Designer & developer for Incredibly Lifelike (http://incrediblylifelike.com/) living the digital nomad lifestyle: Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Scotland, Holland, England. Previously worked as a development manager and "utility infielder" for EarthLink and Los Angeles Times / Tribune.
I like that the title of his post reinforces his point, using "2 bucks" instead of the common "2 cents." It suggests that this information is worth more than a typical opinion (and given the detail and outcome of the post I think he's right).
I think this is a fine option to provide, but I don't buy the argument that inserting a superscripted number is any less cognitively disruptive than underlining the text of a link. It's still distracting from the flow of reading.
Sure. I guess the implementation would be important. The screenshot toward the end of the 37s post suggests that employees have an opportunity to advertise their accomplishments, to which their peers can then respond with fractional portions of their available bonus funds. My guess is that accomplishments that demonstrably move this business forward may get exceedingly large payouts, but that wouldn't preclude server guy or Shopify's 71-year old office manager from getting regular (if smaller) disbursements.
Or could simply modifying the UI solve this problem? Putting the downvote arrow to the right of a news item (maybe just on mobile devices) would prevent fat-fingering, and then votes can remain permanent.
It's not that 37signals are the only ones doing what they do — they're just the best at promoting what they do differently from "conventional" business ideas. With Rework (and Getting Real before it), they're actually making "challenging conventional wisdom" part of their business.
I'm glad Loren will be joining the team and there will be a Twitter for iPad, but what is the implication for all the 3rd party applications if Twitter has official versions on these platforms?
Given that Apple knows a lot about people's buying history and demographics from the iTunes store (music, apps, etc.), I expect they're going to be able to target these ads pretty effectively. I predict you'll see Apple being pretty selective about which advertisers get into the iAds program — they want high quality brands that will be of real interest to users.
I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones.
The Kindle app for iPad already supports color. I downloaded the Kindle sample of the graphic novel "The Impostor's Daughter", and it displays in glorious color (and has more pages than the iBooks sample of the same work).
I posted a nearly duplicate comment (now deleted). My iPad has successfully located me in the Maps application in several different places. It's actually quite accurate.
I'm using it for small, very low-traffic projects, so I'd also be interested in hearing about larger sites using GAE. Also curious whether they're using Python, Java or something running on the JVM like Clojure.
Bear in mind that Netflix streaming doesn't typically include the latest popular releases (hey, that's what iTunes Movie Store is for, right?) However, they do have a pretty decent selection of titles. At the moment, just over 25% of my nearly 50 queued movies are available for streaming.
Could somebody with an Android phone please determine whether they went all the way through with building an Android app? It appears you can only search the marketplace from a handset.
Gootodo (now called Goodtodo) is the best solution I've found. It's simple, without categories, tags or priorities (other than sorting by position). The differentiators for me are: calendar-based to-dos. I can create a to-do that I don't actually need to act on until next week, and it won't show up until then.
Also, awesome email integration, where I can forward an email to, for example, apr14@gootodo.com, and the body of the email will be attached to a to-do that shows up on that date. This is a fantastic way to get in the habit of emptying your inbox as well. Things you have to do don't linger there, you just forward them to your to-do list.
Simple and elegant, and more than worth the $3/mo I pay for it.
Jason Kottke covered this at a higher level, where consumers are taking into account the format of the media and not just the content in their reviews (unlike your average critic working for big media).
They're leveraging what power they have from available tools (star ratings and reviews on popular commerce sites) to put pressure on the publishers.
Is it odd that Amazon doesn't denote (or possibly separate out) reviews from users that it knows purchased the book (or DVD, etc.)? Privacy concerns? The user is already expressing an opinion on something the have [ideally] consumed, thus tying it to their profile.
I'm no color theorist, but it's confusing to me why he would think the numbers for the perfect blue have to add up to 255 across all three channels. By that logic, wouldn't the perfect color white would be R:85 G:85 B:85 (or #555555)?
Reading the title I thought this would be ideas for actual products or services that a start-up could pursue. Rather it is 19 points of advice for startups to follow.
Using existing infrastructure (the printing press) to open up to niche markets during press downtime isn't a bad idea for newspapers. The example of football (soccer) teams printing their own short-run publication and distributing it at an event may have a better foundation in the long-run than a daily local newspaper that has to be delivered door to door. Distribution is cheaper and they target a highly focused audience segment (which may interest advertisers).
I suggest "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, as well as "Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp (or read his blog Rands in Repose, full of thoughtful geek-oriented essays on managing software teams and navigating organizations)
I think it's a stretch to say that the iPad gets the web completely wrong. The author complains about the lack of draggable windows on the iPad, but what is one of the best advancements in browsers in recent years? Tabbed browsing, specifically so you don't have so many windows floating around.
Also, she seems set on imposing her idea of the interrupt-driven experience of a traditional computer(instant messaging, etc.) in dismissing the iPad without considering that Apple may include background tasks in a future version of the iPhone OS — or that maybe an interface that promotes focusing on a single task at one time could be beneficial to the user.
She complains she hasn't done much web browsing on her iPhone, only when she specifically needs information. What exactly is wrong with that?
Which I think is fine. Certainly more digestible to someone who has not been exposed to 37signals and doesn't want to read thousands of blog posts. There's a value-add to editing and distilling.
I adore my Kindle and use it every day, but I have never once tried to browse the web on it. Instapaper's Kindle integration handles any longer web pages I might want to read on the Kindle.
I was under the impression that they reserved 20 7-bit characters for usernames in @replies, which would suggest that it is still limited due to SMS, no?
It's interesting to see the wave of URL shorteners spawned by the constraints Twitter put on its payload. Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world because in the future they'll be able to change where they point (e.g. if they adopt a new CMS with different URL scheme)?