Cars
Two great posts I read today:
I recently heard somebody say he didn’t care about crosswalks because cities belong to pedestrians. It made me realize how the two cities I lived in, Paris and New York, are completely planned for cars.
Two great posts I read today:
I recently heard somebody say he didn’t care about crosswalks because cities belong to pedestrians. It made me realize how the two cities I lived in, Paris and New York, are completely planned for cars.
Kanban is a software development method that requires to lay out the tasks on a board to better visualize the workflow. I find it very inconvenient to rely on a physical board so I spent a few days building a web application.
It’s just a prototype, but I think it already does a good job at giving an overview of the next tasks in the backlog, who is currently working on what, what are the open tasks, and what has recently been deployed.
The task completion level is easy to see with the green/yellow/red progress indicator, and the title of a stage gets highlighted in red when there are more active tasks than the limit the team set (that’s a Kanban thing for focusing on getting things done).
Users can add a new task by clicking the “+” in the backlog where a new card will appear. Then, just type some text and press enter. They can drag and drop stacks of cards from one stage to another or people from one stack to another.
Clicking on a card gets the user to the task’s page where he can:
It also syncs in the background to receive changes made by other people in real time, but it’s not applying changes yet.
The benefit of such app over an out of the box alternative like Trello or an actual cork board is integration and customization: it could automatically run tests and move the cards accordingly, deploy a stack of cards to a staging or production server based on the stage they are in and notify the project stakeholders when needed, all while computing the team velocity for continuous improvement. Such an application can adapt to an existing workflow instead of forcing the opposite.
I’m not sure where this project is going but let me know what you think.
Galt MacDermot - Coffee Cold (1968)
Joel Spolsky:
The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recall.
Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.
PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.
This is a picture my dad took from his office in Paris after I told him to try Instagram. He loves this app.
Dinosaur Trader:
The older table made up of my uncles and aunts was the liveliest. They were trading stories, old and new, and laughing. My table consisted mainly of my immediate family. My brother in law stared down at his “smart phone” for the entirety of the Jets game without saying a word. I looked over at the table containing my cousins who are all about 20 years older than me. A few of them were on smart phones as well.
Yes, traditional manners are being pushed by smartphones. I don’t like watching a movie with friends who constantly look at their phone or laptop.
But family dinners were also ruined by television in the sixties. I bet everybody as a child also had a favorite book they couldn’t stop reading. “Hey, we’re having dinner, you’ll finish your book later.”
Get over it. Just give people the time to adapt to this new lifestyle.
A short video explanation on the end of the world. Funny and interesting as always with C. G. P. Grey:
Anyway. After this NASA became so inundated with questions that they had to take time away from their busy robot building, frontier pushing, knowledge expanding, civilization inspiring schedule, to write a webpage explaining that no, a human-sacrificing, stone-age society with neither wheels to pull carts nor glass to make telescopes, didn’t know more about science at the dawn of history than real scientists do today.
People wonder who between Apple and Google is winning at the smartphone war. Some say Google is, others argue it’s Apple. If you were to build a company, how would you define a success? And what is winning after all?
You can learn in business school that, for a company, winning is maximizing shareholder value. Winning at business is about money.
Apple is making shitloads of money by selling iPhones, iPads and iPods. They sell iOS devices and make money. Google is not making profit in the smartphone market directly by selling devices. When people buy a Samsung Bionic Optimus II X 3D, Samsung gets the money, and Google gets the user.
Google’s strategy is to capture a lot of user information to charge more for ads they serve to the users. The more Android devices are used (not shipped, not sold, not activated: used), the more information Google is going to capture and the more ads they are going to display.
While Apple is silently failing at using the iOS platform to serve iAds, Google wins at being the default search engine in nearly all desktop browsers and mobile devices but Microsoft products. They know what people want, what people say, where people are and want to go. They win at the advertising game.
For people who actually make products, winning is about having people use and love their products. Nobody thinks about customer satisfaction when their only goal is to make more money, but people who actually care about the user experience can be the ones who get the profits. Apple wins at the customer satisfaction game.
Now, you can look at the smartphone market and see the companies sharing the Android profits as one Apple competitor. Then yes, Android is winning. The vendors share the money, but Google gets all the users. If you think about Map and Search, Google even gets iOS users. Yes, two thirds of Google’s mobile search comes from iOS devices, but the remaining third is still for Google.
Or you can look at the market in terms of what I would personally call a success: people loving your products so much that they line up in front of your stores, recommend your products to everybody, and still get you twice as much profit on phones as everybody else combined.
It all depends on what your goal is.
2011 was the year I:
Let’s beat that in 2012. I want to:
I hope you too set high goals for yourself.
Arch bridge in Central Park by Rémi.
It’s becoming more obvious that specs don’t matter these days, or at least that what really matters is harder to compare. People who need product recommendations will only find experts writing for other experts. Nobody knows what RAM is or what 802.11n means. They care about ease of use, time-to-Facebook and how long will the battery last.
I asked some regular people to tell me about their favorite or least-favorite device and explain me why.
My father on its iPhone 4:
The iPhone is a Swiss army knife that amazes me everyday with its intuitive features.
My sister Sarah on her Sony Xperia mini:
I chose it instead of an iPhone because it’s smaller and thus fits well in my pocket. I don’t know how to start a new paragraph when writing an email but for texting, making calls and Google things, it’s fine. It also takes great pictures.
My sister Sarah on her 7.1 megapixel Olympus camera (that’s actually how she refers to it):
My phone takes better pictures. Don’t buy it.
My sister Sarah on her MacBook Pro:
Just like any other Mac, it doesn’t crash and doesn’t get viruses.
My mom on her iPhone:
I been using it for a few years. It replaced the huge mess in my purse. If you run all day, just get one.
My friend Louis on his Eee PC:
Don’t buy that. After only a month, the battery is dead, it’s extremely slow, event while editing text. Yes, it’s lightweight and pretty cheap, but you should spend a little more to get a laptop that does the bare minimum.
I remember clearly my father recommending the iPad to his sister:
It’s easy to use, you don’t need to charge it very often, it’s light and small and you can do everything with it and it’s always connected to the Internet. Perfect for when you go on vacation.
Now, look how Best Buy describes a top-selling laptop to regular people. Below are the main product features:
VISION Technology by AMD / AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon HD 6620G discrete-class graphics / 8GB DDR3 SDRAM / Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive / 15.6” LED high-definition display / 640GB hard drive (5400 rpm) / AMD Radeon HD 6620G graphics / Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n) / Built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Nobody talks about how how open their operating system is or the lack of Flash support. I’m stating the obvious here, but we’ll get there eventually. People needs tech reviews by people.
Check out the National Geographic Photo Contest 2011 on The Big Picture.
New portfolio. Keeping things simple, as always. Just a list of all my projects. I’m looking for a job. Reblog this or retweet that if you want to help. Thanks in advance and sorry for the shameless self promotion.
My friend Alex is looking for a job as a UX guy in NYC. Together, we made Our Band Is Called… and WatchThis. As shown on his blog, he knows how to solve complex problems with simple user interfaces. The best thing? He can also build them.
Alex is your new bicycle. If your company builds software, get in touch with him.