with a  few modifications I could get something that looked a bit like me.

I think the original email to Scott went something like:

Do me an avatar (mascot) that looks like the one at Tuts+ but make him blonde with blue eyes and a v-neck sweater.

Hardly the most challenging brief, but it worked

By hiring Scott to do the work I knew I would get something a little similar to the Envato character because that’s what I wanted and I suppose I should have known that 100′s of other sites would adopt my avatars brother as their own mascot and lead to this confusion. Its a testament to Scott’s skills that a throwaway piece of work he did for an old client (Tuts+) has become so popular.

FYI Scott also did all of the illustration work on Wonder Themes.

Living with it

I like my avatar, I really do, so I’m sticking with it – even if at a fleeting glance it looks the SAME as the Tuts+ freebie that is being used all over the place.

And see, it does look like me:

That’s me on the right at a recent BarCamp

So if you see the famed freebie character (AKA LinkGuy) being used out there on the web don’t assume its me, it probably isn’t