- Business advice from David Lynch?
- “Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.”
- Steve Ballmer spends one-third of his time meeting with customers
- “I get energy from seeing our customers. It reminds me of the things we’re doing well and it also reminds me of the things where we need to improve.”
- You only get three seconds to make an impression
- “People have forgotten that the most important thing on a website is the content. Not the gradient, not the drop shadow, not even that PhotoShop brush that you thought would be cool as a background image. If your content doesn’t say interesting stuff in a concise manner, then no amount of CSS Zen will help. Writing for the web is the toughest and most important part of developing web sites/applications. Get that wrong, and every other part of the design process from your information architecture through to your IE5.5 on OSX CSS hacks just doesn’‘t matter.”
- Video: Real worldish use of multi-touch driven screens
- Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how multi-touch screens “will change the way we work and play.” Examples include usage in image editing, web browsing, creating 3D animations, etc. [tx ML]
- Fotolog and Flickr neck and neck
- “Perhaps this is a sign that those folks trapped in the Web 2.0 bubble are not being critical enough about what is responsible for success on the Web circa-2007…Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”
- SmugMug discusses Amazon S3 problems
- “I can’t think of a particular vendor or service we use that doesn’t have outages, problems, or crashes. From disk arrays to networking gear, everything has bad days. Further, I can’t think of a web site that doesn’t, either. It doesn’t matter if you’re GMail or eBay, you have outages and performance problems from time to time. I knew going into this that Amazon would have problems, and I built our software and our own internal architecture to accommodate occasional issues. This the key to building good internet infrastructures anyway. Assume every piece of your architecture, including Amazon S3, will fail at some point. What will you do? What will your software do?”
- Setting small goals creates sustainable change
- “When someone goes from one extreme to another, the behavioral change rarely lasts. In my experience, this is true in personal finance, fitness, studying, and a bunch of other areas. When I make a change, I almost always make the most incremental change of all and work iteratively from there. This is why I just shake my head when I see personal-finance pundits giving families advice to go from a 0% savings rate to a 25% savings rate (“you can do it!!!”). Giving that kind of advice to someone is not useful if their habits have been set for years. That’s why you find articles like 8 lottery winners who lost their millions. Habits don’t change overnight, and if they do, chances are it won’t be sustainable.”
- Jeff Veen's CMS suggestions (e.g. give customers quick wins)
- “Make it easy to get started. Give first-time users a series of quick wins that become increasingly complex. When I first log in, I want to create a Web page. Next, I’d like to add some styles to it. Then, I’d like to make links to some other Web pages. I’ll build a navigation system after that, and start to add other features eventually. But I want to feel successful with your system within a few minutes. I don’t want to you to present the stunning power at my fingertips until I’m comfortable with my surroundings. Please save the content ranking, on-the-fly PDF creation, community forums, and user polls for later. I may eventually want that stuff, but not the first time I log in.” [tx WH]
- Released: PackRat 1.0 lets you use your Backpack data when you can't be online
- “Before you hit the road for the first time with PackRat, just sync up with Backpack and your data is duplicated in PackRat’s database…When you get back on the ‘net, PackRat will automatically inform Backpack of all your changes and Backpack will be up to date.”
- Tech barons trying to change energy policy
- “The venture capitalists could become a powerful part of the realignment of energy politics. They are lending a new voice to the debate, one that politicians are likely to listen to given the investors’ reputation as smart backers of next-generation companies.”
Caleb Elston
on 31 Jan 07What a crackerjack post. I ended up with over 6 tabs open after getting through the post. I think that is a record.
Anthony
on 31 Jan 07re: Han’s multitouch screens.
I’m speechless.
I’m silently imagining 3D webpage design :)
Sam Leibowitz
on 31 Jan 07In the SmugMug blog article linked, there’s a reference to a much earlier post about their cost calculations regarding S3. According to their numbers, they’re saving something along the lines of half a million bucks a year, and that’s… just, wow.
Chris Blow
on 31 Jan 07Did anyone notice the copy of a book called “Simplicity” on the desk? It’s the one where he is putting. Made me smile when I saw it in the paper yesterday. They might be on to something.
