THE COSMONAUTS

Last week we made a cosmodrinks edition of our weekly lunch with Stuart Robinson, aka sturob, who was visiting from London. Stu is a very talented freelance programmer/interaction designer who develops iPhone applications in his free time. The width and breadth of Stu’s knowledge in both design and programming fields impressed us, and we’re sure the music app that Stu is developing for the iPhone will rock. Some of the stuff we talked about:

• Sam and Stu shared their impressions on programming for the iPhone: it’s hard, unfamiliar, and sometimes you hit against walls that seem impossible to overcome, but eventually you find your way around. It’s an interesting learning experience.
• Train ticket web interfaces suck here and in the UK too. We’re wondering if it is a world wide phenomenon. Solution: hire good designers, or develop an open API.
• Stu posed an interesting dilemma: if you had to choose between saying no to features and saying no to clients, which one would you choose?
• Another thought provoking question by Stu: if design makes things simple, will we come to an age where things just can’t be made any simpler?.

Vostok is also eternally indebted with Stu for introducing our own Sam Lown into the Ruby on Rails world a couple of years ago. The rest of the team is mostly back-end ignorant agnostic, but we sure are glad Sam can bang out impressive stuff in record time.