Malcolm Bastien

uxuiuxui:

Clear from Realmac Software

I’ve never used a task management app with sounds so much like Super Mario World. That has to be good right?

I like a few things about this app:

1. Those sound effects are fun and reward you for completing tasks.
2. The ideas of priority and order are both taken care of by the neat colour gradient system.
3. There’s very little to fus about in the app. It’s even simpler than Apple’s own Reminders app which I now base any iPhone task management app against.
4. Everything is instant.

I can’t wait for this to come out.

samaralex:

It’s A Magical World by spacecoyote

Calvin and Hobbes. Necessary and sufficient for a good childhood.

It’s Just Stuff — Shawn Blanc

…you can tell a lot about me by the things I own. But they are just that — things. They can be stolen, broken, taken, and lost. They should never become distractions to the things that matter most, nor should I ever allow them to define my character, my relationships, and my beliefs.

This blog post from Shawn was a reply to one called The soul of a “consumer electronics entertainment connected scenario” by Dustin Curtis where he talked about how brands’ products really offer consumers identities and “identity experiences”. I’ve written a bunch about branding (a lot more than I thought I would) in the past few weeks, and this is a topic I struggle with.

Shawn quoted Dustin:

People stopped buying computers based on specifications and features years ago. All computers sold now are practically identical in functionality. Today, people are increasingly buying computers the same way they buy cars: to define themselves.

Dustin was talking about a person’s desire for identity, and how some brands, even if their products are similar, offer consumers a stronger identity than others. Specifically he describes three offerings: * “an ability to define themselves” * “a stylistic experience that people want to make their own” * “an extension to someone’s soul”

Shawn’s post on the other hand warns against making judgements about a person based on the things he owns. Judgements should be made about how how a person treats others and things like that.

Both Dustin and Shawn are talking about finding happiness. Every action we take, everything thing we buy, and even the actions we don’t take and the things we don’t buy, all are chosen based on what we think will make us happy. Everyone takes a different path, but generally everything we do is done because we think it will (directly or indirectly) make us happy.

Going back to Shawn’s original quote on the things that “matter most”, even our character, our relationships and our beliefs are all defined and chosen based on seeking happiness.

Nobody Goes to Facebook Anymore. It’s Too Crowded. « Uncrunched

So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile. Update: Check out Ourspot as well.

Path and others are giving us what we want – A nice, sophisticated and diverse conversation with friends, like sitting together at a table just laughing and talking and drinking a latte. Facebook is more like the top picture above. Chaos.

So Michael Arrington is admitting that he was careless when adding friends to Facebook, that he doesn’t want to unfriend anyone, and that he would rather just use a new application that does the same thing.

Not only is he saying that many people’s experience is the same as his, but also that because many feel the same way as he does, that this company and that company are the next new hot platform platform.

I find it hard to believe that anybody will buy into his logic. I find it hard to believe that such a fickle user speaks for any sizeable portion of Facebook users. And the hardest thing for me to believe is that he even knows what he wants.

I was off Facebook for a year and a half. After I rejoined this past October I unfriended many people, going from around 400 friends to just over 100. Not surprisingly, doing that changed what Facebook felt like for the better.

There are always hot spaces, but they’re only ever hot to the same people in tech journalism or in venture capitalism. The problem is that while those two groups use social networks dramatically differently and have dramatically different wants, they have a bad habit of speaking for the entire population.

I still use other networks with similar features like Path and Instagram (Google+ not so much), but not because Facebook is too crowded. I use those other services because they offer their own unique and delightful experiences. You should judge a platform on that. Not on what these people tell you others want.

Shaun Dakin talks about an experience with the Buffer team:

Buffer’s two Co-founders (Joel and Leo) have more than an MVP going for this start up, they have a AP (Awesome Personality) !

My specific interactions with them started about 6 months ago when I started using the free version and noticed that their referral tool which incents users to refer Buffer to friends and others via word of mouth had a slight #Privacy problem. Not a big one, but enough that me being a Privacy guy contacted them to see if they would fix it.

They responded, very nicely, and listened and agreed that something needed to be done.

And they fixed it. Not immediately, which is an eternity in our tweet it now world, but they fixed it based on my input which they did not dismiss.

This is another example a company relating to people in my favourite way, by being human.

Being human is simple, effective and it’s also the one thing a brand can never be.