Chris Blow
on 31 Jan 07—In the Steve Ballmer article, that is.
Greg
on 31 Jan 07I can only hope that their will be a “[Sunrise]” edition. I think by now I’m starting to see Sunspots from waiting and starring at the Sunrise.
Greg P.S. If you didn’t laugh at that, you don’t have humor.
Steve
on 31 Jan 07Packrat is great. The only thing I wish it had was access to my Writeboards. It would be awesome if support was added to the Backpack API to retrieve and update Writeboards.
Kyle
on 31 Jan 07Personally, I don’t think the criticism of bubbl.us in the post on initial impressions is well-founded, as he doesn’t address the fact that there’s a big honkin’ “START” button that takes you right into the app with no registration. As I mentioned in the recent Screens post, you can’t register until you’ve tried the app.
There are a few usability problems with that site, but the front page isn’t one of them.
random8r
on 01 Feb 07Yeah, I’d prefer if each of these “Sunspots” mini-post things had its own separate post – even though they’re only small.
I’m reticent to read them because there’s so many different things going on in them.
That said, I wanted to comment on intuition… intuition is the sum of who you are because it’s about your emotion/feeling working on something. Emotions work about 40,000 times faster than thought. It’s what we call the “gut” reaction to something, because your emotions are who you are…
(Mental) mind is easy to change… but it will be driven back to where you “are at” by your emotion/feeling part… to change that, requires constant effort in time. Emotions aren’t necessarily rational, however. Thus sometimes, relying on intuition isn’t the best thing in the world ;-)
Random8r.
Des Traynor
on 01 Feb 07Kyle: My issue was mainly that the person on the other end doesn’t know what the hell “START” is actually going to do. I went ahead and clicked start, and I still didn’t know what was going on. I typed some text, pressed tab, scrolled my mouse wheel, and I have 2 big brown bubbles in front of me, and I’m still not sure whats going on.
Here are questions, that I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that people might want answered before signing up…
What is a MindMap? What would I like one? How could a MindMap help me? What does a useful Mind Map look like?
This assumption that people want to learn about and try out your application is nuts. Most people are looking for things that will help them in life. The first page of the app needs to show them how, or they will be out of there pretty quickly.
Patrick D
on 01 Feb 07There’s a lot of interesting work being done with multi-touch interactive displays at the University of Calgary Interactions Lab. I was actually lucky enough to visit the lab last week, and wrote up a short summary of some of the cool stuff I saw.
Especially cool was seeing Google Maps, World of Warcraft, and the Sims on an interactive tabletop!
Mike
on 01 Feb 07From the Steve Ballmer article:
Competitors once feared and respected Microsoft. Now they simply respect it. “
Respect Microsoft? Really?
Ian
on 01 Feb 07I certainly agree with Des’ analysis.
Oversimplification is as dangerous as over-complication.
And as SvN readers have greater level of web savvy which leads me to worry that if we do not understand instantly, average users would be even more lost.
Andy Kant
on 01 Feb 07@Mike If you have no respect for Microsoft, you’re probably either blind or you worship Steve Jobs. Most of the products that have come out of Microsoft since around 2002 have been extremely high quality. Their products have their shortcomings but for the most part, they’ve had a pretty great track record in recent years. I’m not saying that everything Microsoft is the best out there, but they make great products, give credit where its due.
Mark
on 03 Feb 07I agree with Andy. My experience as a Windows user has been extremely productive for the last couple of years. I’m amazed what I can accomplish and how enjoyable it is to work on a computer. I’m making movies (3ds max + Soundforge > Vegas > Flash > Dreamweaver > web), producing cool looking documents (Illustrator + MS word > Acrobat), communicating with friends and colleagues (Outlook, IM, web forums) and seeing lots of cool stuff on the web, while listening to an ever increasing range of music (Pandora, archive.org + WinAmp + 3rd party decoders). Its all point and click, point and drag, very intuitive, very fun. Life is good! MS contributed a lot to this environment. I’m so glad its not just UNIX and Mac.
This discussion is closed.