THE PENDING DRAFT

Useful Mac

March 1, 2015

Useful Mac is a new blog by Garret Murray about tools and tricks for mac users. Here’s what he has to say about it:

And so, dear reader, I look forward to sharing some of this experience with you. I fancy myself someone with good taste, a discerning eye for excellent user experience and design, and someone who loves sharing interesting or useful information with others. Let’s take a journey together toward a prettier, more powerful, more Useful Mac.

I just learned about this tool called Bartender to de-clutter my menu bar, which is really cool. Looking forward to more such things.

Useful Mac

A Year from Now You May Wish You Had Started Today

(Karen Lamb)

Work

February 23, 2015

Paul Graham wrote this great piece about “What Doesn’t Seem Like Work“. I don’t believe that you can ever get the best you could be in something if you don’t like it. Of course we can all learn pretty much anything. But if it isn’t the thing you’re truly passionate about, the outcome won’t be as good as it could be. Maybe it will be mediocre, ok-ish, maybe even good. But certainly not the best it could be.

If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It’s not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.

I cannot believe how many people are choosing to work in positions they don’t like. We all tend to think that we don’t have much of a choice. But that’s only true for a handful of people. Most of us have a choice to do whatever we want. So start looking for the thing that doesn’t seem like work today and keep pushing in that direction.

Paul Graham – “What Doesn’t Seem Like Work”

Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple – The New Yorker

February 22, 2015

Finally found some time on this lazy Sunday afternoon to read the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker which gives some very inspiring insights into the way the design team at Apple works. Also, i really enjoy the way Ive seems to be obsessed by the geometry of rounded corners. It’s exactly that obsessive attention to detail that separates Apple from most other product companies.

“At the risk of sounding terribly sentimental, I do think one of the things that just compel us is that we have this sense that, in some way, by caring, we’re actually serving humanity,” he said. “People might think it’s a stupid belief, but it’s a goal—it’s a contribution that we can hope we can make, in some small way, to culture.”

One of the things that resonated with me is this idea that good design is first and foremost about respect. Respect for the person that will eventually use what you build. Not about the style and look of something, not about selling something but about deeply caring how to best solve a problem. I honestly never really thought about design that way before reading “Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek a while ago. Which by the way is one of the best books about design and you should read it right after this article. But i digress.

Won’t spoil you with any more quotes. It’s a very long read, but totally worth it. Grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and read the whole thing.

The New Yorker – The Shape of Things to Come

Paul Graham on “How Not to Die” as a startup

February 9, 2015

I really enjoyed reading this post by Paul Graham about “How Not to Die” as a startup. It’s the transcript of a talk he gave to a group of founders at a Y Combinators dinner in 2007 and he talked about all kinds of things startups are going through. And even though he described it as a “grim” talk himself, i found it to be more of a motivational piece than anything else.

I’m pretty sure he’s right when he says that a big portion of success is basically just “don’t give up”. Paired maybe with a bit of luck and a whole lot of flexibility and iteration. An idea alone almost never directly became a big hit without any form of transformation and the startups that made it are almost never the one’s that had the best and most original idea to begin with, but the one’s that tried harder and kept iterating instead of giving up.

Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”

And also this next quote resonated with me and resembled some of the things i meant when i wrote about our goal to solving almost no one’s problem.

I like Paul Buchheit’s suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track. […]

So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look more closely. Are there zero users who really love you, or is there at least some little group that does? It’s quite possible there will be zero. In that case, tweak your product and try again. Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. If you just keep trying, you’ll find it.

In that sense: Let’s keep on trying, and have a good week!

Paul Graham – How Not to Die

Solve almost no one’s problem

February 1, 2015

The chances that everyone is going to applaud you, never mind even become aware you exist, are virtually nil. Most brands and organizations and individuals that fail fall into the chasm of trying to be all things in order to please everyone, and end up reaching no one.

(Seth Godin)

It’s easy to fall into this trap. We had a similar discussion when we started working on picu some time ago and at first it felt intriguing to try and build The one and only tool for photographers™ but we quickly realized why that’s going to be a bad idea.

What really helped us to figure out what exactly we want to build, and what not, was writing down imaginary user stories of potential clients who could use our product when its finished. What problem should it solve for them, how would they use it and so on. But maybe even more important than that, we wrote down what we called “anti-userstories“. Use cases we deliberately said no to, problems that we don’t want to be able to solve, photographers workflows who will be better served with other tools.

While this seemed silly at first and was a funny exercise, it actually helped us a lot to stay focused and made a lot of our decisions along the way easier.

We are completely aware that our plugin won’t serve every photographer out there, maybe, not even most. But we hope that almost no one will be amazed.

Seth Godin – Almost no one

Random Darknet Shopper

January 31, 2015

The art project i posted yesterday reminded me of another automated art project by the swiss art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik called Random Darknet Shopper.

The group set up an automated shopping robot, gave him a budget of $100 per week in bitcoins and let him shop around in the Darknet – on it’s own. The items he bought were then displayed in an exibition called “The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland“, at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.

The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16’000 listed on Agora market place.

The robot bought things like fake Diesel Jeans, a pair of Nike’s, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a fake Louis Vuitton handbag and also 10 ecstasy pills.

I think the project cleverly forced us to ask some interesting questions, like who’s responsible for a violation of the law if a robot commits it that acts autonomously. As Mike Power wrote in his article “What happens when a software bot goes on a darknet shopping spree” in the Guardian:

Can a robot, or a piece of software, be jailed if it commits a crime? Where does legal culpability lie if code is criminal by design or default? What if a robot buys drugs, weapons, or hacking equipment and has them sent to you, and police intercept the package?

It looks like. On the morning of January 12, the day after the three-month exhibition was closed, the public prosecutor’s office of St. Gallen seized and sealed the work.

It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them. This is what we know at present. We believe that the confiscation is an unjustified intervention into freedom of art.

Random Darknet Shopper (2014) by !Mediengruppe bitnik

Google Will Eat Itself

January 30, 2015

Actually a pretty funny art experiment.

In this project we wanted to buy Google via its own money. We generated revenues by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden websites clicked by bots. With this money we automatically bought Google shares.

Google Will Eat Itself