Say Yeah!

"Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly."

smack416 — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:57:00 -0400

“Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly.”

- That’s a lovely quip from Paul Graham, but it really isn’t as dramatic as it sounds in the context of Ragnar Sass’s 5 Accelerator Lessons.

Still, there’s valuable insight there, so dig in.

Cheers to Mark Davis at Autodesk for his whiteboard work.

smack416 — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:15:45 -0400

Cheers to Mark Davis at Autodesk for his whiteboard work.

"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of..."

smack416 — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:57:38 -0400

“A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

- Eric Ries, startup = experiment.

The nastiness of e-books.

smack416 — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:40:00 -0400

Reading large volumes of text requires effort. It’s quite simply tiring. Over the (hundreds and hundreds of) years, we’ve developed standards for reading that help us get through large swaths of text by mitigating the effort it takes to do so.

This is why prose books are as wide as they are, why there are page layout standards like the grid, margins, and line spacing. And why there are additional typographic standards which address clarity and ease of reading, including type structure, letter spacing, line length, optical alignment, ligatures, and, of course, justification and hyphenation.

And it’s here where e-books fall flat on their face.

To ensure consistent letter and word spacing (thereby reducing the burden of reading), a long form book should be justified, with hyphens, like this:

From Cory Nelson, who created the image above:

There is nothing about EPUBs that prevent e-readers from performing this kind of typesetting automatically.

In other words this isn’t a technical issue with the EPUB standard. And yet:

Kindle doesn’t do this.

Kobo doesn’t do this.

Nook doesn’t do this.

This is, frankly, disgusting. These devices are designed only for reading. And they’re making reading harder. Can you imagine making a product that doesn’t effectively serve it’s sole purpose? (Yes, I know this is done all the time. But that doesn’t make it right. Or acceptable. Or any less infuriating. And this is books. Lazy product designers shouldn’t be messing with books and then proliferating their mess across millions of devices.)

The publishing industry should be embarrassed for putting up with this. Amazon in particular should be mortified for selling these devices, if not apologetic. I mean, the world’s biggest book store is making books harder to read. Not. Cool.

Yes, the standard digital annoyances of vendor lock in and DRM still apply in the digital book world. But these are the least of our concerns when the major e-book readers don’t support basic legibility standards.

Hopefully someone figures something out soon because I’m uncomfortably caught between what seems to be an insane act of using vast resources to print a book that’s exponentially larger and heavier than an e-book reader that then needs to be shipped around the world and carried by me, and not being able to read anything on these useless devices.

Some more reading on this subject:

Justifying the Nook: A case for PDF from Cory Nelson.

Publishing: Why Typography Matters from Michael Hait.

How to Read a Book on Your Phone from Jeff Kirvin.

How is an eBook like Pizza Hut pizza? from Michael Marcus.

A side note on other formats:

Apple has done a pretty decent job with iBooks, supporting justification and hyphenation. The trouble is, they have their books in skeuomorphic software that shows a stack of pages that never change their thickness, no matter how much of the book you’ve read. And their format is DRM locked to iBooks software which is only available on the glowing screen of the iPad, which is less conducive to reading, while the iPad itself is larger and heavier than any of the e-book readers noted above.

And that leaves us with PDFs, which none of the major publishers are supporting because they’re presumably scared of piracy, and which don’t adjust to different screen sizes.

Update:

Ah, there’s a full screen view in iBooks that gets rid of the silly skeuomophic pages. Thanks for the heads up, Matt!

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

smack416 — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:00:53 -0400

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

- Reid Hoffman

"Don’t believe your own story. Let others believe in it. That’s more powerful. You need to step..."

smack416 — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:01:00 -0400

“Don’t believe your own story. Let others believe in it. That’s more powerful. You need to step outside of what you are developing and believe in the reality checks that outsiders will give you. They will see things you don’t, especially if they are users.”

- Startup lessons from William Mougayar.

"Optimism, Opportunity, Execution."

smack416 — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:48:30 -0400

“Optimism, Opportunity, Execution.”

- Canada’s next five years.

Toronto, tech hub of the world.

smack416 — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:25:36 -0400

Six years ago I attended a symposium on Toronto’s roll in the tech/design landscape in North America. At the time it was said we were 3rd in north America for the volume and quality of ICT skilled workers following New York and San Francisco.

This week, Rip Empson, janitor at Techcrunch, shared Startup Genome’s findings on How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up. And it seems we’re holding on to our ranking in the global context.

Startup Genome is also offering a new ranking for the world’s top 25 startup ecosystems, ordered by their average throughput:

Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland)

New York City (NYC, Brooklyn)

London

Toronto

Tel Aviv

Los Angeles

Singapore

Sao Paulo

Bangalore

Moscow

Ben Zifkin begs to differ on this count:

Take what you will from their data but having spent the last 3 years in London, my personal feeling is that we are way ahead of them.

