Check out this video from drewish.com for the screencast:

http://drewish.com/node/127

It helps you record your solutions and store it in one centralized location. How many times have you come across the same problem when working and not recall that pivotal eureka moment that let you arrive at your solution? Even if your solution is not made explicity in your notebook, even retracing  the steps taken to achieve your answer will help you jog your memory faster than anything else can.

Engineering notebooks can help you to reveal previous trends. The items that wasn’t so obvious when you are in the thick of it. Things such as individual workflow habits and the effort spent on each task.

Documents a history of work as evidence Working in a creative role, it is sometimes hard to quantify your level of effort against a certain task or group of tasks. When it comes to software development, it seems there are always items that have not been taken into account of in the official project plan. We’ve all been there. There’s always “that one other thing” you have to do before you get into the main task at hand. Before you know it , the level of effort it takes to accomplish the periphery tasks snowball out of control. Next thing you know, your boss is hovering over your desk demanding to know why a task that was slated for half a day has been unresolved for a week. An engineering notebook can help you persuade them by showing them exactly how much effort is going into finding a solution. (Of course, it’s your job to estimate tasks responsibly but that’s another topic altogether).

You can set up your engineering notebook with as much flexibility as you require. Honestly, any notebook would do but what works for me are unlined spine-bound notebooks.  I feel that unlined ones are important because they allow me the flexibility to use the writing space any way I choose to. Doodle, scratch out, mindmap – it’s up to you. Marble composition books are nice but I personally went with a higher class of notebook(I am a bit of a snob when it comes to this sort of stuff). The Moleskine Cahier was my choice because I am such a big fan of Moleskine and their legacy. So, when I came across their soft-cover notebook series I knew it would be perfect for what I needed. A little bit on the pricey side but well worth it if you’re into quality. $16.00 will get you a package of 3.

On a typical day, I start off my entry in my notebook by writing the date at the top. Page numbers work for some but I like making my table of contents using dates as my points of reference instead of page numbers. That way once you complete a significant milestone, you can put the starting date and ending date in your table of contents along with a brief description of the milestone as your description. Most people make checklists of tasks to do for the day. This can either be a list of pending tasks or just an aggressive three-point agenda that simply has to get done. Another common thing to do is to start providing a small summary of a sizable activity you are doing. I find that the extra mental effort involved in writing down clearly of what I am doing, why I am doing it, and what the expected result is keeps me focused and motivated to push ahead with the task. It’s important to make these messages meaningful. We don’t need any pointless essays or formal pseudocode. Likewise, engineering notebooks should not be a place to collect meeting notes. Use scraps of paper or a mini-legal pad for that. Once you have had time to internalize the meeting notes, then you should record whatever you feel is relevant to your individual workflow. Test results, case studies, and task-switching events are all acceptable items to place in your notebook as well. Remember that what you are trying to go for here is to capture the thought process involved in solving a particular problem. Don’t worry about seizing every minutiae of work into your notebook. It’s there if you need it and you are encouraged to use it.

In the end, the fact remains that you always need to be ready to capture valuable ideas when it hits you. Those precious flashes of insight come too far and few between. They cannot be forced out into stark reality, only encouraged. By keeping a recorded design journal, you’ll be able to document your work activities, encourage creative thinking and maybe even catch a glimpse of your next great idea hidden just between the lines. What are some ways that you record your design work?

Google Maps – whether it it is finding the best way to Junior’s cheesecake or figuring out where to get the next E train, Google Maps has earned a place on the first page of my iPhone after this trip. The fact that you can map driving, walking, and metro directions is still completely mind-boggling to me. The ability to swoop down and peek at some real panoramic street view photos is also really helpful when you want to verify that you’re headed to the right place.

Twitterific – Whether I want to broadcast where I was going next, get tips on what I should be checking out in the city, or sharing some quick pictures with my friends, Twitterific is the one tool I used to do it all. What I really liked was Twitterific’s camera feature which allows you to use the built-in iPhone camera interface to send photos right up to Twitpic.com. It also helped me to keep in touch with friends when I am on the go.

Safari – The best mobile browser on the market did not fail to disappoint. Safari proved it’s worth on my phone when I needed to find out phone numbers for the nearest Apple store or when I needed to take a break and check out the latest articles on dzone.com,

These iPhone apps made a huge difference in my nyc vacation. The time that I saved and that sense of security I felt knowing that any piece of information was available to me at anytime(except for when on the subway) really made me feel much more comfortable traversing Manhattan even though I was a complete stranger to it. Now if only I can get my cousins to admit the same thing.

I am learning to live in the present here and now. Here’s to a great year for all of us.

Here are some ways that you can use Textmate to help you with web development. Please note that all of these tips (and more) can be found in the most excellent book, Pragmatic TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

Closing opening tags – One really important command in this bundle to open and close a tag. You can open and close a tag by typing ^+Shift+< when there is nothing to the left of your cursor. You will see a open tag and close tag appear. Type in whatever you want for your open tag and watch the close tag automatically mirror it for you. After you are done typing in the tag hit Tab and you’ll be able to place your cursor in between the open and close tag. This is great when creating pages full of HTML code. This works with XML documents as well.

Inserting a doctype – For anybody who cannot remember the syntax differences between the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype element, type in the word doctype and hit Tab. This will bring up an option menu from where you can select the exact doctype that you want. It’s saved me an extra 30 seconds. Maybe it will for you too.

Validating your markup with the W3C – Every web developer is concerned with web standards. It helps ensure that all of their web pages work across multiple platforms and stays well formed so that it does not break tomorrow either. Now you can do this within Textmate by typing in ^+Shift+V.

Inserting color codes in CSS stylesheets – When you are creating your CSS stylesheets and you want to double-check the color of a particular hex value, type in Shift+Cmd+C. This will bring up Textmate’s color chooser and allow you make a choice. The color you selected will be transformed to a six digit hexadecimal value with a leading number sign.

When you start using these Textmate shortcuts to do your web development work, you are going to notice that your time to turn around web projects are going to be shorter. Combined with shortcuts, snippets, and command-line integration into Textmate, you are going to start wondering if you ever need to use any other tool for creating textual content.