Leonie and I went to Berlin this weekend. So far, this is my favourite European city, by a long way. Friendly people, I can still speak enough German to get into "trouble" (ie, I can order something, but if the questions come back too quickly, I can't understand them properly), and while it's a huge city, it's very walkable. I think we walked for about 12 hours non-stop (or close to non-stop) on Saturday.
Leonie has a blog post up, but here's my highlights (and some photos from instagram)
- Brooklyn Beef Club and The Dude hotel. Wow. Everything I'd want in a hotel, done right. I can't recommend this place highly enough.
- Angry Chicken!. Super spicy Korean Fried Chicken. The Furious one is NOT German-hot. It's real hot.
- The Barn. Lovely coffee, staffed by Kiwis and Aussies.
The whole city, however, had a lovely feel. Kind of grungy (lots of tagging/grafitti), but very friendly. Highly recommended.
I was using iOS6 maps over there (Leonie had iOS5). It wasn't useless, but it was far from brilliant, mostly trying to find things visually on the map. Just not enough detail when it was zoomed out. Should be an easy-ish fix for Apple tho. Jean-Louis Gassee's post is worth a read.
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Jobs:
If you see a stylus, they blew it.
Normally, I'd agree with this. I usually carry a Moleskine around, with a clutch pencil, but recently, I've been taking my iPad everywhere, and I wanted to move to doing any UX sketches digitally. Leonie had already bought Paper, so after asking on Twitter, I got a Wacom Bamboo stylus for sketching. It's early days, but so far, I love it.
(I'd love it even more if Paper had iOS design templates, but thats a minor gripe)
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Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile Mobile
Don’t build an app based on your website. Build the app that acts as if websites never existed in the first place. Build the app for the person who has never used a desktop computer. Because they’re coming. Soon.
To put a slightly crass edge on it: fuck yeah.