Aside from a few Valley VC outpost offices, we have a way better talent pool, culture of collaboration and (believe it or not) hunger to succeed.

We had a choice to start our new company anywhere in the world and I am grateful every day that we chose Toronto.

While I’m in no position to argue London vs Toronto, having spent all of our time floating around the North American ecosystem, I certainly won’t argue that we have talent to spare and, at least, an interest in collaboration and a strong support ecosystem in Toronto.

I can certainly say that I’m more connected to my peers, fellow entrepreneurs, and designers now than I was 6 years ago. And there seems to be a stronger ecosystem of success, leadership, and collaboration than those days.

Sure, there are a substantial number of really smart people who have (very) recently made their way to the valley, or to NYC, but that hasn’t drained us; it’s just widened our collective reach and only helps to spread the word about the quality of people in Toronto.

We’re certainly happy to headquarter here with the community, the talent, and the city we all love, in a country that isn’t quite as insane as our neighbours to the south.

So here’s to another great year of innovation, great design, and success in Toronto.

Automating retail.

smack416 — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:44:00 -0400

Product-free retail is interesting, but not as exciting as QR-code-free automated retail.

There’s still the point with QR codes where they don’t really work with produce, fragrances, or other things you want to touch and feel. And they’re slow for consumers. If you want to give all that up, you’d be better off shopping online and saving the trip to the store along with the patience and arm strain of photographing everything.

Both Toshiba and Fujitsu are working on automating the checkout process with smarter scanners.

Fujitsu has its ominous looking tunnel, with a conveyor belt that moves products almost 3 times faster than a traditional grocer checkout, all completely automated.

Meanwhile, Toshiba is using a more traditional scanner (as pictured above) with just enough smarts to read objects without worrying about scanning bar codes or inputting produce codes.

A little colour for Easter weekend.

smack416 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:15:57 -0400

A little colour for Easter weekend.

"Apple makes its money over the long term not just by introducing disruption, which would mean..."

smack416 — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:22:19 -0400

“Apple makes its money over the long term not just by introducing disruption, which would mean flash-in-the-pan products that spark and then fizzle, but by seeing disruption through into stable releases, each with significant improvements that appear to be incremental to a product’s design and capabilities.”

- Glenn Fleishman in his Incremental Change article.

"At the end of the day, a lot of products do the same thing, but it’s the little things that make the..."

smack416 — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:59:33 -0400

“At the end of the day, a lot of products do the same thing, but it’s the little things that make the difference, and by taking away the tactile element, I think it’s overall a negative thing for brands.”

- Matthew Stasoff responds to Virtual retail hits Toronto.

Virtual retail hits Toronto.

smack416 — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:13:00 -0400

Well.ca has apparently opened a ‘virtual store’ somewhere in Toronto. This is particularly exciting given the fractured nature of inventory, payments, and in-store mobile adoption, and particularly following up on South Korea’s foray into the space last year.

Sadly, using barcodes as the method of tossing items into your shopping cart seems rather convoluted, but it’s an interesting first step. It would be much easier to touch and go than have to hold up your phone and align it to QR codes. QR codes, of course, mean you can just plaster a wall with a decal and you’re pretty much done, so it’s an easy step technically, if not entirely user friendly (I am no fan of QR codes — at the very least, let the user photograph the product, not a code).

Pretty cool, at any rate.

Update

Mavis Huntley with a first hand review.

Highlights:

A nice surprise was that there was free Wi-Fi in the space. It’s the attention to detail that go along way in executing technically advanced ideas.

I was surprised to find out that the experience of scanning items was also easy to use. I didn’t have to align the scanner exactly to the QR codes, which was good since some of the shelves were out of reach.

Alas, Marina Strauss reports, along my own line of thinking:

Still, while mobile retail is about to boom, the jury is still out on the use of QR codes, said Kaan Yigit, president of Solutions Research Group. Only 20 per cent of Canadian smartphone owners use them; those people are generally male and over half the users are under 30, he said.

For the virtual-store idea to work, shoppers first need to install the app and then use a QR code. “Unless what they are selling is highly exclusive or unique, there are just easier ways to buy the same thing – either at brick and mortar stores or online.”

Photo via marketingmag.ca.

Tech industry infighting and the ongoing saga of Instapaper and Readability.

smack416 — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:02:50 -0400

Craig Saila just shared Readability, Instapaper, the Network and the Price we Pay by Anil Dash. In Anil’s words:

Since the success of the recent Readability app on iOS, things have gotten tense, not between the creators of [Instapaper and Readability], but between supporters, fans and enthusiasts in the community for both apps.

Case in point: John Gruber called Readability “scumbags” for hosting content and not sending user’s back to the source websites of that content, in addition to holding on to cash they’ve earmarked for publishers.

