By Example

Microsoft's recent introduction of Live Mesh is a perfect example of a core difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple is, at heart, a product company. Microsoft is, at heart, a platform company. Both produce products and platforms, but the way they approach the problem and communicate with developers is decidedly different.

With Live Mesh Microsoft says, "Come, build on our platform and do amazing things!" What is the oft cited example for using Live Mesh? Multi-device synchronization of data. Now, to be sure, this is a big and very hard problem to solve. In fact, I really wish Apple's Sync Services were much, much better, but do you wake up in the morning thinking, "Man, I really have a Multi-device synchronization problem?" Most people don't. What they do think is, "Man it's great that when I put stuff on the web, I can get it wherever I am. All I need is a web browser." You see, syncing folders or sharing data across devices isn't top of mind in the way a developer thinks about it. Microsoft's challenge is mapping their platform to real problems in a persuasive way.

Contrast this with Apple's normal product focused pattern. First they release a product that solves a real, tangible problem people have. Say, "I hate it that I have to carry around my iPod and my Cell phone everywhere!" or "Man I wish I could buy that cool song I just heard, right now." or "I have so many digital photos, I wish there was an easy way to do something cool with them." or "Man I hate it when I loose files on my computer, I wish I could just go back in time." To solve these problems Apple, like Microsoft, has to build a platform, but this platform is built for a product first, which they use and improve. Then when they talk to developers they can say, "Did you see this cool thing we just did? You can do the same thing or even something better! Here's how we did it..." It's the difference between saying, "Here are the tools, let me show you how to use them." and "I used these tools to do this great thing. Let me show you how and maybe you can do the same thing." Ultimately, it's leadership by example.

Another great example is Apple's use of the Cocoa APIs in their own applications. Apple builds amazing products and then is able to say to developers, "We used the same APIs available to you today!" Contrast this again to Microsoft. Windows Vista was released with some remarkable new C# APIs. Many of them very cool and very interesting, but what is Microsoft Office written in? C and C++. What APIs does Office use? A multitude of Office only APIs and libraries shared among the applications. Does this hurt C# and the new "WinFX" platform "street cred"? I think so.

Ultimately, Apple and Microsoft are trying to solve many of the same problems, but the path you choose while logical to you, may not be so logical to those you most need to persuade and inspire. No one can argue with the results. For me Apple's "solution first, platform second" approach makes for easy understanding of new ideas as well as providing the activation energy needed to try something new.

The Mix Tape and iTunes

I know I'm dating myself a bit here, but there was a time when friends my age would exchange songs via cassette tape. It was illegal I'm sure, but such a wonderful labor of love. The carefully selected list would exchange hands and then the recipient would spend typically 60 minutes straight listening to each song trying to deduce the "real meaning" for this song being included in the mix. Meanwhile, the giver would also listen to the same songs wondering how the recipient might be enjoying it. As you can imagine this made for some great follow-up discussions. I was reminded of this recently when I found this product from the UK:

Note: the authentic bent label. There are even other styles shown here.

With 64 MB of storage you can get at least 60 minutes of songs for your gift. Very retro. Fun, not terribly sustainable and probably illegal as well, but still pretty cool.

When I saw this I wondered, and not for the first time, "Why doesn't Apple do this kind of thing on iTunes?" They've allowed gifting for a long time, but that's one song or album at a time, not a collection of specially chosen songs. They could send a custom "iCard" or well designed announcement. Going to iTunes would allow you to download the gift list with a special custom cover for the playlist along with custom messages for the whole list and each individual song. What you're selling here is the experience of the music and the gift of listening to each song specially selected for you. There would be a one click "Add to my iPod" once the songs downloaded so you could get going right away. While you listened you could continue to refer to the sender supplied comments for each song on your iPod. As an added bonus, if the person receiving the list, already purchased this song on iTunes, it wouldn't copy down a duplicate song, but just link it into gift playlist with custom text. In this case the cost of the collection would go down by the cost of the duplicate song.

This isn't just about love birds or anniversary collections either. I can see "get well collections" sent, "congratulations you did it!" collections, and even "inspiring songs from a friend that cares" lists being given. I can even see adding a movie or movie rental to the list with the connection of "this movie makes me think of you" or "let's watch this together..." etc.

