Judo n. Maximum efficiency, minimum effort

Search results for “Judo” at our internal Campfire chat room:

Related:
Software Judo
Words of Wisdom on Learning Judo

For demo purposes, we’ve had to populate Highrise with a bunch of fake people. Here are some of the sites we used to save time and increase randomness while creating these make-believe contacts:

The Random Name Generator pulls first and last names from a couple of genealogy sites. Some fun ones that turned up: Garfield Morland, Juniper Pinney, Keaton Dimsdale, and Seymour Zeal.

A search for “John Smith” at whitepages.com provides addresses and phone numbers (we change the street and phone numbers by a couple of digits).

Plambeck.org has a company name generator that serves up choices like Sems Research, Cadridium, Nated Design, etc. 2robots.com also offers a Random Business Name Generator.

For job titles, The Economic Research institute has a huge list. And there’s also GigantaMegaCorp’s Job Title Generator which spits out random ones like Inter Purchasing Planner, Senior Engineering Associate, and Foreign Information Processor.

The less people are aware of you, the better idea it is to give your product away

“A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I’ve lost a great deal.”

Incomprehensible intersections

Photos of traffic-routing gems.

Software development “inventory”

“In software development, inventory is anything that you’ve started and you haven’t gotten done. It’s ‘partially done’ work. In manufacturing if you start making something and it is in-process, it’s not sold, it is inventory. In development it’s the same thing. If you started developing something and it’s not done, it is inventory. What you’re trying to do Lean software development is the least amount of ‘partially done’ work as possible. You want to go from understanding what you’re supposed to do to having it done and deployed and in somebody’s hands as rapidly as possible.” [tx PA]

Marko Karppinen’s CSS column exercise

Click the icons on the upper right to change the number of columns and justification.

The meaning of “The Medium is the Message”

“It is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.’ And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect – its message.”

Soigné = make it perfect

“When you have a really important diner – an influential food critic, a chef you admire, anyone the higher ups deem to be important – the soigné level rises to something absurd like “super soigné.” Anything short of culinary perfection means certain death for a cook…Poor orders were not considered – no sauce on the side people, no special requests, no well-done meats. If they didn’t know how to eat, they weren’t going to appreciate what we were putting on their plates.” [via JK]

The command line comeback

“Standard GUIs, with their drop down menus, check buttons, and tree-lists just cannot compare to the range of options that a text interface gives effortlessly. In just five alphanumeric characters, you can choose one out of 100,000,000 possible sequences. And choosing any one sequence is just as fast as any other sequence (typing five characters takes roughly 1 second). I challenge you to come up with a non text-based interface that can do as well.”

We try to share a lot about our business, how we think, what we do, why we make the decisions we make, what we think works and what doesn’t work, etc.

What haven’t we talked about that you are interested in? I can’t guarantee we’ll have an answer, or be able to share the answer, but we’ll answer what we can.

We may answer some of these as comments and others we may answer as entire posts. We’ll see.

The Deck, our premier advertising network for creative, web and design professionals, is expanding again. It’s obvious that the independent publishing efforts of our four new members come first and foremost from the heart, and we’re happy to be able to support them and happier still to count them as friends.

Khoi Vinh is the Design Director for The New York Times online and he joins the net with his beautiful, measured and insightful Subtraction.com. Tina Roth Eisenberg is the force behind Swiss Miss, a design journal of infectious enthusiasm and unrelenting good taste. Greg Storey has a rare combination of skills. He’s a clear, concise and conversational writer and you could also use the same adjectives to describe his trend-setting modern web design work. You can find Greg at Airbag Industries. There is only one Zeldman, although with the amount of stuff he’s involved in, that fact seems more and more improbable every day. Z has been publishing about his life as a designer and writer at zeldman.com since 1995. He is also a founding member of The Deck, through his stewardship of the mighty A List Apart. Welcome all.

Apple: America’s best retailer is a great article about Apple and its stores.

The critics were way off…

“Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. “It’s desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.,” opined TheStreet.com. “I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” predicted retail consultant David Goldstein…

Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy (Charts) stores turn $930 – tops for electronics retailers – while Tiffany & Co. (Charts) takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

The stores were prototyped like a product…

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!’” says Jobs.

But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm.

