iakttakelser (observations)

The Document Library I’ve seen a new star - and it’s iA - or Information Architects . It’s not completely new star however, as I’ve used their Writer app since last year. Coincidentally, I’ve just read two brilliant blogposts related to iA’s founder Oliver Reichenstein: Good design is invisible: an Verge interview with iA’s Oliver Reichenstein , is a shocking eye-opening review, where the foundations of good design is explained. Mountain Lion’s New File System , is a blogpost on iA’s blog, also by Reichenstein. Just as I thought I’d given an ok explanation in my blog on why people should upgrade to Mountain Lion, I saw that I forgot the Document Library . And following Oliver on his file in one level folders story, I saw that I had omitted the most important part of the OS X update. Here it is: You should absolutely read the two articles. They take you into the inner circle of Apple style design, and if you are open and concentrated, you will not be the same afterwar...

Tengo la suerte de trabajar para un hombre extremadamente práctico en todos los sentidos. Si unimos a esto su pasión por la tecnología y la simplicidad , resulta fácil entender por qué iFacturas es la aplicación de facturación móvil más sencilla del mercado. Como responsable de marketing de iFacturas, son incontables las aplicaciones financieras que he analizado dentro del App Store. La mayoría de ellas son aplicativos web mostrados en un iPhone, por lo que no aprovechan las oportunidades que el propio dispositivo móvil puede aportar al sistema de facturación. Y lo que es aún peor, al ser una aplicación exportada de la web al iPhone, todas las acciones resultan más complicadas que desde el ordenador y todo se muestra a un tamaño más reducido. Hace un año, cuando empezamos con el desarrollo de iFacturas, teníamos claro que nuestra aplicación sería totalmente desarrollada y diseñada para iPhone y que aprovecharíamos todos aquellos elementos que el propio iPhon podía aportar para mejo...

A really good motivation speech of one of the founders of Twitter. A post from techcrunch.com by Erick Schonfeld has the whole story . Here is a part: ...  Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process. So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful — to this point — Keith, two minutes before I was supposed to start this Town Square, told me, stop. I’ve got a mistake in my slides, I forgot to capitalize an “S”. I swear. That level of perfection is what we wanna achieve, because if we achieve that level of perfection — it’s gonna take a long time to do that, a lot of hours — but then our users see it immediately, without thinking. And that’s the importa...

I admit I did change the title, by adding the portable part. But that really cover this eminent story better. The story begins by trying ot define that the future web is - portable. It support that with some numbers, which impress me a lot. Specially when considering @Asymco 2010 data of 5.5B mobile subscribtions of which 960M are 3G. ...growing 3G coverage around the globe ( around 21% by the end of 2010  according to Morgan Stanley).   That makes 1.4B 3G subscribitions out of a population of 7B. Below you see the part of the definitions. But the main story is about designing for it. Read the whole, it's good! A post from Smashing Magazine Feed by James Gardner has the whole story . Here is a part: What Is The Future Web? Back in the old days: analogous Google queries would have taken 30 days. Image: dullhunk The one word that I hear more than any other at the moment is  mobile . Mobile websites, mobile devices, mobile apps: the list seems to go on and ...

A post by Jaime has the whole story . Here is a part: If you like skiing and have ever wanted to sleep in a tent on a mountain, this resort has got you covered. The  Whitepod Resort  is located Les Cerniers, Switzerland in the heart of the Alps. It features an authentic mountain lodge and traditional wooden chalet both with restaurants, 7 km of ski slopes with private ski lifts, and the pièce de résistance — Whitepod — a camp of 15 geodesic dome pods surrounding a central chalet. Each dome is essentially a tent stretched over a wooden structure and platform that allows accommodations out in the beautiful alpine wilderness. Are you packed yet? What:   Whitepod Where:  Whitepod Concept SA, Les Cerniers, 1871 Les Giettes ( map it ) How much:  Starting at about $430 USD to rent a pod for the night. Highlights:  An igloo-like camping and skiing experience on the side of a mountain like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. Design draw:  In...