I suppose every regular Mac user who blogs has to post from time to time, with wishes for Apple to fulfill. I haven't done my fair share of them, so here's my penny in the fountain. I think it would work wonderfully. Come on Apple, give us Mix Tape gifts on iTunes!

iPhone Activation and Sync

Before we knew the iPhone was real, the common wisdom was that in order for Apple to make the experience something of acceptable quality, they'd have to own or at least rent the cell network. Take a look at this iPhone activation and sync video. This is clearly an Apple experience, simple, clear and elegant. Apple is doing what it does best, and AT&T is doing what they do best. This is how every business partnership should be.

Doing activation and sync away from the store allows Apple to control the "out of box experience" which I think is key. You don't get an iPhone without your calendar, contacts, pictures, music and videos. If you did get a phone without all the above personalized data, the first time experience would be decidedly different. From a logistics and spontaneity perspective it also allows people to buy the iPhone quickly, cash and carry, and allow them to do the longer part of the process in the comfort of their own home. No pressure, everything at your own pace. This is designing an experience, not a phone.

Rubber Edges

I spent some time today playing with the iPhone and there's one interaction I just love. It's that when you scroll to the edge of the web page, the iPhone allows you to drag/scroll as far as you like past the edge. It just lets you stretch right past the edge into the "grayness", but when you do let go it pulls back to the end/edge of the data being displayed. It's like the iPhone is saying, "You're in control, but there's no more data over there. Honest, but if you want to go there, sure, you can. But I'm telling you there's nothing there. See, I told you, nothing there. It really is the end." This is very clever. It gives you both a sense of control, but also a sense of boundary. It's like the difference between a corral with split pole fences and one with electric fences. Both define the boundary, but with one, finding the edge is much more unpleasant.

iPhone. A Guided Tour.

This week Apple has released a 20 minute guided tour of the iPhone that shows in great detail the new user interface. You can download the high quality version here.

Apparently there are millions of people excited, even hysterical, about the iPhone's release this Friday. I must be out of the core news/media channels, but I haven't felt the fervor as much as it seems others have. That said, I'm very interested in a phone that "just works" and the iPhone has every indication of being just that. If this post adds to your hype pain, I'm sorry.

While the demos and ads for the iPhone thus far have been persuasive, they really didn't show all the details about the actual user interaction with the iPhone. Not so with this guided tour. If you are on the fence about the iPhone, this 20 minute tour will at the very least, make you want to visit the store and try it out.

Some of the things that caught my attention from a user experience perspective follow:

Everything moves very fast and fluid. Seriously, I'm so used to delays, even on my Mac, this responsiveness really makes you feel in control.

They actually show someone typing on the keyboard with their thumbs, but mention that you shouldn't try it for a week and until you've learned to "trust the intelligence of the keyboard." Personally, I have a hard time believing any touch screen keyboard can be better than something with real tactile response. That said, I tend to see small devices as mostly read only for me. I don't plan on doing major data entry on my phone. Add an appointment, respond to simple text message, type quick answer to an email, add a new phone number to my contact list, sure, but if I end up "living on my phone" I think I've got bigger problems than even a tactile keyboard will solve.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how you are supposed to tell the keyboard to "auto-complete" with the word suggested. I think it's hitting the spacebar, but I can't tell if that's just for spelling corrections or for auto-compelete as well.

It seems like the double tap is taking the "get me more info about this item" that the double click has represented on the Mac for so long. What is interesting is that they are adding to this gesture the sense of "I'm done now, get me out of here." For example in Safari a double tap both zooms in and zooms out. But this behavior is not consistent. In the Google Maps application, to zoom out, you need to tap once with two fingers. So, no zooming out while driving. ;-)

When browsing the web, it sure seems like the zooming is based on CSS devisions. I wonder what kind of problems this will cause on sites with poor or none existent CSS devisions?

It looks like a triple tap is what "activates" a link in the web browser. I think that's a good solution, but I wonder how many times folks will drag, flick or zoom before they actually figure out how to click a link? Activating a link or phone number in an email or SMS message only takes one tap. While not consistent, given the context, I think it will work. In my mind, this shows how weak consistency is, compared to the power of context.

