Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the only sustainable way to earn money is by first creating love, and then hoping that some folks want to demonstrate that love with their dollars.
…. Everything should be shareware to be tried and tested until its value is proven and the love-meter swings open the wallet. If I were to pass on some music or a piece of code I become a vector of word of mouth viral marketing, the best kind, the kind that money can’t buy.
September 29, 2008
Lovable Software
September 27, 2008
Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too
…joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective.
…
I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys
The short article is worth reading.
September 25, 2008
Simple Truths About Cross-Platform Apps
Scott Stevenson tells it like it is,
Even if Apple recommended cross-platform toolkits for Mac development, the basic premise of Mac software market would not change. Mac users bought the computer they did because they found the experience more appealing. Bringing an application across from Windows with minor tweaks simply won’t resonate with this sort of user.
And gives free advice,
Maybe the most important thing you will ever need to know about Mac development is this:
Mac users will generally favor an app with a better experience over the one with more features.
September 24, 2008
I Lost My Phone And Need Ur Numbers!
Several times a year, I see some kind of mass-message sent out on Facebook by someone who lost their mobile phone. They want all their friends to reply with their phone numbers, so they can populate their new phone’s address book. This should not be allowed to happen. Your service-provider should automatically backup the address book on your phone for you, so that if you ever lose your phone, your contacts can be put on your new phone before it’s even active.
Blaming the “lusers” who lose their phones really is wrong headed. Even though you can sync your phone’s address book with your computer, it’s too much work for people, especially if they aren’t technophiles. (Hell I don’t do it, and I’ve got my own website.) And I would argue that it’s not even worth the effort! Losing a phone is an infrequent event, and and it’s just too easy to rebuild a social contact list. Even the most technophobic can just ask a few friends for the digits of their common friends. Obviously things like Facebook, email, and google make this process even easier. (And if all else fails, you can start calling the most-common numbers on your phone bill…)
Besides, ever since the dawn of personal computing, it’s been clear that people will not pro-activly take the time to backup their data, even if it’s single most important thing they could do. Engineers need to design around human fallibility, instead of believing they can “educate” people who’ve got better things to do.
What makes this all so bad to me is that the technology to automatically and invisibly safeguard a person’s address book has been here for decades. Whenever a contact is added to an address book, the phone could automatically send an SMS back to the service provider, telling them the name and number of the new contact. The contents of the message would be encrypted for security and privacy. On receipt, the tellco would add this tiny chunk of information to the database they already have on the customer.
And I’m sure the engineers who actually build mobile phones for a living have better ideas for doing this.
September 17, 2008
The Price of Cool
For those who might doubt such a high value of cool, consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price. With Rolex, the technology is grossly inferior, and still people will pay thousands to own it.
September 16, 2008
We’re In This Together
Leaving work late last Friday, I was impressed with the Bosch brand alarm-panel by the door. I botched entering the access-code, trying to arm the system, and the tiny LCD said,
Invalid Code
Let’s try again.
Security systems are designed to keep people out, have Spartan interfaces out of necessity, and consequently are often somewhat hostile to use. It’s a small thing, but that phrasing “let’s try again” made me smile, and that made a difference.
September 6, 2008
Complexity Is the Enemy
Complexity is the worst enemy of security; as systems become more complex, they get less secure.
September 5, 2008
Condescending Rich Guys
Let’s start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don’t really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.
Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn’t put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it’s just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we’re not quite in on.
September 2, 2008
Waiting for Safety “Kills”
Assume that all the new airport security measures increase the waiting time at airports by — and I’m making this up — 30 minutes per passenger. There were 760 million passenger boardings in the United States in 2007. This means that the extra waiting time at airports has cost us a collective 43,000 years of extra waiting time. Assume a 70-year life expectancy, and the increased waiting time has “killed” 620 people per year — 930 if you calculate the numbers based on 16 hours of awake time per day. So the question is: If we did away with increased airport security, would the result be more people dead from terrorism or fewer?
Relatedly, Tog claims that designing roads for speed first, and safety second, could save lives.
August 28, 2008
Lying With Pictures
A fantastic discussion of lying with photography. One of the take-aways for me were that captioning a picture can be more effective then photoshopping it, especially since the text and image are processed separately in the brain (at least as far as we know).
For historical reference, here’s an article on staged photographs in early 1930’s advertising.