On the one hand, having all the gems and dependencies in one place is a really nice thing. On the other hand, I’m constantly forgetting to run “bundle install”. ALL THE TIME.
The lesson is if you happen to see MissingSourceFile or Missing these required gems errors you may just have a missing gem issue! Remember to add the gems to the Gemfile and run bundle install.
I am a klutz and I misplace things all of the time. But there are two things which I really can’t lose: my iPhone and my iPad. They have now become indispensable tools to me. And this morning I totally forgot where the iPad went. I looked around the house for a little bit and then I started worrying I had left it in a pool hall or something.
Fortunately, I subscribe to MobileMe. (While I think $99/year is a bit steep, that’s for another post.) I just logged onto me.com and used the Find My iPhone panel to make the iPad play a loud chime. Within about 10 seconds I was able to locate it in the house. PHEW. It had been buried under a few things and it’s thin enough that it was well hidden.
Want the awesome Design Classics and want to carry it around on your handy iPad? Check out the Phaidon Design Classics app. It has a curated catalog of 1000 awesome items from the key-opening sardine can to the 1958 Cone Chair to the 1997 iPhone. Amazing stuff with intriguing backstories—what’s so special about the Heinz ketchup bottle or the Triumph TR3A? Now I totally want a few Omstack Chairs and some TAC Tableware…
Just a quick link on Gestalt psychology and user interaction: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.html
I think I’m getting close to trying to get the word out (beyond this blog) about the Birthday War project. One of the missing elements is sound.
This morning I spent some time with Jacob Richardson of Nomuda Games. He’s been taking some voice acting lessons and I asked if he’d like to contribute some of his badass bass voice and this is what we came up with:
bw1test.mp3 (391 KB, MP3)
It was recorded in a pretty standard living room with almost no sound dampening, a Shure SM58, an Alexis MultiMix 12, a MacBook Pro, and Adobe’s Soundbooth CS4.
I’m definitely one of those people who has way too many ideas. There are so many problems in the world that I want to solve and picking a few is hard. Lately I’ve been working on the easy-to-build website idea. In terms of how you create the site and manage its content it’s really quite simple. But in speaking with more and more people I’m finding that it’s not the technology that’s the issue: it’s the marketing message.
Not that it wasn’t a known fact before, but it is becoming more central to how I need to reconsider certain design aspects. This will affect the name, the pitch, the layout, the workflow, etc. It’s almost like I should have started from the targeted end user base first and worked backwards—not starting from the problem.
I spoke to someone this morning who has done magnificently well in the startup space. In passing he mentioned that his current product was actually meant to be one of several. But because this product has become popular it now consumes all of his time. And the more he works on it the better it gets. So, even picking a narrow focus can still mean there’s just an overwhelming amount of work involved.
I think in terms of general solutions. I like making products that have multiple uses. The problem is, products that don’t have specific marketing and one main advertised purpose don’t necessarily stand out. It’s hard to tout the features for two totally different audiences, even if your product can be equally effective for each of them.
I’m starting to think that it’s kind of like marketing baking soda. We know that baking soda is great for cooking, it keeps the fridge fresh, and it’s effective at cleaning. So advertising the awesomeness of baking soda for domestic purposes is one type of branding.
However, baking soda makes a really effective flame retardant in the case of fire. But on the box of baking soda you wouldn’t put: great for food AND for when it catches on fire! It would be hard to market the happy fresh bright orangeness of the box with large strip of bright cautionary red.
Anyways, the upshot of this is that I think I need to retool some things. I still think the core of what I’m building is valid. I just have to make the packaging of it to fit.
When I need to scroll the user’s browser to the top of a web page I often just do a seek to the 0th pixel: $(document).scrollTop(0);. Well, I was thinking the other day: jumping up to the top of the page can break the user’s context because the screen suddenly changes and they have to figure out why. Then I wondered instead: what if I did some smooth-scrolling to the top?
A quick search pulled up this code snippet:
$('html,body').animate({scrollTop: 0}, 800);
Wow, that totally works. I experimented with using $(document) but that doesn’t seem to work.
So, yay. I think I just finished my first pass at my first business plan. I did a search and came up with the SBA.gov guide on doing it. I’m still trying to decide if it is really worthwhile.
Part of my perception of these things is that it’s a bit of an academic exercise. I get the point that a biz plan is meant to help you crystalize the myriad of ideas in your head into a format that you can scrutinize objectively. It gives you a specific goal to shoot for and has language that makes you consider the true essence of your product, what kind of a team will get you there, who is competition, what financial resources will you require, and so on. I can see the value of this.
On the other hand, things change all of the time. I have been with several startups since 2006 now and my experience says that a biz plan is kinda overkill. I think Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule is probably the better format. It’s also really short, so that when you need to update things you can easily do so w/out having to edit a lot of text.