The exterior buttons on the side of the phone actually look hard to press. And there's a button specifically to silence the phone's ringing. That button is one of 4 buttons on the unit. Way to go Apple for elevating that general need to silence a ring tone in a quiet meeting.

You can turn off the phone which looks to be quite painless. I wonder how long it takes to boot up?

The "drag your finger from left to right" seems to be the "authorize this action" or "serious stuff happens when you do this" gesture. You use it to unlock the phone, to confirm a shutdown and to initiate a deletion.

It looks like 5 buttons at the bottom of the screen is a theme in these iPhone applications. Kind of like a toolbar, but one that can never have more than 5 items. It's a constraint really based on the constant size of people's fingers. Apple still let's you "customize your toolbar buttons" at least in the iPod app. The upper portion of the screen is where "confirmation buttons" are located, like "Done", "Clear", "Save", " etc.

Sheets always come from either the bottom or side of the screen, never from the top of the screen. That area seems to be a sacred status area.

Dragging is done by touching a "drag handle" button that let's the iPhone know you are trying drag, not gesture. When you drag, the item increases in size so you you can see around your finger. Nice.

Sometimes you can drag and other times you can "flick" or "throw" things, like when scrolling a web page. I wonder as a designer, how you decide when you can do what? Also, how does the Safari app decided between a "flick" and a quick short drag? There must have been some fun iteration around that algorithm.

Big buttons actually look nice and not "too big and bulky", but not all buttons are huge. Like the audio scroll control in the voice mail application. I wonder how Apple decided when to make a button "finger size" and when to make it small?

The landscape orientation is like "full screen" mode on a Mac.

Airplane mode is awesome. I wish my Mac had that kind of mode as well, not just for airplanes, but for when I just want to be "off the grid" and focus for a bit. Call it QuietRoom: a place where distractions go away.

It looks like when someone calls, you might see a full screen photo of the person who is calling, not just a small thumbnail. If that's so, that's very cool.

Clicking some buttons, but not all, causes a "glow" response. It seems to be how smaller buttons register the click. I think it's a great effect and it looks like you can mostly see it around your finger, which I think is the whole idea behind the effect.

The ring tones seem really high quality and distinctive. Depending on how cool they are, Apple might even get some extra marketing out of "well known" iPhone ring tones. When folks hear a ring, they'll know that person has an iPhone, so even if Apple never sells ring tones, I hope they spent a lot of time working on them, because it could very well pay great dividends. Especially if for some reason they don't allow using a portion of an iTunes song as a ring tone.

All very interesting stuff, for me at least. :-)

What I really appreciate about Apple is their example of taking some domain that people largely view as "solved" and allow changes to occur by introducing new methods, ideas, or products or simply altering existing ones in new ways. Say, for example, how a human interacts with a small computer. Clicking and pointing with a device was "the way it was done," and "using a keyboard" before that. With the iPhone, Apple has said in essence, "No, there is a way to communicate with a computer that removes even the pointing or input device!" They remove the mouse and the stylus and take direct manipulation and human computer interaction to a whole new level. It's really amazing to watch. Allowing for changes to occur in any business is extremely hard, much harder than you might think. Seth Godin said it succinctly in his post on Reasons and excuses:

• Most organizations need a good reason to do something new.

• All they need is a flimsy excuse to not do something for the first time.

• And they often need a lawsuit to stop doing something they're used to.

If there's a space in your area of expertise that people generally view as "solved" or "commodity" or "not interesting any more" look again. The very fact that folks consider that area devoid of innovative potential is probably your greatest indication that there's something more lurking under the surface.

Hardware and Software

John Gruber writing on Apple's choice of AAC as the DRM-free format sold on iTunes, makes this interesting comparison:

Apple’s use of AAC in lieu of MP3 is analogous to the Mac’s switch to USB in 1998. USB was an industry standard that wasn’t taking off because PCs didn’t ship with built-in USB ports, which PC makers didn’t include because there weren’t many USB peripherals on the market, which peripheral makers didn’t want to build because there weren’t enough PCs shipping with USB ports.