A brand can emulate speaking in a human voice and a lot of other stuff, but it can never be human.

While people are empathetic, funny, and creative, brands are objective driven, controlled, and artificial.

We can see that some brands are eager to adopt social platforms that give them the ability to express human qualities. As only two of many examples: Pinterest gives brands a way to relate to customers based on interests and taste, and Tumblr is a way for them to participate in memes and share humour.

Given this, it makes sense to me that brands are less interested in blogging nowadays as a way to interact with customers compared to participating in social networks. Long form writing is more a work than it is a behaviour. For example, a short message like a tweet better resembles how people talk, and I would call that a more human kind of expression than a long form piece of writing.

Ok, so more and more brands are trying to come across as human. I think I’m on to something, but then I get stuck. At this point, I can only ask myself a bunch of other questions:

• How does this affect large businesses versus smaller ones?
• What’s really necessary in a brand and what’s unnecessary?
• Why can’t we just expose the people behind a brand?
• What do people really want?

My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too — Tech News and Analysis:

Today we differentiate between blogging on blogging platforms and sharing on social platforms, but that is just semantics. The essence of blogging is not defined by a platform but by what I learned from Dave and his blogging platform — that media now is raw, collaborative and instantaneous.

The one thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do as I started to write more frequently these past two weeks is talk about how I’m going to blog more, or what I want my blog to become in 2012. I’ve thankfully found more interesting things to write about so that hasn’t been a problem. This article and quote from Om Malik nevertheless reminds me why I continue to make the effort every year, and it reminds me of what I like so much about the medium.

Even though sharing is very different and much more popular now than it was 10 years ago, it’s still the reason why blogging persists. We blog to share our opinions, our interests, and to show that have something to say.

I think there’s a creative need people have that pulls so many of them to platforms that promise them the power of expression. Just like social networks, blogs give us a place to express our raw thoughts. They give us a place to share and link to our favourite parts of the web, and they give us the power to share instantly.

Near the end of his article, Om includes a nice list of 10 lessons he’s learned over his past decade of blogging. It’s worth taking a look at.

(I started to write about how blogs give us the opportunity to create an identity for ourselves online, and avoid having to rely entirely on other platforms, but I don’t think that point is relevant anymore. There are now plenty of examples of people who have defined their own identity through their success on services without having their own homepage. There are also thousands of people whose fame in the real world carried over online without requiring a homepage.)

ignore the code: Learning from Games:

There are many problems with “gamification” but I don’t think this is one of them. Essentially, all UI design is about manipulating users, whether you’re coming up with the most easily understood button labels that will get people to click on the correct button, the most readable typeface that will get people to read your essay, or design ideas taken from video games. The goal of UI design is to get people to use our products successfully. That’s “manipulating people”.

My issue with gamification doesn’t come from the idea, but how the term was adopted by people who had a simplistic understanding of it and employed it only as a set of tactics to manipulate their users into becoming addicted to non-rewarding, and time wasting activities like games and social networks.

It’s true that gamification like all UI design is manipulation, whether good or evil depends on who’s using it, but I also understand it as going beyond only manipulating actions. It also defines the rewards, it defines what the purpose of the game is, it helps the user better understand the environment and his role within it, it defines the feedback the user gets so he knows how he’s doing, and it also give the user a sense of accomplishment and growth as he’s introduced to the next challenge. Most importantly it rewards users for accomplishing defined actions.

And again, it can be used to help people or to hurt them.

Where I think the term “manipulation” is negative is when it overrides the user’s goals with its own. While a humane design would help a user determine what his goals are, and then accomplish them.

Gamification isn’t about being manipulative, it’s about being addictive. The way the whole process works, whether humane or manipulative, demands that the reward experience be repeatable.

The dilemma then becomes: Is getting people addicted to a healthy behaviour as evil as getting them addicted to an unhealthy one?

Bergensbanen (by nrkbeta)

Wishing it would snow.

