thesash

It's an impressive testament to Bezos's vision and integrity that he was able to both articulate these principles early on and stick to them for 15 years.

+1 or even have the game prompt you to enter your email address to play level 2.

...Unless the next iPhone supports NFC

The redesign is a really nice update overall, but in terms of pure search utility, I don't think this is a challenge to Yelp just yet. Yelp's massive review database is still a huge advantage, and provides high quality context to search results that foursquare can't match: http://d.pr/PYyf

The most exciting feature of the whole redesign is one that I totally missed until I read about it in the mashable article, and that's the recommendations on the homepage. It surfaces some really interesting content, and plays on foursquare's strengths which are social data and time-sensitive check ins. Unfortunately, this feature is pretty buried at the moment, and is limited to showing generalized recommendations for the current time. There doesn't seem to be any way to dive deeper into the recommendations by time/date, or to filter by category. There's a lot of potential there however, so I'm excited to see where that goes.

It is also really surprising to me that foursquare does't have a map on their search page if they're pushing local discovery.

Direct link to the prototype: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

I think the underlying (and completely unsolvable) problem boils down to user experience. There are myriad flash apps out there with atrocious hover-state-based interfaces that are annoying on PC, and would be completely unusable on a touch screen device. Activating flash on a mobile device would open the floodgates to countless apps that simply wouldn't work, without providing context to the user as to why they don't work. In such a situation, it is simpler to control the user experience by simply not allowing flash.

Love how simple it is, agree on the color scheme-- the yellow is hard on the eyes, "export" button lacks contrast.

What about adding a feature to dump the data into a google doc instead of sending an email?

It's easy to implement, removes friction if you're developing a social app. However, you become reliant on facebook, search around and you'll find stories about developers having apps banned, etc. Also, if your app is not social, and there is no clear reason to integrate with facebook, users may be hesitant to use it.

Signed up 10 seconds in to the video, looking forward to trying it out.

Perhaps they should look to the legion of flash applications whose hover-based interfaces were dubious at best on desktops and would have been fully unusable on touchscreen devices.

+1000 "'The single lowest hanging fruit in the US' is in process automation.”

While I agree that the current generation of touch screens are rather superficial, I sincerely doubt that the future of interaction looks anything like a stylus.

For artists and designers, the stylus will be used for many years to come, but for casual, everyday use, it simply isn't user friendly. While it may be natural to draw or write on a screen with a stylus, jabbing at buttons on a screen with a stylus is no more intuitive or natural than jabbing at a screen with a finger, and in many use cases (scrolling, zooming, panning) is much less natural. The case for the stylus becomes even weaker in the face of technology like Siri, which elegantly solves the problem of text input.

The Bret Victor "Rant" mentioned in the article makes the case for exploring more dynamic, tactile, interactive experiences, decidedly not limited to one mode of input like the stylus. I, for one, hope for a future that is much more ambitious than the stylus, with new forms of interaction that combine hands, voice, and beyond. Things like this http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/PneumaticDis... and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x... that truly push the boundaries of human computer interaction.

The interface on the app is really really beautiful, I'm between meals so haven't tried out the snapping feature, but just wasted like 30 min rating other people's dishes. The fit or fat interaction design is gorgeous.

> These videos are made so that the delivery manager can understand what the people around him are doing, and so he can explain it to the bean counters.

The irony is that concepts that intentionally ignore reality create the impression among those same people who "don't get it" that these concepts not only are grounded in reality, but are as trivial to create as the concept video makes it look.

It reminds me of this clip from Ali G: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc&feature=youtu...

If you look straight down in the linked shot you can see that they are using a camera on a tripod in lieu of the previous backpack or cart mounted multi-camera rigs

I came across three.js and was actually looking for it randomly today, very cool.

Pretty cool, what did you use to build it? The navigation was a little difficult to grasp, might be more intuitive with a click and drag interface, or something with buttons i.e. google earth.

This very clearly demonstrates Facebook's advantage: despite recent buzz about Facebook being boring, losing its vision, etc, they have built an enormous moat through the developer platform, and the true test for the competition (Google+ or otherwise) is whether or not they can compete on that platform level.

