Visiting Geneva

Will be in Geneva this weekend until Tuesday morning. If you’re in or around the city and would like to meet up drop me a line.

Leopard Review: Preferences and Dashcode

 

Last week I wrote about my 1 month experience using Apple’s Leopard and the couple of flaws that surfaced. Since that time I’ve had time to play around a bit more and some more eye candy melted :-)…

 

System Preferences Search is Broken

The new system preferences pane (control panel to Windows users) has also received a nice sprucing up with a lot of new little customisations and tweaks added. Particularly like the redesigned layout of the network preferences as well as the sharing preferences. One thing sticks out like a giant’s sore thumb though: search doesn’t work!  At all, that is - both out of the box as well as with the latest system updates. 

Seems like Spotlight’s batteries died out here and its back to hunting for that darned checkbox in the dark.

 

DashCode’s Help needs some Help

I’ve been quite eager to try out DashCode for myself - particularly as a I’ve been meaning to getting around to build a couple of widgets for some time now. I’ve found DashCode to be well designed, generally helpful and quite a good IDE overall. Except for one thing: technical help.

It’s great that DashCode makes use of certain proprietary Apple controls (like the Popup Button). Yet, seeing how these controls don’t quite function in the standard HTML/JavaScript fashion, one would expect some form of documentation. However there isn’t (or if there is its too hard to find.) Apple’s penchant for making things that “just work” seems to have stopped short of helping developer getting down to business… a little different from Microsoft’s approach to Developers Developers (lol can’t help throwing that in whenever possible) which, while as corny as they make ‘em, still provides incredible levels of technical support and documentation to .NET, Silverlight, etc users.

Leopard Review: When the eye-candy melted…

I’ve put off upgrading to Max OS X Leopard in the past but since buying a new MacBook around a month ago I’ve been prowling around the new Apple OS.

The redesigned Finder windows as well as the Fan/Grid views of Docked folders are definitely a great improvement and make organising and finding stuff on your Mac much easier. Ditto for the general look-and-feel of menus, windows and dialog boxes. Everything seems to have been very gently refined to give a sleeker and smoother experience.

However, as always, after the eye-candy melts, some hard-to-crack nuts begin showing up…

Mail
I love Apple mail. It kicks Entourage’s or Thunderbird’s ass from here to Glasgow (here being Aberdeen). But one thing is severely pissing off: notifications! Mail absolutely refuses to play a simple “ding” sound to let me know I’ve got new mail. I mean, come on guys. It’s not like you don’t know about it. Can it really be that hard to ship a simple fix for this…

PhotoBooth
What’s with the huge delay in replaying live video huh? What ever happened to the concept of real time that worked so well in Tiger? I fire up PhotoBooth to take a cool picture of myself (or to check my hairdo *blush*) and the hand movement I make to fix my stray locks delays by five seconds… resulting in undesirable hair patterns. Come on fellas, my rep is being negatively affected!

TimeMachine
As slow as a snail on Prozac. Enough said. 

Facebook Chat

Facebook announced instant messaging earlier this month as predictably predicted by TechCrunch. I’ve only just had the service activated on my Facebook account hence the delayed “ahh” moment. 

Although the IM concept is by no means new (heq hem) I love the way Facebook has implemented their web-based rendition of the service. Elegantly simple and a quite a shining example of AJAX technology. Don’t you just love the way chat windows dock into the chat bar at the bottom?

Entrepreneurial Democratization - The Power of “Choice”

Techrunch today published excerpts from Ray Ozzie’s strategy memo to employees. Although most of it was somewhat of a “duh-welcome-to-the-club” moment one bit struck a chord.

The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud

…

design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems … [because] … myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility.

It struck a chord because of a coincidentally related breakfast discussion this morning. The Web has brought a previously unparalled power of choice and democratisation to consumers. Global peer-to-peer discussions fulled by user generated content have not only redefined the knowledge base on which consumers make decisions but also “coerced” large corporations’ PR machines to change their traditional modus operandi. It’s becoming harder than ever for companies to hide misdemeanors - from the littlest to the harshest - because the web is both ubiquitous and persistent.

Despite corporations being larger than life, CEOs have found themselves in a situation where  they must engage in direct conversation with their customers, be it via blogs, Twitter or any other social medium. A recent classic example is the lash-back Facebook suffered on its launch of Beacon.

A New Breed of Entrepreneurs

More interesting and to the point however is what a new ‘breed’ of entrepreneurs are doing given this climate of potential insurrection and swift customer disengagement. Companies like 37Signals, Fon and Seesmic are not only participating in the discussion, but initiating and embracing it. Seesmic in particular, being still in alpha (or is it beta now?), is not just listening to users’ feedback, but basing its product design decisions on what users ask for a priori.

