October 2010
51 posts
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Purchasing Apps in The Current Mac App Marketplace
How do you find Mac apps today? Google.
How will you find Mac apps a year from today? Mac App Store (then maybe Google).
How do you buy Mac apps today? Paypal or Google Checkout or a publisher’s merchant account.
How will you buy Mac apps a year from today? Mac App Store (then maybe Paypal or Google Checkout).
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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me In High School →
Paul Graham:
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in...
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Clients From Hell: Years ago, I was young, naive... →
clientsfromhell:
Years ago, I was young, naive and unemployed. While browsing the graphic design magazines in a book store, an older man approached me.
Client: “I see you look really interested in graphic design. I’m looking to hire a graphic designer.”
Me: “Wow, really? I’m looking for a job right now!”
…
We all like Clients from Hell. But I LOVE this Client from Hell.
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Profounder: Raise Money for Your Business →
thetylerhayes:
Speaking of Jessica Jackley, check out Profounder, a new crowdfunding platform to raise money for your business. Right now, the site is still in beta. But given Ms. Jackley’s track record and overflowing passion, you’ll want to sign up to be notified when it launches.
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Jay Adelson Tells All →
Great notes by Chris O’Brien. A particularly poignant passage:
Adelson knows he’s not alone in his start-up compulsion. And to illustrate his point, he asked the room full of 450 entrepreneurs how many of them reached for their smartphone the moment they opened their eyes in the morning. About half raised their hands.
“That’s probably not okay,” he said. “Look into my eyes. That’s. Not....
Jason Fried on Interruptions →
Jason Fried:
Would you expect someone to get a good night’s sleep if they were interrupted all night? Then how can you expect someone to get a good day’s work if they are interrupted all day?
HINT: No. You can’t.
merlin:
bobulate:
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
— Stephen King
I’d agree with this if he’d substituted “exceptions” with “benefits.”
Rules that discourage people from learning new things produce better Maoists than writers.
[said the web’s most vocal fan of On Writing.]
I knew something felt wrong when I read that...
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“For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all,...”
– John Steinbeck (via kneath)
Good advice for a founder? Eh sure, why not.
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Paul Buchheit on Plans And Fear Of Rejection →
Paul Buchheit:
The whole notion that plans are something that we should “stick to” makes them distracting enough that I prefer to call them “ideas” or “rough sketches” instead. Personally, I try to avoid having plans for my life, but I have many ideas. Which ones actually happen will be a surprise to me. It’s more fun that way.
Compared to you, most people seem dumb →
This should be a mandatory monthly re-read for anyone in the tech industry in general. Especially we snobs of San Francisco.
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Five Traits YCombinator Looks For in Founders →
Speaking of Paul Graham. My personal favorite:
4. Naughtiness
[…] Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they’d hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into...
“Please don’t be cynical…Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were...”
– (via bleikamp)
Oldie but goldie. Couldn’t be more true.
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To Be A Good Startup Founder Is To Be... →
Paul Graham:
… If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I’d tape to the mirror. “Make something people want” is the destination, but “Be relentlessly resourceful” is how you get there.
“I’m less moved by the one-off masterpiece in a career of otherwise half-wrought...”
– Live from Fargo (via merlin)
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The Future of TVs and Living Rooms →
Fred’s analysis of Mark’s analysis:
The Internet has mostly been a level playing field where the best product wins. That has not been the case in the world of big media and CE. Money talks loudly in that world. So it is still unclear whether Internet economics will work in this sector. But I am hopeful. If it prevails, this will be a very interesting market sector to invest in for...
Olly Moss' process →
mrgan:
Olly Moss is a tremendously smart and hard-working designer. You may have seen his posters all over the Internet all the time everywhere you look. He now has a blog, which includes this fascinating, unprecedented look at his creative process.
Good stuff all around.
“To entertain the radical idea that understanding might involve accepting chaos...”
– Richard Saul Wurman (via viafrank)
“It’s okay to be driven a little crazy by someone who is so consistently right.”
– John Sculley on the frustrations of working with Steve Jobs’ perfectionism. (via marco)
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Are You Good Enough Being Great? →
thetylerhayes:
Spencer Thompson:
Do you want to be good, great or exceptional in that career? There is a marked difference between the three. …
All of the top scientific researchers, actors, athletes, artists, writers, businesspeople, tradespeople, media personalities and philanthropists are exceptional at what they do. That’s the reason they are at the top of the world. But they have made...
The Kickstarter Blog: Meaningful Games →
kickstarter:
There are a lot of good reasons to be following Evan Balster’s game project Infinite Blank. If you’re a fan of Minecraft and other open world, sandbox-style games, then Evan’s project — a game that lets you create the world you play in — is a natural fit for you.
But what I especially…
Love Evan’s thoughts. All things start out alongside greater things.
“The cafeteria is well designed, with spacious tables and comfortable chairs. But...”
– Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
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Bobulate: Evening edition →
bobulate:
Long before the advent of a 24-hour workweek, before we were looking to multi-task (then to single-task), long before “getting things done” was a thing to get done, we got things done. On summer nights, the fireflies appeared and “dinner’s ready” was a common call. On schooldays, the bell…
Major news outlets: take heed, for Liz Danzico is redesigning your websites for you. Just...
Be Curious, Be Dangerous →
Mike Rundle:
The CEO of a company I worked at in the 90s was talking to me about their new website I had built. We talked about some tagline and copy adjustments and out of the blue he fired up an FTP client and dove into the HTML. He had 20 years of experience in sales and didn’t know RAM from ROM, but he told me he read some web design tutorials and “knew enough to be...
Inertia interrupted →
bobulate:
“[A] traffic jam is a collection of rooms.”
That’s David Greene of Archigram according to Geoff Manaugh. He continues:
[A]nd “so is a car park — they are really instantly formed and constantly changing communities. A drive-in restaurant ceases to exist when the cars are gone (except for cooking hardware). A motorized environment is a collection of service points.”
I’ve long been...
An exaltation of adds →
bobulate:
Mike Monteiro on the chokehold of calendars:
In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. …. The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a ...
Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards in Usability →
Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen:
Once again, the usability crisis is upon us. We suspect most of you thought it was over. After all, HCI certainly understands how to make things usable, so the emphasis has shifted to more engaging topics, such as new applications, new technological developments, and the challenges of social networks and ubiquitous connection and communication. Well, you were...
Interhoods →
Khoi Vinh:
My good friends at Weightshift have just launched this real-world directory for designers and developers. Log in with your Dribbble or Github accounts and identify your location in New York, San Francsico or Chicago (more cities coming soon). It’s pretty neat to be able to see who is physically near you, neighborhood by neighborhood, and will be even more useful if it achieves...
Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator →
cameronmoll:
This will look familiar to Photoshop users.
/via @bbodien
Findings from the Survey for People Who Make... →
A List Apart knocks it out of the park. Again.
Interesting: “Participation in formal training by salary range” increases only up to ~$120,000/year, then starts decreasing again. Good or bad? You decide.
Marco.org: What technologies are geeks pioneering... →
marco:
From Benjamin Stein’s great post about geek-tech pioneering that you should read right now, before continuing:
In those days, it was really easy to see where consumer technology was going. You could just look at the nerds and know that’s what you’d probably look like in 2-5 years.
[…]
But…
If you ever built your own computer, or carputer, or hacked an Xbox, or built a Linux...