Then came the iMac, whose only peripheral port was USB. (It didn’t even have FireWire.) All of a sudden peripheral makers had a reason to make USB gadgetry, and after that, PC makers had a reason to include USB ports on new PCs.

Hardware and software are the Yin and Yang of the tech industry. Some argue that one is more valuable than the other, but you can't separate them. You need both. Apple is one of the few companies in the position to capitalize on this reality. From a human computer interaction (HCI) standpoint, if we are going to move forward the interaction, this necessitates hardware advances. And who is in the best position to push forward hardware advances that are included by default? Apple.

The newest and perhaps most interesting HCI advances recently have been the result of great software and great hardware, together. The Tivo, Microsoft's XBox and XBox Live, Nintendo's Wii and Apple's iPhone and Apple TV are perfect examples of what amazing things can happen when great hardware design meets with great software interfaces. Additionally, from a purely experiential perspective, people feel better about laying down large quantities of cash for something physical rather than something that's purely intellectual property, as much as I personally value the later.

Fundamentally, where should you look for human computer interaction innovation? You should look to the people who can move forward the whole stack, and can integrate it fully, seamlessly. In the realm of personal computers, that leaves only one company: Apple.

Losing the Idea

Frank Shaw (who incidentally has one of the coolest named blogs ever) has a great post about how our impatience can get in the way of seeing the value of things. This is one of the reasons I'm in favor of people and processes that allow for ideas to interact. It's such a great post, I'm going to quote the whole thing here:

Here’s the question: What is more important, the idea, or the instantiation of the idea? Based on what I’ve been seeing/reading over the past year, it feels like we’re all losing the idea.

For example. Second Life – not that interesting. Not very many people, not great UI, business model challenges. Tons of hype – TONS of hype. And when SL vanishes, people will sniff and say, told you so. BUT. The idea – the idea behind SL, of a real platform for a virtual world, for robust commerce, ease of interaction, that’s interesting. It’s an idea worth pushing for, a dream worth having. Maybe the dreamers at Linden Labs will pull it off and make it real for everyone, but right now, we’ve missed the idea because of the focus on the example.

Or look at Wikipedia. Again, people are focused totally on the example, and not on the idea (Jimbo, I think, has the idea well in hand). Warts and all, Wikipedia has captured attention and created controversy. But by becoming the de facto example for all things wiki, it makes it easy for people (self included) to scoff and poke and mock when things don’t go well. If Wikipedia fades into the oblivion, people will say, well the idea was flawed. NO. The idea – harnessing the real wisdom of the crowds – remains as a beacon. When we focus too much on the company in front of us, we lose the idea.

There are tons of other examples – Digg, YouTube, Google. Each of these represents an “it” company of the moment, but behind each of them is an idea worth considering, regardless of the success or failure of the companies currently playing the lead role of the idea.

Why is it so damaging to lose the idea in the face of its current incarnation? Because some ideas take multiple instantiations to succeed, and if we summarily disregard the idea because of a flawed example, we run the risk of missing a huge opportunity.

As my dad always said, patience is a virtue. We’d all do well to be a bit more patient, and a bit more perceptive in our ability to applaud an idea and laugh at the current example.

This is why from an external perspective (investors, business managers), you need patience and internally (the people actually doing the work) you must have a steadfast determination to persist. Point me to anything that you might call innovation, and I'll point you to a version 2.0+ of an originally underdeveloped even laughable idea.

What's also interesting is that this is coming from a public relations guy! When you introduce something new, you almost always need to define it in terms of the past, in terms people already understand. (This is what makes things intuitive: they are like things you've experienced before, that you already understand.) Since folks, from CEOs to customers, are normally impatient, you need to use short words, quick explanations, simple concepts to promote a clear message, even if what's going on is much more interesting and subtle and even complex. This then, often has the very effect Frank is chafing against: It obscures the core idea while amplifying the current instantiation.

When considering a new idea, most normal people will have a "failure of imagination" that doesn't allow them to distill past the current implementation and see hidden therein a foundation for a future master work. If you find someone that can discern the core value of things and has the patience and courage to persist, hang on, because there's more than likely an explosive future just around the corner.

