• July 23, 2013

My father always told me, “50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.”

When I first bought whoistimsteele.com, I was so determined to come up with the perfect design that I spent all my time researching inspiration, sketching concepts and creating mock-ups. Then work would pick up or life would take over and my site would sit dormant. Repeat this process for four years.

This constant delaying could be a great argument for the importance of self-imposed deadlines. I could take a psychological approach – by delaying the design, I won’t have to begin coding (see “The Carpenter’s Door Never Gets Fixed”).  But this time when I approached whoistimsteele.com, I tossed out my delusions of “the greatest website ever”, chose a WordPress theme, and now I have something.

Recently I have begun development on a mobile app that corresponds with a website. This is a small, start-up business project so we are facing some small, start-up business problems – lack of funding, lack of resources, lack of time. This leads to some compromises. I have begun developing for iOS and Android using PhoneGap.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with PhoneGap, here it is in a nutshell:  you develop a website using Web technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), and it wraps your ‘website’ in an application. I know this isn’t as ideal as writing the apps in native code. Some of you may cry out, “Tim, haven’t you read Drew Crawford’s ‘Why mobile web apps are slow’?” The answer is yes, yes I have read Drew’s article. Yes I know this isn’t ideal.

But sometimes I have to be realistic: I have limited resources, limited time and my strength is front-end technology. That is where PhoneGap shines. It will allow me to build something, and 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.