Anil and Zeldman disagree:

Followup from Gruber:

UPDATE, 1 APRIL 2012: My use of the word scumbags has drawn condemnation from Jeffrey Zeldman and Anil Dash — both of whom (a) sit on Readability’s advisory board, and (b) I consider my friends. I take back nothing, and judge Readability only by their actions, but allow me to take another crack at the above:

I’ll give you the reason: Readability has long exhibited a profound sense of entitlement to work published by others. They collect — and if unclaimed, keep — money on behalf of publishers with whom they have no relationship, and so I find it in-character for them to now steal page views too. Everyone knows shared links should point to the original resource.

I’m not sure it’s fair just yet to label this behaviour as “stealing” or assume a sense of entitlement is driving these actions. That’s certainly how things appear on the surface, but this saga has yet to play out. As others (who are not on Readability’s advisory board) have stated, this may be more of good people trying to figure out a tough problem rather than scumbags screwing other people over.

A perspective which is essentially covered in Mike Davidson’s post, “What the Betamax case teaches us about Readability” and the comments which follow. Though he does bring up some fair points about copyright concerns presented by Readability:

By facilitating the public retransmission of an author’s content in a format not authorized by the author, it would seem that Readability is committing copyright violation, en masse.

But let’s get back to Anil:

As I started to get dragged into a discussion with John on Twitter tonight about how “we can legitimately disagree about the mechanics of this payment method and suggest ways to improve it”, I realized: We’re doing it again. We’re fucking ourselves. We’re crabs in a barrel, all pulling each other down, and the whole web is going to lose as a result.

And this is how we all lose with this kind of in fighting between tech industry friends and colleagues. Anil on his Moveable Type vs Matt Mullenwegg’s Wordpress:

And the thing is, [choosing sides] can be effective, because it does help the eventual winner.

Which is never either of the players that are engaged in the stupid battle.

Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.

How we lose:

I strongly fear we’re about to cause the same damage to the reading tools market that we did through our stupid fights in blogging. We’ve got two great, vibrant reading tools that are innovating in the space. To my mind, they’re entirely complementary and should really be working together. As I see it:

Readability is a really useful network for encouraging and supporting reading, that syncs up your reading content to apps on any device. Its own apps are just a few good choices among the many that connect to the network.

Instapaper is a powerful, best-in-class reading app for serious readers. It has a passionate community that supports it, and focuses on being a great iOS experience.

To me, they’re just not competitors. It’s only the most short-term thinking that would make them so. But those who are fixated on that short term thinking might want to get their shots in on their less-favorite player. And if they do so, they’ll destroy both.

Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.

And the only survivors will be the competitors with inferior products who don’t have nearly as good an experience, as much passion for innovation, or as much love for the web. What those competitors do have, in some cases, is $100 million in venture capital funding. Enough to wait it out while these two tiny little bootstrapped players get torn apart by their own fans.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Unfortunately, this brings me right back home to the Toronto tech community, and a disconnect between a couple of influential individuals. The two Daves haven’t been able to get on the same page and being at lager heads surely only serves to undermine our community. The winner in this case, of course, will be another city.

I wish I had the answer for that one.

Tradeoffs.

smack416 — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:17:40 -0400

John Gruber gave the keynote speech at The Çingleton Symposium this past October, assessing the tech industry from his position keynoting Çingleton 5 years prior, through to the industry as it stood at the time of last October’s keynote, and looking ahead another 5 years.

Looking at the current state of the industry, Gruber reiterated Microsoft’s Windows 8 mantra, “No compromises!”, as Windows 8 looks to bring a touch experience to the desktop and have the power of the desktop on their tablets. The trouble is, this is a massive compromise of an essential tenet of design: reducing complexity.

From Apple’s business app development website:

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Many times your enterprise in-house apps will be derived from an existing desktop application environment, or based on line of business systems that your users depend on. Its easy to fall into the trap of attempting to bring every feature and function from the desktop app down to the mobile device. This approach will usually not deliver the type of experience users expect nor need given the mobile context. Remember that users have different needs for how they might approach or accomplish certain tasks on a mobile device, and certain tasks might not be practical for a mobile device at all.

Gruber continues: “Design is making tradeoffs. If you’re not making difficult tradeoff decisions, you’re probably not working on a difficult design problem.”

So, back to apps, Gruber paraphrasing the project management triangle:

Gruber suggests, if you really want to be great, you’ve got to pick just one. But, where he goes with this is that Apple isn’t focused on good, cheap, or on time. Rather, their number one priority is user experience.

For Apple, they are singularly focused on the experience across every touchpoint. From the hardware, to the software, to the store, to the packaging, to the support Apple provides, and on and on. It’s this unique, company wide focus on user experience that’s allowed them to excel from near death to king of the world status. To not just define new markets, but to own them year over year.