In demand

Ever laconic Seth Godin posts on what he sees in demand these days:

We don't need pilots. We need instigators and navigators, rabble rousers and innovators. People who can't follow a checklist to save their life, but invent the future every day.

I don't think Seth really understands what it means to be a great airplane pilot, but what he's trying to say is right. There was a time when folks who could do the "cog work" (e.g. follow this procedure, the same way, every time. etc.) were valued, but not any more. Moving away from the front line, I might say, what we need are leaders, not managers.

On the hive mind and the wisdom of crowds (or the lack thereof) Steven Johnson of the New York Times summarizes:

A swarm of connected human minds is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the Web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you’re still better off going solo.

There will always be a premium on creativity. You just can't engineer that. It's a human thing. There are problems you can solve with money, but being creative isn't one of them.

The Cost of Focus

I just read this by Michael Bolton on testing, but I think it has more general application:

It occurs to me this evening that when test plans, test scripts, and testers look for particular problems with excessive focus, they do so at the expense of peripheral vision.

Contrast that with what Adam Richardson says about the importance of peripheral vision:

Bill Bradley is today known primarily as a politician in the US, but in his youth he was an outstanding basketball player. Among several notable abilities, he had a natural gift: his eyesight. Specifically, he had abnormally good peripheral vision. Whereas normal peripheral vision covers a horizontal field of 180 degrees, his covered 192 degrees - he could literally see behind himself. Vertically, most people can see 47 degrees upward while looking straight ahead. Bradley could see 72 degrees, meaning he could see the basket even when looking at the ground. These factors gave him an ability to see things on the court that others could not, and detect threats and opportunities earlier than others players. (For a nice essay about Bill Bradley, see this book by John McPhee.)

Peripheral vision is an interesting thing: it provides much less detail but much more sensitivity to movement than our central cone of vision (which is only about 7 degrees in diameter). Peripheral vision is essential when you’re in the jungle or on the savannah, spotting movement at the edges that indicate danger. But our medical tests for eyesight pretty much ignore peripheral vision, focusing instead on how much small detail you can resolve in your central cone.

Business analysis is often the same way. Movements at the edges that are ill-defined are ignored, and all tools and attention are focused on what we can see clearly with great detail that's right in front of us. But it’s the movements at the edges that can both be the most threatening, but also represent the new opportunities. This is where the disruptive innovations that Clayton Christensen talks about come from. By the time you can prove their existence in detail, it’s too late.

Wicked problems are very difficult to understand by staring straight into them and looking for clear detail, however. They need to be approached from the edges, sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle where you find the edge pieces first. Having peripheral vision that is trained to be sensitive to the edges is a key capability (this applies both to product teams and to business units - wherever wicked problems occur).

So encourage staff and managers to pay attention to and nurture their peripheral vision - meeting with their “whacky” customers who push your products to the limit, talk to people who aren’t your customers any more and find out why, and pay close attention to disruptive innovators making cheap and “poor” products that your traditional customers wouldn’t touch. And if you think you're facing a wicked problem, don't expect hard numbers on it; by the time you've got solid data, it's probably too late.

Balance and timing once again seem to be the issue here. Focus, but not excessively otherwise you'll loose valuable peripheral vision which you'll need to find the next great ideas to focus on. It's often the free radical ideas that lead to the innovative idea. And if you are too focused, you'll miss them.

Impatience and Design by Counter Example

“Don’t worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you’re ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” - Howard Aiken, IBM Engineer

This is my favorite quote for the day. Innovation, with all the ideas and execution that it requires, fails to happen for so many reasons, but most common in my experience are these two:

1. Design by Counter Example

2. Impatience

Design by Counter Example

Suppose you come up with some fantastic idea, you are excited about it, so you begin to share it with your coworkers and friends. If your friends are smart, they'll begin to analyis your idea for weaknesses and flaws. They'll do this not because they don't like you or don't trust you, they'll do this because it's what they are trained to do. Find the problems and worse, find the 100% solution, the solution that works everywhere. You'll know these people because they'll often begin their comments to you with "No, but..." or "What about..."

