The Next Web/
Question: What do lingerie, insurance and seat belts have in common?
Answer: They all provide a service that you only benefit from in extreme circumstances.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Why Apple Wins
Meanwhile, all the BlackBerry hype is about the PlayBook. I don’t want a damn tablet, I just want a phone that works, that doesn’t require me to study a manual to figure it out.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
This is why you should read @Anandtect - crazy detailed reviews
The design language used for the iPhone 3G/3G-S and iPod touch 2G/3G was based on accelerating curvature continuity (known as G3 continuity in industrial design terminology), in contrast to the tangentially continuous design (G1 continuity) found on the original iPhone. What this meant, basically, is that the first iPhone had a relatively flat design, whereas the 3G/3G-S had a gently crowned back that aimed to fit the contour of one's hand.
via anandtech.com
They are knowledgeable even about industrial design.
This is why you should read @Anandtect - crazy detailed reviews
The design language used for the iPhone 3G/3G-S and iPod touch 2G/3G was based on accelerating curvature continuity (known as G3 continuity in industrial design terminology), in contrast to the tangentially continuous design (G1 continuity) found on the original iPhone. What this meant, basically, is that the first iPhone had a relatively flat design, whereas the 3G/3G-S had a gently crowned back that aimed to fit the contour of one's hand.
via anandtech.com
They are knowledgeable even about industrial design.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Why we have worker's safety programs - @SteveBlank
After spending the last four years around microwaves I had become attuned to things that you couldn’t see but could hurt you. In the Air Force I had watched my shop mates not quite understand that principle. On the flightline they would test whether a jamming pod was working by putting their hand on the antenna. If their hand felt warm they declared it was. When I tried to explain that the antenna wasn’t warm, but it was the microwaves cooking their hand, they didn’t believe me. There were no standards for microwave protection. (I always wondered if the Air Force would ever do a study of the incidence of cataracts among radar technicians.)
via steveblank.com
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Raison d'être for Blackberry
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2011/03/data-roaming-why-non-rim-smartpho...
Why use a blackberry? For the super efficient data compressions!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Dear Dockers. My pants pockets are too big. Fix that. | brian s hall
I have this problem all the time.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Big thumbs-up from @Lefsetz for @PorterAirlines, #canada, and #Toronto
But what opens my eyes most is a company believing in giving you more, being nice, focusing on service. I didn’t want to fly into Newark, hell, when I booked I didn’t even know I was going into Newark, but I’d take Porter every time in the future. Not only because it’s close to downtown Toronto, but because they make me feel like a human being, like I deserve respect, like we’re all in it together.
via lefsetz.com
I have been missing Lefsetz's blog the last month or so. Didn't realize that he was here and wrote about Toronto.
This is a big thumbs up for Porter.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
A cautionary note about Acrobat - @ksoltys
So you have a fancy new computer running the latest greatest O/S from Microsoft, the 64-bit version of Windows 7. All is well until you try to create a PDF from a Word document using the PDF Maker add-in, which is part of the full version of Adobe Acrobat. Guess what – you can’t – it isn’t available for 64-bit Windows. Way to go, Adobe.
via soltys.ca
So @NYT is waterboarding torture or not?
So according to The New York Times, it's journalistically improper to call waterboarding "torture" -- when done by the United States, but when Nazi Germany (or China) does exactly the same thing, then it may be called "torture" repeatedly and without qualification. An organization which behaves this way may be called many things; "journalist" isn't one of them.
via salon.com
Monday, March 07, 2011
Poor @Symbian. Now being used as a in casual essay to epitomize dying markets.
The worst possible place to be is to focus on a shrinking segment of a market, even if it is underserved (think e.g. of launching a product for people who only want high specialized, auto-tuned, emo ringtones for their Symbian phones).
via blog.eladgil.com
But I still want emo ringtones! Just for my iphone.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Loss of empire
There is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirty of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny; it may have been wrong to taake it; it i certainly dangerous to let it go. And the kind of people who talk of doing so and persuade others to adopt their point of view would very soon bring a state of ruin, and would still do so even if they live by themselves in isolation. For those who are politically apathetic can only survive if they are supported by people who are capable of taking action. They are quite valueless in a city which controls an empire, though they would be safe slaves in a city that was controlled by others.
