Doing this right now, should be up soon. UPDATE: The signup box is up and running.
779 karma · joined July 16, 2009
The app combines four intersecting concepts:
1. Infinite timeline with addressable days. 2. Recurring tasks that support this infinite timeline. 3. First-class subtasks, which have all properties of normal tasks. 4. Contexts, which hide tasks from the list based on certain conditions.
I simply couldn't create a working mental model that accounts for all possible interplay of these concepts without speccing it out in advance.
I'm absolutely aware of the rite-of-passage thing, but I'm doing this because I NEED a proper, working todo app. My life will crumble without it. And I'm prepared spend my time and money on it. In any case, there's no going back to Wunderlist now.
As for marketing, I'm not worried. All I want is a working todo app, and it will be great if it turns out to be useful for other people.
I've spent the last two years developing a todo app that would be a good replacement for Wunderlist (and Astrid, if anyone still remembers that).
The app will include with some major / critical features both those apps lacked: proper hierarchies / first-class subtasks, automatically-activated contexts (e.g. location), snooze for arbitrary durations, a robust implementation of recurring tasks, and an infinite calendar-like timeline to look ahead.
I went full waterfall on it, the spec is 266 pages long and took half a year just to write. I'm currently testing an Android alpha version, and, for me, it works ridiculously well, much better than Wunderlist, which sat on my homescreen since August 2013.
My solution would be to somehow segregate pleasure driving in such a way that people living their normal everyday life are not affected by it -- the same way pleasure shooting / fighting is segregated away from streets, restaurants and cafes to shooting ranges / fight clubs.
In that dream, I wrote small programs, compiled and executed them. The twist was that the result of the execution was presented to me in the form of physical constructs, composed of square hollow section pipes welded together.
I would then walk around the structure, examine it, and wonder, why a particular part of the structure is welded to the whole structure diagonally, instead of a 90-degree angle. Must be a bug somewhere.
I personally consider this a reduction, not an addition. I prefer the old button.
I recently had to review about a hundred websites in my industry, and for quite a few of them I was simply unable to figure out what they do, sell or provide.
Here are my conclusions after using iPhone for a couple of months as a daily driver:
1. The switch itself was, unexpectedly, a lot less painful that I anticipated. All my apps and mobile workflows were up and running in half a day. So I guess I'm platform-agnostic.
2. iOS feels very smooth. No stuttering at all. Sometimes I get lagging, but it's a minor annoyance, not a showstopper - except for cases when I can't pick up a phone call because the round draggy thingy just won't drag.
3. App switching via double-tapping the home button is easy and pleasant. I like it more than the Android way of switching apps.
4. Text editing on iOS is absolutely atrocious. This is a major downside, and a deal breaker for me. That's why I'm switching to Pixel as soon as I can get my hands on it. iOS's magnifying glass cursor is much less convenient than Android's "handle cursors", especially when the text I'm editing is near the top of the screen. Going into the editing mode requires a long tap, as opposed to Android's regular tap, which is annyoing as well. The stock keyboard is slick but useless because I'm a gesture typer. I tried Swype, but it's no match for Google keyboard. GBoard might be a good replacement, but it doesn't support Russian yet, so no opinion here.
4a. The only thing in iPhone that somehow mitigates the awfulness of text editing on iOS is 3D-touch cursor movement. You strong-press in the keyboard area and drag, and the cursor moves. This feature is very well done. I'll probably get me iPhone 6s just to have it (not iPhone 7 because I don't like their new home button). Also, this 3D-touch cursor movement may not work with non-stock keyboard like GBoard or Swype - I have no information about that.
This. This exact thought occurred to me about a week ago -- to my shame, a full year after I read The Dictator's Handbook.
The natural concentration of robot ownership in the hands of a few creates the same autocracy dynamic as described in the book for oil and other natural resources. Also, robotic factories can be seized and controlled by an autocracy, just like oil wells. What's really scary about this is that threatens stable democracies, like the USA.
As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.
Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.
BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:
The spec turned out to be 250 pages long (without pics) and took almost a year to fully develop from the conception stage. In addition to this, I hired a designer to develop an additional design spec for the UI.
So far, this worked great. My total time spent on this project since the moment I gave the spec to developers is about one workday in total. The questions from the devs are mostly trivial, and solvable in an hour or less.
> "This composite image contains an equation in the foreground related to theory research in high-temperature superconductivity, and images in the background resulting from high-temperature superconductivity experiments. Credit: Image courtesy of Penn State University"
At least one of the images in the background is not 'resulting from high-temperature superconductivity experiments', it's just a plain rendering of the default preset of a Filter Forge filter 'Electricity': https://www.filterforge.com/filters/237.html
(I am the author of this particular filter, and the founder of Filter Forge. The 'electric' image looks a bit different on our page because we force seamless tiling to on when rendering images for the web).
>"A fish on land still waves its fins, but the results are qualitatively different when the fish is put in its most suitable watery environment."
>"Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important".
>"Out of control" because artists have to do what they have to do. "Extremely productive" because a great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it. They then make their own paths to the future."
>"Unless I'm badly mistaken, in most processes today—and sadly in most important areas of technology research—the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being "out of control" with superproductive processes. They are trying to "avoid failure" rather than trying to "capture the heavens".
Just wanted to add that shaders lend themselves very well to the functional / dataflow paradigm. There are numerous visual node-based shader editing tools where you construct shaders from blocks, which essentially are pure functions.
For example, rocket / grenade / arrow spam in TF2, or Lucio / Hanzo / Symmetra projectile spam in Overwatch. In this context, spamming is just firing in the general direction of the enemy, hoping that some of the rounds will hit.
Maybe this generalizes to repeated application of some cheap technique that has a low probability of success, where the low chances of success are compensated by the low amount of effort per 'shot' required -- but I can't think of any more examples.
There was a proposal to add user-defined table-based functions to Excel, by a group of authors including none other than Simon Peyton Jones, a major contributor to Haskell and GHC. Here's that paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...
Curiously, the paper is titled 'Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel'.
(And by the way, you can already name and refer to any range of cells in Excel, not just a row or a column. There's also a GUI dialog that lets you manage the names, e.g. rename, delete etc.)
This sounds like a useful metaphor, but I'm unable to fully comprehend it because I suck at thermodynamics and information theory. Could you please elaborate a bit and include some examples of high-entropy names?
(I'm asking because naming is hell, and I'll need to name three products very soon).
(The app currently has all the infrastructure for such contexts, however I'm not yet sure about how to implement person proximity triggers in particular).