Hopefully, as consumers become more and more used to this method of doing business, they will not only love it more, but come to expect it. And from simply reshaping their PR departments, companies the likes of Microsoft, Apple and the horrendously complicated mobile operators, will be pushed toward redesigning the way their product design departments work.

TicketLeap: Ticketing made easy?

Guy Kawasaki reviews TicketLeap today, a new online service that democratises ticket (to paraphrase Guy). Having an interest in the company, Guy is obviously full of praise for these guys, however it went over to TicketLeap.com to check it out for myself and it’s most definitely an ace service. Here’s a quick run-down of what I found:

1. Sign up is straightforward but they manage to muck it up slightly with the ZIP code section. It only accepts numbers (i.e. US format) but most countries have letters in the ZIP (e.g. UK). So I had to enter a fake one to sign up.
2. Great guidance. Once you sign up successfully you get a simple-to-understand list of next steps and things to do without too much unnecessary jabber and marketing talk.
3. Creating an event is also simple and takes about 4 minutes if you already know the venue, times and so on. A great feature is the possibility of adding a seating chart. Really cool stuff guys… but same problem with the ZIP code.
4. Next you choose ticket options. Not too complicated but provides a good set of features, including limiting number of tickets and defining multiple ticket types (e.g. student, premium, etc). TicketLeap will charge a fee per ticket (that seems to be their business model) and you get to choose who pays it (you, the buyer, or an even split).
5. Finally you get options to invite people (from Gmail, etc) and a bunch of useful stuff like custom website badges for direct purchase links and so on).

Overall it seems like a great service. Particularly in view of the fact that it does not require the event organiser to get involved in technicalities of merchant accounts, shopping carts and all that irritatingly complex stuff.

It will be interesting to see how it compares with Amiando, a similar service that I hope to find time to look at well in the coming days.

Israel Innovation Tour

I’ve been irregularly following the reports from the alpha geeks‘ Innovation Tour of Israel.

Israel as a hub for innovation is often underestimated or overlooked by Europeans yet the troubled country has one of the largest and most active venture capital communities this side of the Atlantic. There’s also a great deal of innovation and new ideas coming out of Israeli engineers and geeks in the web and mobile arenas.

It’s enough to keep in mind that ICQ was co-founded by an Israeli, arguably one of the first internet apps to begin the shaping the web as we know it today, i.e. centered around peer-to-peer and real-time communication. Point is, it’s worth looking out of Silicon Valley and having a peek at what’s happening in Silicon Wadi, the next big thing might just be coming from the Eastern Mediterranean…

LeWeb 3 ‘08 - some details up!

Just read the post about the 2008 LeWeb 3 conference in Paris announcing the dates for this year: 9-10 December.

It’s early days of course but if anyone attended LeWeb 2007 you’ll know that it’s well worth keeping the dates in mind. If this year’s event is even half as good as last year’s it will still be one hell of a conference… and given the organising team’s dedication, its more likely to be twice as good! :-)

Negative Productivity

Even worse than procrastination is a bout of negative productivity.

Procrastination can be irritating but at least its somewhat in your hands. Negative productivity comes about from events that happen outside of your control but that conspire to drive you nuts. Typically just when you’ve decided to stop procrastinating and get some work done…

This happened to me yesterday.

Having taken a strong decision to spend a solid afternoon working on the upcoming Billy Connolly website, I made coffee, turned on my laptop and prepared to get down to business, little knowing that Fate was thinking “And now, for something completely different!”

Each time I got started with outlining a work plan I was rudely interrupted by various things ranging from soggy sheets stubbornly entangled in each other, delivery of a large box of clothes and books, delivery of a new microwave oven, failed attempts to get rid of old microwave oven, bad internet connectivity, forgotten passwords, and finally, numerous topplings-over of clothes horse under combined weight of said soggy sheets.

By the end of 5 hours, all I had accomplished was writing down a list of 5 to-do items and in the process of doing so had reached such a level of frustration that it was impossible to settle down to do anything productive by then.

So I went out to have a Gynn ‘N’ Tonnick, safely procrastinating further work to the next day :-)

Procrastination: Perfectionism in disguise?

A philosopher friend recently directed me to the work of one John Perry, a philosopher who writes about structured procrastination. A procrastinating philosopher you might say. Of course, I procrastinated for about 2 days before getting around to looking properly at his stuff. He says:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

Apart from being an accomplished procrastinator myself, I was recently looking into procrastination as a tool for positive action. A kind of “stick”, or negative driver if you will, that, by being something people want to avoid, acts as a catalyst inspiring positive action.

One can look at this as a sort of mental martial art, i.e. using a negative trait to your advantage. It’s worth reading his essay and browsing his site if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a procrastinator… while you should be doing something else of course…