A Friday afternoon thought:

Everyone seems to have gone rather GTD (Getting Things Done) crazy. The fact that everyone is writing GTD software and blogging about it, surely indicates one of two things:

1. It really works and everyone’s got lots of time on their hands
or…
2. People are spending loads of time finding ways to avoiding actually employing the GTD methodology, whilst convincing themselves GTD is in the forefront of their mind … i.e. they are procrastinating

Can anyone clarify this for me?

You may have noticed the beginnings of plans for CSS frameworks/conventions. It’s something i’ve been thinking about for a while now, so it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Something has crossed my mind more and more recently - the more we use frameworks such as Rails, Prototype, Scriptactulous, etc. the more I start to wonder about the longer-term effects of everyone using them. Let’s take Rails as an example - it’s really easy to do things such as auto-completed text boxes, standard error messages, AJAX with blind-down effects, etc. There’s an understandable excitement about these things - it’s refreshing after years of low-interactivity HTML. However, I predict some downsides. Firstly, inappropriate application of technology - rather than considering what is the best solution to a problem, designers and developers will gravitate towards the the easy options.

Secondly, it would be very easy to get complacent, with all these time-saving features and forget to innovate. Gizmos will only be impressive for so long, until everyone else is using them. Building your success on these kinds of features will leave you swamped with competition in the near future. I believe, forging ahead with your own ideas, while sensibly applying the help of frameworks is much healthier.

To conclude, what I’m pointing at here is not actually a problem with the frameworks themselves; it’s a problem of complacency in the mainstream workplace. There will always be a small number of people forging ahead with their own ideas, solving problems in radical new ways, setting the lead for everyone else to thoughtlessly follow…

Over and out.