So I made a start – imported some stencils into OmniGraffle on the iPad and just had a stab at it. I think this is going to be better – previously I’ve tried to work out stuff like navigation layout while designing and I always end up in a muddle – this was better, to be thinking about what should go on the page without worrying too much about what it would look like, where it would go and the prominence it should have in relation to the other content. A well-worthwhile exercise.

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It seems quite hard to believe, really, that I’ve never experienced a sushi train before. They always intimidated me a bit because I’m not terribly familiar with Japanese food, plus I’m a fussy eater, so grabbing random dishes without really knowing what they are kind of put me off a little. But it was great! We ordered a dish each of chicken katsu, and pulled a few random things off the train (unidentifiable squishy balls of… something, some salmon teriyaki, a raw fish and broccolini thing, custard-filled pancakes with raspberry sauce and a little fruit salad) – most enjoyable!

Afterwards we wandered through Hyde Park with the World’s Best Ex-Boss chatting about this, that and the other – old friends, web CMSes we have known, HTML 5 and mobile web dev, among other topics. Really perked me up.

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I’ve been out for most of the day, so mostly I’ve been reading today – I’m up to the chapter on forms in the HTML 5 book and golly gosh! There’s some serious fun to be had there – obviously there’s minimal implementation of the cutest bits, such as browser-implemented field validation and combobox inputs, but it’s going to be awesome once they are, and at least now we can start using this stuff and just have JavaScript to correct where they’re not yet supported. Brilliant! Getting pretty excited about it all, and also very glad I’m reading up on it now, before it’s widely implemented – there’s a lot to take in.

I want to try out wireframing for this project, so I don’t get too caught up in the designing at the expense of basic structure. So this evening I’ve been looking at web-wireframing stencils for OmniGraffle which I’m going to have a go at getting into OmniGraffle on the iPad. Djeli had a go at this a little while back when he first bought the app, but had some difficulties, so I’ve done some research and hopefully have got files in the right formats now. Crossing fingers…

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