Zappos is looking for a Web Producer in Henderson, NV.

UCLA is looking for an Experienced PHP/MYSQL Developer in Los Angeles.

Zagat is looking for a Senior Web Developer in NYC.

American Century Investments is looking for a Senior Web Developer III in Kansas City, MO.

Yahoo is looking for a CSS & OO Javascript Guru in Sunnyvale, CA

MIT Media Lab is looking for a Web Systems Programmer in Cambridge, MA.

Designkitchen is looking for a Senior Web App Developer in Chicago, IL.

MoralMetric.com is looking for a Ruby on Rails Engineer in Golden, CO (or remote).

The First Post is looking for a Senior Web Designer/Developer in Kensington, London, UK

Kinetic Web Solutions is looking for a Developer in Limerick, PA.

Baker Library, Harvard Business School is looking for a Director, Web & Intranet User Experience (Information Products Group) in Boston, MA.

Find a job or put your design or programming in job in front of the best on the Job Board.

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, the welcome and workspace tabs, and adding people to Highrise. Next we’re going to talk about Tasks.

Now/Next
Tasks are a huge part of Highrise. Highrise follows the now/next idea—log the notes of what just happened now and set up your next action. For example: [A NOTE NOW] “Just got off the phone with Walt. We discussed the new product, who it’s for, the ideas behind it, use-cases, etc.” [A TASK NEXT] “9am tomorrow: Send full press kit”

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime
Sometimes things happen right on time. Sometimes you do have a call at 9am sharp tomorrow. But often times you have “stuff” you need to get done sometime tomorrow or sometime this week or next week. And often times you just have stuff you need to get done later. Highrise lets you gracefully deal with tasks with hard and fast dates/times and tasks with suggested time “buckets.” 9am tomorrow is hard and fast, “this week” is a bucket.

The conveyor belt
Most buckets are on a conveyor belt. Later always stays later unless you have dated/timed items in there. Dated/timed items will move based on today’s date. Next week becomes this week. This week becomes overdue. Tomorrow becomes today. Today becomes overdue.

Movie: Watch a task being added. You’ll see you can specify a time for near-time items (today or tomorrow), leave the time off entirely so the task is due “sometime today,” specify a future bucket “next week” or “later,” or specify a specific date/time in the future via a calendar.

Cute, clever, and cool are all important ingredients in a delicious application experience. But often their role is over- or understated. Too much and it’s hard to stomach, too little and it’s all bland.

So how do you get it right? One way to think about it is to treat these three C’s as spices. Spices are there to heighten the flavor of the main dish, not dominate and conquer its entire taste.

You can’t litter your page with darling kittens unless you’re Cute Overload, but you can add a few puns or quirky comparisons to put a smile on someone reading your help section.

You shouldn’t try to discern if someone is writing a letter in your word processor, but you can add a Google Maps link to something you know is an address.

You’d be foolish to make every link a fancy Ajax transition, but you can hide/reveal a very commonly used form with a nice fade.

It’s not about either or. You can be cute, clever, and cool in moderation and end up with character instead of clown.

Credit to Jeff Bezos for planting this comparison in my head.

Shure: The best?
This Q&A at the Shure site is interesting because the company rep actually backs away from declaring its industry standard microphone “the best.”

Question: I was just wondering, the sm57 seams to be the mic that most artists use for their Guitar Cabinet, but is it really the best mic for that or is it just that it’s been such a classical model so long that they just presume that its the best and therefore use it? I mean the technology must have gone forward since it was first released?

Answer:
There is never a “best” microphone. Is there a “best guitar amp”? Is there a “best guitar”? The selection of a mic, guitar amp, or guitar is subjective. It is what appeals to your ear that is important. Many artists prefer the sound of the SM57 for miking a guitar amp, thus its popularity.

“I mean the technology must have gone forward since it was first released?”
The SM57 has been internally improved in many ways over the years, but the styling has stayed the same because customers like it. Some styles are classics: Marshall amps, Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul, Shure SM57 and SM58. Why change if it a model is successful?

Steven Berlin Johnson: Insane, etc.
At author Steven Berlin Johnson’s site, he provides snappy and straightforward summaries for each of his books. The kind of unique p.o.v. stands out from the accurate but dry summaries you usually see.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture—and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received of all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.