The problem with the "No, but..." response is that it sets up conflict, and no forward progress in idea generation can be made until the conflict is resolved. Worse, conflict resolution wastes time and energy and discourages more idea sharing. The "What about..." response almost always follows with some scenario or example that counters your idea in some way. Your response will often be an attempt to resolve that counter example, which when solved will be rewarded with a new and different counter example. Corner case upon corner case, what was a clear, bold and brilliant idea, gets designed into a complex, multifaceted feature that is costly to explain, build and test. If you share your ideas with a team of smart people, this can happen in a disastrously quick manner.

Impatience

Impatience is perhaps the subtlest of innovation killers. You will need patience as you develop the ideas because it will be hard to teach your idea to others, and then once the vision is clear, it will take yet longer to actually implement it. Remember it took Steve Jobs 18 months to convince the record labels to let him build the iTunes music store. If you back down at any point in this long journey, that is when innovation dies. This is why I believe, in so many ways, it's all about the execution.

Ideas are important too, and when you are generating ideas, being creative, all too often a well meaning individuals will ask you to rate the ideas and place them in priority order for potential business impact. This is a good idea, but done too soon, it's like asking a 3 year old what valuable contribution he or she will make to the world, and bereft of any intelligible response condemning the toddler to uselessness.

This impatience to see whether an idea is good or not kills innovation because the real innovation happens generally not in one brilliant flash of light, but at the interaction of ideas, and often ideas interacting with others in the periphery. I first heard Steve Jobs coin the phrase, "connect the dots backwards" and I think this applies here. You can't tell what will be important until after the fact, after the interaction. What you need is a safe place for lots of ideas to interact with out getting shot down. It looks like this:

Creating an environment where ideas can patiently interact and people can interact with the ideas before making the "do or die" business decision is key. What's even more important than the ideas, is that you don't kill the idea generators and integrators, that is, the people! Consider this story related by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal in the February 2002 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

"In a major U.S. oil company, for example, we witnessed a committed and enthusiastic manager gradually become apathetic. An IT specialist, he was assigned to an inter-disciplinary strategy-development task force that was charged with creating a new business model for an up-stream division. The team came up with several radical proposals, but they were met with lukewarm responses from senior managers. After several months, the team's ideas were diluted to the point that not even the IT manger found them interesting. What had once been an exciting task became a farce, from his point of view. Believing that no one was interested in new ideas, he concluded that he was foolish to have been engaged as he was. "I distanced my self," he says, "I knew that none of our innovating ideas would ever make it to implementation. So I continued working out concepts and ideas-but with no skin in the game."

To be fair, even the best organizations occasionally create cynics out of enthusiasts. But some organizations seem to make a practice of it by constantly sabotaging any flickers of creativity or initiative."

When creativity flickers, don't let the cold winds of cost benefit analysis prevail. Provide the fuel of saying "Yes!" and patience to wait and see, even if you must suspend your disbelief. This will give people the space and time they need to make great things happen. Remember it took Michelangelo years to complete the Sistine chapel and Goethe spent almost 60 years writing his masterwork Faust. Good things take time.

So, if you want to be innovative here's my advice:

• Focus on execution, on making ideas reality. For every thousand great ideas, only one reaches someone with the courage to actually do something with it.

• Stop saying "No, but...", learn to say "Yes, and...", find a way to talk about ideas that adds more and moves them forward. Give folks what they want. Suspend your disbelief.

• Be patient, great things take time. The really great ideas are going to be a collision of ideas. Let them grow so they can interact.

Inventory and Shipping Costs

The entrepreneur in me just beams with excitement reading this announcement from Amazon:

Fulfillment by Amazon beta An Amazon Fulfillment Services Group Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a new program that makes delivering your Pro Merchant Program and WebStore orders a snap. You send your new and used products to us, and we'll store them. As orders are placed, we'll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers. Simple fulfillment. Better customer service. Inventory Storage — You still own your inventory, but we warehouse it. Pick, Pack and Ship — When a customer places an order we pick, pack and ship it. Powerful Promotions — Your items can be combined with other Amazon-fulfilled items in one shipment, so customers save on shipping costs. With Fulfillment by Amazon, you can offer your customers Amazon Prime, free Super Saver Shipping on qualifying sales through Amazon.com. Customer Service — We manage post-order customer service, including the return and refund process, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. How it works

1. You send us your inventory - Label, pack and ship your items to Amazon.
2. We store your inventory - When we receive your items, we'll store them until an order is placed.
3. We fulfill your order - When an order is placed, we'll pick, pack and ship the item, and may combine it with other items in the same order.
4. We manage all post-order customer service - We'll manage post-order customer service and handle returns as needed.