“The worst thing possible is to be obliged to invent one’s own motives for acting, for preferring, for buying. The individual in such circumstances is inevitably brought face to face with his own misapprehensions, his own lack of existence, his own faith and anxiety.” (Baudrillard, “The System of Objects”)

…At its core, a brand is not your friend; it sells you something. Whether it’s a product, a lifestyle, or a model of identity, brands are imaginary figures that always have hidden motivations behind the ways that they form relationships. That’s not to say there is something immoral or evil about brands—far from it. Brands justify our own purchase motivations, those irrational impulses that influences how and what we buy. Instead of falling back on ourselves to rationalize a luxury purchase, for example, by making false claims for utility and practicality, the brand assures us that performing this action will grant access to an identity-forming ideal and an otherwise intangible system of meaning. We need brands to assuage the anxiety of being and consuming.

This guy has a great blog (everything is really brilliant), this passage especially is insightful, but it highlights some of the problems I have with brands. My apprehension has to do with the quote by Baudrillard and basic idea of brands as a quick psychological fix to the more or less spiritual problems that people have.

Like followers of a religion, people put faith in a brand to guide them. They trust in brands to make up for their own lack of confidence. People may lack faith and have anxiety, but facing those problems be a bad thing and trusting in brands isn’t the only solution. There are ways to overcome those negative forces without relying on external factors. I certainly don’t think making decisions for yourself is the worst thing possible. (How exactly I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m smart enough to figure that out.)

Products are tools. Brands are illusions. Loyalty should be reserved for people.

— Ed Finkler (@funkatron) November 29, 2011

I’m a fan of buying fewer, high quality things that will best improve your way of life, or improve your work. But products don’t improve people, and an identity achieved through purchasing or consuming (aka desire) is an illusion.

Another thing I don’t like about brands is how they abstract what organizations really are. Brands are value-injected abstractions of organizations, and organizations are groups of people. An organization and its products shouldn’t be defined the artificial values of its brand, it should be defined by, and it should be known by it’s people, their creed and their values.

inspiredbyapple:

AcerCloud: No comment. OK, comment - it looks like an AirPort logo upside down. This is going to be a busy week, isn’t it.

(image from Engadget)

The PC industry is pathetic. There’s not much else to say. It has been this way for the past 5 years. As soon as the iPhone first came out the convergence started, and since then it’s evolved into blatant copying.

It has become an industry of knockoffs.

Don’t Be A Free User -

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

I’m getting more and more tired of running into companies offering services that don’t directly make money off of me as a user. I want to be a customer, not a user. It’s difficult for me to point out where these feelings are coming from but D.H.H.’s talk from Startup School 2008 about Zappos and how they “…are selling fucking shoes!” was the one of the first thing I saw that made me realize the absurdity of how many free services existed that were designed around offering a service for free for the purpose of getting a huge audience.

My frustration comes in with what all those models require: advertising, complicated business models, hype, and serving users as being something other than the number one priority.

If a service is any good, they don’t have to be sexy, and they don’t need to be free to be successful.

It feels good to to give someone money, receive a good or service, and know that I’m supporting them. I like being able to take part in a simple exchange like that, and it’s a simple pleasure that people should rediscover.

A hot service right now is Pinterest. Pinterest is a very large, very popular, and rapidly rising social bookmarking site. I don’t use it though, I prefer to use Gimmebar for one reason because amazingly it seems to have flown under the radar of the social media blogs.

Every time a free service like Pinterest comes out and starts getting popular, the only time you see social media bloggers recommend people pay for a service is along with the term “freemium,” which is fine, but it still requires a business model that supports free users. More often than not they’ll write about how platform should grow and capitalize on brands wanting to engage their audiences using the service. To them, the ultimate value a platform can provide is to give brands the attention of users.

Many examples exist but one that’s pretty appropriate to mention is Tumblr. I wish I could give Tumblr money not only to host my blog, but to ensure that their ability to host blogs is their primary and sole measure of success.

Every time Tumblr or some other service raises a bunch of money there’s speculation about what they will, or what they should do with it. I hate seeing that capital used to grow a non-revenue generating user base. The only way a company can sustain more free users is when it’s part of a strategy of monetizating those users some other way.

As a user, I like knowing that a company’s ultimate goal and measure of success is to provide me with a service, and not that their users are tools to accomplish some other objectives.

For as long as I’ve owned them, I’ve enjoyed the Apple products I own like my MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone, and my iPad. But unlike my iPhone or Macs, the iPad can get me really frustrated. Occasionally I’ll use my iPad at a cafe and everything will be going fine, then in the next moment things start to fall apart.