And what Apple’s done now is show the mass market what it means to be great designers. To care about experience and really deliver something holistic, thoughtful, and courteous to the end user. So now, the average consumer is perhaps starting think like designers. And they, too, would would rather have nothing at all rather than have a piece of crap.

So for us, and for you as an app owner, designer, developer, or investor, Gruber leaves us with this:

One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who’ve never bought an iPhone and who’ve never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years. More than all of us who’ve already bought at least one to this point. And I don’t see how anybody can deny that, unless something unbelievable, y’know, dramatic changes. I mean, that’s certainly the way everything is going now. And so if you think this app store platform is big now, you really haven’t seen anything yet.

So at the event last week, Tim Cook had a line. He said, ‘This is an extraordinary time to be at Apple’. And he is definitely right. But I say to you, ‘This is an extraordinary time to be an Apple developer’.

This is the right time and the right place. This is a once in a career opportunity. This is like being a Rock’n’roll musician in the late sixties.

This is like being a film maker in the seventies following Scorsese, Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (when he was sane).

If things go right, if things go the way I think they are going to go, these next five years, we are never going to work harder, we are never going to be under more pressure, we’re never going to be more stressed, we are never going to feel like we have to work faster, and we are never going to have to solve tougher problems. We’re never going to have to move this fast. But the only thing any of us are going to regret is if we don’t aim big enough.

If you don’t feel that you’re now in a position to do the best work of your entire career, to look back and say, ‘This was the time, I was there, I did this, I helped make this thing a reality’, then you need to find a new position.

This chance will never come again. And we’re lucky, we’re so unbelievably, incredibly lucky that it even came this once.

_______________

You can view the entirety of John’s talk on Vimeo.

Say Yeah in San Francisco!

smack416 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:00:05 -0400

Lee and Matt are in San Francisco for a few days with our colleague Mark Dowds and we’re looking to get a whole whack of Canadians together along with some other San Francisco friends.

Canadians and anyone with a fetish for Canadians and/or good design are all welcome for a casual get together, 5:30 to 8, at the Thirsty Bear.

More details and RSVP on Facebook.

"Excess exposes the soullessness of conventional design, in the same way that sarcasm cuts down..."

smack416 — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:29:22 -0500

“Excess exposes the soullessness of conventional design, in the same way that sarcasm cuts down puffery.”

- Jane Sheppard commenting on blue dalmatians and psychedelia.

SXSW, here we...are.

smack416 — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:38:43 -0500

Scott, Cinzia, and Danielle are plugging away back in Toronto, but Matt and Lee are at SXSW for the next week before heading to San Francisco. If you’re looking to reach us directly, here’s are our US numbers:

Lee: 415.518.5961

Matt: 415.608.4814

Talk or txt, we’d love to catch up with you on the road.

Tumblr's new icons. A great improvement.

smack416 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:35:00 -0500

Tumblr’s just updated their Dashboard blog post icons.

Here’s what they looked like on Monday:

And here’s what our Tumblr Dashboard looks like today:

Wow. What an improvement!

So, what makes these new icons so great? Well, at a glance recognition, that’s what.

Previously, there was a relatively clear distinction in the colour differences for each post type. Tumblr’s done well to keep this colour palette so, not only do the icons continue to be visually distinct from one another, but they retain the same colour for user’s who identified post types this way. In other words, the new icons are still familiar to long time Tumblr users.

However, the previously-used fancy torn paper motif was a needless distraction with its high realism, off balance angle, and consistent shape, ultimately creating a pattern that made it difficult to recognize the icons themselves.

In this case, the apparent decision to simplify meant removing the paper, gradients and drop shadows, so now each of the icons has a distinct shape from one another, at a glance.

Though I could quibble about the inconsistent weights (some icons appear needlessly heavier than others), complain about the vertical alignment (they do look like they’re all centred vertically, but why make some taller than others so there’s no rhythm or consistency to the icons), and wonder about the decision to illustrate the too similar Photo and Chat shapes (that’s a funky chat bubble which is very similar to the camera, making it harder to differentiate between the two), overall this is a great improvement.

Patterns in mobile app design, a series of screen comparisons.

smack416 — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Discover interaction and design similarities and spot the differences between apps in these two categorized directories of mobile app screens.

Mobile UI Patterns

With topics such as Check-in Screens, Empty Data Sets, Maps, and many more, Mobile UI Patterns, gives you a single row of screens to scroll through. Dig in!

Pttrns

Meanwhile, Pttrns joins the fray with a two column approach highlighting such app categories as Calendars, Friends, Messaging, and more. Take a look!

These are great quick reference tools. And I wish there was a crowd-sourced site like this. I don’t think Pinterest really supports this kind of easy sorting, but that would perhaps be the best option. Can you recommend any other sites like these?