I was wondering how a frivolous facebook game that disrupts nothing beat out startups like:

www.trello.com/ www.talkto.com/ http://prismskylabs.com/ and http://www.farmigo.com/

all of which have obvious value propositions and disruptive potential. This explains it.

I agree with almost everything except point 1. A Minimum Viable Product is exactly that-- the smallest possible product that will be viable in the marketplace. Some startups and developers may take this thinking overboard and put products on the market that are so stripped down as to not be viable, but I think that the concept of a true MVP sums up the entire purpose and challenge of Product Management.

A true MVP must strike the balance between feature bloat and watered down junk, driven by a vision of what users need as opposed to what they think they need. Such vision requires a lot of insight and a lot of courage. Imagine being the PM that decided the iPhone was ready to ship without support for copy and paste. Is copy and paste an important feature for a mobile phone? Obviously. Was it necessary for the product to be viable in the marketplace? Clearly, it wasn't, and that is why determining a feature set for and MVP is such a challenge.

Design is not just the way your product looks, it's how it works and how people interact with it. Unless you're building something without a user interface, design is a critical part of your product, and if you ignore it, you're setting yourself up for failure.

You don't need to have a degree from art school to be a designer, just like you dont need a CS degree to write code. You can learn the basic tenants of typography, grid systems, and usability on your own. Whether or not you hire a "designer," design thinking should be part of the process of product development from day one.

In my experience the only reliable way to test compatibility is by doing it by hand.

Addons like IE tab for firefox/chrome that simulate other browsers work decently well, but have some shortcomings. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-3...

Compatibility testing often comes down to a compromise of picking the fewest combinations that cover the highest percentage of your audience. We tend to focus most of our time testing chrome for webkit (covers 99% of safari and opera issues), firefox, and IE on mac and pc. This covers the vast majority of our users, but we have to accept the fact that certain issues will slip through on less widely adopted browsers. Also, dropping support for IE6 cut our compatibility testing/fixing time dramatically.

Interesting, was just thinking about this after watching Asana's demo recently

General PM software gripes (jira, project, pivotal tracker):

1. lack of keyboard shortcuts: have to use mouse way too much. org-mode is so much more intuitive and efficient for task management once learned but lacks collaborations and no one wants to put in the time to learn it.

2. Difficult to get a clear picture of the overall status of projects. Project managers have to spend a lot of time gathering status updates and creating reports because we use so many different tools, and the built-in reporting generally sucks.

3. Lack of intuitive structure within data. An ideal PM platform would structure information in an intuitive way that to make it discoverable by people working on peripherally related projects.

Specific gripes w/Basecamp:

1. Don't get notifications when clients upload files, only when they post messages (they often don't understand the difference)

2. Checkboxes to send out email notifications are not checked by default for new messages. Clients always forget to do this, even when we remind them, and then wonder why we don't respond right away.

3. Refusal to use gantt charts. I get that 37signals has a philosophical objection to dependancies and detailed timelines in PM, but sometimes a gantt chart is the best way to visually display a project timeline, especially if certain milestones are missed and impact the rest of the project.

The explanation just might be the fact that google submits new searches as you type

I have the same problem today that I had back in college- no caffeine at the library. I love working at the library, especially university libraries, but I need a steady stream of caffeine in order to do my best work. If they had a coffee maker at the UCLA library, I'd be sold.

Not all leaders are managers. Some leaders lead quietly from behind their desks while their managers stay out of the way.

That's exactly it. He motivated me to take the initiative, and now, years later, I'm in a position where I can pass that on to my team.

What if it isn't anyone's job to do the dishes? Early on in a startup there are a million things that don't fit under anyone's job description, but simply have to get done.

Does Dropbox have an API that gives read/write access? Being able to drop photos into my dropbox and having them resized and uploaded automatically would be killer. Also much more user friendly than AWS for non geeks.

I run 5-6 times a week. For me it's instant stress relief, and the best path to a clear head. I've solved countless frustrating problems while away from my computer running outside.