smtlaissezfaire

How does one decide what is imminent violence?

Who decides it?

Thanks for posting. We've all been there.

This is something I'm working on solving:

https://www.srchparty.com/

What's the CRM tool you've been using?

This is exactly what I'm working on.

https://www.srchparty.com/

Also, forgot to mention sleep. Being well rested always helps - the opposite, being quite tired - leads me to have a hard time focusing.

Usually several factors go into being focused (not necessarily ranked in order):

* Determination. How much do I care about this feature / bug fix?

* Long blocks of quiet. No distractions. This is usually why late at night works really well for me (no interruptions for meals, no emails, etc).

* Interesting factor. Doing drudge work is highly unmotivating. Using a new technology or building something I consider cool (say, a compiler) is tons of fun and I can't rip myself away from it.

Just to give you guys an idea of what I've been thinking of, here's a screencast of a little prototype I've been working on in my spare time:

http://screencast.com/t/tWUPNgGht2

The UI totally sucks and it isn't well designed at all. There's no sense of clickable screens, no sharing, no ipad, no retina, and no concept of a wire (only a mock). But the germ of the idea is there.

Hmm - yeah, that's a really interesting concept.

Seems like the market is really fragmented - everything from traditional photo/vector graphics software (photoshop, illustrator), traditional wireframing (omnigraffle, etc), online wireframing (balsamiq) and even presentation software (keynote and powerpoint!)

Keynotopia seems like a smart move for those who tend to lean to the presentation side of things - though I'd find it hard to believe that a designer who likes (or is used to) working in illustrator or photoshop would want to start using keynote!

I guess it probably depends what you are planning on doing with the extra monitor.

I've been happy with one monitor and alt-tab (CMD-tab on OS X) for a long time, but recently I've realized that the extra monitor comes in really handy for certain things. For me, that's having chrome open in one window and the chrome inspector in the other (this allows me to concurrently see + play with the DOM/css/js without it crowding the display).

When I have two monitors and I'm doing this sort of work, I never say to myself: "Oh man, I'm being so productive". But when I'm without the second one, I certainly miss it and feel less productive.

Which link specifically were you referring to?

I'm thinking that a bunch of the iphone mockups that I've seen end up with the same shared components - toolbars, tab bars, status bars, etc. Those standard components are really the same objects, just in a more hi fidelity fashion.

Also, AFAIK with those tools, once you export, there is no way to keep the wires and mocks in sync, right?

I've experienced times in a consulting shop where both the mocks + wires are being iterated on simultaenously (mostly because the product guy would use omnigraffle where the designer would use photoshop) - leading to mocks + wires that just didn't jive with each other. This created confusion among the dev, design, and product teams about what specifically we were building, leading to increased time to market.

Yeah, that sounds like good advice, chris.

What if you could streamline the process and cover both the wireframing and mockup phases? The tool I'm thinking about building is very similar to other prototyping tools (like Balsamiq), but would basically take your wires and "upgrade them" to a more pro-looking mockup (after all, it's just a matter of switching out images).

As far as I understand it, MVP is all about determining whether there might be customers out there for you. (It's answering the question "Is anyone actually going to buy this thing?").

So staying small and out of the public spotlight to iterate on failure is valuable (and doesn't produce any negative PR).

If you have to go open beta to get that feedback, then do so. If you can get away with a private beta, do so.

Here's the better question: Can you set up a system so that you don't even need any sort of beta to tell?

Ruby: methods != lambdas != procs

I keep any sort of file I really care about in a personal svn repository. Mostly this is either code, PDF's, Word Docs, Excel, text files, and so on - Not too much video or anything like that.

I then use DatedBackup (http://datedbackup.rubyforge.org/), to backup the repos, and a few servers, which is basically a wrapper around rsync. It more or less mimicks the functionality of a simplified time machine without the gui - keeping snapshots at certain intervals, and deleting them when the drive gets full. It uses a technique similar to rsnapshot, so extra space doesn't get wasted by every snapshot.