Wow and double wow. So what about the pricing? Seems reasonable to me. Maybe Amazon does personal storage next? ;-)

Steve Portigal on Innovation

From Core77:

[Michael] Bierut felt he started off being too "clever" - which I hear as new for new's sake - and that wasn't the right thing to do. I don't think innovative means shocking, obviously new, different, and all that. I think innovation can be invisible and brilliant and seamless to adapt to, with that whiff of exhaled "ooh!" that happens afterwards. To a graphic designer, the word may mean something else.

Hyanide: My Tank Bike

I've posted before about my dream car, but I just found my dream bike: The Tank Bike.

German designers Oliver Keller and Tillman Schlootz presented their extremely extreme personal tank concept for the 2006 Michelin Design Challenge, showcasing vehicles made especially for California's diverse and often rugged topography. Hyanide's tread contains 77 (holla!) identical plastic-covered segments of Kevlar rubber held together by Kevlar rope. Each segment flexes independently, allowing fluid multi-directional movement suitable for any conditions including deep mud, sand and snow.

No more bent axles or broken crank shafts for me!

Colour Like No Other

I remember the first time I saw this Sony commercial, I was blown away. Check out the high quality QuickTime movie here. Simply amazing. This is the kind of creative advertising that inspires, entertains and sells. Well, it looks like they are at it again!

What happens when you strap 70,000 liters of paint to the sides of some old buildings and explode the colored paint everywhere? I guess we'll find out.

My WWDC Wishlist

After reading John Siracusa's hilarious post about WWDC Buzz Word Bingo, I got to thinking about what I'd most like to see at WWDC. Here's my list:

1. Make it brain dead simple to write multi-threaded applications.

How simple? If my application runs fast on a dual core machine, I want it to run twice as fast on a quad-core, no recompile. Too difficult? I'd settle for automatically routing all AppKit method calls to the main thread only, so anything the user sees with their eyes is on the main thread, but everything else happens on other threads, no extra coding by me.

2. Widescreen iPod phone

First and foremost, make it a great phone. Second an iPod. Third, and a distant third at that, a platform I can build upon.

3. Video Airport Express

Encode TV signal to MPEG 4 and send to my Mac's disk drive in real time while I watch another channel streaming from my Mac.

That's it. I'd be happy with that.

P.S. If you are going to be at WWDC this year, drop me a line. I'll be there, and I'd love to chat!

WebKit's JavaScript debugger

Now WebKit includes a JavaScript debugger named Drosera. To use it you need to get the newest build of Safari and enter this in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitScriptDebuggerEnabled -bool true

The best quote is this one:

One of the unique things about Drosera, like the Web Inspector, is that over 90% of it is written in HTML and JavaScript. This is a true testament of what you can do with web technologies today and the rapid development that WebKit allows.

This is cool.

Words Matter

When I wrote the title for this post, it seemed almost trite. I don't mean it to be. The words we have at our disposal define the thoughts we are able to think. If you've learned another language and become fluent enough to think in that language, you know what I mean. I spent two years in Brazil as a missionary and grew to love the Portuguese language. While I took my required 2 years of German in High School, there's nothing like living the language to teach you subtleties of the words. There are some ideas that simply can not be described in another language. The Portuguese word saudade, I think, falls into this category. Further, there are the synthetic languages, like Arabic, where I understand that one symbol can take a whole English paragraph to explain! Simply put, the words you use matter, and more than you might think.

My coworkers often chide me, because when I have a new idea, I'll spend hours trying to come up with the name for the thing. Why? Because it frames the way you think about the idea and code names simply don't switch well. You've got to get the name first. I've never really been able to explain this, but I just heard a speech given by Bruce Sterling that I think finally explains the idea really well and introduces several new ideas along the way. The Internet of Things, check it out.