Seth Godin has a great bit of insight at the end of a post today about how smart companies separate pleasure and pain.

He cites Disney as a good example:

Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.

And airlines as a bad example:

Airlines, on the other hand, surround the very thing they sell (getting you home) with armed guards, untrained TSA agents, long lines and sneering gate agents eager to take your money when you have absolutely no expectation or choice and when your stress is at its highest. This is a problem in the long run.

Obviously some of the security measures are out of the airlines’ control, but the insight is still a great one. It’s similar to the best advice I’ve heard on PR: Blast the bad news out quickly (to get it out of the way) and trickle the good news out slowly (to keep in the way).

Audi is set to release the next version of their MMI (Multi Media Interface). The MMI powers their nav, radio, and car systems.

While I prefer Garmin’s UI simplicity, Audi’s Nav UI is my aesthetic favorite. They pay attention to type, proportions, opacity, shapes and shading in a way that says “we really care about how this looks.”

From an information design perspective, I’ve always been a fan of how they present and combine distance and time. I’ve used lots of nav systems and somehow, for me, Audi’s is the one that presents the right information at the right time in the right way. I do like Honda’s too.

Here are some screenshots from Audi’s latest effort:

And here’s part of their lab where they test the designs. The different dashes are from different models.

Read more about the new MMI at Fourtitude or Audiworld.

Another natural wonder. This time brought to you by ants. Trap-jaw ants use their jaws to propel themselves into the air to evade predators. They can achieve heights of just over 8cm. That translates into a 40ft vertical for an average size human.

Link stolen from Kottke.

Backpack has always allowed you to share pages via email, but the person on the receiving end had to have a Backpack account before they could view the page. We were never really happy about how that worked. We finally did something about it. Big thanks to Jeremy for making this happen.

Now you can share Backpack pages with anyone in the world via email — even if they don’t have a Backpack account. They don’t even need to know what Backpack is.

It’s the quickest and best way we know to share a functional web page or informational page with someone (or some people). Share to-dos, photos, notes, whatever. Pages you share via email are fully functional. Multiple people can collaborate on the page together by adding new list items, checking them off, adding a note, a file, a photo, etc.

And if they do decide to sign up for Backpack, they page will be pulled right into their account as a shared page. It’s all automatic.

We hope you find this enhancement useful. If you don’t already have a Backpack account, sign up for one today.

Artyfactory has a great piece on Picasso’s reduction of a detailed drawing of a bull into an abstract basic shape using just twelve pen strokes.

It starts here:

And ends here:

The interesting stuff is what comes in-between.

We’ve been wanting to offer regularly scheduled webcast tours (or is it a webinar??) of our products for a while now, but we’ve been unable to find the right piece of software on the Mac to get it done.

Here’s what we want: We want to be able to share our screen and our voice and allow up to 100 (?) people at a time to follow along in their web browsers. People who wanted to participate would go to a URL to watch the presentation. Voice could be handled via the net or via a coordinated conference call.

At the end we could do a Q&A session. We’d need some way to moderate the questions so everyone doesn’t jump in at once. We could ultimately just take questions via text/email and then pick a few to answer.

We’re aware of services like GoToMeeting, but you can’t initiate the webcast from a Mac. You can watch along on a Mac, but you can’t seem to broadcast from a Mac. Adobe Captivate looks interesting too, but you can only have a max of 5 people on the webcast.

Anyone have any ideas? Anything I’m overlooking? Thanks for your help.

Jason Fried

July 31, Denver: New Denver Ad Club Keynote (register online)

September 2-5, Boston: Business of Software Conference

September 16-19, NYC: Web 2.0 Expo

September 23, Chicago: Illinois ITA Speaking of Success Series

October 7-8, Chicago: IDEA Conference

October 13, Chicago: An Event Apart

October 14-17, Providence RI: BIF-4

David Heinemeier Hansson

July 21-23, Half Moon Bay California: Fortune Brainstorm Tech

September 2-4, Berlin: RailsConf Europe

September 16-19, NYC: Web 2.0 Expo

September 20, Chicago: WindyCityRails

October 20-22, Barcelona: European Ecommerce Conference

Ryan Singer

November 3-4, NYC: Future of Web Design

I was in a three-hour meeting yesterday. I’m meeting averse, you know that. But one of the things I liked about this meeting was when the guy in charge stopped someone mid-sentence and said “Don’t say everyone or no one. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We all do this. We try to justify our position by saying “No one knows…” or “Everyone knows…” or some derivative thereof. When you throw around these extremes you weaken your point. There is no such thing as everyone or no one. Don’t justify your position by putting an unjustifiable abstraction at the core.

Even “Most people” is a bad one. “Many people” isn’t as bad, but it’s still loaded. I find myself saying it all the time. “Some people” is better. A clear “these people” is best.

So when you’re making a point or taking a position, watch out everyone or no one — they aren’t really there.

When I see stuff like this I’m 1. filled with envy, 2. filled with envy, 3. hungry. More wonderfulness can be found at eatPES.