A different sort of weekend for us. No soccer or ballet. And Lauren is out of town until tomorrow. So I’ve got the three amigos to myself.
I took the kids to Walden Pond this afternoon. Even on an overcast day, it’s a special place.
Month: October 2012
Unsung heroes in startups
In startups, the heroes often cited are the founders. Or the product leads. Or the designers. They are the ones making the headlines or get invited to speak at conferences.
And for good reason. They are driving the vision of the product experience and often breaking new ground. So the praise is often justified.
But they aren’t the only heroes.
More and more, I’m paying more attention to the unsung heroes in these organizations. And in my mind it’s the folks that are keeping the network operations up and running. They deserve a lot more credit.
These days, it’s popular convention to believe with things like Amazon Web Services, all you need are people focusing on the front end and the back end just works.
It’s simply not the case. The amount of things required on the back end are never ending: scaling, CPU loads, managing peak concurrency, storage, API services, paying down technical debt, integration, supporting new front end products, spam, speed improvements, bugs, cost efficiency, search, etc.
And these are the people get notified in the middle of the night when shit goes wrong or when they get a DDOS attack. They are the same people that work weekends or very late at night to deal with site maintance to make all of this work and cause the least amount of interruption to users.
So next time you hit one of your favorite apps or web services, take a moment and give thanks to the team supporting that feature on the back end.
I know I will.
My buddy.
Shooting on film just feels different than digital. I feel like I’m actually creating something that didn’t exist moments before. I don’t get that feeling shooting on digital, and it’s a feeling I like.
sbdc » Why don’t you just go digital?
I just picked up a film camera. More like my dream film camera. I bought a bunch of Porta and Tri-X rolls and I can’t wait to get started.
Hello, beautiful.
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing”
-Steve Jobs, Feb 24, 1955 – Oct 5, 2011
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is’
Kurt Vonnegut
me and @laurensabet. san francisco. 1992.
So where should the industry get all those brand dollars? There may well be an answer in another social platform. I saw something surprising, striking even, during another Advertising Week panel (it can happen!) deep in the bowels of Times Squares’ Dave and Busters. Digital ads that people seemed to love. Indeed, Tumblr, which has been in the ad business for about six months with just two products, may have done the impossible.
Touch gestures
One of the coolest, native mobile user interface gestures ever created in my mind is the “pull to down to refresh” feature. It was introduced by Loren Brichter who created Tweetie (a popular Twitter client that was acquired by Twitter several years back).
That pull down to refresh was decidedly mobile only. It doesn’t work with a mouse and keyboard.
It’s so simple and so elegant. It has become the defector gesture in an ever growing number of mobile apps. Obviously it’s in the Twitter app, it’s now in Facebook for iOS, Foursquare, Apple Mail in iOS 6, and plenty of others. It’s the right gesture for a natural mobile experience. I’m happy to see it gain in popularity over the last few years.
Yet we do see desktop UI in some of the most popular mobile apps. The biggest offender is the “junk drawer” button. Facebook uses it in their app.
That junk drawer button feels like a cop out.
The folks at Instagram invented a new native touch gesture. Liking a photo by double tapping the actual photo itself.
Previously, on the desktop web, liking a photo or some other thing, meant moving your mouse to a small (like, heart, fav) button and then clicking it.
The Instagram guys ditched the requirement for a little button click and replaced it with a big touch friendly gesture. Two taps and bam, a heart pops up and you’re done. Very satisfying.
I suspect we will see more developers add this “like” touch gesture to their apps.
Other interfaces are being replaced by touch gestures. For example in most apps today that allow users to create content there is a “new post” button. Click the button and add more content. But that feels like an exported desktop gesture.
One of my favorite mobile apps is called Clear. It’s a to do list app for the iPhone. They don’t have a “new task” button. You simply pull the page and a new to do appears. Want to see all you lists? Pinch the screen. There is no junk drawer button anywhere. They have a video on their website that shows the app in action.
It’s stunning.
Prismatic is another example of an app breaking new ground. Prismatic is a mobile personalized news app. They have created some new cool touch gestures. For example, when I want to tweet or email an article I read, i simply long tap the article and I get a few sharing options. I’m not sure if the long tap is the best way to do it for most users but i give them a lot of credit for trying out a new touch gesture.
Tumblr’s iPhone app has a cool touch gesture. Instead of tapping the new post button to add a photo, you can just swipe the compose button up and it automatically goes into camera mode. It’s so freaking fast and super cool.
I encourage all developers to think about the touch gestures and leave the desktop web behind.