Eric Schmidt on enterprise customers vs. consumers
“We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance. And by the way, I would argue that we in the industry forgot this. We became as a group – certainly I did – consumed with the complexity of the systems that we were building for powerful corporations, and we forgot that there’s a much larger market around consumers for simple solutions.”
How We Learn
According to William Glasser, we learn “10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what is discussed with others, 80% of what is experienced personally, and 95% of what we teach to someone else.”
Participation isn't huge on web 2.0
“Only .16% of visits to YouTube, .2% of visits to Flickr and 4.59% of visits to Wikipedia are ‘participation visits’. Wikipedia numbers break down to show that older users are the ones doing the editing…There is one new blog being created every second somewhere in the world. Posting volume has also gone way up with 1.5 million posts per day. Dave said that 21% of tracked blogs are active down from 36% in May of last year. He gave us a rundown of things the top bloggers do: Post frequently, stay at it and don’t be intimidated. Japanese is the largest language in the blogosphere with 37% of posts in Japanese.”
Play-Doh interface
“As I twist the Play-Doh and take bits away, the film reacts accordingly in real-time. Add too much Play-Doh and the film rapidly speeds up. An intimate connection is made between the user and the media. Every action has a reaction in the digital space. No scary buttons to press. No instructions to read. It’s just Play-Doh.”
Coda integrates file browser, text editor, terminal, etc. into “a single, elegant window”
“While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.So, that’s what we’ve built. Coda has a complete file browser (and the ability to work locally or remotely), publishing, a full-featured text editor, a WebKit-based preview, a CSS editor with visual tools, a full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more.”
A “unified theory” of information software design
“The long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called ‘information software,’ I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.”
Canon 3D Papercraft
“Nearly everyone has made paper airplanes or tried origami when they were children. Take these memories further when you download dozens of 3D-Papercraft projects for free.”
The path to greatness hasn’t changed
“Scott discusses a time when presidential debate questions were answered in hours instead of a couple of minutes (and the whole debate lasted half a day). He contrasts that to today where we do things in the smallest amount of time possible so that we can do other things (or multi-tasking) and presidential debates last an hour…If we want to achieve greatness that we should pay attention to how the great people who came before us paid attention—by blocking distractions out and focusing on the task at hand.”
Car keys on the way out
“Today’s keyless models use a fob — the small remote control device that most modern cars use to lock and unlock doors — but it performs the additional duty of sending a signal to the ignition. For the car to start, the fob has to be somewhere near the dashboard, perhaps stowed in a cup holder.”
Animation of flight patterns
Ghostly and cool animation of flight patterns.
Dilbert on naming a product
Company lawyer: “I did a trademark search on all of the excellent product names you suggested. Every one of them is taken…”
A List Apart web design survey
“Participate in our first annual survey to increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession.”