Whether it’s trying to get an unresponsive app to detect a swipe, trying to hit a button target, dealing with an app that crashes on load, or spending half the time I spend writing fixing typos. In public it’s easy to feel awkward and self-aware as I attempt to deal with these issues along with having to manipulate the device, change my posture, flip it and turn it in an attempt to get the right orientation.

Even with the introduction of the split keyboard in iOS 5 which was a major improvement, typing is still a challenge. The large border around the edge of the iPad’s screen makes it difficult for my hands to stretch out far enough to type comfortably like I can on my phone. Also, whenever I try to hold the iPad in my hands to use the split-keyboard, it becomes difficult to balance because of the iPad’s weight.

90% of the time, the iPad feels natural and as appropriate as pen and paper for the work I want to do with it. But at other times, I feel like a complete goof for trying to do work with it.

The thing I can’t figure out is why I never feel the same way with any of my other devices. No matter what work I want to do with my laptop, or my iPhone, they may sometimes lag, and apps will sometimes crash, but they do the job and I never get as frustrated with those devices. There has to be an explanation, but I don’t know where to find it.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ changed how we communicate. Now, people are familiar with social networking, and most importantly that means they’re comfortable with liking, retweeting, reblogging and sharing.

One great thing about sharing becoming mainstream is that any good content that’s out there has an easier time flowing to us through our networks.

Compared to the behaviours of sharing and liking links that social networks encourage, making original content is still hard work. Things like writing, producing YouTube videos, coding and making products can only get so easy.

Startups looking to base their businesses on giving friends new ways to communicate are going to have a hard time proving their worth and why the world needs them. Now, successful innovators aren’t the ones making new platforms for us to communicate, they’re the ones making those difficult activities easier and more accessible.

Take Instagram, Mixel, and Tumblr for example. These three companies make photography, art, and blogs easy to get, easy to manage, and fun. Plus, now that everyone understands the concept of sharing and because the communications networks have already been established, those start-ups can make each activity a social one.

Another distinctive quality of these start-ups is that they are evolving ideas. It’s weird for me to say that Instagram is a service that solves a consumer photography need. It feels a lot more appropriate to say it’s changing the nature of what photography is, just as Tumblr is doing for blogging, and just as Mixel is doing for art.

These are the start-ups I look forward to seeing more of.

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America

Definitely something to pick up. Would make a great gift for anyone who has ever played Super Mario in the past 26 years.

A friend shared this video of the HP ENVY with me last night and this sums up what I think of this product, as well as designers behind it.

These people have no shame.

Just like platforms should own a shape, this series from HP should own a material. Any material. Just not aluminum. Going with aluminum must be the worst decision they could have made in the production of this laptop.

The product would have been much better received even if they chose a cheaper material like plastic. Had they only replaced the aluminum with a black, matte plastic to separate itself from the MBP, then things like the speakers, per-key LEDs, the audio dial or “gravity well” and the “high resolution touch sensor” could have become highlights to the discussion.

If that were the case, then instead of having a MacBook Pro knock off what you’re left with is just another PC with frivolous features. Cascading key lighting, a “gravity well” and a high resolution touch sensor are the sorts of things you expect from a premium PC design. And “premium PC” just means expensive. These features weren’t added because they are characteristic of a great laptop, they were added because companies like HP have a strategy of making different products for different market segments. So at some point HP’s designers asked themselves “How can we make this expensive?”

Why they even included a high resolution touch sensor on a Windows laptop is beyond me. There are no gestures in Windows 7 and there’s no need for a multi-touch sensor.

Another really shameful aspect to the design of this laptop besides the resemblance to a MacBook Pro is how much HP made Beats Audio a part of the design. Beats is found in so much of the laptop design that just like the Beats headphones, the product being a marketing vehicle for Beats matters a lot more than an actual audio experience.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about if email is really changing. Something I brought up was how hard it is to separate the signal from the “Twitter will replace email in 2012” hype.

The hard part is that mixed within with the hype, there is truth at work which may explain how social media and email will change the way businesses communicate.

Some studies that articles often quote relate to how young people talk with their friends using Facebook or SMS, and not by email (I can’t find a recent one off the top). It’s easy to imagine that something like this is going to have a big impact on where email is going, but they really don’t.