If you do something do it well. So if you collect black markers, drop it if you don't have more than 523! A post by Jaime has the whole story . Here is a part: Allister calls his documentation of this collection the  Black Marker B.I.B.L.E . Earlier this year, the collection contained 523 unique black markers, and it’s still growing.

iFacturas is based on a vocabulary. It will be published in our API later this year. A post from from OData Blog has the whole story . Here is a part: What are vocabularies? Vocabularies are made up of a set of related 'terms' which when used can express some idea or concept. They allow producers to teach consumers richer ways to interpret and handle data. Vocabularies can range in complexity from simple to complex. A simple vocabulary might tell a consumer which property to use as an entity's title when displaying it in a form, whereas a more complex vocabulary might tell someone how to convert an OData person entity into a vCard entry. Here are some simple examples: This property should be used as the Title of this entity This property has a range of acceptable values (e.g. 1 to 100) This entity can be converted into an vCard This entity is a foaf:Person This navigation property is essentially a 'foaf:Knows [a person]' relationship This property...

I couldn't agree more... A post from Daring Fireball by John Gruber has the whole story . Here is a part: Adam Greenfield on his tenure at Nokia: As it happens, the value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is  fatal  as a purveyor of experiences. Of course you still want to produce your offering for the lowest achievable cost — but that cost is bound up in intangible, nondeterministic dimensions of design, in ways that are only partially-at-best quantifiable. It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons: they’re, I daresay, not even neurocognitively equipped to do so. And yet this is what happened when I was at Nokia and, I would imagine, is happening still.

We started iFacturas with 4 week scrums, ie. deployments. After half a year we changed to 2 weeks and now we try to do it weekly. The increased number of deployments makes it almost a dayli event, instead of a big risky project everybody fears. So the story below with up to 25 deployments dayli is certainly worth contemplating... A post from A VC by Fred has the whole story . Here is a part: Last winter  John Allspaw  joined  Etsy  to run tech ops. John has written  several important books  on web ops and is one of the experts in operating large scale web services. One of the first things John did when he arrived at Etsy is work with the dev and ops teams to put in place a continuous deployment system. Continuous deployment is the idea that you push out changes to your code base all the time instead of doing large builds and pushing out big chunks of code. Here's  an Eric Ries post on continuous deployment  if you want to get a longer descr...

Programmers and architechts love to rewrite code. To finally get it right. 100% right. But it seldom happens. Rewriting code often kills startups. So be warned! A post from VentureBeat by Steve Blank has the whole story . Here is the last part: CEO’s face the “rewrite” problem at least once in their tenure. If they’re an operating exec brought in to replace a founding technical CEO, then it looks like an easy decision – just listen to your engineering VP compare the schedule for a rewrite (short) against the schedule of adapting the old code to the new purpose (long.) In reality this is a fools choice. The engineering team may know the difficulty and problems adapting the old code, but has no idea what difficulties and problems it will face writing a new code base. A CEO who had lived through a debacle of a rewrite or understood the complexity of the code would know that with the original engineering team no longer there, the odds of making the old mistakes over again are high. ...

People in The Apps Lifestyle needs better apps. More and better apps. And whatever can bring down the time of production and make the business model better is sorely needed. I discovered Heroku three months ago, and this was love with first sight. But I clearly see the it's not well suited to for instance iOS apps. So welcome StackMob - you're needed! A post from TechCrunch by MG Siegler has the whole story . Here is a part: It was almost exactly two years ago that  we first wrote about  a company called  Heroku . At the time, the Y Combinator startup was little more than a good idea: ease the development and deployment process a lot of other startups face by putting it in the cloud. Last month, Salesforce bought them for  $212 million in cash . It’s no wonder that a new startup,  StackMob , doesn’t mind being called a “Heroku for mobile”. Truth be told, that is a pretty good way to describe what they’re doing. They’ve created a cloud-based system to eas...

Mac App Store works, and it works well. Developers are earning lot more than expected. Great! A post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) by Megan Lavey has the whole story . Here is a part: After just 20 days in the Mac App Store, the Pixelmator team announced  that it has grossed more than $1 million through sales. When the Mac App Store launched Jan. 6, the software was made available exclusively through it .

