joseph.by

ilovecharts:

Yeah, Geeks!

I’ve been prototyping some App ideas on my MacBook Pro; this post is to help me keep track of the tools I’m using and how I’ve installed them. Feel free to add corrections and feedback. Here’s what I installed:

• the XCode command line tools from developer.apple.com, which includes make
• Homebrew , which seems to be the state of the art for UNIX package management on the Mac
• TextWrangler as my text editor and Mou as a markdown editor
• Python 2.7, through Homebrew; I have yet to try this myself. Although Lion includes Python 2.7, it doesn’t include all of the python source files, which breaks debugging in eclipse. 
• Node.js (which is needed for Bootstrap, so far as I can tell); this can be installed with Homebrew (brew install node) or from the Node.js website through a downloaded package
• The Node.js packages needed for Twitter Bootstrap: recess, jshint, and uglify-js; read @izs’s “Introduction to npm” to get this rolling
• Twitter Bootstrap (install it with git: git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap.git, then run make)
• Google App Engine
• And here’s how to Get Started on GAE with Python
• Eclipse
• The Google plugin for Eclipse

Let me know what I’m missing. I’m going to try and fill in the gaps, and then write some more detailed instructions, where appropriate, to help people get up and running.

In his article last week, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic hit a nerve. He summed up the (okay, my) ennui with the local/social/mobile AppScape thusly:

For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.

He’s right - the obvious stuff has been built. I can distinctly remember drawing a Newton-like hand-held device on the back of my notebooks when I was in middle school (in the late 80s.) You could play games on it (SOS, Crossword and Hangman), and it had features like an accurate battery life meter, and the ability to connect to a phone line without a dongle. (Needless to say, I wasn’t that popular in middle school).

But yes, Apple and Google have pretty much have answered the question of “here’s how you get a PC into your hand.” The touch screen works the way it should have all along, and although data entry leaves much to be desired. I still can’t believe that we’re forced to type long-form text into these devices on a touch screen, rather than dictate, but whatever.

That said, despite a renewed focus on user experience and the so-called “consumerization” of technology most mobile Apps are basically portable versions of PC media properties. Instagram and Path may have been conceived in a post-PC world but they’re still basically PC media apps.

Outsized returns will be earned by developers that find ways to use the distinctive characteristics of mobile devices - omnipresence, location and context awareness, embedded identity and payment, ambient communication - to create high-value solutions to mostly unsolved problems.

Three apps I love that do this:

• Waze: Turn by turn navigation with realtime traffic and other, useful ambient information for drivers. Big telemetry and up-sell opportunities for auto manufacturers. At some point, every car on the road will have Waze - or some clone of it - as an option. It’ll be the OnStar of this decade.

• Rumgr: For people who are too lazy to sell their stuff on craigslist — and for people who browse garage sales. Swiping through photos makes for a great tablet shopping App. Location and availability are as important as price to these buyers. Add in a payment platform, and the ability for buyers to “reserve” things before they actually see them and you’ve got a business model that will scale up nicely. Good job guys. Stick the landing. 

• Uber: Okay, so I’m nearly two years late to this party. Order a Town Car with your phone and pay with it, too. Combines location, immediacy and identity (for payment and reputation). See! useful!

Although we’re not exactly an SEM agency we always get asked for feedback on our customer’s ads. They want to know why their PPC campaigns aren’t working. The ads are usually fine, but their landing pages are usually much too complicated. The thing is users don’t actually read anything except as a last resort. So it’s important that your site (or landing page) be as simple as possible, so that the user can get the gist of your site by reading only a few words. I came upon this infographic this morning from Unbounce - it’s a great summary of what a landing page should (and should not) be.

More Store Closings, Layoffs at Best Buy

I don’t want to say that I told you so, but, well, I did. Middle america continues to move online, content purchases have gone digital, and Walmart and Costco will keep undercutting Best Buy on pricing of high-volume items. For Best Buy to survive it needs to move upmarket in home electronics (helping consumers navigate the complexity of HD home theatre), focus on white goods (kicking Sears out of that market for good), and pray for a real-estate recovery. Because their current model isn’t working.

So I’ve already posted about trendspottr; I love how it surfaces trending tweets about particular topics. It’s not perfect, but the throwaway nature of twitter means that it doesn’t have to be. And it’s helped me discover a lot of interesting stuff, quickly - I surf less, and know more.

I’ve been using trendspottr with HootSuite for a couple weeks now, but I just had my “chocolate in my peanut butter” moment. Mark (one of trendspottr’s founders) told me that I could setup multiple trendspottr streams that track topics I’m interested, right in HootSuite. So I now follow a few topics I care about (advertising, programming, design); and I can check in once or twice a day, see what’s going on, read a couple things, retweet the interesting bits, and go back to Creating Value. Retweeted links are magically tracked with HootSuite’s link shortener, which let’s me see if anyone is listening. Brilliant! Internet fame and fortune is around the corner, I know it!

Seriously, great work. 

The Law of Conservation of Complexity

When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

In our defense, we often did this because how users “used to use the product” was very different from “how they were going to use the product.” So we’d design things so that they would work one way for “old” users who migrated into the new product, but a different way for new users who just started using it. This worked well until we wanted to update one (or both) versions of the feature, and then had to find a way to manage the dependency. More often than not, we would end up migrating “old” users to the “new” setting, removing the setting, and then moving people forward. So rather than avoid pissing off the “old” users, we just deferred annoying them to a later date. It would have been better to just place a bet on the “new” approach, and be ready to modify it if the benefit to the business (gaining new users) didn’t outweigh the cost (pissing off old users).

Bank Accounts Are Hard To Close, And Even Harder To Keep Closed
Catherine New, huffingtonpost.com

Some cus­tomers who closed bank accounts at Bank of Amer­i­ca last fall recent­ly received an unwel­come sur­prise: Their accounts reopened. Per­haps even more per­plex­ing for these cus­tomers: It’s the bank’s pol­i­cy.

Bank of Amer­i­ca will…

How can this be possible. I close an account, the bank reopens it, and they start “charging” fees. Next up, billing the unborn.

The groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday - Spring is Coming! In the meantime, here’s a colorful tune to brighten up a grey winter morning.

Tongue Tied by Grouplove