When I was growing up, email was never the dominant communications channel. As soon as we had computers, my friends and I would chat using ICQ, MSN, txt, and only more recently started using Skype, Facebook Messenger or other smartphone services (Beluga, WhatsApp). In the past 13 years that I’ve been IMing and texting with friends, email as a whole hasn’t gone anywhere. To say that now, Facebook chat and Twitter will replace email is just hype.

Stories that I like to read about on the topic of email are the ones where companies have put money on the line and implemented radical policies experimentally without a guarantee of their return. Things like going turning off email after work hours or disabling email altogether, forcing communication through SMS, phone, and face to face. I like these stories because while also providing more valuable data-points, they also remind me that so much of the discussion is only about the technology.

I think that the realistic opportunity to improve communications retains email, and it involves the convergence of people, technology, and medium.

So here’s what needs to change:

People

• There needs to be empathy through awareness of other people’s jobs, and a better valuing of their time and attention.
• Having “Communication Skills” needs to mean more than not making typos. It needs to involve the less talked about skills like editing.

Technology

• Mobile doesn’t just mean having email on your phone, it means emails with only two words is socially accepted. Behaviours need to match the technology.
• Integration is confusing. More data, more links, more smart options and suggestions hinders what in most cases would otherwise be a quick message. Technology should pursue qualities like seamless, invisible, and instant. If anything else, it creates the right mindset for communication to happen.

Medium

It can’t be just a coincidence that Sparrow has become one of the most popular Mac applications and that it tries to make email light, simple, fast, and fun. Those qualities sound a lot like what’s appealing about social media don’t they?

If I had to arrange the different communication mediums based on those four factors combined (because you can’t every actually separate them), I would put them in order from least to most like so:

phone > face-to-face > email > SMS > IM

The medium of email needs to change. It needs to move away from heavy, slow, complicated and tedious. We need to gamify email in the sense of making it seamless, simple, and rewarding.

Update: What I forgot to mention is that I’m discussing iCloud as it appears in third party applications. I’m not discussing my experience with things such as Photo Stream, iCloud backup, or iCloud contacts/mail.

From what I’ve seen so far, iCloud seams really complicated, enough for it to not be the right solution for my cloud data needs.

I’ve been writing on my blog more frequently lately and for that purpose I use iA Writer for Mac and iOS. The newest release of Writer supports iCloud, and I don’t want to sound negative towards the guys who make Writer but iCloud has turned out to be a lot more complicated to use then I thought it would be. It’s even been more of a hassle than the existing Dropbox solution.

The process for creating and deleting files to and from iCloud is not a short process: 1. First I need to create a new document and save it to my hard drive (when on my Mac). 2. I can then choose to move that file up into iCloud. 3. If I want to delete a file that’s on iCloud I have to first re-save the document as a local version. 4. Once the file’s saved locally, I can delete it from my local hard drive.

It’s basically the same saving and deleting of files that I’ve always done, x2. Unfortunately I’ve also run into problems where files saved to iCloud from my Mac are detectable, but unopenable on my iPad and vice versa.

Compared to Notational Velocity, another writing tool I use regularly, this process has been more trouble than its worth.

Just to illustrate how quick Notational Velocity’s workflow is: I type the title of the note I want to create and hit “Enter” once to create a new note, write, then hit “Command + Delete” to delete it. I have my data on NV synced using Simplenote making the data accessible from multiple devices.

So I don’t think iCloud is great in iA Writer. That said, I do look forward to seeing more apps come out with iCloud support. The latest version of Day One will also include iCloud support and I can see its implementation of using iCloud as a no-hassle data backend as being more trouble free compared with using it as an additional file management outlet.

Last month I attended a showing at Ryerson of a documentary on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Near the end of the Q&A session, one of the Objectivism representatives gave us advice not to make our decision just based on what they were saying, but to come to our own conclusions by thinking for ourselves.

I don’t like objectivism, but I do like this point the person made about deciding your beliefs based on the outcome you come to through thinking for yourself and never based on following external influences.

Following onto that, these sort of situations can come up in social or business circumstances, so you should stop yourself once you notice yourself doing it.

In some situations it’s easier and accepted to not be critical. You may you attend a lecture with a very charismatic person, or gossip from a friend will have you believe negative things about somebody else. But each time you don’t think for yourself, you contribute to a collection of beliefs, values and actions you haven’t fully understood and that misrepresent who you really are.