Strange to see computers from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Seeing the movie, I see that I've been into this game some time now since I started with my first PC, the IBM XT in -84 I think. One woman explain that she was the mother of the motherboard. She created the first - and signed it! A post from .com by has the whole story . Here is a part:

What lovely colors! A post from Design Milk by Jaime has the whole story . Here is a part: Palm Springs Art Museum  resident-artist  Phillip K. Smith III  designed, created and installed a twenty-four foot wide relief and light installation titled  Aperture  in the Hoover Gallery. The piece is created by 700 pieces of intricately cut acrylic and an elaborate sequence of programmed LEDs. The event ran through the end of December 2010, so if you didn’t catch it, here are some great photos of the installation.  

A post from Design Milk by Jaime has the whole story . Here is a part: Nils Voelker  has created a series of light paintings called  Variations on Pi . It’s an edition of 50 unique long exposure photographs of which each is based on a different range of consecutive decimal places of Pi. A machine, equipped with 16 LEDs, moves around as a photo is taken from above. The digits define if and where a circle is drawn but also the colors and angles. Together, 3861 decimal places were used to create the whole edition.

I know I want iOS-style icons. Everywhere. So please Bego. We them need for the blogs and to use to illustrate. A post from Lifehacker by Adam Dachis has the whole story . Here is a part: Like the look of iOS-style icons and want to bring them to your desktop? Here's how to make your own with Photoshop (or an alternative) and  CandyBar . The video suggests that CandyBar is inexpensive, but it's not. It'll run you nearly $30. On the plus side, you get a 15-day free trial with the ability to add up to 250 icons, so that should give you plenty of time and space to create a few custom iOS-style icons without paying for the software (unless you want to—it's a very nice piece of software). David Lanham's  Flurry icons  will provide the majority of your system's icons with the iOS rounded rectangle style, but there will always be a few applications and folders that will go unadorned. Fortunately it's really easy to make these icons yourself with an applicati...

A post from ReadWriteWeb by Klint Finley has the whole story . Here is a part:   RedMonk  analyst Stephen O'Grady tackles the question " What Factors Justify the Use of Apache Hadoop? " O'Grady cites two of the most common criticisms of Hadoop: 1) Most users don't actually need to analyze big data 2) MapReduce is more complex than SQL. O'Grady confirms these criticisms, but finds Hadoop useful anyway. O'Grady acknowledges that volume isn't the only factor in the complexity of a dataset. "Larger dataset sizes present unique computational challenges," writes Grady. "But the structure, workload, accessibility and even location of the data may prove equally challenging."

A post from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging by James Turner has the whole story . Here is a part: Hadoop  gets a lot of buzz these days in database and content management circles, but many people in the industry still don't really know what it is and or how it can be best applied. Cloudera  CEO and  Strata  speaker  Mike Olson , whose company offers an enterprise distribution of Hadoop and contributes to the project, discusses Hadoop's background and its applications in the following interview. Where did Hadoop come from? Mike Olson:  The  underlying   technology  was invented by Google back in their earlier days so they could usefully index all the rich textural and structural information they were collecting, and then present meaningful and actionable results to users. There was nothing on the market that would let them do that, so they built their own platform. Google's innovations were incorporated i...

It still weekend, and some architecture could be nice. A post Podfuscak Residence in Croatia by DVA Arhitekta from Design Milk by Joel has the whole story . Here is a part: This beautiful home in Croatia by  DVA Arhitekta  features recycled red brick that was actually waste from another renovation. Using this material allowed the architect to blend the modern blueprint better with its surroundings. Big window panels allow lots of natural light inside and smart use of materials, gives the interior an upscale look. It’s not every day you see a modern building such as this made from brick — it feels like a slightly warmer option than concrete or stone.

If you care about easy cleaning of your kitchen look for this. No chairs to lift or move. I would love to see a round table version and which is hanging from the roof. It's also ideal for robot vacum-cleaners by the way ;) A post ffrom Design Milk by Jaime has the whole story . Here is a part: Feel like a kid again in Duffy London’s fun  Swing Table ! Discover more great design by following Design Milk on  Twitter  and  Facebook !