(Book II, History of the Peloponnesian War)
(Book II, History of the Peloponnesian War)
Books I am discarding
I have to clean my house today. I went thru my bookshelf and found all the books I don't realistically need. I love my books, but honestly, when am I ever going to read Portrait as a Young Man? I tried burning it in 2001. That copy of the Cosmic Code? I had it since I was 14. I loved it then, but I am not about to create an entire site on it.
Some are more interesting but I will never find the time. Like Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism.
Sigh. Au revoir, Zola.
Some are more interesting but I will never find the time. Like Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism.
Sigh. Au revoir, Zola.
Strange find from my Thucydides
I found these with the copy of History of Peloponnesian War I had. I didn't know I was such a big fan.
Friday, March 04, 2011
How did MySpace, with a smart team of people, do such a BAD UI/UX job with the new design? - @Quora
Answer edited by Andrew Chen....he answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetizat, and the redesign reflected that.First off- let meHowever, However the new MySpace is s: :
When the team was woin, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So tfeed newsfeed to generate short-te. This kind of thing happens all the time.
However, when .
When you are asking what ... (view context)
The answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetization ahead of user experience due to its failing business fundamentals, and the redesign reflected that.First off- let me state that I think the new MySpace is actually better than the old one. However, However the new MySpace is still not good enough, obviously, to turn around the product.
I recently spoke to an interaction designer who worked on the new MySpace, who told me an anecdote that blew my mind: :
When the team was working on the new feed at the heart of MySpace, the interaction designers wanted to make bigger images so that it'd be easy to see what users' friends were doing. Similarly, they wanted to make the feed more easily scannable and have more content per page on the feed. Basically, to turn the feed into a modern implementation the way Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and many others have set up.
However, they were aware that if they did this, then users would be less likely to click through to the images and thus would decrease pageviews. Given MySpace's declining revenues, the interaction designers there were asked to actively design in, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So they added smaller images than they thought optimal, and fewer images per page than they thought optimal, just so that they could generate more pageviews. Basically they were now designing a worse feed newsfeed to generate short-term revenue.
As I understand, this happened systematically within the product which led to many compromises in the user experience, and the business needs won every time. This kind of thing happens all the time.
However, when .
When you are asking what ought to be the strongest user advocates at the company to design for the business goals as a priority, you do not end up with an inspired product experience.
You have to prioritize having a great product experience to end up with a great product experience- it doesn't happen by accident.
Anyway, the site is still huge and influential in many ways, so let's hope the team there figures it out and there's a resurgence in the future.
#2415931 • Mar 04, 2011 12:26 AM
via quora.com
Great insight on UX and how good ones (and bad ones) are made by skilled people.
Found via HNews.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Steven Hyden on Grunge Music and Nostalgia - @AttemptMustache @The_AV_Club
Now is a good time to finally address an issue that’s been hovering in the background of this series from the beginning: the distinction between “cool” ’90s rock and “uncool” ’90s rock. I’ve made an effort to focus on some of the era’s biggest names and most commercially successful rock bands because 1) those are the bands I liked at the time; 2) those are the bands that millions of other people liked at the time; and 3) I find it strange that many people, including myself, don’t seem to remember it that way.
When I look back to my music-listening habits in 1995, I tend to overlook all the time I spent listening to Throwing Copper and instead think only about how I obsessed over GBV’s Alien Lanes, which I bought after reading a glowing four-star review in Rolling Stone. That summer, I tried to make heads or tails of a record that boasted 28 absentmindedly recorded songs in just 41 minutes. I was lost until I realized that the whole record was basically like the second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which stitched a series of melodic fragments into an extended suite. Just like that, Alien Lanes made sense, and GBV quickly became one of my favorite bands. In hindsight, Live seems likes a footnote, despite selling millions of records and playing 25,000-seat amphitheaters in its heyday, while Guided By Voices appears a lot bigger and more important today even if it reached only a fraction of Live’s audience in the ’90s.
via avclub.com
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