When I first heard of “crackberry’s” I hadn’t a clue as to why someone would want to be on their bloody phone all day long. What is the benefit to staying connected at all times of the day, say in the shower or on the bus when I feel its entirely inappropriate and possibly hazardous to be connected. Why must I constantly be present the second someone emails me or a billion posts are put into my reader like those crack heads I see everyday on the bus? To be honest, I abhor those people and grant them an early death. They must be so consumed in their petty little world.

Then I got an iPhone. Sweet, sweet, sexy iPhone. I love my iPhone. It’s the GTD thing of the gods. At times, I coo sweet nothings into its receiver while pondering over visual voice-mails from my grandmother whilst checking emails from work. Yes, its love. Perhaps more than my cat and certainly more than life itself. I’ve become the person I’ve hated, constantly connected, constantly checking email and reading feeds no matter how boring or unwarranted it needs to be consumed. Information that is organized is true power. The big question: has it improved my life?

In a way, yes. In a way, I feel atop an ever-growing mountain of information as it piles up. This is both a luxury and a burden of th e modern age. Google helps GTD via Google Mobile in some very profound ways. Their new website, which connects me to my reader is an instant hit with me. Their old version lacked some of the strong technical abilities that a normal web-browser could handle (such as scrolling iFrames) but this mobile version more than solves these issues in a format that is easy to use and read. I’m surprised that Google would feel the need to create a mobile website, because their old sites worked ok, but this new site is going to ruin me as it caters more towards my addiction.

p.s. you can be happy too, just get an iphone.

After a few weeks, the pressure began to build in our isolated building. As the launch date of our initial website approached, scope creep became a big problem. Stakeholders who signed off on designs beforehand would start to see final, assembled products and make fundamental architectural changes, as they had not fully understood the signed-off documents they had approved only weeks earlier.

This post makes some great references to finding the keys to success in getting your project done and done right.

• Baby Steps
• Don’t be a Control Freak
• Pick your Battles
• Just Do It
• Personal Sacrifice

These might be a little bit common-sensical but a great deal of common sense is lost when put under pressure. Choices that you’d usually make under the calm of an uneventful day are left wasted on the floor when word comes in from outsides your team that things must change.

My team succeeds at corporate web standards because we:

a) educate
b) educate
c) steadfastly “do it our way”
d) deliver our products

Education in the corporate land perhaps the largest hurdle to overcome. Most corporate people have very little technical understanding of how the web actually operates within modern browsers. Finally, when you come across one that does have their head on straight, they might be more than a few years behind in the current trends of thinking (IE 5.5 anyone?). Your goal is to evangelize in a major way the benefits of doing it right via Web Standards. Start small and prove to them why you make the semantic choices you do. What has worked for me is to prove examples of real world problems by providing web standards solutions through a simple quiz. The W3C exists for a reason and your designs and solutions should scale around that. Explaining to a designer, a stakeholder, a programmer why a Web Standards approach is the right way is always going to get you the win.

Stick to your guns when it comes to doing things the right way. In no way would you want your brake mechanic to slap a hack on your car, so why would you want that for your site and your audience? Doing it right and staying steadfast proves that your solutions are repeatable and safe.

Finally, one of the great benefits of Web Standards is that its clearly documented and approachable which aids greatly in producing web sites at a quick pace. If you’ve ever had to paint on a design using tables, you know its not a joy. Separation of content and style is every front-end developers joy. It will be a joy that is shared when you need to make those changes to your site 1 month, 12 months, or longer.

Blue Flavor has just released a somewhat clever iPhone portal app called Leaflets that allows iPhone users a one-stop-shop to various API houses, such as Flickr, NYT, Le Tour, Upcoming, Newsvine and the like.

This sort of app is exactly what I’m sure Jobs was envisioning when he said that the SDK would be Safari. The web is right now in a space where apps like Yahoo! Pipes and other API mashups are becoming defacto standards for generating web based content.

The world of mashups are nothing really new and it would be interesting to see how well and successful aggregation tools like this perform. How can one even measure success with a site like this? In the end, you just have to look to google as the premiere portal. A portal’s success depends on its transparency and ease of direction. Portals need to just get out of the way and let me get to where I want to go, fast.

For now, worth a bookmark and a spin around the block.